November 2, 2016
Submitted by Immersion
Standards-based solution integrates seamlessly with existing work flows and greatly increases key advertising metrics
SAN JOSE, Calif., November 2, 2016 – Immersion Corp. (NASDAQ: IMMR), the leading developer and licensor of touch feedback technology, today announced its Haptic Ad Service, the industry’s first comprehensive service that offers advertisers the ability to add “touch effects” to premium HTML mobile video ads. Immersion’s cloud-based solution uses the industry VAST and VPAID online video ad standards to enable advertisers to design touch effects for mobile video, and serve and sync the effects with mobile ads as they run in real-time.
Made with Immersion’s haptic technology, touch effects in video create engaging and immersive mobile ads and brand experiences, which perform better on key metrics such as ad awareness, engagement and purchase intent. For example, metrics from an outstream mobile video campaign showed that users experiencing video ads with haptics were 51 percent more likely to unmute their phones in order to engage more fully with the content.1
Study Results Show Benefits of Haptics with Outstream Video
To further quantify the value of haptics in advertising, Immersion, in partnership with Teads, the inventor of outstream video advertising and the number 1 video advertising marketplace in the world, commissioned an A/B trial conducted by Research Now®. The study revealed that outstream video ads with haptics resulted in a 41 percent increase in purchase intent and a 75 percent increase in ad awareness. In addition, 71 percent of users in the study agreed that haptics made the ad more interesting, and 72 percent wanted to feel haptics in other mobile video ads.
“The results from our study showed that in-article videos and haptics in advertising have a strong impact on the audience. Outstream video ads already create a more preferred and seamless online experience for the user by placing ads outside of the video stream within the paragraphs of contextually relevant editorial articles. The format, when coupled with Immersion’s haptic technology, helps deliver more memorable ads that allow brands to connect with consumers through multiple senses and creates positive brand perceptions,” said Eric Tourtel, SVP of LATAM, Teads. “In our experience, mobile-optimized ads lead to better user functionality, are stronger at capturing attention and generate greater engagement. Teads is now pushing the boundaries of what is possible on mobile with new immersive formats like inRead Vertical 360 that allow brands to convert their video ads into an interactive vertical experience to project more personal and relevant messages to their audiences. Touch effects are an extension of this, helping bring ads to life and brands closer to the users in what they consider to be the first and preferred screen – their phones.”
“We’re thrilled to see that in multiple studies, the key performance metrics confirm impressive increase in user engagement,” said Todd Whitaker, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Immersion. “Over the last year, we saw incredible momentum from in-app haptic ads. With our new standards-based service offering, we’re making it easier than ever to conduct trials of haptics in mobile video ads and to immediately transition these trials into production, so that advertisers can start experiencing the value that the sense of touch can bring to their media campaigns.”
Immersion’s Haptic Ad Service supports haptics in mobile advertisements from creation to distribution with a full offering of design tools for creatives, haptic design services, campaign management and real-time haptic ad delivery.
• TouchSense® Design Cloud is a haptic design toolkit that enables creative designers and editors to create touch effects for mobile video easily and efficiently using their existing editing tools. This toolkit provides designers with a way to add haptics to video ad content and share the design with a broader team for collaboration. TouchSense Design Cloud also encodes and prepares the haptic ad for distribution.
• TouchSense® Campaign Manager is a platform for media agencies and advertisers to run, track, manage and optimize their haptic ad campaigns. With TouchSense Campaign Manager, advertisers and agencies can set deployment parameters for haptic tracks that align with the ad campaign. Haptic impressions are tracked with haptic ad tag, exported from TouchSense Campaign Manager, that is used in the HTML ad bundle. The haptic tag calls for the ad assets as necessary.
• Immersion also offers its own custom haptic design services for personalized creative and technical support for those who want to use haptic technology to create compelling mobile ads.
Immersion is quickly amassing recognition for its work in the advertising industry. Immersion’s campaign with Peugeot was named a finalist in the 2016 Online Marketing Media and Advertising Awards, and its work with Stoli Vodka was named one of AdWeek’s Mobile Media Plan of the Year.
Learn more about Immersion’s Haptic Ad Service at www.immersion.com/haptic-ad-service.
1Teads and Immersion – In-market Haptics A/B Study, September 2016
About Immersion
Immersion Corporation (NASDAQ: IMMR) is the leading innovator of touch feedback technology, also known as haptics. The company provides technology solutions for creating immersive and realistic experiences that enhance digital interactions by engaging users’ sense of touch. With more than 2,200 issued or pending patents, Immersion's technology has been adopted in more than 3 billion digital devices, and provides haptics in mobile, automotive, advertising, gaming, medical and consumer electronics products. Immersion is headquartered in San Jose, California with offices worldwide. Learn more at www.immersion.com.
About Teads
Teads, founded in 2011, is the inventor of outstream video advertising and number one video advertising marketplace in the world. Publishers work with Teads to create brand new video inventory and manage their existing inventory, monetizing it through programmatic buying, their own sales force, or third parties.
Teads’ native video advertising solutions encompass a series of formats inserted deep into media content, like the inRead playing inside articles. It is changing the game within the video advertising market by creating unprecedented levels of premium inventory, which did not exist before.
Brands and agencies can access this top-tier, premium inventory, available on the web and on mobile, through programmatic or managed services. Through its managed services capabilities, the Teads team execute on its clients’ behalf using its platform.
Teads has a team of over 450 employees, 100 of which are in the innovation team, across 27 offices in 21 countries.
About Research Now®
Research Now Group, Inc., is the global leader in digital data collection to power analytics and insights. It enables confident, data-driven decision-making for its 3,700 market research, consulting, media, and corporate clients through access to millions of deeply-profiled business professionals and consumers. The company has provided high-quality, proprietary, research-only online panel sample since 2001, and currently operates in over 40 countries from more than 20 offices around the globe with locations in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. Research Now is recognized as the quality, scale, and customer satisfaction leader in the market research industry. For more information, please go to www.researchnow.com.
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