Android Gets Mobile Application for Video Ads

Feb 19, 2010
By David Needle
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Companies and ad agencies looking to get more of their message in front of mobile users just got a new tool.

Following its debut on Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone, iVdopia, a mobile-video ad platform, has now released its software development kit (SDK) for Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android operating system.

The SDK is designed to let companies offer both pre- and in-app video ads for third-party applications developed for Android devices. iVdopia has already offered the service on the iPhone to good effect, landing such blue-chip advertisers as Coca Cola (for Coke Zero), Warner Bros. and Miller Lite.

A "pre-app" ad runs before an application loads, while "in-app" advertising appears in the application itself.

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The news comes as Android devices are emerging as one of the leading competitors to Apple's popular iPhone in the white-hot smartphone market.

"Basically, our vision has been to evangelize video advertising on different devices. We see Android as another big market opportunity," Srikanth Kakani, co-founder of iVdopia, told InternetNews.com. "About 80 percent of the publishers we've talked to said they wanted us to be on both platforms," he added, referring to Android and the iPhone.

Kakani said there are plus and minuses to both platforms. "The Android devices have really good processing power so the videos play really smooth," he said. "The bad part is that Android devices tend to have smaller hard disk space, though we have really good caching technology that's paid off in how we handle the video files."

Vdopia plans to release its Talk2Me feature, available now on iPhone, for Android later this year. Talk2Me lets users interact and respond to ads and share them via Twitter and Facebook.

Hoping to leverage the open source community behind Android, iVdopia said that it's inviting developers to propose new creative video ad formats for inclusion in the next release of the iVdopia platform.

The company said it has done very well on the iPhone, with greater than 500 percent year-on-year growth in revenue. Also, it said that its pre-app video ads for iPhone generated as much as 300 percent higher click-through rates (CTR) than the average CTR for online video.

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.