Vuuzle.TV is an ad-supported streaming service with video content including news, entertainment, interviews, and first feature series. The service provides viewers with a live linear, TV-like experience that’s aligned with social video engagement trends, delivering the highly-personalized engaging experience that today’s audiences are looking for.
As the Advertising Growth Specialist at Vuuzle Media Corporation. I am truly proud to be a part of an award-winning team, says Blake Taylor.
This is the path on how I contributed, along with the team’s well-designed plan to make Vuuzle TV number one. It is awesome being crowned the 2021 Brand Blazer for Streaming Innovation by Verizon Media!
In 2019 Vuuzle started its advertising debut with high budget traffic campaigns across different advertising platforms like Google and Facebook. With that approach, we built out high-converting funnels that walked new users down an immersive path to watching content on Vuuzle.
This worked great for us, ad requests raised substantially to an average of 250,000 a day.
Allowing Vuuzle to set its feet down as an OTT competitor. As we moved forward with a healthy base of traffic flowing to our in-app and web-based platforms, we started creating our footprint with a direct traffic push to OTT inside of the Roku platform.
This new direct push to OTT has allowed Vuuzle to scale ad requests with demand on a higher, more targeted scale. Moving large portions of budgets from social advertising to direct OTT traffic, has allowed Vuuzle to position our campaigns to people who are ready to watch now. Roku’s platform has worked great; allowing us to build out high converting ad funnels and audiences while keeping a flow of new users coming and existing users engaged. We plan on scaling along this path as there are many opportunities for Vuuzle to grow its user base and continue to become a leader in streaming in the OTT space.
I take great pride working with such an amazing team at Vuuzle and look forward to achieving what we set out to do in the OTT space.
“It was truly a path that was designed to get us where we are from the growth campaigns. There is a lot more to be done now that would yield the revenue we expect. The plan was executed with precision and we are pleased to be where we are. The team really took well to my direction and added levels of their individual expertise. We matched the technology base with the business model so well we ended up winning the Verizon Media 2021 Brand Blazer Award for Streaming Innovation. Accomplishing this in just 16 months from the launch of Vuuzle. And already seeing daily profits and with an increase in a steady marketing budget into Roku. We will be generating the revenue we expected all along from the programmatic advertising. So in short the system is completely plumed in and we or on our final frontier.”
Verizon Media saw that we have a competent winning team and has given the Vuuzle Media Corporation its support like a big brother in the media and technology industry. The support from Verizon Media fueled the overall daily focus. The collective effort from where we started to where we are now required many asserted man-hours from Jock Mirow, Joe Salvador, Mackenzi Sakai, Nathalia Duran, Natasha Rainey, Blake Taylor, Caila Young, and Ronnie Lawson. I call this the “TOUCH TEAM.” This is the team that is the manifesto of the Vuuzle Media Corp products and services. And this is the team prides itself on high corporate standards for the company, our team members in different branches of the company, our shareholders, our partners, and the founder of the company that trusted our decisions to put Vuuzle Media Corporation in an Award-Winning position in such a short period of time.
We have been executing a well-thought-out plan since the launch of Vuuzle and all subsequent products, most of which are ad-supported models. We had to build the apps first, then launch them, then market to get our initial set of users and brand awareness. Then get approved and integrated with Ad Server(s), SSP(s), and Private Exchanges (PE(s)). Then, we were able to begin to get the attention of advertisers as we grew our brand awareness and consistency in our ad requests, mostly focused on the US market(s).
It’s a progression of things that must happen in order, and we’ve been on track since I joined the team 1.5 years ago. With OTT as our main focus now, we will grow our ROKU platform and plan to launch Apple TV and Amazon FireStick TV in the near future. All the while, we were building amazing tools for Streaming live and VOD content to a worldwide audience. With Jock, Prophecy, and I having streamed 1000’s of events over the last 20 years, this is hands down the best technology stack we’ve ever built and we’ve proved it by enabling studios in the US and overseas to broadcast 100’s of live events over the last 12 months. With this innovation, came some recognition from Verizon for the BrandBlazer award in Streaming Innovation. And, we are humbled.
I’ve got to say that this really was a joint effort – Prophecy gave us the overall direction and freedom to innovate, but it was an “in the code” effort between myself and Joe Salvador that opened up some of the unrealized potentials of the Verizon System. I know it sounds like one of those cocktail napkin stories, but Joe & I actually started brainstorming on new ways to incorporate the Verizon System into our workflow while sitting in a coffee shop in Denver.
It was Joe who discovered the first “hack” – our goal was to create pervasive URLs for live events. We wanted to be able to give broadcasters & creators more of a channel experience. To do that, we had to find a way to have the same URL for different events from the same production company. Joe discovered, in this case, that less event information is better and that by tying the Live Channel to a particular encoder name, we could achieve that result.
Next, we had to give our broadcasters a way to control their own timing for advertising insertion. I took a fairly simple piece of encoding software that Verizon provided and discovered another hack that allowed it to act as an encoder / ad-insertion backend for a very sophisticated broadcasting front end. We could now give live & VOD producers a way to control multiple cameras, overlays, graphic insertion, AND advertising break timing in one simple package that ran on a standard Mac.
I think it was the combination of these two key processes that led us to really being able to open up the Vuzzle / Verizon platform to our key content providers that resulted in the Brand Blazer Award for Streaming Innovation. We found ways to allow our producers to control their own content delivery and focus on production rather than encoding/streaming.
As the Director of Ad Relations at Vuuzle Media Corporation, I am fortunate and blessed to have an instrumental position alongside our other great team members in setting standards toward innovation in streaming!
I take great honor in assisting with directing our devised plan to bring users to our platform while bringing brand awareness at the same time, along with monetization. We knew traffic breeds ad demand and thus revenue. We also knew having a niche would set us apart. Our niche becoming ad inserted live streaming by creating Live Channels within our platform. We used our own in-house specialists Joe Salvador and Jock Mirow for their award winning success and years of experience with live streaming along with Joe and Prophecys’ knowledge of Ad tech in Live streaming. Those 3 genius minds were able to set us in an arena that even other tech giants were not in.
We first set up our relationships with ad supply partners with an end goal on SpotX as our ad exchange. I have a long time background in programmatic advertising working on the other side of things as an ad network partner. Knowing how to connect those dots to then work backwards as a publisher platform was exciting as we got to build from the root up.
Knowing SpotX to be the mother of all ad exchanges, we knew we had to be impressive with our traffic supply for SpotX to even consider a partnership with us. Having my programmatic knowledge directed us to create a budget to push meaningful branded ad campaigns into DSP servers abroad. Once we hit the numbers we wanted to see in that space; we then pushed forward into the social campaign realm as planned. Our traffic led us right where we wanted and needed to be to open the door to conversation and monetization with ad demand partners and SpotX. They ALL were blown away at our effectiveness to achieve our goal with swift efficiency.
We then released our knowledge in live streaming by studying the Verizon platform and hacking it to benefit us to work the way we wanted. Our goal was to give channel partners the opportunity to run a real time live stream on their channel with ad insertion that could be controlled by the content creator or by us so we would not have content interference with the ads and be able to give those content creators the ability to run a quality live stream with the ad insertion from anywhere using an easy set up and cost efficient equipment. Kudos to Joe and Jock for figuring out that hack!!
Our next objective was to take on targeted users on the Roku platform. These users would be users already on the platform that share the interest in our OTT platform. As we ascend on the Roku platform we will continue our direction to becoming a platform users and partners will attach too and keeping an expeditious business model.
Download VuuzleTV on IOS, Android, Roku, or online at Vuuzle.tv See tons of channels and thousands of movies all free!Vuuzle is a premium streaming service that offers live video content. Such as hit television shows, news, sports, and feature-length movies.