• Don Draper Goes to TED: 'Ads Worth Spreading' Challenge to Video Advertisers Announced
    Okay vid-dweebs. We know you are pretty smart. Codecs, player design, ad insertion technology and targeting algorithms are not for the weak-minded. But are you TED smart? The non-profit organization and programmer of the famous deep-think conferences has always been about viral distribution. Its tagline is 'Ideas Worth Spreading." And so it is issuing a challenge to the video advertising community to offer up its best examples of what curator Chris Anderson calls "ads-with-a-difference." Do your ads actually have ideas. Do they have something worth saying ... well, besides 'gotta see this' and 'you'll wanna buy that?' Because Anderson says …
  • The Weird New Art of the iPad Magazine Celebrity Tutorial Video
    It is no surprise or secret that video is a killer medium on the iPad. From the time I first fired up my Netflix app on this platform, I admit I was in love. Even at 9.7 inches, when sitting in your lap, that black slab has the feel of a well-resolved HD screen.
  • Bringing Video Into the Marketplace, and the Marketplace into Video
    Stop me if you have heard this from me before. Video is the new text. Well, too late now. I said it again. One of the fundamental shifts in media consumption in the last few decades has been towards video-centricity. While text (and to a lesser degree still images) were the primary vehicle for most news and information, not video is becoming the preferred mode of media consumption From b2b news sites to every major print brand, the expectation of a video experience somewhere in the mix is there. And almost everyone seems to be producing video of some sort. …
  • The Age of Personal Media Entrepreneurship Begins
    At this evening's OMMA Awards Hitviews' founder Walter Sabo will be hoping to see his project in advertising via viral video celebrity pay off with industry recognition of a novel model. Nominated in the Viral Video category, his campaign for Fox's Glee TV series last year engaged some of the top YouTube personalities to promote the show in their own way. While that approach has been going on all year in a number of ad hoc efforts, Sabo started Hitviews as a way to systematize the process of matching brand marketers with just the right video celebrities for any …
  • As Unfair and Unbalanced as You Like
    One of the weird consequences of post-mass media is that we can now live in an ideologically pure media bubble of our own on just about any medium. Partisan news reporting is available 24/7 now, on cable, on the Web and on mobile extensions of both on your phone. Play your cards right and keep that bubble intact and you may never have to see a challenging point of view again. But stray onto a video news aggregator and you never know what might happen. All of a sudden a right-wing wingnut may find himself confronted by a Jon Stewart …
  • Money: The Web Series
    Monetization of online video has been an elusive goal for many publishers over the years. But if you really want to get close to the cash (and this may be as close to monetization as some startups will get) then you may try a unique government-funded set of video podcasts on, well, money. See your tax dollars at work at NewMoney.gov where an ongoing series of video spots illustrates and explains the process of creating the next generation of U.S. currency.
  • Reckitt Benckiser Buys Into Video Behavioral Ad Targeting
    Even in the seemingly bottomless pool of display inventory, behavioral targeting technologies traditionally have had to contend with scale issues. Sure you can segment audiences based on previous browsing histories into ever more tightly defined targets, but are you ending up with an audience size worth buying? Pull back on some of the segment definitions enough to get a usable audience and decent pool of inventory it doesn't take months to serve and you may have watered down your target beyond the point of increased effectiveness. And so 'BT' is even harder to deploy in the video environment where the …
  • Get Me Creative! Repurposed Spots May Brand But Not Sell
    From the time streaming media became a serious business for advertising, ad tech companies and the more forward-thinking guys at creative agencies lamented the ubiquitous repurposed 15 and 30. Give us creative that fits the medium, the screen, the attention span and the content size of online video experience, they said. And yet any cursory look at most major media sites demonstrates that the pre-roll is dominated by familiar TV spots. Now Dynamic Logic adds to the argument with research showing that repurposed TV ads do indeed raise brand awareness more effectively than other kinds of online ads. Perhaps that …
  • CBS Sports Uses iPad as A Sunday NFL TV Companion
    This is going to be a big week for what I have been calling (and no one has stopped me so far) "second screening" with the iPad. That is, we are getting to test two TV network apps for the Apple tablet that work in synch with live TV programming. The higher profile MyGeneration app from ABC and Nielsen will use audio cues from the program itself to activate interactive elements on the iPad. But we won't get to try that out until later this week when the program premieres. A second screen app that enjoyed less coverage but may …
  • Binaca Crowd Sources the Product Placement
    A decade ago people complained about it, but now product placement has become such a predictable part of the American media experience that brand marketers can both leverage and lampoon it at the same time. Breath freshener Binaca is trying to revive its old brand by soliciting online filmmakers to insert the product into classic film scenes.
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