Digitas media diva Devon O’Donnell sent me this provocative piece from MediaPost’s Online SPIN – ‘controversy served fresh daily’ is the tag line. It’s by Cory Treffiletti, senior vice president and managing director at Carat Interactive San Francisco. The article is part of a debate close to my heart: we can’t just port over to the web 30 second and 60 second spots and think that’s interactive advertising because you can click stuff around it. We need to find new ways of integrating the power of film into ‘lean forward’ active branding experiences – ways that earn attention and create value for the user not just ambush them. There’s certainly a role for placing video into existing ad spaces but new media can play host to some very old and outmoded marketing habits. Read on:
"Streaming video is hot right now,” Writes Treffiletti, “and it's only getting hotter as broadband becomes more pervasive. I get to sit in many discussions that deal with this topic and in one of those conversations I had an epiphany as to how it gets sold in to clients, and I thought I'd share my epiphany with you.
We all know that TV is the most emotionally impactful media form currently available. TV is unmatched in its ability to convey an emotional message, but TV is also a passive medium. Interactive is the medium that affords the most opportunity for dialogue. It is the "lean-forward" medium, compared to TV which is a "lean-back" medium. Streaming video, and other forms of online video, offer the best of both worlds. It offers the emotion of television, coupled with the interactivity and opportunity for dialogue that comes from the Web.
All of that being said, I still don't think we have seen what will eventually become the norm.
The way video is currently viewed online still seems somewhat clunky. It feels as though we're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. If you see the current executions, we're placing video into existing ad spaces. We're pushing video into banners and buttons rather than coming up with new presentation architecture. We need to re-evaluate how we see the Web and how we place video inside of it.
What about a site that is purely a video interface? What about typing in a URL and coming to a TV station? Does the future hold the possibility of a pure video interface with flash layered on top? Companies like Maven and Desksite offer experiences that are similar to this but are housed on your desktop rather than online. Why can't we foresee this experience online as well?
The promise of video is one that will certainly be fulfilled online, and will likely change dramatically before we see this fulfillment. I am really interested to see how video will be incorporated over the next two years. Once dial-up is a thing of the past, of course. Aren't you? “
Devon comments that this article speaks to a shared creative challenge and media planning puzzle. It illustrates well the need for collaborative marketing creativity that straddles both the creative and media capabilities at Digitas.
I think things are changing faster than we can sometimes notice. And that we should be looking at cutting-edge site development for our cues.
If you visit OnStar.com, Getadvice.com, Markmartinsweeps.com, and Mylifemycard.com. You'll see these sites all use video tailored for their own specific Web experiences. And I think its sites like these that will pave the way for new approaches to using video within banners and rich media moving forward.
That isn't to say people aren't innovatively using video within banners today, recall the American Airlines video campaign last year that used “customer” home video elements--"We know why you fly" campaign? It's happening within Digitas, look at the AEFA PointRoll video host banners from Q1. I think the biggest hurdle we face is getting clients to spend the money on the content. Some clients won’t be ready to deal with what amounts to an additional CPM, just for video production pass-through costs.
But as we help our clients see why it is important to deliver freshly tailor-made content to their online audiences, we must take our learnings from the innovative site experiences that are being made now to help us pave the way for better integrated marketing campaigns that can use video more innovatively.
Posted by: Nicholas Kierstead | June 23, 2005 at 09:36 AM
Let's not forget how important the Digitas Powerhouse's role is in this new revolution. We could get the smartest media planners and creatives in a room brainstorming for hours- but without the Powerhouse's expertise most ideas would never make it past exactly that: An Idea. In the end it's content we want, not concepts. The Powerhouse is the key connector between The Idea and The Execution.
Most recently, New York Powerhouse lead Nick Kierstead has been researching new streaming vendors. His idea: let's send out video and graphical test kits and ask these vendors WHAT CAN YOU OFFER US? How do these assets look as full screen streams versus boxed-in elements? What quality can you serve up? How do we optimize all of the technologies offered out there?
At the moment, most of our online video content is either embedded in Flash or being served into a Flash experience. Banner ads and other online media content may have stray methods, but we are all dealing with the same challenges. How do we make this content bigger, better, and more interactive without choking everyone's computer? Even Flash with all of its recent technological bells and whistles is having trouble spitting out films that are larger than 320X240 squares, or over 60 sec long. And even when vendors like Unicast offer lovely full screen video experiences, none of the respectable sites out there want to serve them up!
But, people love watching other people. And even if that person is only 320 pixels high, it still is fascinating. Sure, at the moment people do "lean forward" rather than "lean back" to view, but what does this really tell us about how they are experiencing this new exciting content? We still don't fully understand even how people read text on the web! Until there are more large-scale extensive studies done, we will continue to work in a bit of a void (think about the billions of dollars Sesame Street spent in the advent of educational TV... who would have guessed a big bird would make such an impact?) That said, traditional TV usage has been studied extensively. Our best bet at the moment: combine these findings with our own extensive knowledge of human-computer interaction, and then use the latest and greatest technologies to execute and make the experience tangible. (It is also important to note here that the evolution of the Internet and television is in many ways symbiotic, not competitive. Although it feels like a race at the moment, the goals between the two platforms really are the same. Like poetry, art, and music- it's the content and the relevance of the content to the individual that remains important, not necessarily how they are viewing it. In the future, people will be both "leaning forward" and "leaning back" depending on the moment!)
So, yes-definitely get the media gurus and the creative people chatting. But to get real answers and real results I think we need to do more than form mini-workshops. In a world where technology is creating endless complexities, shouldn't we use everything we have? I bet you would be surprised just how much we already know collectively...
Posted by: Christine Beardsell | June 22, 2005 at 07:48 PM