Moderator: Alan Schulman, Senior Vice President, Executive Creative Director, Executive Director of User Experience, imc2
Nick Johnson, VP National Sales, Internet & Broadband, NBC Universal
Rishi Malhotra, Vice President, Multiplatform Program Marketing, HBO
Jon Vlassopulos, Senior Vice President, Digital Media & Branded Entertainment, Endemol USA

Sizzle reels to kick off the “Great Content” panel. Seems like I’m watching a lot of TV. This is more “Big Love” than I’ve ever watched. And I can’t change the channel. But I digress.

New Endemol show, Get Close to the Sugar Babes is the first interactive, mobile only video show. Reminds me of the “30 Rock” clip from about a year ago….

Nick: Post strike, the creative palate is as wide as ever. Marketers and content creators are thinking about how to extend their content digitally from the get go. For Heroes, NBC will be continuing to extend the show, and working on better integration between the show offline and on. The question is how to get wider distribution. Will also be creating additional web only content.

Jon: As a content producer, more and more people coming to them to find out how to get involved. It is an interesting time creatively. We’re not just talking about static advertising, or just about repurposing, but post-strike we’re thinking more about the web as its own vehicle and how to create content for it.

Rishi: The strike created a massive awareness of the other screens on the writing side. Writers wanted to get paid, right? Now, the first thing you hear from writers is, “What else can we do for the other screens?”

Alan: More “Pre-purposing” of assets post-strike. Excellent term.

Alan: HBO doesn’t have brand adjacency, so what do you do to leverage these new screens?

Rishi: Using content to market content. Using the story as an on ramp for the larger story, building a franchise.

Alan: How do advertisers get involved in influencing the storyline?

Nick: The appetite for integration depends a lot on the maturity of the brand. Will Nissan affect the broader storyline? No. But having a good relationship with the show owners is key to finding opportunities that make sense for your brand.

Alan: What about cable? More opps?

Nick: yes. Shows like Top Chef provide a lot more opportunity for brands to integrate and capture frequency. Reality and challenge shows are easier to integrate brands and products.

Nick: If you want to be more efficient in a broadband environment, there are plenty of them. But not very many opportunities to justify the high CPMs that high quality content offers.

Alan: with all the “pre-purposing” of assets, who is paying for the creation of that content?

Rishi: When people ask late in the game, it adds production days and costs. The earlier you can build a “surround story” and bake it into the natural show production, the better.

Moderator: Dina Kaplan, COO, BlipTV
Deva Bronson, Digital Media Manager, KFC
Ari Paparo, Group Product Manager, Google
Adam Shlachter, Senior Partner, Group Director, Mediaedge:cia
Cheryl Kellond, Vice President, Advertising Marketplaces, Yahoo! Inc.

Dina: Will ad budgets come from TV or digital?
Adam: Its all the same money in the end. Because of the rapid change in what we can buy and where we can place ads,
it is tough to say if there’ any one thing that hsould be on a plan, and where those
budgets should come from. But so much of online video is on demand, it is hard to quantify how many people you’ll get, when, where, etc.

Adam: Macy’s has a very holistic point of view of marketing. They have online as a much bigger part of their overall media budget. Digital shouldn’t take anything away from it. It should supplement.

Dina: Three types of video content
True pro
True consumer
And now emerging category, or pro-sumer. Independent production companies.
Will they be monetized differently?

Ari: there is going to be segmentation. Huge attraction to professional, and advertisers are staying away from UGC. There will be a mixture of approaches to find and organize the safe content.

Deva, KFC: UGC can be exactly where you need to be in order to reach your audience. It can be scary, but you have to be where you can reach 14-18 year old guys.

Cheryl: Need to give a “well lit” marketplace for advertisers to choose from.

Adam S: Plenty of ways for content to be distributed. Up t oadvertisers to decide if they want to be there. Need to figure out the right way to deliver your message. Theres a time and place to deliver your messages, but we need to figure that out so we aren’t bombarding people with ads in the wrong places. You can’t hit people with ads every time they want to see an ad in order to watch a :30 clip.

Dina: What is the ideal format right now? What is working the best?
Deva- “Preroll. Super short pre-roll is definitely still the favorite.”
Best length? Deva- differs by advertiser and product. Sometimes you need a :30 if you have a really intricate message.

Dina: Can a really interesting 1:30 clip support a :30 pre-roll? Deva – yes, if it is compelling enough.

Cheryl: we need to learn what works best and optimize the user experience. There are enough different formats right now to find the optimal mix for advertisers.

Dina: What content worked well?
Cheryl: Kohler remodeling was very good. Overlay that lasted 10 seconds. When you clicked, it unlocked a full interactive experience. It used the medium really well.

Ari: Isn’t one format. Varies by site and objectives. Pre-roll with an overlay. Overlay doesn’t give enough branding on its own.

Adam: important to create an experience with value. The KFC campaign during march madness was excellent. Banners were video teasers that drive people to the KFC site with even more content. Saw lots of interaction and saw lots of people coming to the site. A nice holistic experience. Hopefully it will result in people going to the stores.

Adam: pre-roll is “scale worthy.” All depends on the client, their objectives, and who they are trying to reach.

Cheryl: Important to fund the development of the middle tier content. Help create the web as a video worthy destination.

Ari: So early in the experience. Lots of people have cancelled their land line phone service. How many people have cancelled cable?

Adam: More people will consume TV worthy content online, either to catch up or watch again. Content is becoming more portable, and as bandwidth catches up, mobile devices.

Ari: Tremor makes a bid for yahoo.

Deva would like to see holistic upfront video buy.

Balance between standardization and customization?
Ari: hard to customize things with video, so its easier to push back. But the point of standards isn’t to lock people in, it is to ease the friction in day to day operations. Plenty of opportunities on both sides.

Cheryl: Most customization comes from full sponsorship opps.
Deva: Will be a catch 22. Always going to be difficult. Of course we want rules and guidelines, but then we are going to go and ask for smething custom anyway.

What is the shift in content going on in the space? Will there be two different standards for short form, YouTube content, mid-length like news clips, and then long form?
Cheryl: consumers are consuming what is available to them. We will see consumption patterns change as there is a wider array of content available. The ad experience will tie back to who is best equipped to sell that content. TV content will have TV-like ads. Natively digital content will have something more custom.

Ari: nobody has cracked the code for moving content to your plasma.

Pricing? What are buyers looking for?
Cheryl: Yahoo sells sponsorships, so a lot of money comes from that. CPMs in regular in stream content will be based on the audience and what you can show the value of an audience to be.

If you are doing something outside of a straight media buy, do you need guaranteed impressions?
Deva: case by case basis.

Where are the dollars going to come from? How to the publishers and agencies evolve?
Ari: There’s always the problem of buying what is easy to buy, and shunning what is difficult. There isn’t one answer, and the shift will be slower. Agencies need to advise their clients on the “lean back vs lean forward” experience. During this ‘gap’ period, explore other ways to spend the money.

Cheryl: Burden is on the industry to talk to people in terms that they are comfortable. How do you explain it so it doesn’t appear to be an “either or” proposition, but rather something that works together.