Archive for September, 2008
Self-Service Advertising
Our friends from Google, a few miles south of us on the 101 hit the jackpot for several reasons, one of which was their allowing all advertisers, (but mainly small ones, and ones from SMBs) to sign up, login and start running text ads. Great idea. Let’s now all do it for video. Small issue though – It’s a few orders of magnitude harder to upload a video ad than to type in a 3 line text advertisement.
Also, since the availability of video content on ad networks is far, far less in terms of volume or impressions/streams, or whatever metric you want to use, it deosn’t work so well. The reason being even if we figured out how to get the video built, uploaded and targeted, the next problem is that the target of the 94065 zip code or DMA would end up with a few hundred or a thousand people actually watching the video. In other words the ad network just isn’t big enough to get enough scale for this kind of SMB or small market video advertising.
Spotrunner tried their hand at it for the cable spot market by hiring dozens of people with green screens, G5 Macintoshes and video cameras. There are several companies, big and small, including Comcast (see article here) who are dipping their toe in this water and specifically pitching the fact that it will be easy to advertise online with video because there are great tools to make and upload ads and target the ads online.
Well, we support all these measures. And we think it’s a great opportunity to get the little guy the ability to advertise on video. We just think that doing it on a large network will afford more eyeballs than on a web-site or property-by-property basis. Maybe we should call Comcast.
- Jayant Kadambi
Chad Hurley’s – The Future of Online Video
So, I was forwarded this Google blog post on the future of online video. First time I’ve ever looked at the Google blog, to be honest. Anyway, not surprisingly, Chad Hurley is quite sanguine about the prospects for online video. Go figure. But seriously, given YouTube’s history over the past 3 years, it’s a pretty safe bet.
As I’ve mentioned on these pages before, I fancy myself to be a photographer, (mostly wildlife and nature, not portraits), not that you cared. Why do I mention this? Well, it’s amazing how when I have a video camera or a camera in my hands, people will mug for the camera, do silly things, pose, and then rush to see what it looks like and then ask if they can have a copy so they can send it willy nilly to friends and acquaintances alike. It seems human nature loves video and the social interaction that comes with sharing video. So, yes, we agree with the assessment that video has a good future.
The question on the table in our minds is really which of this video is monetisable in a systematic way that will allow the cost structures for uploading, streaming, delivering and syndicating this video content all over the planet to be supported by a method other than charity from Google’s search business. Will advertisers actually place ads in, around, over and generally associate themselves in order to make this video distribution and content creation business really blossom? Or will there be another business model around it?
Interesting times, for sure.
- Jayant Kadambi
YuMe Sponsored thinkLA Golf Event
YuMe was a sponsor of ThinkLA’s annual charity golf event benefiting the Advertising Industry Emergency Fund (AIEF). The event was held at the beautiful Moorpark Country Club, in the mountains east of Ventura, CA.
Pictured are Michael Mathieu (YuMe’s CEO), and Corey Weiss (VP, Integrated Marketing at Palisades MediaGroup). While the YuMe team tied for 17th overall, we know that we were likely to be amongst the top three in lost balls!
- Steven Comfort
Left Handed Males Who are Buying Golf Clubs
Targeting is a funny thing (funny strange, not funny ha ha). Every Advertiser wants targeting. They want to know if people are left handed so they can pitch them left handed golf club ads. And if they are interested in golf, they figure they can pitch them a really expensive, left-handed set of golf clubs.
The issue with targeting on video (or for that matter anything) is that as you get more granularity on the audience, the smaller the inventory pool. Audiences (18-24 yr. old males) become niches (18-24 yr. old males who like golf) and niches become micro-niches (18-24 yr. old males who like golf and were visiting golf club sites).
So, the general problem is that once you find the micro-niche for the advertiser, they’re happy and in turn they’ll run the campaign. Then everything is great, until the campaign completes and it under-delivers. Micro-niches have this nasty habit of reducing the available pool of people.
So what’s the solution? Reach and scale. In behavioural targeting terms, it’s called overlap. If you have a large potential audience (we do – 134MM), the odds of finding people who have been shopping around for a car (proxied by people who have visited car websites or been watching car videos, etc.) in your network for that niche grow higher. And you’ll get more of them as a result, which means intent-based or behavioural targeting opportunities will be more relevant.
We recently announced the capability to do just this across our network. We waited until we had grown to a point where we could provide a meaningful audience for advertisers. Because few things are more frustrating than being sold the ability to find left-handed males who are golfers and then finding out that the network has 3 people. It’s hard to go back to the client and tell them that their targeted spend under-delivered badly.
YuMe’s behavioural targeting solution is pretty simple… we have reach and scale on a national level, offering advanced targeting and optimization capabilities that make video ads perform… that’s just it.
- Jayant Kadambi
Branded Entertainment
Everyone who’s watched James Bond movies knows the power of branded entertainment. I can still picture Sean Connery’s Aston Martin from Dr. No, and that was run in 1961. There was an article recently in the WSJ about the success of branded entertainment. We agree, involving the advertiser early and often is the best way to integrate the content/video with the brand, get all the ideas flowing, put the brand in the right context and generally make everyone happy. There are a few problems though and it will be interesting to see if the industry can figure them out. The first is whether this system can scale to volume. It’s time consuming, onerous work, and repeating it at scale to build a $100M business may not be easy. Each set of webisodes or videos takes time to figure out (where do I put the soda can, car, etc.). The second, more interesting problem, is the same problem faced by TV in the upfronts. How many people am I going to get to see this? Since it’s new content, there’s only comparables to the content or comparables to the site. (On a side note, there are several companies who generate traffic by syndicating the content in players with auto-play turned on to blog sites to solve this problem. More on whether that is a scam or works well later).
So, how does the agency know whether their $750K for a sponsorship and branded entertainment video is going to be a success? Is the publisher/content owner going to guarantee views? The last question is whether advertisers will care if the branded entertainment gets syndicated onto sites of questionable repute or they don’t care where the content ends up. At least on TV, you know it’ll be on NBC. Online, it’s a more difficult problem.
- Jayant Kadambi
