EU Bienvenue à Product Placement

European Union lawmakers gave the final green light last month to ground breaking new EU rules allowing broadcasters to raise more money through product placement in order to off-set new technologies such as video-on-demand and PVRs. Euro MPs adopted the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which aims to update EU broadcasting law to cater for developments such as the Internet and mobile TV. The new rules will now be sent to national capitals, and the EU's 27 member countries will have until the end of 2009 to implement them into their statute books. The European Commission said the new rules would meet the demands of a fast-moving and dynamic industry, citing the new text should help European media business remain competitive in the digital era.

According to FremantleMedia, product placement on European television could bring in revenues of €150m (£107m) by 2010.

Recent figures from countries that permit product placement, such as Australia suggest that clearer rules should help the European audiovisual industry become more competitive, especially compared with the U.S.

Product Placement Keeps Track of Digital

Product Placement will be the only “traditional” marketing tool with comparable growth expectations of digital media beyond 2010 with a CAGR of 20 percent – spurred on by advertisers’ desire to drive relevancy and reach for their advertising as consumer control over interruption advertising continues, according to a startling new report by IBM Global Business Services.

The report entitled The End of Advertising as We Know It, forecasts greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than occurred in the previous fifty, indicates that by 2012, the landscape of the industry will change so profoundly that in order to survive advertising industry players will need to take aggressive steps to innovate in three key areas:

• Consumers: making micro-segmentation and personalization paramount in marketing;

• Business models: how and where advertising inventory is sold, the structure and forms of partnerships, revenue models and advertising formats;

• Business design and infrastructure: All players need to redesign organizational and operating capabilities across the advertising lifecycle to support consumer and business model innovation: consumer analytics, channel planning, buying/selling, creation, delivery and impact reporting.

Nearly half of the advertising survey respondents anticipate a significant (greater than 10%) revenue shift away from the 30-second spot within the next five years, and almost 10 percent of respondents thought there would be a dramatic (greater than 25 percent) shift. Two-thirds of advertising experts surveyed by IBM expect 20 percent of advertising revenue to move from impression-based to impact-based formats within three years.

The bulk of survey respondents acknowledged that consumers have tired of interruption advertising, and are increasingly in control of how they interact, filter, distribute, and consume their content, and associated advertising messages.

The Ad Marketplace

Notably, the report found that self-service advertising exchanges or "marketplaces" are attracting revenues that were once exclusively sold through proprietary channels or transactions. More than half of ad professionals polled by IBM expect that in the next five years open advertising exchanges will take 30 percent of current revenues now commanded by traditional broadcasters and media.

The IBM report shows increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked. IBM said all players must adapt to a world where advertising inventory is increasingly bought and sold in open exchanges vs. traditional channels.

Traditional advertising players risk major revenue declines as budgets shift rapidly to new, interactive formats, which are expected to grow at nearly five times that of traditional advertising.

Bill Battino, Communications Sector managing partner, IBM Global Business Services said, "companies must re-look at how they serve content to consumers with business models based much more on engaging consumers in a relationship. Digital entertainment is experiencing faster adoption than anyone had previously anticipated. The advertising community needs to dramatically re-orient its business to serve consumers who increasingly access content in non-linear formats," he said.

Finally, a corporate giant speaks frankly to the industry. I'd love to know the voice traffic between New York, London, Sydney and Paris Monday morning.

"Duncan, this is Alan. Did you see that news report Friday?"
"IBM, yeah. F#*#k.

Online Video Metrics Matters

In their October report, Web Video Marketing - Best Practices, TubeMogul mentioned that the strength of online video as a marketing medium stems from its engagement potential, SEO value, and measurement opportunities. According to TubeMogul at least fifty percent of the time, creating a great viral video is all about content and production. The goal, “is to create something remarkable, literally, something that causes people to remark - and in doing so effectively conveys your message".

We've been using TubeMogul for months and appreciate having the analytics to pitch our services to potential sponsors, but the really great part is all the time that it saves us not having to visit every video-sharing Website.

Online video is one of the best venues to engage an audience - don't even think about excluding it! This new medium allows the video creator to communicate a message on multiple levels - via visual imagery, the spoken word, music and visual text. It may sound like a commercial for a Montessori school - but this is the way people learn, and consequently, the way legendary brands are created. As a case in point, think of traditional internet marketing; when was the last time that a paid search listing or banner ad raised your blood pressure or induced you to forward something to a friend? Get the point?

The trick, as with any marketing effort, is to both be remarkable AND communicate your message. Use the right package to make your video a hit, but don't create a vehicle without passengers. Make sure the content is doing what it supposed to do.

Bottom line: choose production components that fit with your message, content, and intended audience.

Let's hope the current writers strike in the U.S, which seeks a greater share of revenue from Webisodes, Mobisodes and the like, doesn't fuel the cost of content and in the process slow the move to distribution methods like TubeMogul.

Tide Turns in Favour of Webisodes

With the success of LG15 and KateModern, a flurry of new online video Webisodes has overtaken the space in recent months with big name advertisers now lining up to get in on the action.

We recently reported Bebo's third Webisode installment, Sofia's Diary.

Bebo's lead has now prompted Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. owned MySpace to launch its first scripted online series, with Ford Focus sponsoring, via MySpaceTV. The show, Roommates, follows eight former college roomies that have all picked up and moved to LA. While MySpace owns the editorial content, LA-based Iron Sink Media will handle production.

MySpace has also partnered with Hearst to produce another Web-only reality show targeting first year college students. The new reality show, Freshman 15, will follow 15 girls in the first year of college as they tackle the troubles of adjusting to their new lives.

CosmoGirl magazine and Raw Digital are also partnering on an online soap opera series set in a suburban Michigan high school. The three to four-minute webisodes will air three times a week for five weeks on cosmogirl.com. It will follow the lives and adventures of Jaime and Anna, a pair of best friends.

Meanwhile, Proctor & Gamble have been busy launching their own online and off-deck Webisode called "Crescent Heights", sponsored by Tide. This is one of the first times an advertiser has used both the Web and mobile for distribution of original programming. The company is credited with inventing the soap opera by sponsoring the "Ma Perkins' radio show in the U.S and, later, "Guiding Light," so you would expect such an innovator to be one of the first to try to recreate that success in today's digital universe.

Earlier this month, Australian cross-platform production company Hoodlum won a MIPCOM Mobile & Internet TV award for the drama Emmerdale Online, conceived to run concurrently with British broadcaster ITV's long-running prime-time soap of the same name. Hoodlum's founders Tracey Robertson and Nathan Mayfield talked about digital storytelling at last week's SPAA Fringe event in Sydney and their past project for Yahoo7's PS Trixi.

After a run on the conference speaker circuit from MIPTV in Cannes last month to the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, KateModern creator Miles Beckett is in Melbourne this week to promote mobile media as part of ACMI's Portable Film Festival. His arrival down under is timely, given that the local Australian version of YouTube launched last week.

With the average Webisode being only three to four minutes long, Australian short film makers are some of the most talented in the world and can really tap this space if they wake up to its potential.

Every Australian short film maker should have their own channel on YouTube.

Globally, online dramas have come of age this year, and interest in the developing format from internet publishers, mobile phone carriers, advertisers and even TV networks and traditional production studios has come alive in the past few months.

Advertisers including Procter & Gamble, MSN, Orange mobile and Disney are paying up to $568,000 each to integrate their brands into KateModern, which has attracted 18 million views in 10 weeks.

Local versions of YouTube have already launched in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, Netherlands and Ireland.

Welcome to the global village.

Nokia Leads Mobile Ad Content Push

Nokia's Mosh is a new mobile social networking site where users can upload and share content consumable on mobile phones. Through both Web-based and mobile handset-based interfaces, users can post professional and user-created content for themselves, a group, or the whole network to share.

Nokia's Mosh move is smart and taps the social media gamut after it also announced last month it had entered into an agreement to acquire mobile advertising and marketing company Enpocket for an undisclosed sum.

Worldwide, mobile ad spending is expected to reach US$1.5 billion this year and grow to US$11.3 billion by 2011, according to market researcher Informa Telecoms & Media.

In March this year, Nokia announced two mobile advertising services. Nokia Ad Service, a fully managed service for advertisers to conduct targeted advertising on mobile services and applications consists of a group of mobile publishers forming a mobile ad network and a platform to deploy, manage and optimize mobile advertising campaigns.

Nokia Advertising Connector, a private label service for third party Publishers and Advertising Aggregators that want to extend to relevant mobile advertising operates as an intelligent switch, selecting between text, visual, audio and video ads - depending on the user's context - and feeding the ad to the device.

In the UK, Vodafone has also carried out trials with both Yahoo! and Google in various markets of a new ad-based model themselves.

Leading research house Frost & Sullivan, said in a recently issued report, another business model that has shown the most positive indications of success is the ad-funded or sponsored-content model, where subscribers get to download or access content for free in exchange for receiving selected ads either as a precursor to the ad or embedded within a downloadable application. Incentive-based ads such as offering cash, free minutes, downloads and discount coupons are also an attractive way of pushing content.

Locally, a recent study by Ericsson's Consumer Lab found that one in four Australian mobile phone users have access to Mobile TV services and a third of those already use the service.

In August, the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) Mobile Industry Group launched its AIMIA Mobile Advertising Guidelines, which recommends best practices for the creation and sizing of mobile display advertisements in Australia.

The new Guidelines have been developed following extensive consultation with carriers, publishers, content aggregators and content providers, both within Australia and internationally.

The new Guidelines have been endorsed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Further guidelines for text-based sponsored listings, video and animated ads and mobile TV will be needed.

Vodafone itself released its own consumer charter for mobile phone advertising in September. The Vodafone charter goes beyond the technical display advertising standards by tackling self-regulatory issues.

The charter states that customers must opt in to receive an advertising message and be able to opt out, and Vodafone will not release customers' personal information to advertisers. It also covers technical, pricing, complaint resolution and campaign tracking issues. Hutch3G and Optus have conducted similar testing.

In May, Telstra's Sensis division released the findings of its pioneering research into the delivery of display advertising on Australians’ mobile phones. The trials explored mobile advertising from a technical and design perspective, measuring consumer responses to various mobile campaign tools including banners, content sponsorship, mobile search and mobile video advertising. Last month, Sensis commenced a trial for customers to download to their phone promotional coupons that are instantly redeemable at fast food chains Pizza Hut and KFC.

But I think the really exciting acquisition has been the Yahoo! purchase of Actionality, which we reported on in August. This technology is true in-content advertising. Windows Mobile 6 is also coming along with Microsoft's recent purchase of ScreenTonic.

Producer wise, Yamgo is a very cool outfit we like from Oxford in the UK getting in on the extreme sports action for product placement in mobile content.

The number of mobile phones in use is growing much faster than the number of computers. There are 2.5 billion mobile phones around the world compared to the planet's billion or so personal computers.

That's a lot of eyeballs.

James

Online Product Placement for Sofia's Diary Webisode

Product placement in online video Webisodes are all the buzz right now, with six-figure deals being reported for Orange, MSN, Procter & Gamble, Disney and now Atlantic Records to appear in KateModern, the Bebo driven web series sweeping the EU social network, with local-language versions of the site expected in Poland and the strong possibility that France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Holland will follow suit by year's end.

Bebo's second web installment Sofia's Diary based on a Portuguese soap looks set to ordain Bebo as the hottest social networking site in the U.K. and Ireland. Bebo and Sony Pictures Television have joined forces to launch the interactive teen Web drama. The interactive 1-3 minute webisodes are impressing advertisers with their ability to reach elusive teens and twentysomethings. Bebo's new partnership with Yahoo! is expected to deepen that focus in offering greater sponsorship and brand integration within Sofia's Diary.

Irish company Campbell Ryan Film Productions Ltd has been selected by Sony Pictures Television and Bebo to produce the first season.

Like KateModern, the series will show in real time the day to day life of UK teenager Sofia and will include daily videos and text updates posted on her Bebo profile. Written by BAFTA-winning Irish writer Danny Stack, Melanie Martinez and Marta Gomes, the show will combine real events with fictional stories, and keep viewers attention with real-time interaction with characters, in order to help direct the storyline.

Mirranda

Branded Entertainment at Mipcom

Bonsoiree, Sofia here in sunny Cannes and we've just been listening to CBS President and CEO Les Moonves deliver his keynote inside the plush new Grand Auditorium at Mipcom.

All eyes on India, but it's day two, in the auditorium that has marketers and producers abuzz with excitement with the latest in Branded Content case studies to be delivered by Justin Wilkes of @radical.media (inc BBH NY, Unilever/AXE The Gamekillers). In fact, a demain the entire lineup looks set to be a Branded Entertainment board 'affaire, with Valerie Accary delivering for BBDO Paris this day.

Ad types climbing the Croix des Gardes with their Blackberries! (pas pun). They must be very keen for content, this I am sure! (James, I am not seated next to Ben Silverman at Le Bilboquet, as I know you will be reading this on the plane!)

Variety's Marlene Edmunds reported Friday last, "most can't create content departments for branded entertainment within their own agencies fast enough. Advertisers and brands themselves want to be seen as partners or even buyers of content, opening up another revenue model for the industry".

BBH's Mark Boyd is quoted as saying, "the larger question is not how programming will be affected by product placement but how our favorite programs will be funded if these funding avenues aren't available."

C'est tout!

Sofia

Online Video Ads Signal Digital Style

According to a new online video survey conducted by independent research company TNS, the medium itself can be as valuable as the message it conveys. Results of the AOL/Google Online Video Survey conducted from July 9 to July 15, 2007 were based on online survey responses from 2,394 online video viewers between 18 and 54 years old. Forty-one percent of respondents said that after they see a brand featured in an online video ad, they were more likely to think of that brand as having a strong digital presence on the Internet. Proving, that the deployment of online video advertising can play a unique and critical role in representing a brand as being digitally-focused and digitally-accessible with audiences online. In fact, the survey found that one in three respondents said that they thought brands featured in online videos were perceived as "innovative" (32%), "creative" (32%), and "fun" (30%). Which just goes to show, leveraging the online video medium, also lifts overall brand perception.

But take note, the survey pointed out YouTubers still command the lion's share for audiences, with most users having requested a video-sharing website in the past month (77%), followed by news sites (55%) and broadcast TV sites (49%) as their favourite online-video destinations. Lest we forget that PwC research only recently found that 50 percent of consumers surveyed said that they would skip online video with pre-roll ads, hence Google InVideo.

Google's InVideo ads on YouTube, are we feel, just a prologue to something more akin to actual in-content advertising using video hyperlink technology, such as VideoClix. So it was no surprise to learn that 43% of those surveyed by TNS said that it was important to be able to click through to a brand's website.

Babelgum Online Film Festival

Filmmakers, mark September 15 on your calendars!
The Babelgum Online Film Festival, named after the internet TV network, will showcase films that are shorter than 45 minutes long, either shot in English or with English-language subtitles.

Online users will select the 10 shortlisted entries, with the nine-strong jury, headed by Spike Lee, selecting the final six from categories such as documentaries, advertising, animation, social and environment themed subjects or short film, for movies under 20 minutes long. The final category, titled the "Looking for Genius" award, will aim to praise a "new or emerging talent who displays clear and outstanding achievement". Each winner will bag €20,000 (£13,500) and, hopefully, the chance to break into the movie business.

Entry dates: 15 September, 2007 – 15 February, 2008. Winners will be announced at a Gala ceremony likely to be scheduled during the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008. So start rolling and good luck!

For those of you who don't know, Babelgum is a new contender for the global broadband video market. Just like the Joost project from the creators of the Skype voip service, Babelgum is based on a secure peer-to-peer video network. It is backed by Silvio Scaglia, who made a personal fortune from Fastweb, the Italian broadband video, voice and data service provider.

An interesting aspect of the Babelgum platform is the notion of personalised smart channels, which will automatically suggest specific programming based on recommendations and collective feedback from viewers.

Development is being led by chief technology officer Mallku Caballero, previously co-founder and chief scientist at White Pine Software, which produced CUSeeMe, one of the first popular video applications on the internet.

A billing and tracking system will record which programming and advertising has been viewed and by whom, enabling advanced billing options in the future.

Hoopla hulu!

NBC Universal and News Corp. took a step closer to launching Hulu on Wednesday and expect to begin a trial run in October.

The new site being sponsored by NBC and News Corp. (nyse: NWS) is intended to provide an alternative to watching TV programming online, in a way that's supported by advertising and endorsed by copyright holders.

The site is expected to initially feature programming from Fox shows like 24 and Family Guy as well as NBC shows like 30 Rock and Las Vegas.

Ofcom: 80% of DVR Users Skip UK TVCs

Close to 78% of people in the U.K. who own digital video recording devices, or DVRs, claim to fast forward advertisements, according to new research last week from U.K. communications regulator Ofcom.

The findings suggest widespread fears that the growing use of the devices could hit advertising revenues are well-founded. Ofcom said 15% of U.K. television households now have such devices, which include Sky + and other similar products.

Big numbers, which might come as warning shock for marketers and networks locally, with Foxtel IQ, IceTV and now TiVo destined for our shores in the new year. Though, word has it Seven is already finalising million-dollar TiVo advertising deals with at least 20 big brands (yeah right), and you can bet a key concern for each of those is that ads won't be effective if TiVo users can skip through them at the press of a button. At present, DVRs are found in about 320,000 of Australia's 7.8 million homes. That number includes the 200,000+ subscribers to pay TV operator Foxtel and its IQ service.

After IceTV's triumphant Federal Court victory against Nine earlier this month, InShot plans to move ahead with Ice to explore future telescopic ad models in both its device and web-based services.

Yahoo! In-Mobile Advertising

Well, it seems like everybody is getting "in" on the action these days. Information Week reports Yahoo has acquired Actionality, a German mobile advertising technology company, for an undisclosed sum.

Actionality provides software technology that inserts none other than ads in content for mobile devices, such as mobile phone games. The company claims that it has simplified in-game branding and advertising to the point that it's a one-click process. The purchase gives Yahoo access to software technology that inserts ads in content for mobile devices, such as mobile phone games.

Branded Entertainment Fastest

Earlier this month, we took note of New York private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson 2012 study, which forecast branded entertainment will be among the fastest-growing media segments over the next five years, but we knew this already. One thing we did pay attention to in the report was that consumers are spending more time with "consumer-supported media," such as webisodes and video games, instead of traditional ad-supported media, such as broadcast TV and print newspapers.

Google's In-Video Advertising Play on YouTube

Nearly a year after shelling out $1.65 billion to acquire video-sharing darling YouTube, Google has introduced an ambitious in-video advertising strategy this week aimed at legitimising its hefty investment in the San Bruno startup.

AdoTube's In-Video Adittude

In the race for best in-video advertising model AdoTube's all-new Instream Flash Media Player wins hands down. Unlike other models, which, in effect, steal time, AdoTube offers an alternative, unique way to advertise online without disrupting the user experience.