By Lewis Rothkopf
September 15, 2009
We’ve become accustomed to the notion of “one-stop shopping”: We can get our socks where we get our soda, and tennis rackets are located just a few aisles away from potato chips. Extremely convenient and often price-advantageous, the superstore phenomenon thrives and successful chains are often the envy of many other businesses.
Another scenario: You’re at the car wash (the kind where you need to get out of your car) and you’re watching the miracle happening on the other side of the glass. As you’re walking, through you think to yourself, “Hey – I could use one of those air fresheners. And maybe a windshield cleaner. They have everything here that I need for my car, all in one place.” And so it goes.
Consumer behaviors, of course, often fail to translate well into B2B strategies. Consider the growing trend of video ad networks that offer a technology solution that promises to aggregate video ad fill from that network and also from other networks — many times at no cost to the publisher. From the publisher’s standpoint it may sound like a panacea – increased fill of unsold video inventory, only one system to manage, and in some cases, the ability to optimize by CPM.
To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost
By Barry Grant
September 10, 2009
I’ve often found that communicating the value of different types of ad units to clients is almost as challenging as the back end technology work that goes into creating the units themselves.
Each campaign is different, and each targeted audience calls for a new mix in both message and presentation. I like to think of the wide variety of available ad units in terms of sushi: There are lots of different styles, but only a few key families (i.e., sashimi, nigiri, rolls).
This sushi analogy can be useful in helping clients to plan campaigns. Instead of presenting clients that are less familiar with video with a flurry of industry jargon that includes pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll, expandable, overlay, ticker, bumper, bug, interstitial, floating ad, takeover, etc., I find it useful to break things into a few simple families: in-stream, in-banner, and page-level (which includes units like interstitials, floating ads, and page takeovers). This way, you can unclutter your value proposition for potentially timid online video advertising customers, and leave them feeling that they’ve found the optimal ad mix for their marketing spend.
To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost
By Tod Sacerdoti
July 10, 2009
A common adage in business schools today is that the railroad companies failed because they didn’t realize they were in the transportation business, not the railroad business. I would suggest that today, broadcasters are similarly confused. National broadcasters are in the video-advertising business.
Any TV company that generates more than 50% of its revenue from selling video advertisements is in the video- advertising business. It is not in the content business, as it would like to believe. TV content is simply the delivery mechanism for video advertising.
This is an important distinction. A range of delivery mechanisms have arrived and the ensuing tsunami of available video inventory is going to threaten all broadcasters who don’t recognize this emerging phenomenon and address their customers’ changing viewing habits and needs.
To read the rest of the post, visit AdvertisingAge
By Tod Sacerdoti
July 8, 2009
A few weeks ago, when I was in New York, I had the opportunity to sit down with the producer of the most successful game show on television. The meeting made me think about television, and led to the realization that I could easily identify the most successful reality, drama, news, sports and game shows on television without even thinking.The realization also made me wonder: what’s the most-watched show on the Internet? The reality is: Nobody knows. More, I am not sure that many folks would even agree on the definitions in the question. When talking about Internet video viewing, the concept of “most-watched” is vague to begin with. Are we talking about most uniques to a site, streams on a site, streams in syndication, views on YouTube, podcasts or in banner video autostart advertisements?
To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost
By Tod Sacerdoti
June 18, 2009
When a media buyer decides to buy online video ad space, she or he is first faced with the challenge of finding where the scalable, high-quality, targeted inventory lives. Is it with the publishers, portals, or ad networks? With experience, buyers learn where the “money card” is, and it’s usually not where they originally thought.
We recently conducted an ad agency survey in which we asked 150 video advertising media buyers where they were most likely to buy video inventory today. In contrast to the display advertising business, in which portals dominate, survey respondents indicated they were much more likely to buy inventory either directly from an ad network (41 percent) or publisher (51 percent) than they were from a portal (8 percent).
Why is this? The reasons are due to key differences between the display and video medium.
To read the rest of the post, visit iMedia
By Lewis Rothkopf, BrightRoll’s vice president of network development
June 8, 2009
Go ahead and Bing the phrase “ad networks are bad.” You’ll see 33,300,000 results.
Now, Bing “ad networks are good.” As you were expecting, far fewer results. Right? No. 86,300,000 results with the words “ad networks” and “good” in close proximity.
Why? Because although it is in vogue to trash the ad network business, networks play a crucial role in the advertiser/publisher ecosystem. This is particularly true in the video space.
To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost’s Video Insider
By Tod Sacerdoti
May 11, 2009
Last month my company surveyed 150 video advertising media buyers about their needs, new opportunities and the future of online video advertising. After cutting through buzz-worthy sound bites about pricing (yes, it’s going down) and spending (yes, it’s going up), we found some very interesting topics come up.
In particular, video advertising buyers were explicit about needs in a few key areas: efficiency, targeting and research.
Efficiency is generally a subjective term, but survey results provided some hard numbers to digest. The most important form of efficiency for advertisers today is price, with 46% of video advertisers buying with this metric in mind. Campaign execution efficiencies, including encoding, trafficking and managing publishers, continues to be important for 28% of respondents. Content and delivery speed are less important, for 12% and 3% respectively.
To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost’s Video Insider
By Lewis Rothkopf, BrightRoll’s vice president of network development
April 23, 2009
There’s a great amount of buzz about “TV Everywhere” — everywhere! And while many consumers will be thrilled to have access to the video content they pay to see at home — everywhere — independent content producers have good reason to worry about the “big boys” moving in on their turf. After all, wasn’t the vacuum created by the lack of legal super-premium content the reason for the great success of independent video over the last four years?
Not completely.
It’s true that independent video filled an important void for those looking to watch something interesting during their lunch hour (or “other” time), but who weren’t interested in (insert-clichéd viral -video reference here). Yes, the fact that quality independent video took off was due in large part to a lack of serious competition, but also because it was engaging, well-produced and often compelling.
Now, those independent producers face an uphill battle in holding onto and growing their audience. They’ll be battling with some of the very best content in existence for very limited consumer attention spans. Because lunch hours (and even “other” time) are only so long, even compelling content isn’t enough anymore. To stay in the game, independent producers must assign equal importance to the editorial and business sides of their ventures.
To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost’s Video Insider.
By Tod Sacerdoti
In July of 2008, I penned a byline for MediaPost’s Video Insider that addressed an increasingly hot topic in industry circles: how to reach TV-sized audiences online. In an era of ‘TV Everywhere‘ talk, and growing focus on online video metrics, the need for better standards around measurement has become vital. In many ways, it helps to look at online video ad buys in much the same way as we look at TV ad buys.
Unlike traditional GRP, iGRP (the Internet Gross Ratings Point) addresses many of the same metrics that TV buyers are familiar with, but packages them for the Internet. As more brands devote their ad budgets to hybrid campaigns that include TV and online video buys, or entirely scrap TV buys for video campaigns, I’m glad to see that iGRP is being pushed as an industry standard for measurement.
Consumers are increasingly watching content across many different platforms. To reach them, advertisers need to understand how to best harness the power of the Web and television, and be able to accurately measure the mediums against each other.
As I wrote in my piece, online video offers the best of both worlds – measurable performance coupled with massive audience aggregation. Why not leverage the strengths of the medium and package it in a way that the bigger buyers understand?
Nine months later, it’s heartening to see more of our industry peers signing on to the iGRP standard: This week, YuMe announced their “coining” of the iGRP term. While they weren’t the first to discuss this online video advertising standard, these types of visible stands are exactly what the industry needs to mature and thrive.
By Tod Sacerdoti
March 16, 2009
In 1999, everyone wanted a Web site but few people knew how to code in HTML. The solution? Everyone created and hosted their Web site on Geocities. A huge Internet company ended up buying Geocities (Yahoo) and, over time, most good content creators left Geocities and built sites that they owned, operated and controlled.
Sound familiar? It should. Three years ago, it was hard to host your videos online. Flash players were rudimentary, content management systems were built on popsicle sticks and video streaming costs were high. As a result, everyone uploaded and hosted their video content on YouTube. YouTube’s traffic grew and they too were bought by a big Internet company.
Today, no major media company makes significant money syndicating their content to YouTube and no viable economic model has emerged that properly compensates long form, scripted content creators for their development costs. Consequently, nearly all media companies are creating video destinations and/or building syndicated video offerings that they own, operate and control. Early data suggests that this strategy is proving effective, as broadcast audience networks, content sites and syndication offerings are beginning to scale both in users and in revenue.
To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost’s Video Insider.