There is currently a huge shift happening in the manner that Rich Media advertising is being approached. The swing is happening due to technological developments that are being driven by innovation and new ways of thinking about advertising online as a whole. At this current stage in the progression I am going to call this new order - Dynamic Adverts - although I'm sure once it finds its feet that a name will declare itself.
Currently Creative Agencies and Media Agencies are having to create multiple variants of adverts depending on language, video, text, text changes and various other factors. In the past the best way to deal with this was to use XML (or even better some sort of chain of XML) but everyone learnt very quickly that this can have issues. Firstly the servers the XML needs to be on must be so robust it is rare that anyone except the large companies could host them without the server crashing due to the amounts of requests. So therefore the XML was ultimately not as quickly up datable as people would have liked. Then there is the ability to pull in dynamic content on RSS feeds so that the updates would happen without any work required to the advert.
The way the industry is currently moving is into the realms of Dynamic Adverts. This in simplest terms means that an advert could be created that is in essence a shell with all the content ready to be pulled into it. You can then set up as much text, video, images and audio as you want and reference which ones you want to use. It is then possible to swap all the elements of the advert over at the touch of a button (with acceptance from the client, media agency and creative agency if required of course!). This then makes all creatives instantly up dateable whether it is a simple price change, date change or if the entire video has been re-shot and re-edited. It also gets rid of the need to re-make the creative again for this change or for sites to re-test anything as technically it already works.
This then opens up whole new ideas in terms of booking and buying media space and planning campaigns that will run for much longer terms but are still optimisable and updateable during the lifespan of the campaign. For example I could soon see media space being bought in big bulk deals over the space of a few years and then being resold for more money, actually becoming investable space. You buy with the plan to fill the slots and then if they are not getting the desired results, sell the space on for profit. It also means that you can leave the ad tag in the page for a long period of time and the sites need to traffic far less saving them time and money.
Ultimately it means that advertising becomes far less transient and yet more so all in one step, you get the opportunity to use it as you wish rather than being confined by others. You can also start planning much better combined camapigns and swapping elements around to test them and see what gets the best results. Of course everything is completely trackable and so you can see what works best in all areas of your camapign.
Ultimately the whole process of advertising online will change but hopefully away from the more laborious tasks and into giving everyone more time to think about better targetting, niche marketing and inventive ways to utilise the medium. This will be especially true for Creative Agencies as it will allow them much more time in the thinking stages rather than the making stages. Also they can plan to update as more content arises. This should lead to a huge step up in the online advertising world from all apsects and finally a far better grade of creative setting the benchmark.
Showing posts with label future. Show all posts
Showing posts with label future. Show all posts
Friday, November 28, 2008
The Future Of Online Video
Yesterday I attended a conference (Amplified 08) where one of the main sessions was a group discussion about the future of online video. There were people from all areas of the online industry from the BBC & Reuters to start up companies and freelancers. There was quite a heated discussion about the new IP TV companies and the way that the larger Old Order companies (BBC, ITV, Channel 4......) were dealing with the future of video online. However everyone seemed to me to be approaching this question from the wrong angles.
All the discussion and points raised related to how to move the structures that already exist over into the online domain. However, I personally feel, that everyone seems to be asking the wrong questions. The reason that Online excels so dramatically is in its ability to include interaction. I know from so many advertising campaigns in the past that linear video works on the internet far less well than non linear - allowing people to choose their desired content or make bespoke versions of other peoples work is what online users expect and is what the community feels is a pre-requisite in most areas.
What I mean by this is that people need to start looking at online video as a different medium to TV or film video as there is a wealth that can be achieved in new and dramatic manners that will engage the audience in a far stronger way. As one example - Adobe are releasing a new tool that gives you the assets (full scenes) so that you can choose how long you want scenes, which camera angles you wish to use, what sort of size you would like to render the video out to (depending on your requirements, online, TV, HD, projections etc...) so you can tailor the content to exactly what you want. This then runs alongside all the new technology that enables you to embed video or 'widget' it to your social network. Users can then make their own bespoke version of videos and therefore build a far stronger bond with the Band/Brand/Clothing range that the video is for making users feel part of that brand which is what they are doing with YouTube videos through their own conviction without anyone making anything new to provide this ability. What the audience wants we should give them.
This copies over into all areas of video for example if you are watching sport you can decide which camera angles you want ie: keep a close view on your favourite player. Or choose to have multiple windows open watching different views that you can drage to resize as you watch. Or have an action replay open while you still watch the over all game to see if it was a good decision by the referee. Even this example seems very un-inventive when you actually start questioning what is feasible with video online.
This mentality then needs also to be applied to other online areas such as Music, Text and as all the cultural movements within Art over the last half a century have been moving far more into 2nd level artistry than originating ideas and this is a shift that everyone has become accustomed to culturally. Therefore we all need to embrace others taking our work, bastardising it and making something new from it, feeling complimented that it was of a standard and style good enough for others to want to evolve to a new level themselves, rather than fearing that they might do something better than you did originally.
Ultimately it all come back to the thinking that "recording songs from the radio" never killed the music industry and when you can record something in one programme as you listen to it in another then this worry really does become redundant. We all need to shift our thinking into seeing these things we create as tools for others to use - in the same way Kraftwerk did for hip-hop in the early years of sampling or Andy Warhol did with house hold items. Feel proud that part of your work has influenced another into doing something similar and then take from others work and evolve those. As a wise Buddha once told me - "The amateur borrows, the genius steals".
So ultimately we need to stop trying to shoehorn the old ideals into online and embrace what is so amazing about this new media. We need to start to utilise these progressions in video that will lead the way in making online video excel at the same time as actually offering something new that means revenue creation, rather than doing something not quite as good as you could get from tv (and I don't even want to start talking about tracking and fullscreen that then pushes tv to the side completely and makes it increasingly redundant).
I personally think this is the direct future of online video and we need to start catering for it now.
All the discussion and points raised related to how to move the structures that already exist over into the online domain. However, I personally feel, that everyone seems to be asking the wrong questions. The reason that Online excels so dramatically is in its ability to include interaction. I know from so many advertising campaigns in the past that linear video works on the internet far less well than non linear - allowing people to choose their desired content or make bespoke versions of other peoples work is what online users expect and is what the community feels is a pre-requisite in most areas.
What I mean by this is that people need to start looking at online video as a different medium to TV or film video as there is a wealth that can be achieved in new and dramatic manners that will engage the audience in a far stronger way. As one example - Adobe are releasing a new tool that gives you the assets (full scenes) so that you can choose how long you want scenes, which camera angles you wish to use, what sort of size you would like to render the video out to (depending on your requirements, online, TV, HD, projections etc...) so you can tailor the content to exactly what you want. This then runs alongside all the new technology that enables you to embed video or 'widget' it to your social network. Users can then make their own bespoke version of videos and therefore build a far stronger bond with the Band/Brand/Clothing range that the video is for making users feel part of that brand which is what they are doing with YouTube videos through their own conviction without anyone making anything new to provide this ability. What the audience wants we should give them.
This copies over into all areas of video for example if you are watching sport you can decide which camera angles you want ie: keep a close view on your favourite player. Or choose to have multiple windows open watching different views that you can drage to resize as you watch. Or have an action replay open while you still watch the over all game to see if it was a good decision by the referee. Even this example seems very un-inventive when you actually start questioning what is feasible with video online.
This mentality then needs also to be applied to other online areas such as Music, Text and as all the cultural movements within Art over the last half a century have been moving far more into 2nd level artistry than originating ideas and this is a shift that everyone has become accustomed to culturally. Therefore we all need to embrace others taking our work, bastardising it and making something new from it, feeling complimented that it was of a standard and style good enough for others to want to evolve to a new level themselves, rather than fearing that they might do something better than you did originally.
Ultimately it all come back to the thinking that "recording songs from the radio" never killed the music industry and when you can record something in one programme as you listen to it in another then this worry really does become redundant. We all need to shift our thinking into seeing these things we create as tools for others to use - in the same way Kraftwerk did for hip-hop in the early years of sampling or Andy Warhol did with house hold items. Feel proud that part of your work has influenced another into doing something similar and then take from others work and evolve those. As a wise Buddha once told me - "The amateur borrows, the genius steals".
So ultimately we need to stop trying to shoehorn the old ideals into online and embrace what is so amazing about this new media. We need to start to utilise these progressions in video that will lead the way in making online video excel at the same time as actually offering something new that means revenue creation, rather than doing something not quite as good as you could get from tv (and I don't even want to start talking about tracking and fullscreen that then pushes tv to the side completely and makes it increasingly redundant).
I personally think this is the direct future of online video and we need to start catering for it now.
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