Hours of TV programming are being viewed online, yet video advertising is still not evolving. The key to monetization may come from TV's advertising past.
Upon hearing that The New York Journal had published his obituary, Mark Twain said, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
And so it was with television, which was prematurely and enthusiastically eulogized in the mid-1990s by the suddenly digital and entirely narcissistic progeny of "Cheers." Of course, that doesn’t explain why the most prominent feature of every new digital device nowadays is a TV screen. Nor does it explain why the most prominent feature of the online experience is video.
Despite the boneheaded and self-serving predictions of digital media experts too young to know better, and despite the misguided though well-intended claims by egalitarians, academicians and media reformists alike, broadband and wireless access are not at all about heady things like enhanced communications, education, democracy or equal access. Broadband and wireless are all about television, plain and simple.
Broadband and wireless are why every digital device on the planet now comes with a TV screen. They are why television will affect the internet far more profoundly than the internet could ever affect television and why the internet is transforming from an information-based medium to an entertainment-based medium at warp speed. It's all about television and television is all about entertainment.
Already, more than half of all available bandwidth is consumed by video uploads, downloads and streams. Digital broadband and wireless technologies now offer film studios and TV networks unfettered access to the Holy Grail of syndication platforms. In the months and years to come, tens of thousands of hours of classic video and film will be digitized, repackaged as bite-sized clips and distributed as self-contained content units. Existing video portals like YouTube and EVTV1 will serve merely as staging grounds/fancy server farms for videos clips invoked across hundreds of thousands of websites catering to every conceivable demographic and psychographic profile. Likewise, millions of hours of video content will be narrowcast to tens of millions of digital mobile device screens. Far from destroying television, the digital media have made it all but impossible to turn off. You can’t throw a brick and not hit a TV screen nowadays.
All of the above notwithstanding, the 800-pound online video gorilla comes with a commercial appetite that the medium is especially ill-equipped to satisfy, for two basic reasons:
1. The essential conflict between the seamless user experience and the utterly intrusive demands of branded advertising: A trillion-dollar investment in a seamless online user experience renders any intrusion -- any interruption whatsoever -- intolerable. Yet branded advertising, the only revenue engine powerful enough to feed online video, is all about intrusion and interruption. It only works when it compels us to watch, look, listen or change the channel. In essence, it only works when it intrudes, when it challenges us to say "no." By contrast, brand advertising online waits patiently in on-demand mode for someone to say "yes" -- a pathetic legacy model designed by technologists who knew and cared nothing about commercial media.
2. Digital media evangelists drink far too much of their own Kool-Aid: Their only concession to historical media context is a mind-numbing (and convenient) belief in diehard media myths like ad-supported programming and the advertising-in-exchange-for-free-content quid pro quo.
The prevailing 15- and 30-second pre-roll model for online video is a textbook example of what happens when a digitally-schooled media maven with little or no historical context tries to mix one medium with another: neither is served and both fail in the attempt. Pre-roll attrition rates are appalling, a fact that abuses both viewer and advertiser confidence, ultimately starves the 800-pound gorilla and in any event hardly explains why anyone would expect an online viewer to sit through a 15- or 30-second commercial spot that they wouldn't watch on TV in the first place.
For years now, digital marketers have prayed for functionally unlimited bandwidth to create a richer brand advertising experience that could compete with TV. Now that the 800-pound gorilla is here, however, there seems to be precious little food in the intrusion-free digital pantry to feed it. Video's ability to attract online viewers is clearly not the issue: witness the uncontested appeal and popularity of the major video portals. Yet while consumer-generated video offers proven appeal to viewers, advertisers remain passionately unenthusiastic. A great deal of consumer-generated video is far too unsavory, and much of what isn't consumer-generated has been pirated or otherwise obtained and distributed through questionable channels. Either way, the risks associated with online video far exceed the gains for most brand advertisers.
The more visionary and successful online video initiatives, however, will be (and already are) those that:
- Traffic in advertiser-friendly and licensed video
- Reflect and incorporate a true sense of media history and context
Those who truly understand the complementary commercial aspects of both digital media and television are the only ones who can truly understand that the only way to make brand advertising work in an on-demand world is to get customers to demand the intrusion -- exactly what the early TV advertisers did back in the Golden Age of TV when they owned the programs and thus controlled the entire commercial environment. Of course most advertisers aren't in the position to buy or produce their own video content. But they don't have to be. They only have to control or own the environment where the videos are played.
What all of the above suggests is that we are stepping back to the future in a kind of retro-evolutionary waltz. The media future ahead will tolerate only those diversions and intrusions we demand and the branding environments we encounter en route will seek less to sell and more to capitalize on our status as willing co-conspirators in an accelerating and undying quest for more entertainment. It's all about television -- again.
Jeff Einstein is a partner in The New EPA, a creative strategy and branding boutique from the Brothers Einstein.