The Homa Files

TakeAway:  The beauty of online ads is that companies can let consumers do most of the work. 

Once a consumer finds an interesting ad, he or she will do the company’s dirty work of spreading that puppy around to hundreds to thousands of their friends. 

Now, companies are upping the game by offering videos. This could be the best viral marketing has ever seen.

* * * * *

Excerpted from NYTimes, “Online Ads Are Booming, if They’re Attached to a Video,” By Brian Stelter, November 11, 2009

News Web sites are starting to look a lot less like newspapers and a lot more like television.  CNN.com and ESPN.com are featuring video much more prominently on their home pages, often prompting visitors to press play before they begin to read … news Web sites are not the only Web sites jumping on this trend …

A major reason is commercial. At a time when other categories of advertising dollars are shrinking, video ads are booming. News sites are adding more video inventory to keep pace with the demands of advertisers, and benefiting from the higher cost-per-thousands, or C.P.M.’s, that ads on those videos command …

Video is now the fastest-growing segment of the Internet advertising market … and video ads will be the “main channel” for major advertisers seeking to increase their online spending in the next 5 years …

Some companies think of online video as an extension of TV, and others think of it as an enhancement — one that allows for interactive messages and instant feedback from viewers.

Companies acknowledge that the medium is still in many ways immature. Sites continue to disagree about the legitimacy of “autoplay,” a setting that starts videos automatically when a Web page loads, increasing the number of streams without necessarily knowing that the Web user is watching.  And, ads next to “serious” news dispatches normally cannot draw the same C.P.M.’s as lighter fare …

“The Web is fulfilling this promise of being a medium where you can enjoy video as much as you can see it on TV,” … “The difference online is, if you want to do something with it — share it, stick it on a blog, post it on a Facebook page, or mark it and save it — you can do all that. And that was never possible before.”

Edit by TJS

* * * * *

Full Article
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/business/media/11adco.html?_r=1&ref=media

* * * * *

This entry was posted on January 18, 2010 at 6:57 am and is filed under Internet - Soc Networking, Mktg - Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.