Bart Feder, CEO/president of The FeedRoom since 2004, has a background of more than 20 years as a TV news director, at WABC-TV in New York and other stations. The FeedRoom started out playing video content for media companies but has branched out into the corporate world, because today “every company needs to have a digital strategy,” Feder said. He discusses the development of The FeedRoom into a company that plays video content for a wide range of clients, manages the advertising that some of its clients play and seeks to work with advertisers and publishers on developing new forms of video advertising that will satisfy advertiser and publisher demands.
iSPOT: Please provide some background on The FeedRoom.
Feder: We’re in our eighth year. We started out as one of the first broadband video destinations on the web, a content aggregator doing mostly news and information video and selling advertising around it. We were a little early and the ad market hadn’t come around yet and it’s still finding its feet. We’ve developed good partnerships specifically with media companies and we began to sell it as a solution and we’ve continued with both media companies and increasingly with corporations.
iSPOT: You have a background in TV, so maybe that’s why you’ve focused on media companies. But how did you develop the corporate side of the business and how does that change the way you work and how video is being used?
Feder: It became a natural extension. It stemmed from a discovery or belief that every company in the broadband age is a digital media company. Every company gets to play and needs to have a digital media strategy so we thought about what we did for our media customers and applied it to corporate communications and consumer marketing and all the things a corporation needs to do to target its constituencies. It made sense and the fact we knew about what works from a content perspective on the web was an advantage for us. Not only do we know the best ways of distributing the content, we can do some best practices around content choices as well.
iSPOT: Can you provide an example of how a corporate client has used The FeedRoom?
Feder: If you look at the content Sun Microsystems plays, it might not be something you and I would spend a lot of time with, but they created content that’s watchable if you’re a Java developer who’s interested in Sun. Some of it is more highly produced. It’s about understanding the audience and media and creating the content that matches that. When I was in TV for 20 years my speech every day was we have to find content that’s timely, relevant and compelling and if you do that, you’ll get viewers. If corporations get the timely and relevant pieces down they’ll do well because they already have an audience that wants information from them. Where they tend to struggle is the compelling part, but if you put tools for creating the content into real peoples’ hands, they get creative and as the cost of production goes down you’ll see more creative content because they’ll give it to real people to produce instead of their agencies that know how to make great commercials but not necessarily genuine web content.
iSPOT: As far as advertising goes, if a media company plays video content online it can attach advertising to it. For a corporate client the content is the advertising.
Feder: It’s just another kind of communication. Most of the time for corporations, they’re using video to replace other less effective, more expensive ways of communicating. The ROI they derive in two ways: saving money and being able to measure effectiveness better, whereas for the media companies the ROI is clearly around recapturing eyeballs they’re losing from their traditional forms of media and they can sell advertising with it the same way they did with their old models. We’re taking the same concept but the ROI is different depending on whether you’re a corporate or media customer. And there are the specific use cases that lead to those ROIs. When we talk to corporations, we come to the PR group and they’re using video as extension of their PR, in some cases it’s marketing and in some cases it’s channels of communication or the relaunch of their website and integrating video throughout the site.
iSPOT: What’s your role in helping companies incorporate advertising into their content?
Feder: The clients make the calls for the advertising, we integrate the advertising into the content with our asset management system. We manage the campaigns but we don’t sell the ads; we leave it to the brands who are getting the higher CPMs. They complete the sale and send it to our ad services team and we manage the campaign. They collect the check and we get our monthly recurring fees. One of the keys here is as video becomes more pervasive, making it a business or media solution is different from posting video on YouTube. That’s cool but it’s about how do you wrap it into a business solution and take the messy part away from people whose role is to create the content and find the audience for it.
iSPOT: How does your role make it easier for clients to play video advertising and generate revenue from it?
Feder: We’re taking on the whole platform for them. The New York Times puts their effort into working with journalists to create great video content and their ad sales team goes out and sells it. That’s where they stop and we handle the rest of it to make sure it looks great online and hand them back the metrics.
iSPOT: What do you do to accomplish all those things?
Feder: We do the encoding of the video, we manage the assets, create the user experience, the application players, allow for distribution of the content to RSS and XML and video sharing if they want it and we integrate the advertising components into the site and return the metrics back to them so they can determine what content works best and what’s not working.
iSPOT: Once they sell an ad, how does it actually play?
Feder: They send it us as an insertion order and the creative and we encode it and set it up to play against the appropriate content in the site.
iSPOT: Do you play all kinds of ads?
Feder: You still you have mostly pre-rolls, but we’re working with clients on overlays and branding the player for clients and adding sponsored content to the mix. Because of our range of experience and our clients as new forms of advertising come to the fore, we’re working them in and incorporating them into their video application.
iSPOT: How have you seen video advertising grow over the eight years and where is it headed?
Feder: It hasn’t grown much, pre-roll is still the most popular method and has been since we started in 2000. For such a dynamic medium there hasn’t been a lot of change. It’s starting to evolve thankfully. The tech around Flash allows for more dynamic targeted advertising around video, which will give greater benefit to advertisers. Agencies are getting smarter about the creative and publishers are getting more assured of the value of video and are maintaining higher CPMs and demanding better creative and establishing more opportunities for cross platform packages so you can look across the platform and figure out the best format for each.
iSPOT: Does a company like The FeedRoom have any role in making these changes happen?
Feder: We’re constantly working to optimize the user experience. We were one of the first companies in the world to do pre-roll so we’ve been at the forefront since its inception. The key is to try and break video advertising out of the box it found itself in, the same way the web advanced beyond banners and pop-unders. It took awhile for the technology to become more integrated and interesting. What happened was there was a revolt against the pop-overs and pop-unders from users. With video ads, clearly :30 ads preceding :30 clips is not well received so it’s necessity being the mother of invention. As video advertising becomes more important and a genuine revenue stream, we’ll find that the agencies that do the creative and publishers who sell it are putting more effort around it. What we do is try to find tech solutions that make it a good buy and sell, and experience for the end user. We play in the middle space that continues to make the user experience better.
