• by Mark Naples , June 11, 2004

About a year ago, I upset some people by writing a column that complained about new rich media ad formats that had been introduced by two of the major rich media vendors. "The last thing we needed," I wrote, "was larger downloads."

This week, Eyeblaster introduced a new product that is, I believe, a step in the right direction. The company's VideoClip Module is an in-stream advertising and content management solution that enables web publishers and advertisers to create and serve video-based ads directly into video content streams. True, Eyeblaster raised the file size capacity again. But, the idea is that these ads will be shown within existing content streams that users are already viewing. That's right - it makes them more like TV-style commercials, at least that's how they'll seem to ad execs who have been reluctant to migrate budgets from TV buys to interactive.

Anyone who has been on ESPN.com, CBS MarketWatch or other premium sites that routinely stream content knows that they're going to see an ad that resembles a television commercial at some point, probably right before the content they are waiting for. The vast majority of these users are at work, on the fastest kind of broadband connections, and they spend the most online. These are all reasons why I think that this new format will be a hit.

Indeed, according to AccuStream iMedia Research, the total number of video streams served and viewed in 2003 rose 104 percent and is expected to reach 10 million total streams in 2004. 78 percent of the total streams were accessed by broadband users, who are twice as likely to have spent $2,500 or more online in the past year.

(Did you spend that much online? Or, are all those car buyers on eBay skewing that figure skyward? I do a lot of buying online, but that seems like a large number to me, at least it seems large to use as a lynchpin for measurement).

In what seems an epoch ago, in 1999, I was employee number four at a company called VastVideo, which was building the largest repository of informational video online to capitalize on the expansion of broadband. The idea was that consumers seek information online much more frequently than entertainment, and the expansion of broadband was going to make this content, sorted with a special taxonomy that we patented, fairly easy to monetize.

Obviously, predictions about the penetration of broadband were somewhat ambitious. So, even though we had four graduates of MIT's media lab on the job, we were pushing a rope. Though ours was an ASP model, there just weren't that many sites ready to have us stream video, not to mention a dearth of advertisers and agencies ready to listen to our pitch. Of course, the spring of 2000 changed everything anyway.

But, this is a very different time. Today, hundreds of sites, including dozens of newspaper sites, stream video, with many leveraging local news clips that are bracketed by the same commercials that viewers watch on television. If this were the trend five years ago, VastVideo and companies like it may have made it.

Of course, whether they would have or not, the key would have been the ease with which these video streams could be monetized. Streamlining monetization is central to the new Eyeblaster product.

Since leveraging video assets from television commercials can streamline a brand's marketing effort and facilitate cross-media campaigns with a unified look and brand messaging, I think we'll see many of the same commercials on television that we see online in the coming months. Please don't misunderstand me, those of you who think this is bad news for interactive. I'm not implying that this is the future of our media. I'm implying that it may help get more television dollars spent online.

And I think we can all agree - that would be great news.