Extreme Reach is a software platform that helps marketers navigate the complex world of digital advertising. The company has launched a new platform that Extreme Reach promises will help simplify and streamline the workflow processes of distributing an ad across myriad platforms, devices and screens that consumers now use to access media.
“Our mission is to help major brands and agencies execute their video campaign against any screen that they like,” said John Roland, co-founder and CEO of Extreme Reach. “That includes linear TV as well as video on demand and programmatic TV, digital video, programmatic video and even OTT. Extreme’s platform can execute campaigns across any screen and device.”
The company is a major player in the space. Its platform is used by over 10,000 brand and agency clients, with over 3 million video ads. And Extreme Reach is already integrated with most of the local pay TV systems, broadcast stations, national networks and online publishers “That’s where the name Extreme Reach comes from,” Roland joked. “When we first started it was kind of ironic, but we’ve lived up to the name.”
The company is now evangelizing the benefits of its video ad streaming platform. Video ad production and distribution is a collaborative effort between the brand, the ad agency, creative production houses, publishers and others. Orchestrating a multi-channel campaign involves plenty of back and forth, especially with multiple formats in play.
The Extreme Reach platform, Roland said, is able to handle a lot of the middle work between creation and distribution. The idea is to take a video ad, upload it into Extreme Reach’s platform, and then distribute it to all the different ad servers, exchanges and publishers that make up the campaign using a video asset API that Roland said is already integrated with the top online publishers. He likened the process to streaming a particular song on Spotify, or sharing a video with friends on YouTube.
“Rather than manually transcoding files and the FTP’ing (file transfer protocol) them to one another, all you do is share the link to the video ad, and they put it into their ad server, and they can stream it directly into your ad streaming campaign all in real time,” he said. “By doing that, you’re now moving the video advertising industry to a streaming model, the exact same way YouTube has done it with content, and the exact same way Netflix has done it with movies and Spotify has done with music.” The platform handles all the transcoding for different file formats, and Roland said the company does about 50,000 transcodes a day.
The other important piece of Extreme Reach’s platform is that it serves as a bridge between linear TV and digital platforms for distributing video advertisements. Roland claims that most brands run the same ad creative across linear TV and online platforms, but often times TV and digital marketing workflows are still siloed.
And there’s a third component here: handling talent and rights management. While talent and rights management is easy to control on linear TV, the Internet-based publishing platforms and the automation that comes with them bring new complexities into the fold. Marketers spend about $75 million on fees related to talents and rights management violations each year.
Roland said Extreme Reach’s platform is able to manage those rights more easily through its API, which adds access permissions to the video asset for talent and rights compliance verification.
The hope is to create a process for the creative side of digital marketing that’s more in line with how media buying works online. “Streaming ensures scalability for programmatic by moving creative at the speed of media and enables flawless execution of screen-agnostic campaigns,” Roland wrote in an open letter last week. “Let’s unite to make cloud-based video ad streaming the industry standard in 2017.”