Beet.TV Transcripts

Google Launches Contextual Video Syndication Business with Dow Jones and Conde Nast, New York Times Reports

Jeff Marcus

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[Start of Audio]

Well, clearly, the most common form is the pre-roll, so the easiest way to interact is, “I’m interested in content. Content is the bait. I’m showing the content, and boom; I’m seeing the ad that’s in front of it.”

But another popular thing people are doing is having video just start interactively within the page, so that you go onto a page; there’s the video, and it catches your eye a lot better than static content does.

It’s easier to get interest, where somebody looks down and they say, “Oh, that’s an interesting movie. That’s an interesting product.” And then they watch it and perhaps click through it.”

Video advertising is dependent on getting relevant messages to people. Brand awareness type of advertising worries about the content and the things that it’s surrounding on that, so in terms of brand advertisers, they want to make sure that the content that they’re with is applicable to what they’ve got.

That can happen on the fly in the online world, but it’s something that not everybody has adopted and realized how to do. It takes some backend communication, backend decision-making that has to be done properly.

And that’s a learning curve that we’re gonna have to bring, ad agencies and advertisers up to speed on. Direct marketers have less of a concern of what the content is, and for them, they’re much more worried about who is the view, who is the eyeball that’s in front of what I’ve got.

So that’s where behavioral targeting really takes off is to make sure that the right message and the relevant message is in front of the person, independent of where they are so that somebody who might have been on a financial site before and looked at some things is probably interested in finance and then is on YouTube or My Space, which is more of an entertainment or a cultural type of a site, but you would know that this is a person that’s more interested in something like financials.

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Google Adsense, Online Video, Jeff Marcus

Ford Models with Camcorders Are Absolutely Fabulous on YouTube -- World's Top Modeling Agency is Creating a New "Media Company"

John Caplan, Ford Models

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[Start of Audio]

John Caplan: So, welcome to Ford Models. Let me show you around Ford Models in

New York

and I think it’ll help you understand how we’re transitioning the company into being a media business.

In many ways, Ford is an incubator of new talent. Someone comes in here as a young person, we incubate them through and they launch their career being a high end fashion model. Then they go off and have become, in sort of the old media world, big personalities. In the new Ford media world, we’re actually transitioning them into work being our business partners as we produce content together.

We shoot tons of stuff right in here. Models will stand in the ____ tell their story, “How I became a model, what I would be if I wasn’t a model.” This is the main Ford Models women’s division. Charro, a young model from the Philippines, Patricia Velasquez, has had amazing success as a model and is now, you know, wonderfully successful in the entertainment business. You know, we’re this big, global brand with an incredible reach among young people and we’re now converting that into being a content business.

Andy Plesser: So John, this is, in a sense, is kind of a studio. It’s kind of a new studio system to incubate talent.

John Caplan: Really, all the human beings that work in the fashion business are represented here and what that enables us to do for our content business is to package talent together for content we’re producing. But we think of ourselves really as a twenty-first century studio.

Andy Plesser: What I understand is this is sort of a new approach to creating a brand in the digital age. So tell us the kind of shows you’re doing, the kinds of programming and sort of how that’s structured and the scope of it.

John Caplan: One of the programs we’re shooting is Dressing Room Confidential. And Dressing Room Confidential is Alexandra, one or our top models, goes shopping. She takes the clothes into the dressing room, undresses and puts the clothes on and she’s talking directly, you know, she’s not interviewing designers. She’s communicating directly with the audience. 

Andy Plesser: She shoots that herself?

John Caplan: She shoots that with a partner who – and they take turns shooting one another.

Andy Plesser: So you guys – you – tell us, you give a camera then to the talent and a tripod and some instructions or what kind of gear do you give them?

John Caplan: I think the amazing thing about young people today is everybody knows how to shoot. And if we’ve given them simple cameras, but we’re not asking for highly produced content because, in fact, the higher the production value, the lower the sort of – the audience interest.

Andy Plesser: John, so tell us, you know, after you basically produce these clips and have these clips put together, what do you do with them? What’s the distribution strategy?

John Caplan: So the distribution strategy is really in it’s infancy. Right? So we’re at crawl before walk and well before run. You know, we are now partnering with everybody from News Market to Vio to Youtube, V-mix _____ distributing content across their platforms.

Andy Plesser: Taking the clips and uploading it to those sites.

John Caplan: Correct. Uploading, tagging, simple stuff. We are – the models are publishing the clips themselves on some of their MySpace pages. We are basically testing and learning about the audience and where the audience aggregates. You know, at Youtube we’re the twelfth most visited site on Youtube thirty-five days after launching.

I’m John Caplan and you’re watching Beet.TV.

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Ford Models, John Caplan, digital media company, Fashion Week

Bud.TV's Monday Launch is Emblematic of Big Advertising Switch Online, Declares Ad Age Editor-in-Chief Scott Donaton -- New York Times Magazine Features "BrewTube" this Sunday....

Scott Donaton, AdvertisingAge

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[Start of Audio]

Every advertiser out there is looking at the marketing mix and how they spend their money and where they spend their money and how they make those decisions. What’s definitely clear is that there is beginning to be a big more towards devoting significant portions of budget in some cases to online and digital advertising formats.

And that money is not incremental money for most of those advertisers. That money is gonna come from their television schedules. It’s gonna come from their magazine advertising, so there’s no doubt that, overall, the traditional media segments are gonna be challenged the hold onto their share of advertising, and the online digital piece of it’s gonna continue to grow, but TV is a great example that Annheiser-Busch is doing. This is not incremental advertising spending. This is spending that Budweiser has basically said is gonna come right out of their television budget.

So that shift is happening, and that’s why what you see, and there will be varying degrees of success, but all of the traditional media companies are saying, “Look, we have to follow not a platform-based model, but a brand-based model,” so NBC will say, “NBC is not a TV network; it’s a brand of entertainment content,” and, obviously, that’s their bid to capture more of that dollar in the advertising and the digital advertising space, and every newspaper company and magazine company’s doing the same thing.

The issue is some of them won’t be able to make the transition. They’ll have brands that will come up without a legacy model that will go against them purely in the digital space and win. Some of these big established brands will make it through, and the key is to kind of stop looking at the threat and start looking at the potential opportunity, and that doesn’t mean that you’re maybe not scared about what you have to lose; that you’re not putting revenue at risk, but if you kind of sit there with your legacy model, trying to protect an existing pot of money, you’re gonna lose it anyway.

So I think you’ve gotta – if you’re a traditional media company, you’ve gotta just sort of say, “We understand that a lot of these dollars are gonna migrate to digital. Can our brand exist there and capture a piece of it there?”

But from the advertiser media planning point of view, there’s no doubt that this migration of dollars from traditional media to digital media is gonna continue and will get more pronounced each year, starting – last year was the first time it sort of began to show up in the numbers, even though there was a sense that it was happening a little bit before that. This year, it’ll show up in the numbers a little more, and that trend is definitely gonna continue and accelerate.

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Bud.TV, Online Video Advertising, Budweiser, The New York Times Magazine

Too Many Marketers are Jumping into Viral Video, AdvertisingAge EIC Scott Donaton Declares

Scott Donaton, AdvertisingAge

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[Start of Audio]

Marketers have really jumped into this viral video thing, and that’s good and that’s bad, and it’s good because I think that it’s very important right now with all of these new options, new ways that people can go to market; that companies experiment.

So on the one hand, I’m very much in favor of get out there; try something new. Don’t sit around waiting for the metrics to catch up or the standards to be set. You have to just sort of – if you sit still here, somebody else is gonna basically take it away from you.

On the other hand, this is like any form of marketing communication; if you’re gonna get involved and if you’re an advertiser and you wanna do viral video, have an idea, have a strategy, have a sense of where this actually sits and why you’re doing it.

I think, too often, advertisers fall into this mindset – I call it “get me one of those,” where the boss basically says – the CEO says to the CMO; the CMO says to the agency, “Get me a viral video,” and you go, “Okay, why?” “I don’t know; because everybody else has one; because my competitor has one; because other people are doing it; because I read about it,” and that’s just not good enough.

And it’s amazing. It sounds like such an over-simplification. I’m sure there are people who will hear that and say, “C’mon, that doesn’t really happen in the business world.” But I’ve had enough people say to me, “It’s absolutely how it happens.” Somebody hears a buzzword. Somebody said to me, “I don’t like my client to go to conferences because they always come back and they want whatever they’ve just heard about.”

And there’s a danger. There have been some really cool things done with viral video and with social networking by some advertisers, things like the Philips Bodygroomer was a really cool idea, the video of the guy sort of talking metaphorically about how this shaves parts of your body that you wouldn’t otherwise think to shave as a man and the Ax Game Killer series has had a lot of traction.

But there are too many marketers right now who are jumping into these spaces without knowing what it is they wanna do, and that is potentially gonna turn away people from the concept of advertiser-supported viral video. I’m not saying don’t experiment. I’m not saying that you might not make mistakes, but I’m saying you need to have an idea behind what you do, even if it turns out to be the wrong idea. You can’t just do these things for the sake of doing them.

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Viral Video, AdvertisingAge, Scott Donaton