Streaming Media - August/September 2007 - (Page 40)

these are message ads, aimed more at a B2B than a consumer audience. These ads may display in an instream banner on a media site like The Wall Street Journal. The advertisers run a teaser loop to draw the user in, but it’s entirely up to the user to watch or not. “The user has to make a choice, whether it’s our technology or anybody else’s. The user can see the looping video, but then they have to click on the banner ad to keep watching,” he says. What’s more, he says, when viewers click the banner, it’s important that they stay put on the site they originally arrived at because they wanted to view information on that media site. “When I click that banner it’s crucially important that I know I’m going to watch the video in this space, that I’m not going to be pulled out and have my page refreshed and now end up on some other vendor site or delivery site that I didn’t come here intending to see. We’ve found there is a tremendous lift to response Brightcove’s Adam Berry says ad-rotation is an absolute necessity to keep viewers from getting frustrated with the experience, a bad situation for all concerned. “If you don’t have good creative rotation, you drive your viewers crazy,” he says. “If a viewer comes to your site and they are going to watch, say, 15 video clips over the course of multiple visits, if you are only running two creatives and they are forced to watch one creative multiple times, that frequency gets too high, and the viewers start to check out.” In order to alleviate this, Berry says, you need to develop a strategy for frequencycapping and creative rotation. It’s not just the number of creatives involved, though; it also has to do with how often you serve ads to visitors. Even if you have a good rotation, if you are serving them up before every piece of content, you will still annoy the viewer. Glickman says publishers must avoid saturating a site with ads. “Certain sites are notorious for serving an online video advertising Note how much more effective a video ad is when it’s accompanied by a banner (far left) than when it’s not (near left). rates when viewers find out they can watch without leaving the [site],” Reinstein says. Not everyone agrees, however, that it’s crucial to keep the eyeballs of the viewer on the original site. In fact, Ben Crain, VP of Media at Rapt, thinks you have to have confidence in your content and that viewers will come back. “That’s been a conundrum from day one. Within any ad, you can click through and go to the marketer site. Consumers are showing up for content and if the content is good enough, even if they leave momentarily, they will come back and the publisher needs to trust that’s the case. If it’s not the case, they have more fundamental problems than clicking through the ad,” Crain says. ad before every piece of content,” he says. Publishers are trying to make money, Glickman says, but they will lose viewers if they don’t do it the right way. Final Word If you haven’t begun thinking about online video advertising, it’s time to start. Research shows that viewers are not only willing to watch online video ads, they are likely to take action when they do. Users who are used to watching these types of ads on TV understand that to view high-quality content, the publisher has to make money, and that means ads. But as with any advertising medium, there is a right way to do things and it’s important that you follow some of the guidelines discussed in this article to be certain your ad has the impact you want without alienating the audience you are trying to impress. Ron Miller (ronsmiller@ronsmiller.com) is a freelance technology writer based in Massachusetts. Comments? Email us at letters@streamingmedia.com, or check the masthead for other ways to contact us Mix it Up When viewers go to a site and watch video ads, nothing turns them off faster than seeing the same ads over and over. That’s why it’s important to have a good ad-rotation going, and at the same time, don’t overwhelm the viewer with too many ads when the fact is they came to see your content. 40 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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