In 1986, Gerry Rubin and Larry Postaer launched RPA in Santa Monica, CA, which became the largest independent agency on the West Coast with an interactive division recently recognized as best creative by OMMA magazine and Marketing Daily. The agency is renowned for the work they have done for major clients, especially Honda and Acura. iSPOT spoke with RPA’s Senior VP/Interactive General Manager Pete Imwalle about the agency’s use of broadband video, some of the best work its done and what’s ahead for the future.
iSPOT: How important is video advertising for your clients?
Imwalle: We don’t look at online video as a specific goal. We look at who we’re trying to reach and what we’re trying to tell them. Then we look at all the tools in the toolbox and say how are we going to do this.
If we have a need to reach young men like we did for the Honda Element, we determine what’s the best way to reach them. You can reach them with sports, you can reach them with activities they’re into, like snowboarding, mountain biking and surfing, all things that match up well with those targets so we can be in events where they are and we can be in endemic media for those kind of things.
Online is one of those tools that help us reach a certain percentage of the population. Video with both TV and other forms of video gives you an opportunity to be a little more immersive, more emotional and to push different buttons than you can get with anything that’s static. Video in the online sense is a very fluid term. You have video in everything from flash banners to full length features that can run online. We look at video as video whether it’s going to be on TV or online, video advertising or DVD or CD-ROM. One thing we’re trying to do now is look at every video asset and what kind of uses we can get out of it afterward.
iSPOT: Can you provide any examples of your best video campaigns?
Imwalle: Our goal isn’t to shoot a :30 commercial and figure out if we can run it online. Our goal is to come up with a good video concept and when we do that, look for the different applications. For Honda Element last year, we originally started out with the idea that the videos were going to be only online commercials. There wasn’t a huge budget, especially for a car account and we were going to do offbeat creative that would run online. But the commercials ended up being so compelling that we decided to run some of it on TV. It went the other way.
In addition to making :15 and :30 commercials, we also captured lots of other interactions that could be used online in specific places, whether for one animated banner or for Element Island. With Elementandfriends.com you can see all the commercials and interact with the characters from the commercials and the vehicles that are featured. We used pieces of audio and video that take the commercial to the next step. Our goal online is to be a tool that extends what we’re doing in other areas. Instead of just taking our TV commercials and running them online we say if people like the commercials, how can we use them online to build a deeper and more dynamic relationship. How can we gain some affinity and have people develop a relation with our brand rather than repeating what we’ve done on TV.
iSPOT: Can you give us more detail on how your broadband creative is different from TV?
Imwalle: The biggest one is the media for online is completely flexible. If we have an idea that’s :37 long, we make a :37 second execution. The online world gives us a ton of opportunities. It used to be let’s repurpose our existing assets and the reason for that was that TV production costs a lot of money, so lets not redo that for online. But that was the case when online was one percent of the budget. When online becomes 10, 20 or even 30 percent of the budget, all of a sudden you’re not just trying to repurpose your assets. If you do a home page takeover of Yahoo or MSN or some kind of roadblock on one of the major portals, it’s the equivalent of doing a network TV buy in terms of the quantity of audience and you have to think in terms of how can we impress these people.
One of the things we try to do is not make things cheap because it’s easier. Online is a key component, not an afterthought. So part of it is quality, the other part is with online you have a group of people who have chosen to be where they are and to watch what they’re watching, so with TV you have to make a commercial that’s entertaining enough to get attention. In the online space, someone has a mouse in their hand ready to click so we always have to be as relevant as possible and we always have to be as respectful as we can be of a user’s time and attention, even more so than TV. If you’re online and you have a video that runs as a pre-roll, people may dump out of it and watch it someplace else or not watch it at all.
iSPOT: When you were talking about making a campaign TiVO proof, how does that pertain to online video advertising?
Imwalle: The research we’ve seen says online video has about a 12-second attention span. Our goal is to work with that 12 seconds, although it’s not a hard and fast rule. Sometimes you have a concept that needs more and it’s worth it for us. If you’re looking at something like a Honda Element, a niche vehicle, sometimes it’s okay if 95 percent click out of it before it’s done because the five percent who watch it are the ones we’re trying to talk to. But a larger national advertiser like Honda doesn’t want to offend or bother potential customers. But most research says people are less bothered by online advertising than TV. Early adopters have recognized that they’d rather have free content with some advertising than pay subscription fees for every site they go to.
iSPOT: What kind of sites do you use?
Imwalle: It depends on which model. For the Honda Element, we were talking to young people so we had video on MySpace. If you look at the way we used MySpace, we created a character that was a crab. In year two, we created a home for the crab, we called him Gil and we created a profile on MySpace. We didn’t put up a typical advertising section, we created a character who talked like an actor and he remained an actor throughout. He has over 100,000 registered friends, it was a very dynamic relationship. Gil talked to the audience and shared his spots and we used it to talk about spots that were coming.
It was a way to dynamically interact with the audience and video was a lot of it, plus for consumer-generated stuff we gave people tools to do their own things. We have videos from consumers who put Gil in their own commercials and wrote things because they have this relationship with the character. Besides MySpace, we had it on music sites and other places that were appropriate. You look at the Honda Odyssey, a mini-van, we’ll be in places where young families will be watching. For a major launch, we use portals, Yahoo, MSN and AOL, but even there we’re in specific areas that we sponsor. Last year, we sponsored a section on MSN supporting the rock star television show that Mark Burnett put on. We put in commercials with content woven into the site.
iSPOT: What’s ahead for 2007?
Imwalle: 2007 will bring more of what we’ve had in the evolution in the way people are watching things. We’re in the business of identifying prospects for clients and getting messages in front of them. Online video is getting popular because more and more people are using video online to get content they traditionally would have gotten from TV or a newspaper or magazine. The longer people are on the Internet the more they start to use it so people who are new might use it five hours a week while people who have been on for 10 years might use it 20 hours a week.
I think as it becomes a more viable tool that replaces yellow pages in people’s houses and becomes more integrated, there will be more opportunities. We look at online video as just another way to reach our customers and as more people are using video online there will be more opportunities for us to get sponsorships. Online video will be more important because one thing you see with the new operating systems from Apple and Windows and Microsoft, there’s more integration of computer and TV. When you’re looking at video, it doesn’t matter where it comes from. In a few years you’ll have shows like Lost that might be appointment TV now, but instead of watching it Wednesday at 9 you can watch it whenever you want. It’s already happening, but adoption is fairly small and advertising within it hasn’t worked itself out. But there’s going to be a large market for sponsored content that people don’t want to pay for.
Relevancy and entertainment are more important online. As long as the advertising’s relevant, people won’t find it annoying. If you’re blanketing the area with pop ups or pop unders, those are the ads that get people angry. Publishers for a long time were chasing dollars so they would sell anything to anyone. But publishers have gotten to the point where they won’t sell pop unders because it makes them a less desirable place for people to come and makes advertising revenue lower. Publishers are starting to police themselves and you’re getting better quality.
