Innovid - winning global leadership in interactive video creative tools and executions
I was recruited by the CEO of Innovid to product manage the creative side of Innovid's product offering. Innovid (later a public company) was at that point an early-stage startup, with about two dozen people in the NYC office, and market demand for a video-focused buy-side ad server was not yet proven. By the time I left, Innovid had grown to over $100M in revenue.
Much of the early effort went into creative - establishing and driving market demand for interactive video executions as one-off buys on the advertiser and agency side, and building white label relationships with publishers to resell interactive video for a markup.
A creative tool - the iRoll Studio - made it easy for publisher and internal users to create simple interactive units in minutes. In addition, we helped create the market for interactive video, creating well-known standard units and ultimately helping to standardize formats as part of the IAB Rising Stars initiative.
COMPANY
Innovid
ROLE
Director, then Senior Director, Product
FOCUS
Product management
Product design
Product marketing
Sales engineering
Partnerships
The iRoll App Studio existed when I arrived - conceived by the founders as a very simple interface for adding interactivity. It leveraged the then-new concept of "apps" from the iPhone and provided on-video buttons to trigger specific interactive functionality such as image or additional video galleries, tickets and showtimes retrieval, and social sharing.
We expanded on the original, adding more interactive features, allowing the creation of more sophisticated-looking units, and most importantly, building out capabilities that helped scale the unit for mass production by internal and external teams. The addition of a searchable library of all iRolls, the ability to duplicate and modify existing iRolls, and streamlining the generation and delivery of VAST tags in the publish phase made it easy for production teams to create, manage, and traffic dozens or even hundreds of interactive video units. One white-label customer scaled to over a thousand creatives in the library without trouble finding anything, and that account grew from about $1M to $3M.
We sold these capabilities to major video ad networks, and built a multi-million dollar publisher business by allowing publishers to create and manage their own interactive video units.
I had wanted the Studio to support every format. When our biggest partner asked for a YouTube-style skip ad and threatened to build it themselves, I looked at market share by format, found that several standard units were unpopular and hard to build, and chose to build those in house instead. The skip ad took three weeks to build and made $400K in its first quarter.
As mobile video took off, we extended the iRoll Studio to mobile, which involved translating the output from Flash to HTML, building an iRoll app for iOS and Android that could be used to preview the units on the relevant device, and creating a QR code publish process that made it easy to create and immediately preview units on mobile. I also added a sales admin component so salespeople could curate their own demos, and ran the sales training.
This video, recorded in real time and not sped up, shows how quickly you could create an interactive video using the iRoll Studio.
Part of our early work was establishing these units in the market.
Below are videos showing some of our leading units, as well as the iRoll Expander unit, which was a new unit we created and co-submitted with Yahoo! to win inclusion in the IAB Rising Stars selection of industry-standard interactive video units.