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