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Mike Cassidy has posed a challenge on Online
Video Insider: “If you were given $1 million for an
online video business, how would you spend it?” Cassidy comes up with four
business models—video search, video portal, ad serving, and ad solution—that
are prime for someone—anyone—to develop the killer solution.
We’ve been discussing the same issues here. Like Cassidy, we’re interested in what you have to say.
Online Video Watch posted a nice piece about us last night, explaining what sets us apart from others in this space. And they’re right—expect more to come from us in the not-too-distant future.
Google unveiled its AdSense for video program last week, enabling publishers to include text- or video-overlay ads into video clips on the Google Content Network. You can read about here, here, here, and here. Aside from filling Google’s ample coffers with even more cash, the program further opens up the debate regarding online video advertising formats.
Google’s news comes on the heels of VideoEgg’s pay-for-engagement scheme that does away with CPM in favor of a model in which advertisers pay only when a user engages with an ad. Now marketers can fight about how they want to pay for online video ads.
Both initiatives are attempts to allow marketers to find (and pay for) viewers who are engaged in their ads. But neither of them measure how deep that engagement is. So along comes Microsoft today with the announcement of its Engagement Mapping standard for measuring interaction with online ads. The method takes into account “all the various online touchpoints and interactions a consumer experiences before an eventual sale.” That includes the impact the frequency, size, and format (such as video) of an ad have on the consumer’s path to action.
Oh yes, the action in the online video advertising space is getting fast and furious. And it’s only going to get more confusing before some clarity emerges. Which horse do you want to bet on?
Search Engine Watch has a good post on optimizing video for search, explaining that this is a great time for small businesses in particular to get moving on universal search and SEO for their video ads. The piece mentions a company called eLocalListing, which helps local online video move beyond Internet Yellow Pages listings and onto search engine results pages. The timing is particularly good considering that Google is testing video ads on its search results pages. The opportunities keep growing.
How’s this for a tipping point: Johnson & Johnson, not exactly known for being on the cutting edge of marketing, is promoting the popular Johnson’s Baby Lotion in a series of animated Web videos, largely eschewing the TV market (subscription required to read Wall Street Journal link). According to the article, J&J—one of the largest TV advertisers—went with the interactive approach “because it believes young parents scour the Web for baby-care advice.”
As the Journal notes, J&J is like most consumer-products companies in that it’s usually conservative in its marketing approach. But the company deserves credit not just for going where their customers are, but for taking an approach that differs greatly from its traditional ad strategy. Let’s hope that’s a sign of things to come for online video advertising.
At Fliqz, we’re all about providing business solutions. Real estate is one of those industries for which video provides obvious tangible benefits, as our CEO Benjamin Wayne explains in this E-Commerce News piece on “Sales 2.0.” (And if there’s any industry that needs all the help it can get, it’s real estate.) For more details on how we do it, check out our real estate case studies.
There’s a lot of talk about what the future of online video advertising will be. All anyone seems to know for sure is that it shouldn’t work like the traditional advertising models that have been in use for, oh, more than half a century. Yesterday, Microsoft provided a glimpse at what the future could look like.
The company demonstrated several next-generation ad technologies, including contextual video ads, which uses speech recognition to dynamically serve ads based on content spoken in a video. Another technology, Intelligent Bug Ads (now that’s a creepy name), locates “nonintrusive frames in a video in which to place ads,” according to the Microsoft press release. That is, it places a small clickable overlay where it’s least likely to annoy the viewer.
The idea, of course, is to make online video ads more relevant to the content, as opposed to the stuff you’re assaulted with during the Super Bowl. Expect to see more action in this area from all corners of the industry.
