Google, Veoh Launch New Ad Initiatives

Google and Veoh have introduced new video ad initiatives to help publishers and marketers connect with consumers.

Google released new ad video ad units that support 728×90 and 160×600 formats. Unlike the old formats, these new units are standard IAB sizes that should fit more easily into existing ad placements on publishers’ sites. The ads hold a ribbon of thumbnails, which can be clicked to bring up the YouTube video player and accompanying advertisement.

Mefeedia CEO Frank Sinton, who tipped us off to the new Google ad sizes, was enthusiastic about their arrival. “This makes the YouTube AdSense player 100x more useful to publishers like Mefeedia (and potentially gets a LOT more views for YouTube videos, again),” said Sinton via email.

The ads are currently only supporting English and Japanese language accounts in Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, the UK and the U.S.

Meanwhile Veoh, which has amassed a mix of UGC and professional content from the TV networks, has launched a new behavioral ad targeting system that promised to connect video and display ads with specific audiences by combining video consumption, searching, browsing and community activity data.

In beta, the service will initially let marketers target ads to nine different lifestyle segments including auto, pop culture, and sci-fi, but will expand as the program matures. As AdWeek points out, other companies like Tacoda and Revenue Science have tried behavioral targeting before, but ran into inventory issues and had to switch to becoming ad networks.