Moderator: Ken Doctor, Analyst, Outsell, Inc.
Panelists:
Ian Blaine, CEO, thePlatform, Inc.
Danny Fishman, President, Broadband Enterprises
Sean Morgan, Founder & CEO, Critical Mention
Shoba Purushothaman, CEO & Co-founder, The NewsMarket
Ken started off with a great compilation of videos seen by millions online that were cultural icons in 2007. Mainstream video still matters, obviously, but user-generated videos are creating their own cultural icons quickly, inexpensively and with a different kind of focus.
Ken: Tell us about your space.
Fishman: Started as a rep firm, struggled with scalability, built a pre-roll network, moving into brands and brand syndication. As opposed as to wanting to broadcast on a site or a channel advertisers wanted much more granularity. Started pushing out beyond sites like Warner, in syndication we're seeing people looking for specific programming and scale, need multiple distribution channels, have evolved syndication platform to provide contexutal syndication, mostly repurposed programming now, but now original online programming is hot, still a lot of iffy ideas being pitched, working with Hollywood production companies so that brands will enter. Long-form brand entterainment is now looking at online.
Shoba: On one side it's the news business, on the other side is the marketing industry, started knowing that text world was moving online and would need to integrate video content, created more effective distribution mechanism, free marketing videos available to media for free. Enabled news industry to buy and sell video content. Traditionally built around buying services from traditional video outlets like Reuters, news industry is searching for more efficient ways to get content. Also government, rollout of new 5-dollar bills. Launched 5 years ago, all of the news media were television stations then, over last 18 months 50 percent are print titles, niche trade publications, half of base but consuming 2/3 of content. Pfizer increased video for news by 80 percent. Still a lot of intimidation about technology, need to know what they need, do a lot of business in auto sector, all-time most popular ocntent was the launch of the world's cheapest car by Tata.
Blaine: There's a transition from this being a toy to a tool. Serve both media companies and B2B companies, one has a choice one doesn't consumer media has to do this, enterprise doesn't have to do this but it's a choice. On media side my 5-year-old has no idea about linear programming, that's a telling thing, its influence on television is huge. How to take the best of the Internet world and to make them both more available. Matching interests to inventory is key, as is the power of the crowd, people add value to content, cannot overestimate the importance of this. Some examples are things tagged as political debate but humorous, but advertisers will have a far different attitude towards humor clips. Working on learning more about the content, what it does when it goes places, info in the package makes it easier to put meaningful advertising in it.
Morgan: Two business lines, Critical Mention, focused on aggregating content for business intelligence, desktop subscription, Lexis/Nexis of TV, thousands of desktops licensed, infrastructure today is ingesting 13,000 hours of TV. Make it searchable by spoken word. B2B intelligence marketplace is very large but mostly driven by text. ClipSyndicate a but like ScreamingMedia, publishing tools, log into it, capture highly authoritative, respected news. ClipSyndicate does same for video, 300 providers, 240 network affiliates. Also emerging Web video brands, ExpertVillage, NYT, others providing online-only video. Video out to 20,000 URLs. Networks - McGraw-Hill, Penwell, Reed, Need a video news component. Close to 8,000 hours of broadcast news in U.S. alone every day. What is authoritative, what works in B2B, what provides value to end subscribers. Do we want to think about single search providing co-mingled text and video results, ClipSyndicate content is all licensed hours after it's been aired, newspaper industry was trained by Lexis/Nexis as to what a content royalty, video people say "what," video is not a revenue share business. ClipSyndicate brings in 50,000 discrete video assets from partners.
Ken: Basics, metrics are kind of a joke, what to we know about who's viewing videos, earlier viewing was younger and male, what kinds of programming, news vs. non-news, breaking news or orther verticals?
Shoba: Primary viewing is still happening with news video, in entertainment news video gets high marks, what is interesting is studies show that news video will continue to grow in influience, far from watching the evening news when we get home, most of the time my own news comes from the Web.
Fishman: So many types of news properties, has hit a critical mass, niche programming, news based audience is a very hungry audience. Lots of stats from research, my 100 year-old grandma knows how to do online video.
Ken: In terms of monetization it's mostly ads, little subscription.
Fishman: Has to be pretty niche for subscription to work.
Blaine: If you can access online for free you will, the more niche the more likely premium works. Subscription dwarfed by advertising. Belief is that studios are not going to go to an ad model ever.
Morgan: ClipSyndicate it's segmented into ad and subscription clearly, s..yndicating content into verticals with robust ad sales model. 80 dollar CPMs in niche sites, video changing ad dynamic, prosumer chosen video. Should be able to leverage video more effectively than banners deliver.
Ken: Half a billion dollars ads last year, what are CPMs this year, business high, 100 dollar CPMs, where's growth.
Fishman: Demand rising strongly, CPMs somewhat stable.
Blaine: Depends on the spectrum, known TV content will be high
Ken: Are we dealing with brands in a different way now?
Shoba: Brands more active earlieron, new model emerging, they have the ability to be a media company, Studio Dell enormous success, one of top ten sites, captivating content. Two years ago BudTV failed, but more brands are going to grow, setup costs are low and then they don't have to pay CPMs, this will eat into existing ad revenues.
Blaine: Works for a narrow range of brands.
Shoba: But if you're a niche B2B brand almost by definition you're a targeted audience, you're not trying to reach 50,000 people, you can drive people to you, a lot of trade publications have narrow topic areas,
Morgan: Real opportunity to take CPC advertisers and put them in flash panel players. When really relevant ad in players, click throughs can be in mid single digits.
Blaine: Not good for a tire ad next to why tires fail article.
Fishman: Banking future on contextualizaion, brands want to go to long format, too infomercially, let brand mangers work on this.
Morgan: Video's only in a browsable format, just text titles. A lot of focus needs to be not just browsable but via full-text services.
Shoba: Strong storytelling by may brands, Dell, many you can watch and feel that it's honest, will be blurring of lines, many stories will be told on their own Web site but more will be packaged for wider use in more conversational packaging.
Question: Video is passive, will it be more interactive?
Blaine: Not passive now, kids ineracts with friends while watching video, big cultural shift, for advertisers that's something that you can touch and learn something, yes, interactivity is coming.
Morgan: Lots of startup technology allows this now.
Fishman: We do overlays, hot-spotting on product placements, active integration, we're there now.
Question: Destination sites are they a dying business model, is it all about aggregation?
Blaine: For very few companies sites are enough, think about superdistribution, you're going to win if you meet them on the sites that they want to be in.
Fishman: Some organizations protective of content, in trouble, won't cannibalize their own brands, have to reach out.
Morgan: Learn from "walled gardens" of early online newspapers, will come a time that their content will go willy-nilly with some controls to protect it from shoing up on porn sites.
Ken: Age of multimedia is arriving!
Quick Take: Great panel, a lot more opportunity for brands to get conversational online, so sevices like TheNewsMarket will become more important as potential ad inventory once there's both long-form and teaser-form industrial footage.
Labels: SIIA Information Industry Summit 2008, video
