Moderator: Joe Mandese, MediaPost
Panelists:
Christine Cook, Martha Stewart
Aleck Schleider, Advertising.com
John Lumpkin, Heavy.com
Garrett Albanese, Carat
Peter Naylor, NBC Universal

Garrett, Carat: There is use for both ad networks and branded sites. If you need reach, ad networks are great. If you want a customized experience, you have to go to a branded site.

Christine, MSO: We use ad networks for backfill.

Peter Naylor: The sites are extensions of our brands and cable networks. Each of them have a video environment with full episodes of shows or outtakes and clips. But ad networks are both competitors and complimentary. There is a place for both branded destinations and networks, depending on an advertisers’ objectives.

John, Heavy.com: We’re both a destination and have the Heavy Network. The key to our success is packaging. Advertisers want to control as much of the experience as possible. The web is like Times Square. Its flooded with advertising messages.

Aleck, Ad.com: Advertisers want to buy branded sites. That is part of every media plan. Brands associating with brands is always going to be important. But the scale the ad networks bring enables marketers to reach their audiences in a fragmented audience. On the publisher side, ad networks should be looked at as partners, not competitors. We understand that sites have their own sales forces, and will create customized opportunities.

Garret, Carat: Joe asks how important networks are to the media buy. Ad networks come into play when we are all competing for a small pool of inventory, which drives CPMs up. They provide us with a lower cost alternative to offset the high CPMs.

Heavy: We do 35 million streams per month on Heavy.com. With the network, we’ve doubled the size of scale that we can offer.

Christine, MSO: Video ad networks drive less than 1/8 of our total online ad revenue.

Naylor: We aren’t using video ad networks for anything because we are oversold. First and foremost we try to sell to the TV buyers as part of a 360 buy. Now that we are syndicating content, we have more inventory to sell. But we’re at the top of the tail.

MSO: We’re a small publisher, so advertisers will come to us and buy everything. Its either feast or famine. We are now doing more integrated, 360 marketing programs.

Peter: We’ve made a strong bet with Hulu as our syndication partner. So that is our distribution platform. The guys at CBS are doing their own platform, but everyone is focusing on distribution as the way to go. Its easy to forget that 24 months ago was when broadcasters made the decision to stream their shows at all, let alone “go where they are.” We’re embracing the idea of using distribution to build an audience.

Aleck, Ad.com: The majority of our business is display advertising. NBC is monetizing more long form content. But the majority of ad network inventory is short form content. Advertisers are used to buying offline, long form content. Short form content is a different format for them. That’s why we’re looking at 5 second, 10 second ads in front of a music video or news clip. But there are billions of video streams that are going unmonetized. Those streams are available. It’s a matter of us educating the market on how to use it, to be more comfortable with it, to make sure they feel safe with UGC.

Garret, Carat: The majority of the budgets I have is going to branded sites. My clients want a branded player, a custom skin, a custom experience. But they still worry about getting “that call” asking why an ad was running next to a particular piece of content.

Christine, MSO: The promise of the web was 1 to 1 conversation. With networks, you don’t know what the mood or the mindset of the audience is. With the branded broadcasters, you know a lot more about the audience.

Peter: Need to go one step further. Cant just be one to one. You need to be able to estaqblish a dialogue. You need to go beyond the “right ad, right person, right time.” There is so much you can do with the real estate.

Heavy: People buy from us to have 100% share of voice. But people need to be shown what to do. They aren’t used to data capture or store locators when it comes to video advertising.

MSO: When we hit the promise of interactive TV, it will happen on TV. Our websites will be on TV. Broadband video is ideal for direct response as well as building brands. You can “find that store” as well as tell a story. But the Web hasn’t quite gotten there yet. With the recession, though, we’ll see more money go towards the networks because people are brand conscious.

Heavy: Advertisers come to us to take advantage of our creative capabilities as well. We created branded entertainment for JVC that is a music video entirely about their product, and we have the network to deliver the scale.

Ad.com: Transparency. We don’t go below 20 sites for an advertiser. We won’t create subchannels. We’ll let advertisers pick a channel, and eliminate sites if they want to, but wont provide guaranteed impressions on any site.

Heavy.com: Finding a store isn’t just a DR vehicle. It is also engagement.

MSO: Didn’t mean to say that all networks are DR, or don’t have the ability to do branding.

Heavy: I would rather have more people tell me that people didn’t come into their store as a measurement of success rather than not enough people clicked on my ad.

Peter: Google gets so rewarded for the “last click,” but all of the factors driving those searches are ignored. In a “trying economy” more and more people are going to ask to “prove it.”

Ad.com: There are a ton of branded campaigns that just aren’t getting credit.

Peter: Getting “up the attribution funnel” is a good thing, because it will give credit where credit is deserved.

Ad.com: We’re not dealing with long tail advertisers. The offline directory business is being hurt by google. We work with midsize and larger advertisers.

Heavy: We also don’t deal with small advertisers. We work with the Proctor and Gambles of the world. We built an environment where young men can come and watch great video content.

Ad.com: There are a lot of ad networks - too many - in the market place. They need to follow rules, act with ethics. The ones that don’t create the problems for the rest of the networks. But there is a definite place for branded sites and ad networks. But for networks, we need to do things right by advertisers and publishers.

MSO: Wenda’s Pork Bellies remark is about not commoditizing our business. If we focus on the exchanges and the long tail and bid management, we can lose focus of the one to one relationship marketing that we offer. We create an experience that establishes a conversation between Martha and her fans. We create something unique. We can’t start with a conversation about price or ROI. We still want to talk about ideas.

Carat: If my client’s objective is to drive sales, I shouldn’t be wasting your time or my time talking about creating a custom branded engaging experience. If I need to drive sales, I’m going to go to a network type buy.

Vertical ad networks? Peter and Christine are both branded sites and have their own ad networks. How do you deal with that dichotomy.

GRP = total audience meansurement (TAMy). Because you cant dedup audiences across platforms, you need to look at total audience, and we’ll never get to a true integrated GRP.

Garret: There is a lot of power of using video within a banner.
MSO: American Airlines was one of the best video executions, where you could go see Grandma.
Peter: You have a choice on which ad you want to see.

Audience Pre-Roll Question:
Garret: Overlays are relatively new. They are less intrusive, but people are still learning how to use it. Pre-roll makes a lot of sense for longer form content. You can build a story over the course of a video. If there is a 2 minute news clip, can you get your message across in 5-10 seconds? To do brand awareness, you need a longer exposure. So it definitely depends on your objectives.

Heavy: Mid-roll gets much better results than pre-roll. We don’t want to prevent people from getting to the content that they want to see. Overlays are disruptive, like floating ads over video.

MSO: We offer better pricing for 5-10 second pre-roll, and still got mostly 30 second ads.

Peter Naylor: Marketers aren’t clueless. They are as resource constrained as anyone, so it takes them a while to learn how to use these new formats and technologies.

Garret: As a proportion of the overall media spend, its harder to justify the additional spend on video production for the 5 million impressions that you are going to buy.

Moderator:Will Richmond, President, Broadband Directions
Presenters:
Christopher Johnston, Director, Ad Products and Technology Partnerships, Brightcove
Rob Aitken, Product Manager, Online Video, Associated Press
Mike Henry, SVP, Advertising Sales, Veoh Networks
Jon Gibs, VP, Media Analytics, Nielsen Online

Exploring new ad models to better monetize longer form content. ABC looking at only putting two ads in a pod.

Excellent question: Is the reduced amount of advertising in online video impacting the amount of advertising on TV? Fox will be launching new programs with fewer ads in it, making shows as long as 50 minutes. (Note: Today Fox announced that they’d be cutting down on the number of commercials they’ll be showing in their newest programming.

Veoh seeing a trend that UGC is developing very quickly and catching up to professional produced content. Short form, video snacking is the majority of content that people are watching on Veoh. But there longer form content is increasing the time spent. Most of the mid-tier content is being created by more “independent” video producers that competes with professionally produced content.

Chris Johnson, Brightcove: 120 million viewers across 300+ publishers. Some of the top publishers, like TMZ, provide lots and lots of short form content clips. Record labels also producing plenty of 3-5 minute range. There is a growing semi-pro cadre of producers out there that create high level, professionally produced content that “just didn’t make it on to TV.”

Chris Johnson: Targeting, for the most part, are looking at video ad inventory the same way as display. They know who their audience is – psycho, demo, age data. Some publishers are beginning to do contextual targeting. Haven’t seen that much behavioral targeting in video yet, mostly because there isn’t enough video advertising to do it. Meta data drives most of the targeting. Targeting is still very nascent. Buyers want “males 18-35.”

Chris J: The issue of scale is changing. If you want to buy a ton of males 18-35, you can. But if you want to get more narrow than that, you start buying impressions 11 at a time, and that’s not efficient.

Rob A, AP: We aren’t targeting at all. We are focused on creating content for categories to create premium inventory across verticals. But right now, there just isn’t the volume to segment it more narrowly. Doing more cross-promotion of content.

John, Neilsen: We’re focusing on how to “directly connect the dots” when talking to media buyers. We need to see some agreements put in place between advertisers and agencies in order to create more interesting advertising at scale. People are looking for more flexible opportunities. Depending on how a video player is structured, there are different creative executions available. Expandable overlays, full player takeovers, fully interactive.

Mike, Veoh: Two camps – Online and TV. The online people are buying the same way as always, using the same vernacular. But in a video environment, the ROI opportunities are limited. If you are engaged with the content, you are less likely to go exploring through the advertising. On the TV side, content and advertising will be delivered dynamically, no matter what the platform. The TV buying environment is going to become a lot more like the online ad serving environment.

From the audience: What is a GRP?
Nielsen: Reach of an ad multiplied by the frequency. Works very well with large audiences and non-contextual advertising. Starts to break down when you cut the pie in thinner slices. Ad impressions online aren’t as effective as a :30 second spot on TV.

Veoh: The search paradigm for video is so dramatically different. There is a fundamental difference when you are looking for information compared to when you are looking for entertainment.

Moderator: Peter Price, NATAS
Panelists:
Isaac Josephson, ABC News Digital
Jordan Hoffner, YouTube
Vivian Schiller, NYTimes.com
Richard Glosser, CondeNet

Vivian: The challenge for legacy media companies is that people are coming and watching videos, but haven’t been able to significantly monetize it. We love our relationship with YouTube, but it needs to come to a point where it isn’t just “branding.”

Isaac: For ABC, there is more of a vested interest in producing their own video and hosting it and driving traffic to it. We can do an hour long interview with Ron Paul, that wouldn’t air in its entirety, but we can run it online.

Jordan: The important point is “not monetizing it in a meaningful way.” Traditional media used to be the only game in town. Now there is fragmentation, and plenty of places for advertisers to spend money. It needs to be looked at in a different way. The notion of ‘scarcity’ is gone.

Richard: the genie is out of the bottle. Content is being freely distributed around the web. When they put Desperate Housewives on iTunes, that should have been a clarion call to everyone. What access and unique insight can we bring to the table? You can’t force people to consume media only on your site.

Vivian: “Distribute or die.” There are plenty of ways to distribute content beyond YouTube. Bloggers post RSS feed links, and those drive traffic back to our site where we can monetize it. Some experiments work, some don’t. Video is not a big money maker for us right now. We have pre-roll and sponsorships and no regrets. But with YouTube, we have to consider what the long term strategy is, and how that works for us, as a content creator and owner. How is video distribution going to monetized?

Richard: There is more wind behind video than other products. We’re starting to see TV money move to the Web. And the ones leading the charge are the ones with the most to lose. People will go around broadcast networks if they can.

Jordan: We wouldn’t have launched overlays if we didn’t have a really good reason. We tested and tested and tested. We are doing lots of testing to figure out what the best ad formats are for different video. Pre-roll isn’t good for us, or our type of video. That said, it is important for people to remember that we don’t advertise on user generated content. We only monetize our professionally generated content.

Isaac: Overlays are good for now. But we’re asking advertising clients to come up with new creative. But the CPMs for overlays is a full order of magnitude lower than what we see for preroll. From a business perspective, they just aren’t the answer for us right now.

- Moderator: Jamison Tilsner, Tilzy.TV
- Jim Lauderback, Revision3
- Herb Scannel, NextNewNetworks
- Alex Blum, KickApps

Tilz: For most video producers, its still a passion project, but starting to see it as a medium that is attractive to advertisers.

Herb, NNN: Creates micro-niche networks.

Alex: KickApps is a technology provider. Makes it easy for everyone to introduce video on their sites, wrapped with a full suite of social media experiences. Key to the platform’s capabilities is that developers can access the tools on a self-service basis. Now powering 22,000 sites.

Jim, revision3: internet TV network with 15 different shows. Mostly male 18-35 audience who have abandoned TV as their main form entertainment.

Herb: BarelyPolitical.com is a political satire community that produced the Obama Girl video. Herb showed the follow-up video for Mike Gravel, who apparently is still running for president, doing the SoljaBoy dance. ThreadBanger.com features content for fashion designers and manufacturers, and was able to incorporate some product placement sponsorships for sewing machines. Lastly, IndyMogul is for independent film producers, which Columbia Pictures approached for content integration as well. Hysterical video on the world of illegal underground board game playing. Did you know there was a steroid problem in Hungry Hungry Hippos?

Tilz: How did the content channels develop?
Herb: Three different paths of development. Commissioned a show and built a network around it. IndyMogul began when a friend of an employee sent in a demo. Lastly, Ben Relles did a few videos on Obama Girl, and NNN bought that company and brought them under the NNN umbrella.

We looked at communities that were robust on the internet. With the elections coming up, the political satire space was a natural. For Threadbanger, most of the fashion shows are aimed at high level, high fashion. The sewing machine “sew off’ happened organically. Counted on there being an advertiser base that was endemic to the content, and advertisers that would want to reach the audience. NNN can be bought horizontally and vertically.

Jim, Rev3: We do a lot of things that are similar to NNN, going after niche markets. But we’ve been more focused on longer form programs that people make real time in their schedule to watch. Our roots were around technology, so our early programming was tech based. Built a strong base of programming around that, and then built up to compliment that. Next channel was music, then internet culture, but we don’t see automotive as a niche that we are going into, or at least not going into next. In addition to the content, its all about the talent. DiggNation is popular because of the chemistry between the hosts. “99% of our audience has unaided advertising recall. 48% of our audience has made a purchase.”

Tilz: How do you handle the 3rd party advertising when you syndicate content to other sites like BlipTV?
Jim: The integrated sponsorships travel with the content, but we work with the publishers to provide category exclusivity for our sponsors before we provide the content. So there won’t be a Victoria’s Secret ad when we syndicate content that is sponsored by Body By Venus, for example.

Alex, KickApps: Powered a hip-hop American Idol style contest.. Wyclef Jean picked the ultimate winner. Cingular Wireless paid premium dollars in order to reach that market.

Alex: We spend time with advertisers and agencies to let them know that projects and content like this are pretty easy to create. The costs and time in developing an experience like that today are minimal.

Tilz: Why did Rev3 and NNN choose to develop your own tech instead of using one of the other platforms?
Jim: We’re all HD, and wanted to control the user experience. We are both downloads and streams. Our audience wants DIVX and H264, so we needed much more control.
Herb: We also wanted to control the experience. We work towards being compatible with as many other platforms as possible.

Tilz: How do you ensure that your destination is the premiere destination for watching yoru content, and not your syndication partners?
Herb: We thought that the best way to “birth” brands would be to super-distribute content. We aligned ourselves with a number of partners to make sure we were where our audiences were. While bigger media companies were trying to keep control, we wanted to give our users what they wanted. The website would be the place where people who want a deeper community experience would go. We focused on the communities, rather than the destination.
Alex: There are 3 things that we advise our clients. Syndication, viral syndication through widgets that can be easily snagged by your audience and put it out on your behalf. Then people can use your website for a deeper experience that you can’t provide out there on the web. But it allows your fans to be your best sales people. Many of our clients are seeing as much traffic driven through the widgets as through SEO.

All of our web based tools are made for average web developers, but we’ve got WYSIWYG creation tools.

Jim: We liked having a destination website to expose people to other content in our network, but we understand that it is “anywhere, anytime, any device, any service.” When it comes to video online, you can’t control the experience. Syndication is about discovery. That’s where they’ll find the content. But when they want to join the community, they do that back at our site.

Tilz: how meaningful is the revenue?
Herb: Starting to get more meaningful. YouTube is the iPod of the video business. We’re advocates of the creation of a video syndication marketplace. The video syndication space is a collaborative space. All of us are in the game of building a marketplace.

Tilz: CPMs on your networks and cross distribution platforms?
Jim: Still feeling our way through that. $80-$100 CPMs on sponsorship.
Alex: Clients of ours are seeing extraordinary CPMs for certain verticals like auto and health. In the range of $70-$80. If you’ve created a social media destination, you can learn a lot about your audience. You can use all that information to inform intelligent adserving.

Tilz: Is there a magic threashold?
Herb: We strive to get a million views per month per channel. But some endemic advertisers like the community and will be willing to pay for it because of the depth of interaction and engagement of the community.
Alex: Advertisers need to understand that the niche oriented sites are made up of influencers, and you need to reach them.
Jim: We’ve been very successful with CPA as well. When you pick the right advertiser for the audience, you can do very well with CPA.

Audience: Are CPMs artificially high because of a still growing audience?
Alex: CPMs will go up because of targeting. There will be more experiences availale, but the ad dollars will continue to flood in. We’re continuing to see the migration of ad dollars. The migration of those dollars will create more opportunities.
Jim: If advertisers want to reach your audiences, then you can keep those CPMs high, or even higher. If you made content for CIOs and had 150 of them in a room at any time, you could have $1000 CPMs and be worth it.

Question: Optimizing for search engines? Is SEO as much of a factor with niche video?
Alex: Viral syndication is an alternative to SEO. In many cases, SEO has a small impact on what you are trying to accomplish.
Jim: the challenge across the board is discovery. Super distribution is one way. But 70% of all internet experiences start with a search query. So you can own or create your own “channel” through smart SEO.

Question: Measurement?
Herb: Freewheel provides the opportunity to dynamically insert advertising into your content across your super distribution channels. You can lay over Visible Measures technology and really create a lot of metrics to look at. There are plenty of technology solutions out there. But remember, for 30 years, Nielson data was completely unvalidated.
Jim: Freewheel is becoming the DoubleClick of online video. You can consolidate all of your super distribution into one report.

At this morning’s Streaming Media East keynote, NBC Universal Chief Digital Officer George Kliavikoff talked up NBC’s original digital programming strategy, the future of Hulu and expressed optimism that a new iTunes deal may be near.

On Apple:
All we want to do in any distribution agreement is to set the wholesale price…on every platform and with every partner in the world with the exception of one, we’ve gotten to set that price.

I applaud the moves that have been made lately by Apple. In the UK now there is variable pricing…the deal with HBO content…that we love. So things are moving in the right direction.

On piracy:
We want our partners to help the industry combat piracy…if you think short term it’s great for consumers to get everything for free…but eventually the money runs out…if we in a consumer friendly way alert people that what they’re doing is illegal and offer an alternative…this has nothing to do with DRM.

For example when Hulu content is uploaded somewhere else presumably we can use technology to detect that and push consumers to the place where that content is available legally.

YouTube has done a pretty good job lately of filtering what’s on their site…but you turn back the clock six months on any of the big UGC sites, it’s rampant.

We’re aggressive about making sure our stuff comes down from YouTube,.YouTube has an active program where we can start pre-filtering some of that stuff and they’ve made great strides in the last couple months…if you create a great experience over time people will migrate to that great experience…what we did with Hulu.

On Predictive Marketing and Original Digital Content
For the company the cable model has been hugely successful, focus on a particular community (for example Bravo has a very specific audience) Filter by top ten advertising categories. Focus on undeserved: We ventured to create a set of content verticals “digital cable networks if you will” where advertisers can spend their money…we do syndication deals with sites that are particular in that genre.

We launched about a month ago our auto channel, DriverTV.com, we went into the marketplace, found the absolute best content…all HD, ”it’s really like car porn” we syndicate it across large websites, that particular content is great because they’re [reaching] an in-market consumer so we get paid by Cadillac….Revenue we generate we’re going to reinvest in original car content.

The Health Network – we produce in excess of 120 videos a week, that had aired once on TV and syndicate them online. Yourtotalhealth, launched with a bunch of syndication partners.

In these niche categories they’re almost sold before we make them. In the case of autos the car companies get to use that footage so it’s almost no cost, and in the case of the Health Network it’s footage we already have.

On The Future of Hulu
I think in three years from now if they do their job well…it will be a one stop shop for a lot of great content…I happen to be biased but I think it’s the best user experience on the internet today….I think also this strategy they have of allowing anyone to take any section of a video and embed it anywhere in the world is great…also other devices, TV, Mobile, continuing to work closely with advertisers to…use the interactivity of the platforms.

On the CBS-CNET Deal:
I can’t wait for it to close because I can’t wait for CBS content to be on Hulu…all kidding aside I’m good friends with Neil and Quincy, I think it’s a great way for CBS to get a lot of scale very quickly…I envy Quincy because he operates under different economic conditions than I do…I work for GE, I couldn’t have gotten that deal through.

On the morning of the StreamingMedia East show here in NYC, Netflix made the largest consumer facing announcement early. They have debuted their first set top box, the first in a series of hardware products set for release this year.

Manufactured by Roku, specialists in network audio devices to date, 5″ x 5″ the box features composite, component, s-video, HDMI and a digital audio connection, pretty much covering the bases for today’s and tomorrow’s delivery of streamed movie content.

Speaking with reps from Netflix earlier this month, it was clear to me that Netflix is committed to offering the widest variety of movies anywhere, period. And, building on the “if you build it RIGHT, they will come,” theme, their first entry into the set-top box market is cheap - $99 - compared to the competition, and more importantly, backed by the content to enjoy it.

Oddly enough, I had spent this past weekend catching up on some episodes of the Showtime series “Weeds” using Netflix’s current “Browse Instant” capabilities. For programming that isn’t high impact, fast moving car chases or a uniformly monochromatic color, like a baseball or football field, their current streaming platform works quite nicely. I had no stuttering of the stream, a clear picture at full screen (42″ plasma) and digital sound. There was some slight pixelation in very dark scenes, but that was the only major complaint that I had. I’d like to continue to test it with some high action summer blockbuster fare, but I think I’ll wait until I can compare it head to head with the net set top box.

Ok, see you at the Streaming Media show!

Ahead of this week’s Streaming Media East conference, the New York Hilton will play host to the New York Video 2.0 Meetup with more than 600 people RSVPd and demos by:

1. EkkoTV - Andrew Sternthal, Co-Founder & CEO
2. Vusion - Grover Righter, VP Marketing
3. BestTV - Oded Felled, Founder & VP BD
4. Magnify.net - Steven Rosenbaum, Founder & CEO
5. Adotube - Joshua Winograd, Chief Revenue Officer

If you’ll be at SME and want to meet up drop us a line.

In Cannes for the premiere of the new Indiana Jones movie, Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, George Lucas and others answered jounalist questions via community video platform Seesmic.

The idea which founder Loic Le Muer describes as coming together at the last minute in coordination with Picture Production Company was designed as a way for journalists around the world to ask questions and get a direct response - which was then made available to the public. The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss had this to say of the experience:

I just posted a few direct questions to Spielberg and Karen Allen (Marian was always one of my favourite heroines) and it’s quite a buzz watching them reply directly to your own questions. Seesmic is quite intimate too - like most people, I just use my webcam and was still wearing my pyjamas when I recorded. But hey, pyjamas have a good internet heritage.

And the answers, coming directly from the filmmakers have an intimacy of their own, they’re far more personal than your standard TV interview.

Above: Spielberg on plans for the small screen

Above: Harrison Ford on the first day on set

Above: George Lucas on whether a young audience will still ‘buy’ Indy

Flight of the Conchords has a new video out on YouTube by way of their label Sub Pop Records. The band plans to write season two back in New Zealand and they’re on tour now so it may be a while before they’re back on HBO. In the meantime, enjoy this:

Above: Flight of the Conchords - Ladies of the World

This online video campaign, for AMP energy drinks, is my new favorite ad. BBDO Worldwide certainly nailed their audience. I’m predicting “Tea Partay” type numbers.

Head over to Adweek or Brightcove to watch.