Quest for the Standard

Earlier this year, a joint venture, called The Pool, was led by Publicis companies Starcom MediaVest Group and VivaKi, and including Hulu, Microsoft and Yahoo, to test and establish standards for new advertising models among the ad elite.

The Pool wants to narrow the current vast selection for video to one golden standard, which they will present in February 2010. Last week, two executives, Curt Hecht, president of VivaKi Nerve Center, and Tracey Scheppach, video innovation director at Starcom USA, presented the audience at IAB’s Digital Video conference the timeline for their testing. They’ve reduced their initial like of 30 possible online video ad units to two, which they will be testing (against the pre-roll format) until October of this year.

While they didn’t go into much more detail, it’s certainly an interesting prospect – one online video format that achieves the most engagement from consumers while achieving what’s most appealing to media buyers. Could such a thing exist?

IAB has taken their own group of advisors, calling The Re-Imagining Interactive Advertising Task Force (what a name!), which includes more than 20 publishers and agencies like CBS Interactive, Digitas, Google, Razorfish and Universal McCann. For the first time, this group will help to recommend changes to IAB’s annual review of ad standards. This is part of the IAB’s ongoing push to create better guidelines for advertisers. It seems that lack of standardization in online advertising is everyone’s problem, but these efforts are a big incentive to brands who are hesitant to invest in the space.

Meanwhile, media companies are doing their best to get creative about selling video ads. NBC has started pitching variations of their usual ad units, offering a “push back” roll-over unit under the video window and longer single pre-roll ads.

Whatever the end results from these two groups are, there’s sure to be a dramatic shift for content owners. Perhaps content owners can save money by repurposing the “old standard,” pre-roll ads, into refreshed and retargeted personalized video? It’s worth testing the waters.

Tags: Creative, IAB, Publicis, Standards
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Production Optimized: Shooting More Successful Videos

Getting more bang for your buck has hit every level of every industry. Even video production teams are looking for different ways of creating low-cost, high-quality video, targeted content that can be used for several different audiences.

Production teams already shoot a mixture of targeted and generic material as part of the filming process. During the editing process, the different segments of the video (i.e. targeted and generic) are spliced together to create a succinct video that conveys the intended message and serves to entertain the viewer.

Think of all the different takes or scenes that are involved in filming, only to be discarded in the editing process. What if we were able to save this material for later use and possible monetization? It’s time to look at video production differently in terms of segmented content that can be easily spliced together to present a targeted message, which involves shooting stock video and targeted material.

But what about highlighting what the production team does best – being creative? ‘Personalized video’ technology streamlines the segmenting and editing process so that the same production team can fully focus their energy on filming and the creative process.

Production teams already know how to think about targeting, about how to shoot multiple versions for specific audiences, and they know how tricky it can be to keep track of more than a few threads and edit them into separate versions. Immediately upon using a personalized video platform, they realize that they already have the skills to make much more finely detailed targeting, many more variants, and much more finely structured versions because personalized video tools allow them to keep track of things, work on multiple versions simultaneously, and there’s no need to spend ages editing all of those versions. And they are now spending their valuable time thinking about the task – creative time, instead of technical drudgery doing the editing. With personalized video technology, the editing phase goes from utilizing the brunt of their energies to autopilot.

Freeing up creative minds makes them more creative. These video production teams are exactly the types of early adopters that can make the most of what personalized video offers because they already have the right mind-set.

If you shoot lots of original video material, personalized video technology could make you more productive and more successful.

Tags: Creative, Production, Techniques, Video
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