Streaming Media - August/September 2007 - (Page 36)

These visitors, he says, are looking for a very stylistically produced video. When the ad is interesting or relevant, the consumer is going to accept it more readily and watch it through, he says, because they are seeing something that already interests them. Berry suggests that, with video content, it is also important to use online programming techniques to draw the viewers in and keep them watching and therefore make them more likely to accept the video ads along the way. “Web video is really about snacking on video, about watching short-form video,” he says. “It’s really important that you put a variety of different [but] related clips in front of the viewer, so when they finish watching one, they stay to watch the next one. That could be because you are telling a story in serial fashion across multiple clips, or it could be that you are tapping an interest that a viewer has in a subject matter area and they are moving across the different clips that are related in some way.” Take Advantage of the Fact That You Are Online Many companies are simply recycling existing TV ads are used to having on the web by building in links or through design by having frames with additional information where users can click to find out more. Glickman says it only makes sense to take advantage of the fact that you are online. Hallmeran of eMarketer agrees, but he warns you to be careful of how you link, maybe creating a mini-site related directly to the product or service you are highlighting in the ad, rather than linking to your general site where the content of the ad may no longer be readily apparent to the viewer. ”If you have a link, make sure the landing page tracks back properly to what you are doing with video because it becomes far more integral online, what you do with video and what you are doing with other aspects of your marketing.” This is because viewers, he believes, don’t separate the video from your website. “If you have a [link] and it’s such a general page [that the viewer can’t find] the thing in the ad, you have undercut the effectiveness of the ad,” Hallerman says. Interactivity also provides a way to gauge viewer interest based on what they click, says Bill Reinstein, CEO at online video advertising David Hallerman of eMarketer points out that, since video ad rates are typically the most expensive, publishers are eager to sell them. Advertisers’ first priority should be to make sure their ads link to compelling content, says Brightcove’s Adam Berry. If your ad’s content and production values aren’t a match for the site’s audience, says CondeNet’s Richard Glosser, they won’t be effective. Tremor Media CEO Jason Glickman encourages advertisers to take advantage of the web’s interactive, lean-forward nature by populating ads with clickable frames and links. for online video ads, maybe editing them to make them shorter for an online audience, but Jason Glickman, CEO at Tremor Media, argues that this is not the best use of the online format. He says that we may be seeing reuse of television ads now simply because advertisers do not have sufficient inventory of online video ads to show something different, but he says we are starting to see more ads specifically designed for the web experience and he sees that as a positive move. “What we are seeing now is publishers creating shorter ads and different types of ad units specifically for the web and particularly for online video, and really, it’s a format that lends itself to the lean-forward [experience] of online versus the lean-back [experience] of watching TV,” Glickman says. What he means by that is that the web by its nature is an active experience while TV is passive. He says you can tap into this active experience that users Accela Communications, a company that helps customers develop longer-form video ads for marketing purposes. He says it’s important to build in branching points after short time periods to allow the user to choose where to go next, and this provides valuable data for the ad publishers. “The act of clicking on those links, if you think about it, becomes a pre-qualifying event and also an overall piece of intelligence information that a client would want to know,” Reinstein says. But Jupiter’s Elliott isn’t as convinced that interactivity is required or even desirable. “Interactivity is not necessarily something people are looking for,” he says, especially in pre-roll ads. He says, if you are a consumer watching a pre-roll ad, you want to watch the content you came to see, and not go off to another website to look at the advertiser’s content. But he acknowledges that advertisers could play with interactivity in post-roll 36 STREAMING MEDIA August/September 2007

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Streaming Media - August/September 2007

Table of Contents Sweet Sixteen Letters to the Editor Technology and Business Trends IBM Takes Webcasting to the Desktop ROI in the EDU Bank Serves Espresso, Enterprise Video Online Video Advertising: Hit or Miss MLB’s Foul Bawl A Crash Course in Flash Video Newspapers in Multimedia Metamorphosis Webcasting Large Entertainment Events: Seeing Through the Hype Webcasting With Windows Media Can’t Start A Fire . . . A WiMAX Primer Mobile Video at Last Telestream Episode Pro Grass Valley ProCoder 3 Silverlight Is No Flash Killer

Streaming Media - August/September 2007

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