Tips from Clickz's online video conference
Last Thursday we at Promediacorp explored the world of online video advertising at Clickz’s Online Video Advertising Conference. It was held in the New York midtown Hilton where “art deco comes to die” according to one panelist, and participants ate boxed lunches.
A few key points:
1) Targeting segments via the internet can be highly specified unlike television, and right now it’s still much cheaper. At the same time, a limited segment of our population have access to high speed internet where streaming videos are just a click away. Even so, the advertising online is is very small compared to usage, so this is a high growth industry.
2) Online advertising stresses the interaction of the viewers in the advertising process, they want viewers to play with their material. One great example is Verizon’s push to publicize their Fios network, for which they are serving up fiber optic technology to all their high speed internet customers. So they created a beat box mixing game (www.beatboxmixer.com), which requires a high speed connection. Beat boxing is when a person makes “beats” using only their mouth. Players select a champion beat boxing team, orchestrate their own team beats, and can share the resulting demo with friends. We highly suggest you play with it, Stumble Upon dubbed it worthy of 5 stars.
3) Distribution is key to push a viral video. After a company has pulled together marketers, producers, account managers, and creative directors to create a great online video advertisement, the question must be asked “now how do we promote it?” Yahoo!, You Tube, smaller vodcast directory sites are all options. The goal is to make your video “viral” which means that it gains widespread popularity across the web via word-of-mouthwire.
4) 5 second adds. Do you like recording your TV content and then fast forwarding through the adds? No for long! AOL/Time Warner is working on the 5 second ad, so that even if you want to fast forward through your recorded TV content, your typically 30 second adds will become 5 seconds each. For example, the floating, silver fonted “Lost” will slowly twirl at a tilt against the black background for 5 seconds.