• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, October 29, 2008

“Context is king, content isn’t,” averred Ted D’Cruz-Young, the president of Ideocracy, at Mediapost’s OMMA Video conference Wednesday morning. That’s because “there’s just too much crap content” online, when user-generated video is taken into account. D’Cruz-Young made the comment during a panel discussion with digital execs about the tradeoffs involved in the transition from the mass media model that typified the broadcast TV age, and the emerging commercial landscape of online video. There seemed to be a consensus among the panelists that quality, a paramount concern during the broadcast age because of the scale of content distribution and audiences, is simply less valuable in the Internet age. That’s because there’s a process of self-selection at work in the smaller audiences for the bizarre errata of online video: quality matters less because if they’ve chosen to be there, they’re already to some degree engaged with the content.

The emphasis, D’Cruz-Young said, should be on the choice of context for advertising. The challenge is not grading and delivering different quality levels for video content, but identifying the communities or passionate audiences that respond to a particular video niche or gravitate to a particular kind of content.  On a related note, D’Cruz-Young also skewered the idea that advertisers should only get involved in branded entertainment content when they are able to increase the entertainment value of the content. “What are you talking about? How can your brand possibly make something more entertaining? It’s not entertaining. Let’s just pop that bubble right now.” However Melissa Fallon, vice-president of television and digital for Davie Brown Entertainment, countered that brand entertainment and product integration must still be organic and in some way meaningful: “It can’t just be slapping a logo on something.”