Online video has been sold
so hard and for so long as the familiar, safe branding vehicle that will lure TV dollars online, we rarely hear much about its direct marketing potential. But ad software and services company Panache
says that with the right formats and appeals, video advertising can also take names and become a hard core DM lead generator. The company is rolling out Tuesday morning a slate new products for its publisher partners to add to the mix call "Lead Accelerator."
There is nothing
revolutionary here, in that we have seen the pieces many times before. There is a pre-roll at the center of the experience as well as a companion display element that can run more immediate and urgent
offers. There is an in-video overlay that brings the calls to action into direct view. And taking aim at the product's initial target market of financial services, the overlay and display in the
product's pre-roll also can dynamically pull in live data like financial feeds. In the case of the mock-up demo here, an E-Trade overlay ad has market updates and a stock lookup embedded in the
pop-up.
"These are four classic elements that we are putting together in combination," says Panache COO Cheryl Kellond. She thinks that the branding effect of the pre-roll will be
energized by having more deeply integrated calls to action that have the immediacy of live data. "It creates an immediate feeling by bringing four elements together into an environment where the
viewer wants to engage, and it can drive the advertiser to direct marketing performance they might not get from a traditional video unit."
Panache says that the unit evolved from feedback from
publisher partners. There was a need in niche markets like financial services for product that publishers could bring to agencies that had the familiarity of video advertising ties to metrics that
could justify the spend. "Publishers tell us it has to be easy to sell," says Jill Druschke, vp of marketing, Panache. "The vertical focus was key." Also important to ease of use was combining four
familiar elements, for some of which the advertiser might already have creative assets to deploy and combine.
The back end metrics are designed to capture leads or move the user to a lead-gen
page. The hope is that enhancements like these to the traditional video pre-roll will bring to video lead-gen dollars that aren't identified with the category. They say that financial services is the
first vertical partners will focus on because this was the place where the most demand was felt. While Panache has no advertisers to announce as yet, the company works with publishers like CBS and Fox
News, which would have clientele in this vertical.
Clearly as video evolves beyond simply attracting brand dollars, it will need to weave its way into the other marketing goals and channels
like lead gen. Arguably companion units can and do already accomplish some of this will direct calls to action. One of the things interesting about this multi-element approach, however, is the
prospect for creative optimization. With multiple elements at work the marketers can tweak and experiment, do multivariate testing of elements and even geo or demo-target some elements of the unit
while retaining the same creative in others. There are some interesting twists to this.