The Great Unwatched
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Why doesn't the video market clear? Do clients just refuse to pay enough for the good space? Don't tell me they know how much that ad space is worth to them in revenue.
I worked at an adtech startup for two years --- we only barely touched on video, but the dynamics are still there. Buyers plan on the scale of D-Day but there's really no place to do that --- there's no halftime superbowl ad on the internet, just a billion little things that have slightly different definitions of every single thing involved. What's an inch when screens are different sizes and the site has responsive design? What if you've got something built around 4:3 or 16:9 and their site is the opposite? What counts as adult, exactly? Bet it isn't the same in Northbrook IL as it in Palo Alto).
It's a big mess, and the things that put buyers' minds at ease aren't the same that make them money.
from my uninformed position as a viewer of advertising, it seems like the opposite of this is true. On any site i would consider premium (e.g. hulu, youtube, theonion, and yes, nationalgeographic) my biggest pet peeve with advertising is that they have more ad blocks to fill than they do advertisements, and they have to keep re-using the same ads over and over again. surely the advertiser doesn't want to pay for me to see the same 15-second video ad a half-dozen times in a row on a single visit, do they?
Anecdote: about a decade ago, on the Lichfield to Redditch railway line, some bright spark decided to install video screens on the trains that played news clips and adverts. The sound level was idiotically high. The screens were positioned all along the main part of each carriage. There was a token 'quiet' section at the remote end of each carriage which did not have any form of sound insulation between it and the main part of the carriage.
The initiative lasted about 6 months. Rail staff told me that the level of vandalism targeted specifically on the equipment was the worst they had seen (some of the train staff had worked out how to jam the DVD-ROM players in the steel boxes to prevent worse damage to the kit). The jingles used to advertise the local car insurance (! on a commuter train !) brokers and estate agents still haunt my dreams. I will never buy anything from any of the local advertisers, many who have now gone bankrupt. I remember actually seeing a cafe bar that had been advertised on this system and crossing the road to get away purely by reflex action.
Can anyone explain why Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here official video on YouTube shows a shampoo advert aimed at young women? I mean, Gil wasn't exactly a male grooming icon if you know what I mean. Targeting appears off...
You can see the ad networks as opportunistic parasites that take advantage of over-specialization in ad-land. Fancy creatives that have next to no tech knowledge get their budgets gobbled by people with some measure of tech capability and no ethics. The 'outsource everything but your core competency' only works when you can trust everyone that you are outsourcing to.
The lack of quality inventory is also something of a canard. Direct buying and selling requires ::effort::, thinking, spending on expertise, and salespeople. Dumping ads into a network that quotes absurd numbers and promises everything requires pressing a button and going to get coffee.
It's like the Somali pirates -- they identified a bunch of ships that had no defenses and corporations that would barf out millions of dollars when you point guns at a few sailors. A $500 weapons budget could hold a multi-billion dollar cargo hostage. It's similar with ad piracy.
This.
Online advertsing is a micro-transactions model. With print and Tv you have a single touch-point with the publisher or network, and they have a single-pipe-channel to N users. With online, the content is de-fragmented into individual sales units on an individual users screen. Each pixel of real-estate is de-bundled and needs to be bought/sold/negotiated. That is a massive amount of cognitive overhead on the business side. And, on the creative side...there is way too much variation/uncertainty about the context to fully tailor the creative elements to each user/context (way too expensive). This explains the huge "value add" of reducing complexity. If you can sell remnants with a 1-click solution, you just saved somebody some pain. And that guy/gal has a budget and needs to make numbers...so you can negotiate a cut.
Most marketing agencies are owned by a handful of large conglomerates, so this is by design to a great degree. Even when the creative and the media people are under the same roof, they may be entirely separate organizations with their own profit targets.
However, in the latter case, I've already purchased the product, so the "advertising" is actually an in-product enhancement pointing me at getting more value out of what I've already paid for. I wonder if I would be so interested in the cross-promotions if I had to pay for new tracks or albums every time.
Pretty soon it will look like the bargain of the century.
Edit: I was thinking of instagram, whatsapp was about 15x as expensive as YouTube.
This is part of the reason why a lot of online media is such trash. Ad budgets are getting siphoned off by fraud at scale. If the internet's entire purpose is to connect people with the information that they need as quickly as possible, then this purpose is being circumvented. Instead they are getting junk masquerading as information.
The Daily Caller quote is also a canard. They get paid junk rates because they are offering junk space and have junk site performance and a broken mobile website. Media companies would treat it as serious if their papers printed incorrectly half the time or the signal turned to static or had odd color hue on TV. On the web shoddy workmanship is considered acceptable.
The DC and countless other sites could charge higher if they just sold more direct. Whatever happened to 'disintermediation?' Instead they hand over the inventory to a few lines of javascript because it's easy, lazy, and requires no salespeople.
It's very hard to sell directly. You have to have significant scale for advertisers to even be interested in talking to you, and even if you reach that scale it requires a whole sales staff and tech support which, frankly, most (digital) publishers just don't have.