Moderator: Jamison Tilsner, Tilzy.TV
TS Kelly, Mediacontacts
Randy Kilgore, Tremor Media
Kevin McGurn, Hulu
Peter Naylor, NBC Universal
Tim Shey, New Next Networks

Do Independent Video Producers Stand a Chance Against the Big Boys?

Tim: NNN is the home of Obama girl, and now McCain girl, which became the #1 video on YouTube within the first 12 hours of its launch. NNN has embraced the idea of super distribution. We’ve embraced as many formats and outlets as possible, while still controlling the advertising and monetization of the content.

Tilz: Could the talent behind IndyMogul (NNN channel) have had the same success on their own?
Tim: There is a certain point in business where things start to get really interesting. We’d been working a bit with lots of the early web video producers. When a video property starts to gain serious traction, they need to ask, “Ok, now what?” So when a lot of people like this all want to do the same thing, there is economy of scale. What we thought about was how not to make the original audiences, that made these shows popular, suffer through the monetization process.

Tilz: How important is the marketing effort in order to gain traction?
Tim: When we first launched, we didn’t care if we got 15k views per month. We wanted organic growth. There is always a way to drive traffic. You can go to Yahoo and turn on the traffic, but then you don’t know if you really have something good. Once we establish that the content is good, we can go out and do deals around them.

Kevin: Hulu starts mostly with professionally produced content that already has an audience. But for other content, we use what our editors think is cool, and also what is popular on the site. They aren’t always the same. We want to make video as viral as possible. If you think your friends would like a video, we want you to be able to share it. Things on the web don’t have to be an instant success. In fact, they generally aren’t, unless they were popular somewhere else first.

Tilz: I noticed that Hulu has adopted some of the made for web content. DadLabs, Abigale’s Teenage Diary, for example.

Kevin: All of our content is professionally produced, and high quality. Hulu is a high resolution, high quality player, which is a barrier to entry for a lot of user generated content. Hulu is going to be the biggest aggregator of professionally produced content. Video can be shot on a small budget, but still have quality.

Tilz: How do you see a fragmented market as an ad agency?

TS: Size matters. Sometimes it’s the motion of the ocean. It’s the motion for the smaller producers. We look at a lot of data to figure out what is working. We educate, test, and prove performance. We have to mesh all of this data together to figure it all out, but in the end, its about getting people into stores and buying product. Our job is to be able to interpret data for our clients. In the past it was a lot easier. There is a tremendous need for analytics.

Randy: If TV is the goliath, we are all Davids right now.

TS: I don’t need to worry about aggregating content, and don’t look at video in isolation. I just need to prove it worked. I look at the relationship of video and search, video and display.

Randy: The other goliath is the unknown. We want to shed light on it, but it is hard right now. The time, effort and innovation is what will allow us to ‘slay the monster.’

Peter: It is very difficult to compare the web and TV. Its not squares and squares. Its squares and circles. You’ve got evergreen content on the web. You can take all these clips and aggregate them into niche networks. But the content was used one way in one medium, and is used differently on the web.

Tilz: NBC and Hulu are selling ads across their entire library?
Peter & Kevin: Yes.

Tilz: What stops you from using all the data that TS describes?

Kevin: We are using it. We are doing a crawl, walk, run approach. But we have demographic data, and profiling data, and targeting data, and can share that with buyers to help them plan. The agencies are tasked with marrying that to the adserver data that they have. But you have a heightened level of information that you can’t get anywhere else. With Dynamic Logic and Insight Express, you can add even more data to help plan your next campaign.

Peter: Networks have only really been streaming shows for 24 months. Our advertisers get the first look at the data we gather on how people are consuming the content.

TS: There is a level of expectation for accountability for how things work online. We are presenting results to our clients in multiple forms. We use ecommerce data. We use whatever we have to show that a campaign works. Advertisers are now coming to us to help them produce content. Its like the 50s all over again.

Tilz: Jeff Zucker said he wants to avoid going to niche. That seems at odds with some of the current content producers.
Peter: He was talking specifically about broadcast. When he is talking about broadcast, he’s talking about creating “tentpole” events that people gather around. When it comes to niche content, look at some of our investments. We’ve invested in DriverTV, which is for automotive shoppers. We have an investment for pet owners. So overall, we are placing bets everywhere – broad and niche.

Tilz: What should be the definitive success metric?
TS: Sales. There are so many moving parts.

Randy: You really need to be consultative. You need to do a lot of the blocking and tackling. But each client has their own set of success metrics, and that is what is critical to us. But that is also what makes it difficult to do one-offs.

Kevin: There isn’t a standard across the board. Your ad opportunities vary based on the content. People need to back off of engagement. What you choose to do with an ad impression is up to the client. Understand your audience, see which ones are performing the best, and optimize. We’ve got both brand and direct response metrics to measure and work with.

Tim: As a programming company, we are relying on a lot of the people on the stage to figure that out. We can’t focus on developing the next behavioral targeting technology. But we need to get on board with some metric as an industry just so we can all have a conversation around a common metric. In the meantime, we sell a lot of sponsorships and integrate our sponsors very organically.

Q&A:
Lloyd Truffelman, Trylon: What can we learn about the “inversion” that we were talking about earlier. People sit down to “see what is on TV.” How are we going to find content?
Kevin: It is about the individual, and a network of trusted friend, trusted sources. And then you look at what those networks are doing. Personalized platforms. But we need “one number” across all platforms that allows us to measure all of this. We’re going to need to find a common language.

Tim: We are still betting on brands. Even as blogging was taking apart the publishing industry, there were plenty of outlets popping up to become your brand that you trust to help you find the content you love. Brands haven’t gone away, they are just evolving in the way they communicate with people.

Randy: It is exciting now that there are so many people creating content for the digital space. But it is not going to stay that way for ever. The big guns, people that can make things happen, are getting involved. CAA was at the Digital NewFront presentation. There will always be some opportunity to be innovative and get yourself known, but that opportunity will shrink.

Tim: There is great stuff out there. We need to bring the content from the end of the tail and push it up to the head. That’s what Hulu is doing with recommending content.

Tags: hulu, new next networks, OMMA, omma video, tilzy.tv, Tremor Media

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Events, Video Portals, Web 2.0, advertising, video syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.