Guest Post: Capitalising on your Broadband Video Content, Avenue A | Razorfish

In this MIP Blog guest post, Domenic Venuto, SVP media & entertainment for interactive marketing firm Avenue A | Razorfish and a MIPCOM conference speaker this week, explains how make the most of your content online.

Avenue A | Razorfish is one of the largest interactive marketing and
technology companies in the world with a dedicated Media & Entertainment
Practice.

We build experiences that engage consumers, attract advertisers
and deliver business value to media organisations.

We have done a lot of
work consulting, designing and building video players that leverage our
clients assets in ways that can be best monetised.

While today, it seems
like the chief revenue opportunity with online video is still advertising,
there is movement toward experimenting with different models.

One of the
most prevalent forms of video advertising is the still pre-roll, but some
publishers, like NBC or ABC, are creating more interactive micro-site
experiences in their players for advertisers, NBC even calls their
experience a ‘Branded Canvas’.

Short form video relies heavily on overlays,
but we are now seeing sites experiment with other forms of ads.

In
attempting to figure out a profitable ad model, YouTube has recently
announced a number of experiments, most notably the post-roll, in addition
to any pre-roll and overlay.

They have also started experimenting with
click-to-buy actions on music videos which link directly to iTunes or
Amazon.com.

All of this appears incremental and may not be enough to
sustain and build revenue at the same scale as Google’s other products.

Examples of successful paid for video content do exist, perhaps best in
class being iTunes and Netflix.

We are beginning to see a lot advertisers not only advertise against video
but also around video in order to ‘monetise the experience’, Pandora has
been doing this with music but video sites are following suit.

Made-for-web
content is also another trend that appears to be gaining in popularity and
is yet another monetisation opportunities.

MSN’s In the Motherhood was a
great example of strong product placement and content sponsorship
opportunity for advertisers.

Monetizing content outside its original platform must also be a
consideration. Hulu has perhaps set the standard with their embeddable
player that allows users to cut their own content clips, embed them outside
of Hulu.com but still have Hulu’s ads run against the video.

Hulu should be
commended for taking such the bold step of allowing consumers to customize
and control the content.

While many opportunities currently lie in larger
business development deals, portability of video content seems to be another
emerging trend.

Media organisations shouldn’t be afraid that online
distribution cannibalises traditional distribution platforms.

TV viewing is
still growing, our research, along with many other third party researchers
agree that online video is supplementary, that if anything, it enhances
their television viewing audience.