So, where is all the good content? Beyond YouTube and Hulu, where do you go to find good, entertaining, informative, quality content online?

Contextual in-text targeting that launches video, content syndication, porting video between tv and computers and creating good, sponsored content and distributing it is all on the agenda.

The Internet Content Syndication Council has been established to help foster the understanding of content syndication.

So, what is stopping the widespread distribution of content? Mollie Spillman of TidalTV believes that everyone is still figuring out their content syndication strategies. We don’t know how big the market is, what the opportunities are, and when to jump in. There’s a wide spectrum of companies doing vastly different syndication deals. Do you put every episode of a show up online? And most importantly, they don’t want to cannibalize their own TV ad revenue. There’s too much at stake to give up.

Will that cannibalization happen anyway? If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will. People asking to create viral video are asking the wrong question. It is lightning in a bottle. The Jimmy Kimmel / Ben Affleck video was huge, and is now over. The industry needs a model that can repeat itself.

Andrew Sussman added on the cannibalizaton that organizations have gotten so large, with their own divisions with their own P&L responsibilities, that it is unavoidable. The question will become “which screen do you put the content on first?” As the industry matures, best practices will develop for different content to maximize the revenue streams in the long term, not just “TV has the most money, so lets try that first.”

Everyone is willing to make a bet on a smart team with a smart idea, work with video ad networks and aggregators to see what everyone brings to the table. MySpace has traffic. TidalTV only works with brands and has no UGC and better ad systems for monetizing the content. The smarter companies are trying a variety of strategies right now, but not doing 1000 deals, and not doing a walled-garden either. The goal isn’t to be the only stop for content. It is to be one of the stops. Consumers have so much choice that media companies are under pressure to retain audiences and keeping up with the change of pace.

Sussman points out that nobody controls all of the distribution right now. “No one entity can ruin your day.”

Kevin Wassong mentioned that “exclusive” isn’t such a priority any more for lots of people. Portals and major media still want exclusives, but content owners and smaller distributors don’t. But companies want to stick with their business models, or risk being out of business. Portals aren’t charging “carriage fees” anymore. In fact, they are paying for content.

John Sendek from Vibrant points out that there is tons of content that isn’t being monetized right now. As Patrick Keane from CBS gave some credit to other media credit for Cumulative Rating Points. Who gets paid for the benefit of social media and engagement that TV can’t provide.

But what about the hurdles for the marketers? Scale is still challenge numero uno. The publishers with scale (read:YouTube) still make advertisers and content owners nervous. Spillman points out that there isn’t scale for reach and effectiveness that marketers need to provide to their clients. Still can’t put all of the forms of targeting in place and test without the scale. The advertisers are waiting for the audiences to come. The CPMs that advertisers are paying are there, but the overall dollars pale in comparison to TV.

What is scale anyway? Does it matter? Or is it the value and quality of an audience rather than the size? Scale and critical mass is determined by the advertisers’ needs. Over targeting to a niche audience can eliminate the scale. But in the last 6 months we’ve seen a correlation between the amount of content coming online with consumption.

The challenge, according to Kevin from Minyanville, isn’t a lack of content. It’s a lack of good content. Additionally, a free-content model isn’t sustainable. Its also difficult to produce content at the price levels that make sense. People don’t yet know how to create “web-only” content for monetization. Cost structures are changing more slowly than strategies.

An ad-driven world is very different than a retail model. The larger an audience you have – and can control – the better. Every deal is different. Lots of quid-pro-quo deals that are win-win for the content producer and the publisher / syndicator. But there is no proven formula for how deals should be done.

What does bi-polar mean, anyway? And who writes these panel titles? Nevermind. Another standing room only panel.

Engagement continues to be mysterious, and measuring it even more so. There is data that is reflective and indicative, but it is probably best to let the client determine the success metric for themselves.

Measuring video is more straightforward. There are proxies for success, but still no hard metric. Across multi-channel campaigns, advertisers want to know if the message is attracting users to the brand and providing additional exposure to the brand, according to Matt Cutler. Can we drive better, higher quality experiences. In the end, if an advertiser spends $10, do they get $12 back?

Maria spoke about reach vs. branding campaigns, where optimization engines are turned off. Looking towards audiences, advertisers are looking to develop metrics for measuring attitudinal behavior that is matched to the demo and psychographic data.

Are we able to change perception of the brand? With high variables in performance of campaigns, the industry is still trying to learn what to measure. With video, according to Ken Mallon, the variances between “good campaigns and bad campaigns” is much greater than typical display advertising. Poor targeting makes more of an impact. “When you see a video ad for diapers and you don’t have children, you are turned off by the brand.”

Maria – we need to find more ways to measure more things so we can become better advertisers.

Visible Measures: even if we have data, it may not be understood by the people who have it. For instance, there is a ton of data about financial performance, but how many people truly leverage it when looking at the performance of their investments? Beyond a P/E ratio, how much do people really understand?

There are forward leaning innovators who are taking the risk – but there is much larger reward for those who take the risk.

Online is currently being held to a higher standard than other media. The overall market is responding to those pressures. TV measurement has made major advancements in response to the advances in online. Too many people still buying on impressions without knowing who they reach. It is a TV mentality.

Ken – measurement leads to transparency. Transparency leads to trust.

As media planners and buyers, they are searching for a proxy to replace the CTR as a standard to look at as a key measure. What about all the people who are influenced but aren’t clickers? Albert Kim expresses the need to move away from the “last impression seen” model, and look at the “overall journey” that the user takes beforehand.

There is also a shift away from the old demographic and psychographic measures like age, gender and income and more towards more descriptive monikers for clusters like “humble homes” or “established elite” “eager seekers.”. The audience votes with their mouse. Deeper understanding leads to better experiences and better results of advertisers, publishers and consumers.

Trying to marry all of the different data sources and see what it means. Clients are looking for two key take aways, and not a 50 page powerpoint deck on metrics.

Eric Picard is clearly one of the smartest people around. Its no wonder he’s one of Microsoft’s online advertising thought leaders.

He’s providing an overview of manual vs. automated optimization, and the pros and cons of exchanges for both publishers and advertisers. Blind bidding is bad for both the advertiser and publisher.

As campaigns run, if campaign goals aren’t being met, there is a flood of data to review in order to make the appropriate changes to the marketing and creative mix. Just as goals can be translated into a media plan, they can also be translated into business rules for automation. The end result? An automated agency.

But is this a good thing? Lets turn to the panelists. However, ironically, there’s a technical snafu that held up Eric presentation, and could “de-optimize” the panel.

Strategy will continue to be done by humans. Execution and optimization will be automated. And, until we can track online ad exposure to offline conversions, we’ll still need people to place value on the media and its effectiveness in the real world.

Automation will provide more data to enable better decision making. But decision making should ultimately stay in the hands of real people. People who don’t have the strategic hat on will need to reconsider their role in the media buying and planning process.

While relationships are important, media is a commodity, and the media buying process should be more about supply and demand, and less on relationships. Automation can tremendously reduce the amount of sales friction in the buying process. The value of the impression is in the impression itself. When free markets are infiltrated by people who don’t understand the value of the media in the marketplace, people can artificially bid-up the value of the impression, which reduces the overall ROI on the marketing effort. Automated markets need to be smart, not just free.

“The most important, most valuable ad bought is the one that the buyer sees.”

Just weighing in before the panelists take the stage. I think there are a lot of media buyers and planners who are definitely afraid for their jobs if media planning becomes totally automated.

Conversely, Cory Treffiletti believes that technology will enable media buyers to handle larger budgets more efficiently, which is true, of course. But it will also cut the need for all those 25 year old media planners (who consistently take a bad rap for their ability to digest all the data thrown their way) dramatically as well.

The panel generally believes that automation will change the industry over the next five years, creating new data pools and the ability to manage thousands of categories, sites, keywords, etc., which is currently not scalable.

Mediapost’s Joe Mandese is leading a panel discussion on “nomadic consumers and nomadic media,” with Alan Cohen from Initiative, Cathleen Campe from RPA, Shawn Gold from Social Approach (and formerly MySpace) Ed Montes of MediaContacts and Scott Sorokin from Carat.

Kicking off the panel, for some reason, is a check in on which candidate the panelists are endorsing. A good laugh from “Obama probably looks better than Hillary at 3 in the morning.”

Widgets again? Yep. Jeez. I’ve tuned out for a bit. Too much widget chat at the show, but I’ve had some healthy conversations with people about them and how they may put an emphasis back on Marketing 101. What are your goals, and does a widget help you achieve them? But we digress….

The core issue is media fragmentation, reach and frequency, and the thinking that needs to go into developing a holistic marketing plan rather than just a media plan (see previous post).

Radio used to be scary because there were 1,000 radio stations. Now the issue has magnified. But social media enables consumers to say “I’m not going to have ads that I don’t want on my Facebook page.”

But there’s still a built in fall back that TV has reach and is a safety vehicle for marketers. “Broadcast is dead is one of the silliest things people are saying right now.”

Alan Cohen, President of Initiative West and Innovation Worldwide, explains how the overall marketing game has changed, and how to Make Magic out of Moments. They created a 24 hour online TV channel for the movie Saw 3, which is loaded with content previously reserved for DVD extras. They also took over “Comedy Time,” and got comedians to do jokes based around the movie, driving awareness across all of the user-generated video sites, including a Jack Black knock off singing “Saw 3, I love you and my girlfriend (in that order.)

Alan also showed how they promoted Keane’s new album in print magazines, putting tiny usb drives into the print ads, distributing Keane’s new single, similar to how Prince introduced his new album in the UK. He also showed how they distributed CBS content on a similar promotion with a usb stick.

His overall theme - the new world order - is taking the big marketing ideas to clients, not just the media buy. Agencies need to be trend experts and hire people that are in the core demo to identify those trends as they emerge.

What to do? Hire fresh thinkers, inject creativity, leave “digital breadcrumbs” and capitalize on whats next. Remember, media IS marketing.

So there weren’t any serious parties (ala Blue Lithium @ AdTech) here at OMMA, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any fun to be had. The pool at the Roosevelt Hotel, not the official OMMA hotel, provided plenty of wee-hour excitement.

Names and companies withheld to protect the not-so-innocent, but a few lessons were learned. First, don’t mess with drunk women with brothers on death row. Yep. You read that right. After being cut off from the bar, “Miss 1980’s bridesmaid dress & jeans” wearing girl joined our table and began to mix it up with, well, everyone at the table. It didn’t go over well when Miss “I’m connected to the mob” told a very attractive woman in her early 30’s that she looked 45, and that her J. Crew sweater was “from the 70s” and she “hoped she didn’t pay more than $100 for it.” Ah, good times.

To lighten the mood, another online video network rep found himself swimming in the pool, solo, around 1 am. Again, good times. Fortunately the heat lamps and fire pit were enough to warm him back up before heading back across the street to the official OMMA hotel. Hey, at least he wasn’t wearing a toga at the Toga Bar in Caesar’s Palace. But who would do such a thing?

Day two of the OMMA show starts shortly. More to follow……

Nothing worse than your laptop battery dying while your boss is speaking on a panel. Well, a few things are, but I guess that depends on who your boss is. So pardon the cut-and-paste job from my notes that are now a few hours (and a few vodka tonics) late.

I walked in late to the “How to Buy Video and Look Smart Doing It” panel because the previous panel ran over. The core question is how to hit scale and how to buy it. Buying across a lot of publishers in a seamless way is very dependent on the backend technology. Tremor’s Randy Kilgore believes that technology will be they key to breaking out of the pre-roll vs. overlay box that the industry is stuck in. “People are turning offline dollars into online pennies.” There’s a need to do better.

Reset Media’s Chris Bryant believes that the content distribution model needs to change before premium content owners see a real shift. Hulu’s model starts a bit of a stir on the panel. Finally a bit of excitement, but it was short lived. Everyone wanting to get to the cocktail party definitely stifles a heated debate….and so does having companies in symbiotic relationships on the same panel. But we digress.

Chris Johnson from Brightcove says that no single format, and no single distribution channel will solve all of the issues that the industry faces. Content owners need to get content where their users are, and not wait for users to come to them. Over time, experimenting will get results, and then “lather, rinse, repeat.”

Original content for online can’t be compared to long form, TV content. Even for TV shows ported online, users are only consuming about 10 minutes online of an hour long show offline. Very utilitarian. Better targeting for the content in the video rather than site level will help. Chris Johnson disagrees: “If I’m watching Grey’s Anatomy, I’m not looking for a doctor, so that kind of targeting won’t work.”

YuMe’s Stephen Comfort said that the biggest advertisers are being the most pro-active, and bringing concepts and ideas to the market. “Just like the 1950s when Tide would bring a concept for a show, big advertisers are doing the same thing again.”

(this is where my battery died, and now I have to re-read my hand-written notes)

The discussion turned to widgets, despite the fact that the widget panel was going on in the next room. Chris Johnson talked about “marketers as publishers,” including Kohler’s branded content promoting kitchen and bath design, as well as Stop & Shop’s “why S&S is good for me” as examples of marketers leveraging their audience and their interests. He also cited Heavy.com as a publisher who clearly understands their audience, and delivers content that is totally for them.

Randy Kilgore reminded the audience to not lose sight of the fact that advertising is about selling products. The most effective advertising are the ads that sell stuff, not just the ads that make people laugh. Creating fun ads is fun, but not necessarily effective when measuring ROI.

YuMe’s Comfort said that the best campaigns are the ones where advertisers user multiple creative assets. “Go the extra mile and do the overlays and banners, too. It opens doors. There is a limited amount of content that makes sense for a :30 pre-roll.”

Brightcove’s Chris Johnson agreed, saying that leveraging offline ad content with overlays and banners makes a lot of sense and costs very little compared to the original investment.

An interesting conundrum that was discussed was the online vs. offline buyers market. Having traditional offline people enter the online space can be interesting because they don’t want - or aren’t used to - all the data and reporting that online advertising can produce. It can be overwhelming for them.

Randy Kilgore wrapped up, mentioning Microsoft as a good example of a brand embracing the online model. They spend 2.5% of their media budget just testing new formats, and more advertisers need to follow their lead.

And that, our dear readers, wraps up day 1 of the OMMA Hollywood conference. Day two updates to follow shortly.

From the Pitch Your Niche panel….

FoxSports is producing 4 hours of web-only video per day. Ed Bunnell said that video is their top priority. Peter Tyrrell from The Enthusiast Network represents about 30 sites for automotive enthusiasts. He sees video as the top demand for the audience. National Banana was founded by panelist Patrick Panzarella and the creators of the Airplane movies.

How do you create content that is appealing to advertisers and to audiences alike? Patrick is looking for advertisers and marketers to be smarter about racey content. Is Elliot Spitzer content ad friendly? Need to figure out innovative ways to incorporate a brand.

TEN Mags gets their content ideas from their audience. They are focused on evergreen content that appeals to auto enthusiasts at all stages of enthusiasm, from “how to” content to event driven content around auto shows. When developing a niche market, you have to listen to your audience.

FoxSports reaches males 18-35 and is news cycle driven, but they try to create more evergreen content as well. “Every day is a pre-game show.” As sports producers, they are also sports fans, so they are able to ask themselves “what do we want to watch,” and then create it.

AP is also (obviously) news driven. They look at their affiliates first, and compliment that experience. Newspapers lack the same content as TV news. They recently created a Citizen Journalists Network to cover politics, bringing the local flavor to similar content.

One of the challenges is helping people find the actual content. Tagging content isn’t as effective as people may think. As convergence continues to happen, we’ll lose the distinction between TV and IP based content.

National Banana doesn’t consider themselves a destination site yet. They produce content and super-syndicate it across multiple video distributors. One challenge is creating content that people are already searching for. Marketers aren’t sure what they want right now. When they want ‘celebrity content’ do they mean Brad Pitt or Elliot Spitzer’s hooker, who is a much bigger celebrity online right now.

Building an appropriate strategy is also a challenge. Joost has been struggling with traffic, and Hulu hasn’t become mainstream yet. FoxSports syndicates some pieces of content, but has a partnership with MSN to deliver sports content to their homepage. TEN Mags uses syndication of content as a promotional tool, rather than trying to monetize “the third screen.” TEN wants to play nicely with the big boys. AP is experimenting with a few different relationship models beyond their content licensing.

For third party content, National Banana will hire 3rd party writers, but doesn’t buy third party content. TEN Mags works with freelances to create spec content, but is rare that they pick up a finished piece and always maintains final cut approval. FoxSports works in conjunction with the major leagues for live events, but is primarily the sole content provider for their site. They allow advertisers to “own” a show, surrounding the content in whatever way the advertiser wants, and syndication interferes with the control of the user experience.

TEN Mags has endemic advertisers that support the network of sites. Tracking the content is key to monetization. When people pick up content, they can easily cut out a pre- or post-roll, but mid-rolls are more challenging to remove. AP is mostly monetized through pre-roll, but is playing around with the other ad formats. FoxSports mostly sells sponsorships of channels and particular content.

in the first keynote of the afternoon, Keeping Up in the Digital Age, eSurance’s Chief Marketing Officer, John Swigart provides the audience with 3 key lessions:
1- The Triumph of Action
2- No Media is Dead
3- The Defeat of the Uncertainty Principle

Unfortunately, insurance is a pretty stale topic to wrap these lessons around. The guy sitting next to me just asked me, “Is this guy at the right conference?” Ouch. Rough room.