Online video advertising brings new perspective to push and pull
As advertising spend on traditional media declines, spend online continues to accelerate. But it is only playing catch-up with the time consumers now spend online. This time increasingly involves content creation, community building and blogging, which is proving rather inconvenient to adland as these activities were never intended for infiltration by commercial interests. David Michael, strategy director at Utarget explains…
But “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”. The new orthodoxy is that brands must therefore generate their own communities of users who will then voluntarily shape and even champion the brand. This sits alongside the other new orthodoxy that online ads must only ever invite users to engage with their message. This medium, it seems, is too posh to push.
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Allow me to dissent from these orthodoxies. Advertising in the user generated world is more often than not seen as encroachment. It is also complex and time consuming to manage campaigns that have to navigate through such a minefield (not forgetting the bogeyman of inappropriate user-content). Often these campaigns are characterised by unquantifiable impact and limited volume reach.
Video advertising brings a new perspective to this question of push and pull. Video ads will require push to reach the coverage that brand advertisers migrating from TV require. Will users tolerate this? Well, not when tied to user-generated content but perhaps they will in return for access to quality video content (and quality site content in general). Recent ICM research indicated that more than 50 per cent of users would prefer to watch adverts to receive free content than directly pay for that content (74 per cent of 18-24 year olds). But these video ads, whilst utilising the branding power of TV need to be relevant to users and offer interaction.
Online does require new engaging forms of advertising for a “lean-forward” audience. But as TV and PC converge I think effective online advertising will emerge from the strengths of both media. As major brands increasingly follow their consumers’ online new media needs to offer these major brands advertising solutions which combine the reach, branding and visual impact of TV with the targeting and interaction of online. Video advertising has that potential. With increasingly sophisticated targeting and the need to monetise compelling but expensive content the question of push becomes a red herring.
