One Giant Leap for Online Video Advertising – Solidarity

It’s recently been said that the recession is slowing the adoption of online video for marketing purposes. But it’s not really the only reason. There are many other reasons that advertisers and marketers aren’t jumping on the bandwagon and joining the online video ‘revolution.’ Here’s my quick list of what we need to do before we can expect it to gain complete widespread acceptance like other forms of marketing and advertising.

Format Wars!

One of the real problems for advertisers is that when they develop their content for online ad campaigns it must then be re-sized, re-encoded and re-formatted based on what advertising channels they are using. This is effectively creating additional cost and problems for the advertisers where they can’t simply make a single size and format and use it everywhere. Television has a unique advantage in this respect because ad units are all the same. The length (in time) might differ but the format and requirements are standardized.

In order for online video to be a viable option for advertisers on the same scale as television this is certainly going to need to be accomplished. The IAB is helping us work toward this with its online video standards suggestions and the Open Video project is also playing a major factor. The third major factor that is going to affect this is HTML 5 and the <video> tag. But more on that later.

Even if it comes down to everyone accepting creative in one format and then re-encoding it themselves to suit their ad network, I think that it’s got to be done by the ad networks. Advertisers can take a single ad and display it on any channel on television, satellite and cable. But then when they try to make the jump to online video advertising they end up having to create entirely new content and that’s a huge hurdle for them to get involved because of expense and time.

Track it All

There are as many ways that video ad tracking is done as there are ad networks online. The problem is that in order for an advertiser to determine if they think a campaign will be effective or if they should place an ad with a particular network, they must do some amazing amount of math that requires the characters from The Big Bang Theory. Spending time doing that is counter-productive and most likely a major reason for a wide variety of advertisers to only do some test campaigns or worse yet, nothing at all with a ‘wait and see’ approach.

What we need is a single, industry accepted way to determine effectiveness. Statements like ‘we have a proprietary way of tracking but we can’t tell you how it works’ only work to further segment the industry and make it look like everyone is too busy fighting amongst themselves to actually be worth investing ad dollars into.

Now I’m no Communist. I’m not saying that everyone needs to share their intellectual property and show everyone else HOW they are doing things. But, like most other forms of media for advertising there has to be a either a single way to judge effectiveness and track statistics or there has to be an extremely simple conversion for a handful of ways.

Each ad network having their own ideas of what a view is, how to determine ROI (proprietary or not), what the measure of effectiveness is, etc is only working against everyone involved. We need a completely standardized and widely accepted way that provides a cohesive and unified front to advertisers. Everyone can still differentiate their product through other innovative inclusions and proprietary ways to present it, statistical analysis and the like. But if we truly want those ad dollars to pour forth like the biblical flood, we need to grease those floodgate gears.

Every ad network has some specific, unique offering and that will always be the case. I’m not talking about making everything the same. I’m simply saying that, like labels on food, advertising on television and bread in France, there has to be a standardized something so that the advertisers know what they are getting without having to employ rocket scientists or physicists.

About the Author - Christophor Rick
Christophor Rick is a freelance writer specializing in technology, new media and consumer electronics. His work appears on numerous sites across the web including ReelSEO. He went to uni for Biotechnology, did an internship with NASA and has written 2 as-yet-unpublished books (a 3rd is in progress). He is also the CEO at Gamers Daily News and his past work has included press releases, copywriting, travel writing and journalism. His newest project R2 Relations is leveraging the power of social networks to increase brand awareness and traffic for companies and their products and creating online communities for increased interaction with the products and brands.

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