Boy was I wrong when I said that dynamic in-video ads hadn’t been done before!

From Cory Treffiletti at Online Spin:

Last week I made the statement that the majority of online video networks either serve video into existing ad units or are manually attaching video spots like 30-second commercials into existing video content. That set off a flurry of responses from such companies as Scanscout, Tremor Media, Eyeblaster, Broadband Enterprises and a new start-up called QMeCom. Each of these folks professes to be capable of dynamically ad-serving video spots into video content based on cookie profiles or behavioral data. I did take a peek at each of their newest products and they do appear to be delivering these services to advertisers within their existing networks of inventory, By using an ad tag from Doubleclick, Atlas or any of the major ad-servers, you can track these units in your digital dashboard for ad management and reporting. I can’t speak on the performance of any of these, as I have not tested them, but at least you know where to look.

Then Michael Arrington reinforced the point with his aptly titled post: Ok, Ok. All of You (even YouTube) Invented Video Overlay Ads “First”:

VideoEgg has certainly been doing this for a year or so…

Next up was Adbrite founder Philip Kaplan, who emailed me to say that Adbrite has had their own overlay product for nearly a year…

And finally, Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire sent me a long email saying they’ve been doing this as far back as October 2005…

So where did I read recently that dynamically generated ads were the holy grail for video content? Seriously. It was within the past month. I’ll send a Facebook gift to anyone who can help me figure it out.

Interestingly, Jeremy Allaire continued by saying that advertisers weren’t particularly interested in video overlays:

There are a lot of factors behind this limited uptake, including:

- the advertising community buying video have been very focused on leveraging existing creative and buying patterns in the online video space
- most content publishers and media owners have been focused on getting the ‘basics’ up and running, and also responding to the RFPs from marketers and advertisers, which are almost 100% focused on basic short-form video commercials
- for premium brands and content, the basic pre-roll and companion banners are yielding extremely attractive CPMs and there is little evidence that :15 ads have any negative impact on end-user viewership behavior — in fact, our own metrics show that sites that run without any ads, and then introduce :15 pre-rolls and banners achieve identical usage and performance (e.g. no drop-off in users because of ads) on their content.

Brian Hayes pointed out after my last post that Google’s going to have a tough time recouping their $1.6 billion using this model.

So consumers don’t like it, advertisers aren’t interested, and Google can’t make money at it. Why are they doing it, then? And what do you recommend instead?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Online advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.