The broadcast upfronts are winding down, but the mission of online sellers, particularly the three biggest-Time Warner's America Online, Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Yahoo!-pitching broadband video
offerings, is just beginning. All three are bringing broadband video into the marketplace and have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to do integrated deals in conjunction with marketers'
upfront broadcast media buys.
While no player has stepped forward to trumpet the results thus far, all continue to evangelize broadband video and to sell it into the media marketplace. MSN
launched its broadband video gambit in January when it introduced the MSN Video Service with a roster of advertisers that included Revlon and Procter & Gamble. Several of the launch advertisers
re-upped with MSN.
Yahoo!'s Launch music service is a popular and frequently cited destination of marketers. It's also a popular venue for broadband video advertising. Launch streamed 200
million music videos in May to free and for-pay consumers. Overall, Yahoo! counted 5.8 million fee-paying customers as of March 31 who subscribe to services such as hosting, extra mail storage,
LAUNCHcast Plus and others. "Stream-over stream or in-stream video in the Launch product is a place where [broadband advertising] makes a lot of sense, they have lots of content and the user is
expecting to see sight, sound and motion," said Sean Finnegan, Midwest Director, OMD Digital, a unit of Omnicom Group.
Yahoo! partners with Eyewonder and Klipmart, among other video technology
providers. "We are fairly agnostic about video being included in cutting-edge ad units," said Mark McLaughlin, Yahoo!'s group category development officer for entertainment, music and sports.
What Yahoo! and others are pitching is pre-roll or a single streaming ad, usually a :15 or :30, that plays prior to video content. "It is as close to a cut and paste of a TV commercial as you could
imagine," McLaughlin says. The Launch video player offers three windows-a video window, a content window and a persistent banner which lasts until the end of each music video, about 3-4 minutes.
Yahoo! allows only one commercial per ad pod, "Meaning, even if someone buys two :15s, we would not play two :15s in a row before a music video," McLaughlin explains.
AOL, through its AOL Media
Networks unit, offers pre-roll in 15-second increments as well, in addition to in-banner advertising which is essentially a video ad running within a banner. AOL has never offered this before. AOL
intends to distribute broadband video advertising as widely as possible across its network, i.e., across its AOL, AOL.com, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), Netscape, Compuserve and ICQ properties,
according to Kevin Conroy, EVP and COO, AOL for Broadband. The goal is to make broadband video easier to buy and place, and to offer advertisers ad tracking services. Among AOL's sweet spots for
broadband video-News, Sports, Music and Movies, according to Tom Bosco, AOL's director of broadband sales.
Embedded video within a content page is another popular option for advertisers. 250.
On "The embedded unit allows an Internet buyer to think about Yahoo!'s network and to overlay video. We think that that's going to be very popular with media buyers," McLaughlin notes. Yahoo! is
vetting its broadband video offerings to interactive media agencies and broadcast TV buying groups. "When we have the opportunity to talk to TV people we are showing examples of both units and where
we're making progress with TV people, is usually when it's an agency where internally, they're closely integrated with Internet media units," McLaughlin explains.
While some interactive agency
strategists say this year's upfronts didn't net as many integrated deals as they'd hoped, some progress was made. "Less video was sold through the upfront than we had expected, it's still partially a
timing issue, but a lot of good groundwork was laid for next year," said Alan Schanzer, managing director, The Digital Edge, a unit of WPP Group's Mediaedge:cia.
"We have seen over the past year,
as broadband has really scaled more and more, the use of television or video assets in our advertising, but this upfront, in a small way, is the first time we're really seeing the exploration of the
TV budgets to support these ad units," Yahoo!'s McLaughlin said. "The shops most likely to place TV dollars with Yahoo! to run video advertising are the earliest adopters, and they are generally the
places where there are Internet-experienced buyers who are easily accessible to the TV buyers," he added.