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8/12/08

Is Internet Video Forcing a Re-Think of Brand Building Tools?

By Dan Taylor

In any technology market, it's easy to lose sight of the end customer. Digital media is no exception, and sometimes our industry falls into a discussion about advertising technologies, forgetting that marketers buy advertising to accomplish their own business objectives. As the marketer selects from a variety of traditional and digital media - and marketing as well as advertising choices - there are numerous factors and priorities at play.

Brand advertising is one such priority. The goal of brand advertising is to build a brand in the minds of consumers. To accomplish this, marketers seek outlets with broad reach and bombard consumers repeatedly with messages. Think about Mazda's long-standing "Zoom zoom zoom" campaign - what does it convey about the brand? how many times have you seen or heard it?

Chances are that you've seen it dozens of times in many different formats. Zoom zoom zoom. To the point where you don't think about it anymore. That's the goal of brand advertising.

Television has been a long-standing brand advertising outlet. The audiences are big, and each 30-second spot yields millions of impressions. That's the way we've thought about it for decades.

And so that's been the way that we've thought about it as we make the shift to digital. Marketers have blindly followed their customers online, cutting the 30-second spot down to :15 …assuming that the 15-second pre-roll is just another brand advertising vehicle.

But that may not be the case. In a recent study of IAB video advertising formats, Break.com and Panache found something very interesting. It turns out that - in their study - an interactive :15 pre-roll is an effective response marketing tool and overlays are ideal for brand building.

These findings aren't set in stone. But they do go against commonly-accepted wisdom. Going into the study, I would have guessed that interactive overlays would be effective performance advertising…and that the :15 video ads would be far better suited for brand building. If the opposite is true, then it might force a thorough re-think about television advertising.

Think about it this way. If we can directly measure the performance of video advertising, then we may value it in an altogether different manner. Programmers might realize that they're using their most valuable inventory for network promotions and selling their least-valuable inventory for the highest price.

The impacts of which could be disruptive…to say the least.

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