We have been interested in the viability of online advertising using and surrounding video clips. This is the sustainable business model for online video.
Yet, we don’t really know what these ads will look like and what will work. The whole area of user interface of online video advertising is taking many forms as pre-roll, post-roll and banners that run across the top or bottom of video players. It will be interesting to see how this all shapes up.
One thing that I wonder about is how will viewers click to find the site of the advertiser? Is this important? Isn’t this a key way that advertisers determine the success of a campaign? Will click-throughs be some sort of metric to successfully measuring the effectiveness of video advertising?
To sort this out, we invited Greg Stuart, president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the trade association for all the major online publishers, to our Manhattan studios to ask him a thing or two about click-throughs and online video.
He says click-throughs hold little value in the performance of the ad. And he as some advice for the broadband video industry:
"there’s absolutely no relationship between a click-through and a brand attitude change – it has nothing to do with it whatsoever. Consumers hear messages, they see messaging and they begin to shift their perceptions about that brand as a result of that, and that again leads to that change of behavior. So I would be very concerned if the broadband video industry started to measure click performance as some metric. It’s just not the right thing to do."
To find out what really works in the ad game, I highly recommend you read Greg’s new book "What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds."
— Andy Plesser
Exploring Video Advertising – Jeremy Lockhorn, group director at Avenue A/Razorfish, has an analysis of accountability in video advertising. Like so much of Web 2.0, the customer is king in this domain as well, according to Jeremy.
Tackling Video Fraud – Cool story by Michael Kanellos of CNET. Having developed software to identify fake photos, researchers at Dartmouth College are looking to do the same for video clips.
Greg Stuart, Interactive Advertising Bureau, Click-throughs, Online Video Advertising, ClickZ
