Online killed the TV star

by Carlos Menezes

Back in April I wrote about how digital adverising spend in the UK had overtaken the spend on newspaper ads. Now comes a piece in BusinessWeek estimating that video ad sales will grow from $775 million this year to $4.3 billion in 2011.

Unfortunately eMarketer expects that this massive growth will merely result in extended experimentation with the medium.

In a nutshell, what the BusinessWeek article predicts is that only after 2011 will we begin to see advertisers taking online video seriously as a result of the distinction between online and television ads fading. As online video approaches television quality the entire medium will become more attractive to advertisers and will lose the impression that it currently has of being a user-generated realm. In theory this should allow for the traditional advertising executive's ego to find some room for exclusivity in an arena that is currently lacking a distinct hierarchy.

One would expect this to result in budgets being gradually shifted from television advertising to online video. The real dilemma that will then raise its horned head is one that's already being discussed today – how do you make ads as unobtrusive as possible while still encouraging users to interact with them?

Possible solutions include offering visitors to a site potential rewards for interacting with an ad or else making the ads run at the bottom or side of the screen without interrupting whatever else is going on in the page. More creative implementations are sure to follow as the above tactics are merely derivatives of what's currently being offered in television nowadays.

Despite the difficulties inherent in the medium it also provides a number of unique opportunities. 2011 is only four years away. By that time we should conceivably be working with an avenue that allows us to combine the emotive richness of television advertising with the interactive nature of the web. Throw in the fact that the online world allows for much more pinpoint targeting of market segments and one wonders why there is so little buzz coming from the ad agencies of the world.

The comparatively low cost of creating online video advertising suggests that the predicted growth in spending is well justified but one just feels the need for advertisers to treat the medium as its own creature. Technology is growing and pushing us forward to a point where it will make perfect sense to tackle online video advertising as the multi-billion dollar industry that it's destined to become.

But why are ad agencies sitting back and waiting to be pushed? If anything they should be the ones pushing technology. I just have a sneaking suspicion that these agencies are going to be caught with their pants down come 2011.

Strategies should already be in the development phase on how the agencies are going to adapt and a corporate culture should be instilled as soon as possible to ensure that the agency's creatives and strategists are not going to have to reboot their thought processes when the growth of online video hits a critical mass.

Of course there are some notable examples of companies that are tackling this head on: Sony is one that comes to mind straight away with their planned transformation of Grouper.

Still I can't shake the sneaking suspicion that most of the prominent agencies are paddling behind the wave rather than riding on its crest.

The solution? Start paddling damn hard.

2007/07/25 | permalink | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

  Bookmark this on ... BlinkBits BlinkList Blogmarks Buddymarks CiteUlike Connotea del.icio.us Digg it FeedMarker feedmelinks Furl Give a Link Gravee igooi Lilisto Linkagogo Linkroll ma.gnolia Maple.nu Netvouz Onlywire RawSugar reddit Scuttle Shadows Simpy Sphinn Spurl tagtooga TalkDigger Wink Yahoo MyWeb