Ad:Tech - Online Video Panel

I was a last minute addition to the San Francisco Ad:Tech panel on Online Video. The title of the session was "Beyond the Pre-Roll: That State of Online Video." Our moderator, Daisy Whitney, of TV Week, started by criticizing the intrusive pre-roll format. We walked through several other ad formats that accompany online video content. On Monday, the day before Ad:Tech, Eric Franchi of Undertone Networks wrote in MediaPost's Video Insider about pre-roll and the new video ad formats, mentioning the heavy fire that pre-roll has been getting. What is aboundantly clear is that there is a big disconnect between the consumer experience of pre-roll and the agency/advertiser view of pre-roll as a valuable sight/sound/motion messaging vehicle. You simply don't get that with a sponsorship or display unit.

Chris Allen of Starcom and I discussed that from the advertiser side, pre-roll is what our clients are comfortable with - they are re-purposing TV :30s. The advertisers have already spent money on the production costs and want to stretch the creative dollar even further. They have also approved the brand messaging for the TV spot. Finally, with the proliferation of ad formats accompanying online video advertising, pre-roll and mid-roll are as standard as they come.

Overlay units (generally unobtrusive and can be performance-based) are generally better for the consumer experience. However, there is a monetization issue for the publisher. Overlay units will never be able to charge the same CPM as pre-rolls or mid-rolls (Gordon McLeod of WSJ.com said they charge $90 CPMs in the TV 3.0 session). If performance based, the revenue won't match either. Hence, Eric summarized well in the Video Insider blog post stating that pre-roll is best for professionally produced content and overlays are best for the long tail.

A couple other discussion points I brought up is that advertisers are trying to figure out how to reallocate their media budgets. If they spend on online video, where should that budget come from? TV? Online? They look to us, as their agency, to compare effectiveness.

Another interesting question that Daisy posed was whether made-for-Web productions are viable models. Those ventures absolutely can make money because production costs are dramatically lower. On the flip side, they are hard pressed to get sufficient distribution to become a massive hit, which will always be the advantage of the television networks. Web-only series have the appeal of podcasts in that they can reach engaged but niche audiences. It takes motivated media buyers to find those outlets for their clients.

To circle back to the pre-roll discussion, my own feeling is that the eventual winning execution for online video (winning proposition for both advertiser and consumer) will be a persistent rich media companion ad that pauses the video content upon interaction with the ad unit and contains expandable panels of video.

IAG acquired by Nielsen

Nielsen adds a highly complementary and fast-rising business with the addition of IAG Research to its stable.

IAG Research is the company that produces the lists of most well-liked TV ads, which is featured on AdAge.

The company gathers its data by creating questions around broadcast TV content and advertising during that time slot. Those questions are provided to the public not by way of survey invitations but a contest that provides points for correctly answering questions. With that kind of approach, there are definitely ways to cheat or game the system, which IAG needs to constantly prove it effectively accounts for. It certainly appears to have provided a satisfactory resolution such that Nielsen (my previous company) deemed it appropriate to acquire the firm.

In addition, IAG had sufficient weight that it was becoming a second currency used in some broadcast contract negotiations.

The acquisition makes perfect sense at a time where TV content and advertising is now easily consumed online. The most intriguing possibility lies in the idea of assessing effectiveness of sequential messaging for a single advertiser in a single program. For example, if Hulu can prove that sequential (and exclusive) messaging that builds and tells a story is 3x more impactful than the same 30-second spot repeated, then online video has a nicely quantifiable high-value proposition. Online video CPMs no longer need to be driven by supply-demand. Also, the exact same ad spot can be evaluated in both the TV viewing environment and the online viewing environment to compare branding effect and relative cost effectiveness between them.

Video Analytics

The introduction of YouTube Insight gives content creators some nice options for tracking distribution of video assets around the Internet. In addition, this arms viral video marketers with data tracking to show evidence of impact.



Before YouTube Insight, there was also TubeMogul and VidMetrix (part of Visible Measures). These services appear to crawl for publicly available information on video views each day in order to track video view counts. Hence, they are able to provide video views and comments on a daily basis.

When videos are transcoded through their services, TubeMogul and VidMetrix would be able to attain more detailed information and provide geographic and demographic detail. (However, in this video, TubeMogul states that demography is inferred from IP address, so data quality is highly questionable.) In order to entice content owners to upload through them, the sites offer a single upload service in order to distribute across multiple sites, including YouTube, MySpace, Y! Video, Google Video, Metacafe, Revver, and Veoh, among others.


Two other companies in the video analytics space are Streametrics.tv and divinityMetrics. I will have to spend more time reviewing their services before posting.