• by Paul Olliver , March 11, 2008

Leonardo Da Vinci famously stated that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and nothing could be truer for the plight of the online media buyer.

A case in point would be the IAB's efforts in the late '90s to standardize online display ad units. The overall assumption was to make it simple for advertisers to buy across a wide variety of sites with minimum creative customization. The second, and probably more important result, was to deliver uniform, and therefore comparable, reporting metrics.

It worked. Brilliantly.

Outside of a few laggards, the online publishing community gathered together, and provided the economies of scale that standardization provided. As an industry we arrived at a simple set of operating principles that allowed the sophistication of what we do to come out.

However, skip 10 years later and we see a little complexity surrounding video - just how do we bring video content to users, while maintaining the revenues to continue doing so? In other words, how do we package and sell this new opportunity to advertisers.

Recent reports from eMarketer show that advertising spend on video, while earmarked to grow, only made up $775 million of the $20 billion spent online last year - that's around 4% - and with reports of over 80% of online users viewing video on a weekly basis, there is clearly a disconnect somewhere, particularly when the branding opportunities are clearly so powerful for advertisers.

Currently there are four main avenues for buying "video":

1) Inline -- Modern TV Style Pre/mid/post roll, commonly repurposed TV ads;

2) Adjacent -- Companion ad placements;

3) Inherent -- 1950's TV style Advertorials, the content IS the ad; and,

4) Outlying -- Pop-ups/unders ....please pop-off.

But will we ever have one standard placement? More importantly, do we need one standard? I would argue that we can and should have "placement sophistication," but that the overriding concern here should be to make it as simple as possible for advertisers to spend on "video."

Part of the issue is a result of healthy competition between video technologies. Another is the ongoing discussion around metric and reporting nomenclature. However, some hope is in sight. There are online video ad networks popping up aiming to make the buy side simple, but will these companies operate in a spirit of cooperation, and will they work towards a mutually beneficial solution?

Herein lies the prisoner's dilemma - as it requires universal group cooperation for all the individuals to succeed, and I just don't see much of that going on right now.

It's true that the IAB has various initiatives to standardize video reporting metrics, and there seems to be a general consensus by what is meant by "engagement," and "interaction." However, the sell side of our equation doesn't seem to be making it simple to even arrive at the metrics -- as without the sales, there clearly won't be any metrics to report.