Timothy Hanlon on Online Video Advertising
Timothy Hanlon, Senior Vice President/Ventures for Denuo, talks about the challenges involved in finding what works best in online video advertising -- and what can and can't be transfered from television advertising.
Transcript: Timothy Hanlon on Online Video Advertising
I think the majority of advertisers that are in the online video space are refugees from traditional television environment. So the creative that they bring to the table are pre-constructed 15s and 30s, very simply edited and digitized to bring into broadband video environments. I think it s pretty easy to get involved and into broadband video advertising environments using that as your lynch pin.
But the reality is it's a much more sophisticated enterprise. I think a lot of advertisers that have been in with the easy stuff -- the 30s, the 15s, the digitized television spots -- are recognizing that broadband video can be much much more. Of course it requires a whole bunch of different advertising, especially at the agency level. Your creative has to be a lot more fluid, many more creative units, longer forms, shorter forms, multiple versions of and then working in partnership with some publishers and contact companies to figure out what the best content to advertising ratio is. Is it going to be pre-roll, post-roll, mid-roll, no roll, sponsorship -- all these kinds of things. So I think that level of sophistication is lost on most of the traditional advertisers that are just getting their feet wet with broadband video but those who have been around it for a couple of years in its really early infancy, I think there is a yearning to get to a better place.
I think every week there's a new change, a new wrinkle, a new advancement that makes the process more nirvana-like. I think we're going to get to a better place where advertising and content co-mingle better, whether that's a better, more sane approach to pre-roll advertising, and post-rolls, whether that s a scan scout-ish mid-roll tweak of some sort or alert that there s more information relevant to the content of the video, it is iterative though. It's a partnership between programmer and advertiser to figure out what the best mix is. And I think historically, advertisers and agencies have relied on media companies to create the opportunities that the agencies and the marketers buy, and put ads into. I think the reality is that it has to be a shared effort. And that puts more onus on the agencies and the marketers to think about what do they want to market. Maybe it s not just creating an ad. Maybe it s creating long form video content on their own accord, and not even needing content owners per se. They could literally create their own content and syndicate it out themselves like programmers do. In other words, everything is on the table. It just requires the agencies and the marketers to kind of step up their game to be much more involved and much more sophisticated than just being simple buyers of ad units.
The world is really about video flowing across multiple places whether it's a mobile environment or out of a home environment or god forbid, the classic television environment. There are lots of places where video is going to live and breathe. We need to have the same kind of metrics, dynamics, creativity, and measurement, as we re focusing on online environments, across all those environments. To me, that is an amazing amount of challenge, but it's also a tremendous opportunity for redefining what video is for marketing.
So I think classically video marketing has been about television, and more specifically about 30 second spots in and around content created by professional content creators. So filling in 30 second gaps or 60 second gaps or 15 second gaps in linear television oriented environments, that now is only maybe one of a couple of dozen different video environments. And that to me is the pivot point of why the skill set needs to change. It has to be much more holistic, much more free-flowing, and much more multi-point because consumers are just not just going to be watching linear television anymore. Clearly broadband video, and the advent of that over the last decade or so, shows that people are very comfortable consuming video in that environment. It's fair to say that they're also going to be comfortable consuming video in many other environments as well.