VideoEgg: New Buzz for Old Hats

Perhaps ad network VideoEgg should switch business models (again) and become a PR firm, because the company is definitely good at generating buzz. Whether it was declaring a turf war with YouTube over overlay ads, dropping video partners, or, like today, announcing new features to ad products that have been in the market for years, the company knows how to pimp itself.

Some tech blogs jumped on the VideoEgg bandwagon to tout its “new” features such as dynamic RSS content updates, localized messaging, multiple video tracks in a single ad, shopping functionality and sharing.

Too bad it’s all been done before. BrightRoll offers auto-updating, geotargeting, and viral sharing on its network. Tremor Media offers multiple videos in a single banner as well as dynamic ad versioning. And while it doesn’t consider VideoEgg a direct competitor, Eyeblaster did geotargeting in ads with airlines years ago as well as dynamic RSS updates with BBC. It has toyed with offering shopping experiences within the ad unit, but hasn’t gotten too far because it is difficult to create secure environments within the ad and it wound up doing what VideoEgg is doing: deep linking to a client’s store.

To be fair, I’ll bet even VideoEgg was surprised by the amount of coverage it received for the release. During a phone briefing yesterday, VideoEgg CMO Troy Young said of the announcement, “It’s not the second coming, but I think it’s cool.”

(Disclosure: BrightRoll is funded by True Ventures, which also funded GigaOM.)