“Web Video Goes Mainstream: Is Your Brand Ready?”

The answer is no for the most part, but people are trying.

I had a chance to speak at the “Web Video Goes Mainstream: Is Your Brand Ready?” conference last week. It bestowed a few pearls of wisdom and edgy speakers, along with the litany of clichés, questions with no answer (e.g., how will YouTube make money?) and humdrum “I come from a big company with a big name who is involved in video on the web in a big way” speakers.

Here’s an idea- after every conference involving video on the web, we should let a panel of attendees from a cross-functional sample set (e.g., agency, brand, internet company, old media company, consultant, investor, etc) rate each speaker. Then we should rank order the companies who have speakers who “get it” and then invest in those companies. My mom used to make investment decisions about retail companies in this manner. She sold off Ann Taylor when she thought the inventory became boxy and matronly and bought up the Gap as they started expanding into Kids/Baby. She did pretty well.*

If we employed my faulty stock buying scheme, I would recommend buying Microsoft, Razorfish/Avenue A and Brightcove (sorry its private, but maybe Diller will float you a couple of his shares). And I would be short Google-- screaming short all the way down the elevator shaft all alone. 

Jeremy Allaire knows how to attract great talent, great boards and create great stories. The company is positioning itself as a full eco-system providing publisher tools (workflow, content management, flash players), content creator services (digitization, syndication) and an ad services. It is still somewhat hard to tell where specifically they will knock the cover off the ball. Adam Gerber, their VP of Ad Product and Strategy certainly had me going long on the team.

He was pushing advertisers to work with their creative agencies to develop appropriate creative for the web- multiple types of creative, shorter form, appropriate exposure levels. The point is straightforward and quite meaningful.  Like Adam, I am shocked when agencies want to use 60s on the web or use the same piece of creative over and over again.

Then there was Todd Herman, Director of Advertising & Business Strategy at MSN. He is a spirited, contrarian guy who clearly likes to get an audience going. Todd showed off his maverick style by handling his microphone like Phil Donahue on Red Bull and attacking the agencies in the audience for holding back the web. Todd had some of my favorite thoughts of the day. He compared the death of video concurrency to file sharing. “If you think it is hard to stick file sharing back in the bottle, trying doing it with time.” People want to watch what they want, when they want.

To make the point, Todd repeatedly told the audience “we are not milk, we are super-milk.” This is meant to make the case that our interest in watching content does not expire like milk. Major content creators and distributors have historically put artificial expiration dates on our content. But unlike milk, this content should not sour. His point- make the damn content available, and preferably through MSN, AOL and Google. Todd was evangelizing for the whole industry and I actually believed him.

Finally, he really got the crowd going by running through a evolution of video on the web portals chronologically over the last 5 years: Jibjab cartoon --> Feedroom --> ESPN Motion/MSN Video to Youtube/AOL. MSN has experienced a 300% 3-year CAGR in online video ad revenue and now sells 80% of their inventory upfront. He walked through a number of these evolutionary roadmaps and MSN stats, ending each set of examples with a quote- “If you believe video on the web is not mainstream, you may be a redneck.”  He was doing his best to get the spread collar, Hermes tie agency crowd to feel a bit uncomfortable. I was feeling a bit sunburned by the end.

Todd quoted an interesting stat at the end of his speech. Based on a recent Odyssey Research report, 58% answered false, when asked “Do you watch video on the web when you have nothing else to do?” 55% say the web is the single best way to get news. And yet only 33% rank web content positively. What does this mean? It is a great time to producing content. Consumers like TV content, but do not like the delivery mechanism. These consumers like the Internet as a delivery mechanism, but do not like Internet content. We watch freak of the week content on Youtube because it is all we have. Not for long.

Finally, the Google Video exec was a bit disappointing, leaving us with little new in the way of Google's video strategy.  For now, it appears the strategy is to aggregate and organize as many videos in the Google video store as possible. I know a lot of small companies are thrilled to arbitrage their hosting and bandwidth for the moment (put it up on Google video and have Google streaming it out for you). No doubt, a real video adwords will follow soon enough.

*Note: Following my public market investment advice is at your own risk.

Comments

[Chris Gilbey]

Very interesting post. Particularly that it is a great time to be producing content. I agree. This time reminds me of the period I was joining the music business in the early 70's. The 60's had been phenomenal in terms of music, but the 70'd saw us doing more and better - certainly from my vantage point...

Metaphorically Google is The Beatles. And regardless of their power and authority, maybe already past Sgt Pepper. The newcomers may be a lot of one hit wonders at the moment, but the best is still to come, and there are so many possibilities...