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.
