7 Video Wishes That Just Came True with Celtra’s Smart Video Ad Formats

Here is the mission – design a great looking display video ad, which plays consistently across various devices’ screens, media properties and operating systems. An ad that displays an engaging interactive brand experience and provides consolidated, trackable, and reliable results.

Here is the mission – design a great looking display video ad, which plays consistently across various devices’ screens, media properties and operating systems. An ad that displays an engaging interactive brand experience and provides consolidated, trackable, and reliable results.

While this may sound trivial, this task involves several not-so-trivial solutions.
Back in the heyday of Flash, you thought you already had those hassles solved, but this became quite a challenge on mobile screens using HTML5; especially across different in-app properties.

Luckily now, using this new video technology from Celtra let’s you put the hassles behind and focus on good branding and meaningful creatives!

Wish #1: Play video inline everywhere

If you’ve had the chance to dabble in the running of inline display video ads across mobile devices and with various media owners, you’ve probably noticed several unpleasant surprises and hiccups. In many cases, the video-play defaults to the device’s native player.When this happens, you lose both the creative opportunity for a proper interactive layout, and the ability to track and report on the video.

Now, with Celtra’s online automatic video transcoder and smart decision engine, you can use a single source video file and seamlessly play it inline, across different devices, web, and in-app SDKs.

Here is how we do it: For every video, we automatically produce multiple video streams to match different devices and media type requirements. This allows us to deliver the best consistent inline video play experience across all variables.

Wish #2: Autoplay the video and create a video teaser

Prior to this solution, to achieve this auto-playing video teaser for mobile, you needed to animate a heavy stack of sequenced sprites. This often resulted in quite large initial file size.

Now you can use a real video to create the teaser. With intelligent progressive loading, we deliver a lighter file size, which results in a smoother playback experience.

Here is how we do it: We created a special video stream that handles this experience. We automatically chop and loop 5 seconds of the video and configure it perfectly for pre-expand units. For designers, the ‘teaser option’ is just another checkbox for the video component, we take care of the rest.

Wish #3: Make Video Responsive

Responsive design and video are better together! With this release we also introduce our responsive design solution. This is the first format designed specifically with responsive behavior in mind.

The layout, including the video facade, is given a relative percentage size and positioning breakpoints. This allows them to smoothly scale and adapt to different screen sizes and between device orientations. Furthermore, the video plays uninterrupted between device orientations while the layout is reflowed and scaled.

Wish #4: Enter full screen with continuous video playback

With these new features you no longer rely on the device’s native player for a full screen experience. The video plays continuously while users switch between the inline and fullscreen stages.

We achieved this experience through the implementation of our proprietary web based video player. This, in combination with the syncing of the playhead across the multiple video streams supports such a smooth full screen transition.

Wish #5: Overlay and animate interactive elements on top of an inline video

Prior to this solution overlaying interactive elements with mobile video was tricky; especially on handsets and especially agnostically across SDK and devices.

With this new solution, the inline video is just another layer in the AdCreator builder. You can easily compose interactive overlays–including animated shapes, images, text, or other components – on top of a video asset to create an impactful and engaging experience.

Wish #6: Sync video play and ad content to bring richer ad experiences

If you want to trigger actions in the ad content in response to video based events, this is now easy breezy! We wrapped up several actions and APIs to support video events such as video complete or video pause. This makes video events easily accessible for designers and builders.

Last but not least, wish #7: Get consistent and reliable video tracking

Even tougher Android devices are now being tracked so your video data pool is now comprehensive. Video data is consolidated, and consistent across different media owners. It’s also easy to access and digest in real time. Furthermore you can analyze video consumption down to the second, and go beyond the quartiles.