Although Joe Krings of Refinery, New York, is a seasoned editor, the past year has been a learning experience for him and his company colleagues. That’s because in spring 2004, Refinery and addressable ad technology company Visible World, New York, entered into a cooperative working alliance. This has put Refinery on the ground floor of customized advertising, with extensive experimentation and an ambitious campaign for the Ford Dealers in the New York Tri-State area out of J. Walter Thompson (JWT), Detroit, and New Brunswick, N.J.
“It’s a different mindset,” observed Krings. “In a normal edit, you think about reaching your audience in the most effective way possible. But here, you have to think, for example, of ten different ways to reach ten different sets of people. What this year has given us is a greater understanding of the possibilities available to us and how to utilize this technology to the greatest extent.”
Visible World’s PostMan software–part of its IntelliSpot package of services and toolsets–has been integrated into Refinery’s Avid suites. PostMan enables an editor to manage varied video, audio and title elements, generating assorted versions of spots by mixing and matching those elements. For the aforementioned Ford Dealers initiative, different versions were deployed in communities within the Tri-State territory, with promotions (financing, lease terms) and visuals–primarily for the Ford F-150 truck–tied to the demographics in specific zip codes. For example, rural viewers saw F-150 trucks towing a tractor and horse trailer. Meanwhile, TV audiences in suburban markets witnessed the F-150 pulling a motorboat. Additionally, an ad in which the upscale Ford Lariat truck was substituted for the F-150 ran in affluent neighborhoods of Princeton, N.J.
For the Ford Dealers campaign, Krings was able to expeditiously update and change lease and financing rates by “frontloading” the different voiceover elements, which he edited and added to the storyboards in PostMan. This quick turnaround accommodated the fact that lease/finance offers actually changed during the midst of the media buy schedule. All the different spots were assembled on the fly. When specific criteria were called up, a commercial came together in any one of the available combinations mapped out by Krings utilizing PostMan. Thus Ford could alter spots and the accompanying finance/lease deals in any zip code without the time and cost expenditures normally associated with the conventional re-editing of an ad.
“There’s a lot more up-front work involved for the editors,” said Elaine Morris Palmer, Refinery’s director of business development. “You have much more reliance on the editor for the architecture of a campaign.”
While JWT’s targeting pattern was for 10 different model/offer combinations to reach 10 different types of viewer demographics, there were more than 1,100 possible combinations in PostMan for the Ford campaign to draw from, according to Jeffrey Marino, Visible World’s director of client services.
The New York Interconnect, billed as being the largest cable system interconnect in the U.S., distributed the customized ads in October/November ’04 across a mix of the cable networks it serves. In essence, Postman helped to dovetail edit decisions with media strategy, helping to drive the distribution of the targeted spots.
Before it went to work on the Ford campaign, Refinery received storyboards authored in Visible World’s Storymaker, a program in which creative is shaped in accord with media planning. Marino worked closely with JWT creatives on the use of Storymaker, pre-visualizing various creative approaches and story outcomes.
Marino noted that Refinery, under the aegis of CEO Alan Eisenberg, is the only editorial company thus far with which Visible World has an ongoing formal affiliation. However, Marino envisions Visible World down the road entering into relationships with other edit houses, making PostMan readily available to them.
“We originally talked to a lot of editors and post facilities,” related Marino. “But Refinery took the bull by the horns so we focused on that relationship. The feedback that Joe has provided us with has been valuable.”
Taking the bull by the horns entailed experimentation. In fact, Krings cut a demo package, “Ford Broadcast,” that led to the Ford Dealers’ on-air campaign. Refinery also maintains New York-based sister shops Stitch Motion Graphics and Steam Collective (formerly Steam Films). Production house Steam Collective has been restructured, formalizing collaborative relationships with companies in varied communications industry disciplines in order to address a changing media landscape, and to leverage the hands-on experience and lessons learned about customized content at Refinery. According to Palmer, the Steam Collective is in development on a project for a multi-national client company seeking fresh ideas and multi-platform exposure.
VISIBLE POTENTIAL
Launched in ’00 by founder Seth Haberman, Visible World has steadily grown, drawing investors to the customized spot business. Proponents of the targeting technology reason that ads that are more relevant to viewers will survive and perhaps flourish during this era of zapping, which figures to accelerate with the projected increase in household penetration of personal video recorders. Furthermore, addressable ads can potentially drill deeper than zip codes, eventually into individual household demographics and set-top boxes.
Prime investors in Visible World include Grey Global Group, WPP Group, Comcast Interactive Capital, Reuters Venture Capital and Dawntreader Funds. (Dawntreader Funds manages some $270 million that is focused on information technology investments.) Among the early investors in Visible World, added Marino, was the late ad guru, Jay Chiat.
Visible World additionally has a partnership with cable TV’s Comcast, allowing the addressable technology to reach 26 markets–encompassing 25 million-plus households–in the Comcast network.
Haberman is a familiar name in post industry circles. He was the founder of the Montage Group, a pioneering firm in nonlinear editing technology.
Besides the Ford Tri-State Dealers spots on the East Coast, Visible World’s IntelliSpot package has been deployed in a 1-800-Flowers campaign that aired in Los Angeles for Mothers Day 2002, and a United Airlines campaign that debuted in Chicago in May ’04. The latter introduced United’s low-cost Ted airline to Chicago. But rather than just have Ted send its regards to Chicago, agency Fallon, Minneapolis, saw the benefit of greeting each of the smaller communities that make up Chicago. Customized taglines were created to recognize such Windy City neighborhoods as Arlington Heights, Crystal Lake, Joliet and the South Side.