For the first time, advertisers can target, monitor, and optimize online video advertising in real-time through channels of content across any Internet-enabled platform—broadband, mobile, IPTV, or download, or even peer-to-peer. And it’s all possible through YuMe’s full suite of interactive ad products.

Founded in 2004, YuMe set out to monetize the distribution of video—answering an industry-wide demand for more clarity in targeting, flexibility in format, and overall efficiency in managing video ad campaigns. It also wanted to tap into the video ad sales market, expected to reach $3.1 billion by 2010, according to eMarketer’s July 2007 report.

Jayant Kadambi, CEO and Co-founder of YuMe explains: "We looked around at existing ad models, platforms, and technologies and found they were all primarily built for Web sites. We knew video was very different, so we built our ad platform to distribute ads (really videos) over any broadband connection—DSL lines, set-top boxes, mobile devices to PCs sitting in your home, and traditional Web sites as well."

Today, YuMe’s suite of products is revolutionizing the way advertisers buy video advertising and improving the relevancy of video advertising for every viewer, regardless of device or platform. It is all built on the Microsoft® .NET Framework and other core Microsoft technologies including Microsoft Metadirectory Services Server (MMS), Windows Media® Player, Silverlight™, and more.

The company says that by leveraging Microsoft technologies it has built and delivered a superior online video ad management system. And by partnering early with the Emerging Business Team, it has had access to top-tier products, resources, and insights from product teams with the online domain expertise it required—and access to Microsoft’s partnership ecosystem as well. YuMe is now part of the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program.

By using the scalable .NET Framework, YuMe says development process times are faster and simpler, and it has made the entire platform more stable and secure. It enabled the company to develop the first dedicated broadband video advertising network built exclusively for the new world of Web video.

Soon after the video ad management platform launched in March 2007, YuMe was recognized as “Best In Show” at Under the Radar 2007.

Unlike other solutions on the market, YuMe is both a Video Ad Management System and a Video Advertising Network. The Ad Management System provides video monetization tools for publishers and content producers, and provides a single platform called ACE (Adaptive Campaign Engine) for all ads whether from third-party networks, syndication feeds, publishers or YuMe sales. The Video Advertising Network provides what the company calls a ‘new kind of video advertising buy.’ Its ad network is organized into brand safe, ad-ready channels of content, from entertainment to lifestyle, news, music, sports, animation and gaming. Advertisers can buy across audiences and channels, improving the relevancy of the video advertising for the viewer. It also provides real-time targeting (dynamic ad insertion), measurement, and optimization that ensures an ad campaign performs, as it should.

Explains Kadambi, “We’re an ad network and an ad management platform, and the only company that can do this across many platforms—a Web site that’s streaming, on a download as we do for NBC, on a Windows PC, or an Xbox®. When advertisers want to target a TV show like Lost or Heroes, they are advertising on content. They don’t want to think about the technical details of where that content is being watched. We take care of that for them—and offer a solution that spans any platform that these TV shows are being watched on.”

“And the cool thing is we’ll also tell them that 400 people watched on their mobile, 300 watched on the Xbox, and 1,000 on a PC. This ‘campaign measurement’ feature is the major differentiation of our solution, and Microsoft tools were critical,” says Kadambi.

YuMe used the MMS Servers for the data center portion of its business, used Silverlight and Windows Media Player for the Windows browser, and .NET Framework for the Windows Vista® business.

The company is more convinced now than ever before that as video moves online, there will be a need for a sophisticated system to monetize it. Since the company announced its ad platform in March 2007, it has become one of the largest independent video ad networks in the U.S. Says Kadambi, “We’re almost as big as YouTube now in terms of the amount of content that we’re representing on our network.”

Says Kadambi, “We are the only advertising network that offers premium and transparent video advertising with quality reach—we’re providing advertisers with access to some 400+ Web sites, more than 150 million premium video streams (and just under 1 billion page views), and 46.7 million unique visitors per month.”

Already, the company is gaining customer interest as well. It is providing the ad platform and ad serving technology for the streaming video content on Microsoft Media Center Internet TV. And in January 2008, YuMe was selected by NBC to provide ad management, campaign management, trafficking, and reporting for the new NBC Direct service. YuMe has also announced that it will serve InVideo overlay ads as part of Google’s AdSense for its video beta advertising program.

Download YuMe’s success story in PDF format.