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.

If you are from the left or from the right - or somewhere in the middle - don’t let your politics get in the way of voting for your favorite Obama in :30 video.

More than 3 million people voted to nail down 15 finalists. Thanks, 3 million people. I didn’t want to sit through the terrible ones.

“Why can’t we all just get along?”

As if anyone has been clamoring for the lost episodes of the Gilmore Girls, Warner Brothers announced today that they will launch two of their own video portals. TheWB.com and KidsWB.com. The press release cited Mattel, McDonald’s and Johnson & Johnson as marketing partners, but wasn’t specific as to which (or both) properties.

My question - Why? Hulu is already doing some heavy lifting and creating the non-YouTube destination for high quality, licensed content from TV. Why not join in the fun, creating a bigger, better Hulu with even more of your favorite content? The release also cites multiple partners for multi-platform syndication including Comcast Cable, Fancast.com, AOL, a number of mobile carriers, and an application on Facebook for integration of Facebook’s social utility on TheWB.com, and TheWB.com’s entertainment content on Facebook. Clearly they are up for sharing their content.

The complaint I hear most (although seriously doubt its validity) is that people don’t know what stations their favorite programs are on. If you miss an episode of 30 Rock, they claim not to know to check NBC.com. But I can’t fathom that having a new URL/destination site that is named after a channel that no longer exists is going to help the matter. Glad I’m not jonesing for some Dawson’s Creek reruns. (please note the deep sarcasm) Seems like some major media companies will remain content with a fragmented media landscape.

The folks from Fox Sports’s Best Damn Sports Show Period have created a music (well, sorta) video ahead of this weekend’s football draft.

I hope they can analyze draft picks better than they can rap. Pretty funny, though. Lucky for us, the title of the post works because there isn’t a whole lot of pre-draft viral video floating around. Or is there?

A new Nielsen Online report shows that Senator Barack Obama is dominating the other candidates in campaign video views (press release PDF).

The report shows Obama with 518,000 unique video viewers consuming more than 820,000 streams of content, and averaging 16 minutes per user. Hillary and McCain lag behind with 351,000 and 38,000 unique viewers, consuming 551,000 and 66,000 streams respectively. Obama simply trounces his competitors in time spent, with nearly 4x Hillary’s 4.8 minutes per viewer, and McCain’s 1.5 minutes per viewer.

Head over to MarketingCharts for the graphs.

Lets just cut right to the chase. I’m going to have to pony up the money for the Extra Innings package through my cable company.

I used both the Silverlight and NextDef plugins to try and get to the “TV Quality” that is advertised for the 1.2MB stream from MLB.TV’s Premium package. What TV? Well, on a 42″ 1080p plasma screen, the stream looks like your grandmother’s 20 year old RCA with the picture tube on its last legs.

The good news? MLB.TV’s premium package looks fantastic on a laptop or on a 22″ widescreen monitor plugged into the computer. Plain and simple, it looks great. If, hypothetically, you wanted to watch this afternoon’s Red Sox game while you were writing a press release, you wouldn’t be disappointed in the least with the offering. Stutter free, high quality audio and video without any sign of noise in the signal. If you were in a hotel room with basic cable in a city where you can’t even begin to fathom watching the local game, you’d also be spared the usual agony. And without a doubt, the stream beats the quality of watching your cable box over a Slingbox.

The bad news is that MLB.TV’s offering just isn’t up to what I’m going to call “livingroom quality.” There will be, for the foreseeable future, a balance between convenience and quality, and that value can’t be underestimated. I would rather have watched the Red Sox make a triumphant late inning comeback to beat the (Walker) Texas Rangers on Sunday than any other game, but it came at a price. Or rather, a choice of prices.

I could have sat at my desk with my 22″ monitor and been perfectly happy with the quality of the video stream. But alas, thats not what my experiment is all about. We’re talking convergence. We’re talking “lean back.” We’re talking sitting on your sofa with a few friends, a few beers and seeing if anyone notices that you aren’t watching cable, let alone HDTV. Unfortunately, it didn’t take more than 5 seconds for the first person to speak up, and they spoke up loud and clear. “What’s wrong with your TV? This sucks!”

Did it suck? No, not really. We wouldn’t have been able to watch the game at all, and that is a luxury in its own right. But is it on par with even regular TV? Not yet. So road warriors, sign up without any hesitation. But if you plan on watching full screen baseball without a pixelated, monochromatic outfield, you better call your cable company for the time being.

For anyone keeping track, the test PC uses an Intel Core2 CPU 6600 @ 2.4GHz, 4GB of RAM and an nVidia 7900 GS video card connected with a DVI-to-HDMI cable to a Panasonic 42″ TH-42PZ700U 1080p TV. Windows XP Pro SP2.

Yes, thats vague. But I could tell you that my weekend pick was Matzah and gefilte fish, but thats not what I’m looking forward to at all.

Over the past week, I’ve spoken with reps from a number of the major video aggregators and streaming providers about their recommended settings for outputting video from the web to TV. I also purchased a monthly subscription to the MLB.TV Premium Package for their 1.2MB stream. I’ll be tweaking my video card and TV and starting OVW’s own convergence video shootout.

Beyond the novelty factor, what online video can really replicate - or even hold its own - against a TV offering? On my previous experiments, I’d been using an s-video output into a regular CRT display. Now we’ve added DVI/HDMI outputs to the mix, and a 1080p plasma TV to the mix, which may not be as forgiving. We’ll just have to see.

We’ve yet to decide if we’ll do a comprehensive comparison, or share our thoughts on a rolling basis, but I’m looking forward to Arrested Development on Hulu, a few movies on Netflix’s Watch Now, and maybe Veoh’s most popular content, Star Trek (ok, maybe less so for the Star Trek, but I’m sure I’ll find something to enjoy). I’ve had some issues with Microsoft’s Silverlight player with my previous MLB experiments, but I’m hoping they’ve worked through them. Do the TV networks have a leg up when the screen you watch on is a TV? My sofa and I look forward to finding out…..just as soon as we’re done with our Seder.

Kate Kaye, one of my favorite “real” journalists, writes in today’s ClickZ that career sites are embracing online video at a very healthy clip.

“Video is a tiny sliver of recruitment advertising, but it’s growing incredibly fast,” said Peter Zollman, founding principal of Classified Intelligence, who predicts big increases over the next two to three years in online video job ads….As is the case for all classic classifieds ad categories, he continued, for online job ads, “Video is going to be up and print is going to be down.”

Kate points to an entry level package from CareerTV, which offers hosting and 4,000 impressions for $4,000. That’s a $1,000 CPM, which is an incredibly steep price to pay for online video advertising, but not too hefty compared to recruiting costs in general. Combined with the ability to reach the best candidates with the most visually compelling case for your company and its corporate culture in a way that no regular classified ad ever could, there is definitely room for growth in this niche. Recruiting fees to agencies can range from 10% - 20% of base salary, so landing one $50k hire would more than pay for itself.

Tremor Media has launched the beta version of Acudeo, their next generation Video Monetization Platform. Acudeo addresses the complexities involved with video ad delivery and offers the same ease and ad server compatibility that publishers are accustomed to for their banner advertising. Acudeo allows publishers to schedule and dynamically deliver in-stream video and overlay ads from multiple ad sources, maximizing ad delivery opportunities and revenue.

Acudeo’s support for multiple ad formats and sources enables publishers to easily add additional sources of revenue, extending their own ad sales efforts through Tremor Media as well as additional ad sources.

“We believe Acudeo will do for video advertising what the advent of third party ad serving did for online display advertising,” said Jesse Chenard, Chief Strategy Officer, Tremor Media. “Giving publishers the ability to deliver ads from multiple sources without swapping out multiple players is a dramatic shift in video ad serving operations.”

Tremor launched Acudeo to be the first platform that ensures compliance with the newly-released IAB Digital Video Ad Format Guidelines. This will help publishers simplify the process, standardize their workflow and operations for efficiency and implement industry best practices for delivery and playback, measurement, ad tracking, billing and reporting.

Neal Weinberg, President, Sales and Marketing, Top TV Bytes said, “Acudeo’s support for pre-roll and overlay formats allows us to monetize each stream we deliver without interrupting the user’s enjoyment of our content, and still give them the opportunity to interact with our advertisers’ messages when they choose to.”

*Note: Corey Kronengold works for Tremor Media

Check out the keynote presentations on the Mediapost website. Everyone has finally returned from the event, encoded the videos, and posted them for your enjoyment.

The good folks at RealTVFilms.com were also on hand filming. Check out their interviews as well.