• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, November 3, 2010

Digital video is teaching us a lot about the potential of video itself as a medium. Until now, video simply had been the sexy stuff, the lean-back stuff. Decades of middlebrow derision of non-literary media like film and TV trained us intellectually to de-value the depth and nuance of these media relative to the "word."

I know whereof I speak. I spent over a decade and a half in academia where teaching film and TV history and criticism consigned me to the "pop culture" ghetto of hip young professors that the tenured English Department members loved to bait at cocktail parties. "Tell me, young man, how goes the exegesis of 'Twin Peaks?' Any progress on the research about the treatment of time and force in 'Miami Vice?' Are you onto the symbolism of their purple blazers, yet?"

I had to be thankful. After all they had taken valuable time away from their important work on the 5,000th study of Blake's mysticism, which about five scholars worldwide were anxious to read and another 300 grad students were forced to skim and pretend to appreciate.

Nah, I'm not bitter. But it is good to see that the rise of cheap-to-make, cheaper-to-distribute video on digital platforms may also help undermine the centuries of literary bias and demonstrate once and for all that visual media communicate richly and allow insights that the word cannot always handle. As video replaces text increasingly as the medium of choice for all kinds of communication we are seeing how this platform is not a diminishment of the word so much as a unique medium with its own power.

To wit, sometimes a video can get to the heart of the silliness rife even in the most obscure niche fields -- like online display advertising. Longtime friend of Mediapost and investment banker Terence Kawaja of LUMA has been lampooning the world of online advertising for years in a series of brilliant video clips that occasionally make the rounds among the digerati. Under the nom de plume L McDuff, Kawaja, who does standup on the side, made his biggest splash with the incredible Wall Street Blues in which he put the media collapse to the tune of "American Pie."

This week he launches "ad:tech -- From Hype to Stereotype" which uses animated animals to satirize the doublespeak of the ad technology economy. From the acronyms that pepper the field (DSPs, RTBs, SSPs) to the flexible business models that morph to the latest trend, Kawaja has his way with the silliness of the field. Terence was the man behind the famous chart of the ad technology economy that made its way onto everyone's presentation deck in the past year. This video says more about the inanity of ad technology market than any column or even that chart.

And while we were digging around L Mcduff's oeuvre of video stabs at the industry we found what may be his most inspired effort, although from the YouTube count it has not been circulated as well. "A Few Good DSPs" re-dubs the climax from "A Few Good Men" as a confrontation between an accusatory publisher (Tom Cruise) with premium inventory and a DSP (Jack Nicholson) who is pretty sure the media company "can't handle the truth" of how inventory is handled through his real-time bidding system.

Actually, covering the online ad field suddenly is starting to feel a lot like academia where I listened to countless pitches of post-modern cultural theory. There is another case where no one in that room had the guts to say WTF are you guys talking about, lest they be labeled too stupid to understand that bleeding edge of the field.