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DMI: Emerging Solutions for Contextual and Behavioral Video Advertising
4:27: Mike Gordon is moderator. Panelists introducing themselves.
4:30 – Gordon: What behavioral or contextual technologies are working today?
4:32 – Scherer: I don’t think there are enough technologies or data to make a truly rich experience. The targeting that will prove to be successful is basic geographical targeting. If you have scale in your platform, you will generate revenue.
4:33 – Carpenter: Our first attempt at addressing contextual advertising problem was in giving a customer the ability to skin a player with their brand. Now, what contextual ads give you the ability to address the brand, as opposed to just click-throughs. We’ll see CPMs go up as this shift happens. Contextual ads are relatively nacent today across our customers, but those that have used it are generating more revenue from it.
4:36 – Gordon: Are the ad sales teams ready to sell this?
4:36 – Carpenter: Very real, but the thing about contextual is it gives you the ability to target.
4:37 – Karnes: We are evangelists for this medium, and we have an ad sales team. It is a catch-22 – if you want the social web to take hold of your content, you have to let go. We have customers that want to only target negative keywords. The technology isn’t there yet to soft through keywords enough.
4:39 – Gordon: What are advertisers looking for in n contextual technologies?
4:40 – Scherer: Difficult to answer. At the end of the day, advertisers want to reach users on differing platforms. They have the budgets, but are losing share because their audiences are migrating. There’s a lot to lose. When there is enough standardization from site to site, the servers are ready to go. Publishers that enable their media players to accept IAB tags are going to benefit.
4:43 - Karnes: Last year, web portals started losing dollars to smaller sites. Advertisers want us to get them to their audience.
4:44 – Scherer: Publishers want us to integrate the systems in the backoffice so we can beenfit from the interaction, for example with upsell.
4:44 – Gordon: How is this broader than just advertising?
4:45 – Carpenter: Users are there for some sort of experience. Five years ago, video was in its own section of a site. The contextual methodology is more about put video where they might be, not where they might look for it. From a publishing standpoint, its about getting the video embedded in some aspect of the experience, and in a spot where contextually it makes sense that it is there. If its done properly, you can increase inventory, traffic, views, search optimization, for your site. In doing that, you enable more opportunities to serve up more relevant ads.
4:48 – Gordon: Are we going to feel like someone is in our houses experiencing this with me?
4:48 – Karnes: Targeting needs to be a consumer choice. They need to be able to turn off the data transmission if they want. Also – advertising is becoming a story, not just a break from the content. As the ad experience improves through creative storytelling, the market will improve and mature.
4:49 – Scherer: The horse is out of the barn. Advertisers are already tracking us, but from the user perpective its about having choice. But a targeted environment is an opportunity for brands to connect at the right time and place. Its early, but users are apt to seek out content from brands they have affinity to. Its multidimensional, but there are discussions on Capital HIll, awareness of the issues, but nothing to worry about. We will find the happy medium.
4:50 – Q+A Time
4:50 – Is opting out still meaning opting out of the entire site?
4:52 – Scherer: We see each publisher set their own policies, and they need to be sensitive that they could destroy their user experience.
4:53 – Carpenter: Its a delicate balance a publisher has to manage, but the IAB has standards that help guide. If you ahve 2 minute clips with 30 sec ads in between, you hurt the user experience. But if you sell the right ad length, and the experience right – not sending the same ad all the time, getting the ad to view time ration – it will work.
4:55 – Do you see a StumbleUpon model – fill out a profile of what you are interested in, and we’ll serve ads only based on that?
4:56 – Karnes: Still a question of accuracy with that information, especially with younger viewers. Takes a lot of tech smarts to get through that. But for the user, if they provide that, its much better information that decyphering all the automated info out there.
4:57 – Scherer: We also see a focus on branded content that’s dicoverable and promotable to their targets.
4:58 – Carpenter: General guiding principle is for the publisher to sell their audience, and not the text on the site.
5:00 – Thank you!
5:00 – Gordon: Summing up today. We have hit a few key themes: The world is fragmented, and it is requieing us to be a lot smarter about how to address that world with our businesses. And, there are human beings on the other end of that experience, and we have to address that before any of this other stuff matters.
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