SpotXchange Spotlight Blog

Sight, Sound and Motion from Digital Hollywood

by Brent Durand

The Digital Hollywood conference wrapped up this week, and some of the event chatter included topics that continue to be top of mind for online advertising industry professionals. Here are some of the takeaways from the conference.

Content is King, But Popularity is Gaining Ground

We know that in the good old days of traditional TV, audiences were tied to a few popular shows on the broadcast networks. These days, this audience is becoming more and more fragmented with great content across cable networks, online, on mobile devices and now on tablets (an aside: to date I've never seen so many iPads in one room, wow). So how do advertisers reach this audience online these days?

The publishers have a strong belief that premium content is king. The argument is that the best content on the best websites attract the best targets. The consensus in the room seemed to be that user-generated content on sites like YouTube still isn't safe for a brand. However, YouTube is extremely popular and gets tons of traffic, so how do advertisers balance it all?

SpotXchange is starting to see some advertisers reframe their thinking and start to add "popular"websites to the list of "premium"websites. Brands have to go where the viewers are, and with the democratization of content (user-generated) and today's fragmentation, reach and scale are only achieved through the advanced targeting efforts of video ad networks. There is no doubt that a balance can be struck between "premium"and "popular,"and it's finding the right balance to achieve your objectives.

Self-Regulation Will Save the Day (and Our Industry's Reputation)

Targeting online with video is something that only a few ad networks do well (I'm biased toward the leader in the space, SpotXchange), but the practice is growing at a very rapid pace. Targeting, both online and on mobile devices, is a beautiful thing when it works well (we've all seen the perfectly targeted ad show up at just the right time). The biggest roadblock in the ad targeting world seems to be consumer education, which leads into concerns over privacy and self-regulation versus government regulation. We, as an industry, have to do a better job at educating the public about the benefits of targeting (the main one being that more and more we'll only see relevant ads when we're searching for new products or services). Most people find that to be OK, as long as their personal information isn't collected in the process.

There are always some bad apples out there, but the online ad industry needs to take it upon itself to keep targeting using anonymous data and to do so with relevance. The IAB and BetterAdvertising.com will lead the effort, but we all need to do our share and self-regulate. Ideally there will be a bright future for targeting and the benefits it brings consumers. One VC firm at Digital Hollywood mentioned that most investments in online advertising right now are in exchanges/real-time bidding environments and targeting, for example.

Facilitating the Shift to Online Advertising

Online video advertising is still small relative to TV advertising budgets, but it's growing at break-neck speed. Simplifying that process of getting the right videos in front of the right folks online is critical to continued fast growth. Video ad networks and other providers have to make the process simple, provide flexible pricing models, and provide our clients with feedback after their campaigns run. Many agencies have 50 years worth of data to justify their TV spends, and proven GRP formulas, whereas they don't have the same data for online media. As online video advertising continues to evolve, the pricing models and creative executions will continue to become more universal and refined, which will help continue the trend of traditional media budgets moving online.

Our challenge as we try to stay ahead of an evolving, growing industry is to provide timely, relevant ad content on the sites that best reach a very fragmented audience across a transmedia environment. And to do it in a transparent, trusted way. That's a tall order, but there are leaders in the industry that are up to the task.

Brent Durand is Director of West Coast Sales for SpotXchange.
By Leanne Smullen On October 22, 2010
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