VideoVoo: Online Video Marketing

More and more eyeballs online and less and less attention for traditional offline TV make marketers shift millions of dollars into the web based video marketplace, into independent video partners and internet TVs. Still, there is simply not enough online video inventory, not enough ad time left for advertisers - advertisers, many of whom are still insisting on the established thirty-minute spots, as if the internet was the same horse as the old TV stallion in the same stable. Despite the fact that the one thing that might give these old school marketers any chance to get into the precious online video niches - especially in these inventory-hard days - is to reduce their ad time to a few seconds. To a few seconds and spiced with a lot more riddles to make users go after you, search, explore and scrutinize the web for you. 3-10 seconds should do it. Repeated, connected, versatile and tested 3-10 seconds.

As Abbey Klaassen in Advertising Age writes

Dina Kaplan, co-founder and president of Blip.tv, which hosts and sells advertising for independent online-video producers, said the floodgates have started to open, but how much money online-video sellers will be able to accept remains to be seen. “A month ago the sky parted, and we have more ad requests than we can handle,” she said. “It’ll be tough for just about any web-video site to absorb TV dollars.”

If you compare the proportions of current ad spend for TV and the internet, the demand is even more promising: eMarketer estimates online video ad spend in 2008 at about $1.4 billion in contrast to the $70 billion for TV. So there is still a lot of dollar liquid to be sucked up by the online sponge, even though the guaranteed numbers may not be delivered…

“We’re seeing from some of our video partners that they’re not delivering on guaranteed numbers as it is now, so if there’s an influx of dollars, it’s going to be a problem,” said Adam Kasper, senior VP-director of digital media at Media Contacts. A big issue is the scale difference between the two channels: 1.5 million views online is considered a hit, while an audience of 1.5 million on broadcast is a failure.

The way I see it, even the tenth (or hundredth!) of it is a HIT if you have ample data to prove that you have actually reached your target audience. So online video hit is even more refined and can go a lot lower than the article suggests.

Nevertheless, if you wish to advertise on online video sites and muscle your way through other marketers more easily, make very flexible 3-30 second ad formats (30 s ones happily accepted by online TV channels), think of various video partners (very niche ones too with a few thousand users per clip, if they are truly your target), interconnect the various ads, send links to them from other online ads placed on microsites, lists, etc., make long-term relations with the video partners and, last but not least, optimize your ads within the different time-frames based on your 24/7 data. Online video campaigns are really different, so if you don’t feel the difference, get somebody to think for you and update your mindset.

(source of Rabbit eats wolf photo montage: www.mtklub.hu) (and several other sites - sorry, I have no clue who I should credit it to, as it has been screenshot so many times)