When you think of the media coverage of online video marketing, you'd think that it was something that was actually making some type of big impact upon the industry, in reality, it's a tiny portion of the overall ad spend anywhere, and even with the Internet, it's a fraction of the overall spend.
So other than being an interesting thing to read and write about, what wrong?
Part of it has to do with the control factor again. But in this case I'm in agreement with it. With my marketing, there's no way that I want my stuff being marketed around some of the types of user-generated videos that would highly offend my customers; that's a legitimate concern for many marketers.
What that means is that marketers are looking for professionally produced content that they know they can rely on representing a specific theme or idea that would fit in with their strategy.
But the other aspect of this is probably even more important, and that is the continual way that traditional media and marketers look for audiences on TV. That simply isn't going to happen online.
In other words they are looking for markets online that aren't fragmented. It's not going to be found. If you look at the two biggies like YouTube (GOOG) and MySpace (NWS-A), even though they claim huge audiences, to say they're in a type of mass would be totally untrue.
People visit the overall site, but the diversity of sites or profiles visited or videos watched are fragmented as much as if they were individual web sites.
Because marketers are looking for predictability within their specific product offerings, it forces them to look for professional content. The problem is that there simply isn't enough of it to go around at this time. The networks have been slow to offer it online in a monetized way.
For example, Randy Kilgore, chief revenue officer, Tremor, said, "Scale is an issue for the top brand-name advertisers." Broadband Enterprises CEO Matt Wasserlauf added that when you even consider CBS.com, its reach is only the size of a small cable channel.
The problem with that type of thinking is that they're looking at it from a mass market point-of-view, which doesn't exist in the online world. I'm not even sure if it ever will. Since cable TV there really hasn't been a mass market like there was when there was only three TV networks in America.
In relationship to scale, which seems to be the major concern of marketers, they will have to learn to offer things across many fragments of a market. It's really not that difficult. They seem to have a hard time understanding that scale will only be reached by targeting fragments across various Web sites.
For marketers that understand this, it could be a great opportunity at this time to enter into spaces that the larger companies aren't willing or able to do.
If I was working with these large media companies, I would look for smaller, fragmented audiences and market hard to them and measure results to see the impact. They, along with all of us, need to try things across the scattered market to reach the scale we desire to reach out to.
Comment Preview