Conversation with VideoEgg CMO Troy Young

Earlier this week I sat down with the Chief Marketing Officer for VideoEgg, Troy Young. We spoke about VideoEgg and the Eggnetwork Advertising Platform (EAP).

The company started with a video platform that was always meant to be syndicated. They have grown to currently serve between 5-6 million video streams a day. In the last six months, they pulled the ad technology out of the video platform to create EAP which currently works for video and Facebook apps with mobile and other 3rd party platforms coming soon.  EAP creates an "invitation to interact" and can show basically anything in the window if the user mouses over the invitation.

Troy said that "banners suck" and banners don’t work anymore because they have lost their sensitivity. The EAP network currently has 150 publisher sites and 250 major brands have utilized the platform.

They create an excellent way to monetize your Facebook applications as the code/API takes minutes to install and since Facebook knows who you are, they can deliver the right ad to the right person. They work on creating micro-experiences inside the ad player versus just sending someone off to the advertiser’s Web site. Ringtones appear to be pretty popular currently. Current publishers include: Bebo, Hi5 and MyYearbook. Facebook apps include iLike and RockU. VideoEgg does not have a relationship with Facebook, just the app developers.

Their core principles are:

• Engagement is everything
• Media is community
• Buying rich media should be super simple

The VideoEgg team is about 90 people with headquarters in San Francisco and a Sales VP in NY and London.

The last item we discussed is their reporting. Troy noted that their ad units receive 5x the interaction of a traditional banner creative. They count an interaction as someone mousing over the overlay. I am not sold on this as the proper metric for this type of ad. Anytime someone is faced with a new type of ad, they will typically do something with it as they don’t know how to close it. Remember fly overs and popups? I sure hope one day (soon) we can get to at least baseline industry metrics for online advertising because what we have now leaves advertisers without a full picture for comparison.

Thanks to Troy for taking the time to meet with me during Advertising Week!