Chris Anderson, who leads TED, the New York-based, non-profit global conference/online video business, says that advertising is "broken" and he wants to help fix it by cultivating creativity on Madison Avenue.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Anderson says that marketers need to be more creative in projecting their brands. To encourage this, TED is organizing a competition called "Ads Worth Spreading" – a take on TED's slogan "Ideas Worth Spreading."
Although TED is a non-profit, it gains considerable ad revenue through online video sponsorships. For several years, BMW was the exclusive sponsor of TED Talks, now there are several who rotate through the site. But, never as pre-rolls and often with creative executions as post-rolls.
TED Talks, a daily program which publishes an 18-minute TED speaker presentation, gets up to 500,000 video views per day, he says.
This is the first of three interviews from our session with Anderson taped last week in his New York office.
Andy Plesser
