Internet Tech Boston

Last Wednesday evening I attended “The Ins and Outs of Making Money from Online Video,” a part of the video event series sponsored by PermissionTV that is produced by MITX.org. The event was sparsely populated, which was a big letdown after attending an 800+ packed house at WebInno19 just a couple of days earlier. Here’s a brief overview of the panel, and what I learned:

• Waikit Lau is co-founder of ScanScout, “the market-leading in-stream video advertising network.” Waikit showed a demonstration of the product, which included an example of an overlay video, an overlay banner, and an overlay custom flash animation (swf).
  

  Waikit Lau of ScanScout

  Waikit basically let the product do the talking, which was nice. We saw how you can utilize their product to produce fairly complex, but easy to implement ad units on top of your video content. It was clear to see how to make money from online video using ScanScout.

• Mark Pascarella is President and CEO at GoTuit Media Corp, which “enables publishers to transform entire video libraries into a superior Gotuit-enabled experience marked by best-in-class navigation, video search, targeted advertising, virtual remixing and personalized viewing.” Mark also showed a demo of the product, which showed how to apply metadata to video to give user fine grain control over types of content to watch, but it was conspicuously devoid of any advertisements. However, it wasn’t that hard to see how a combination of a 3rd party ad server and pinpoint video content accuracy could result in a high number of impressions. Mark summed it up using this example: if you’re selling ads against Major League Soccer content, your audience is probably most interested in all David Beckham goals. You can leave the rest behind.
• The last and longest speaker of the night was Chris Johnston, Senior Vice President, Director of Integrated Production at Mullen. Chris spent an awful long time showing us the GM Used Car Ambush, a brand awareness site that Mullen produced. It’s a great site, but I was confused as to why it was part of this panel. First, all of the “video content” was produced by Mullen in support of this website. Second, there were no advertisements in the site. Instead, it was souped-up brand awareness / viral site, that hopes to get its target audience to change its perception of the target brand. Whereas ScanScout and GoTuit provided solutions that enabled you to actually make money on your existing video, I was hard pressed to see the relevancy of hiring a high-priced ad agency to get comedic talent, buy a van, shoot hidden camera spots, get the “victims” to sign waivers, post-produce and edit the video, design a concept site, build the Flash components, sit back, and hope it results in someone actually buying a car.

Two nights ago I attended the 2008 What’s Next Forum and Technology Awards Ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Innovation Technology Exchange (MITX). The Technology Awards “recognize and celebrate innovative [marketing] technologies developed in New England.” My company, PermissionTV, was nominated as a finalist in the “Video” category. Although we didn’t win, it was a great event and it was nice to be considered for the award given the exceptional companies and great talent that was assembled.

Despite a brief interruption due to a fire alarm (the event planners must have loved that), there was still enough time for a short panel discussion on whether software licensing and service fees could be affected by competition in the form of ad-supported online software services. In particular I found Baba Shetty, Chief Media Officer at Hill Holiday to have some insightful remarks. Baba stated that while the Internet has enabled a “seek out or keep out” permission-based ad model that by definition should lead to higher ROI on targeted online ads, corporations are currently suffering with “an outdated marketing infrastructure” that prohibits them from realizing the full benefit of internet marketing and ad-serving technology. I took his comment to mean that the majority of people in marketing these days would still rather focus their time and budget on mailing postcards and attending trade shows. It’s what they know and are comfortable with. This sentiment was echoed by Jeff Bussgang, General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, who pointed that while it’s “easy to get into experimental budgets,” there still has not been widespread commitment from corporates to create an Internet-centric marketing or advertising strategy.

Based on my experiences formerly leading an Interactive Marketing Agency and currently with an Online Video Delivery company, I tend to agree. Interactive is still seen as a “tack-on” to the overall marketing plan, instead of a core delivery and metric model to both online and offline tactics. This reality is not caused by deficiencies in the technologies or products available, but rather in the people who are charged with their implementation and use. For those corporations that have the right personnel in place, they are able to reap the benefits – but from my vantage point, the widespread revolution of internet-based marketing is still a few years away.