In the wake of the writers’ strike, a lot has been written about the possibility of an increased Internet video ad spend by traditional TV spenders, but Danny Fishman, president of Broadband Enterprises, a video ad and syndication network and content producer, says it’s already occurring. By week two of the strike, Fishman says Broadband Enterprises was taking seven figure orders from advertisers who will run their spots online, instead of TV. In this week’s iChat, Fishman discusses how the strike will boost Broadband Enterprises business across its network of sites, the syndicated content it plays on other sites and the original content it produces and plays on the same syndication network.
iSPOT: What impact has the writers’ strike had on the sale of broadband video advertising?
Fishman: With the writers’ strike we’re really starting to see some activity. We have the rep side, the syndication side and the original production side of our business. On the rep and syndication sides there was instant impact because advertisers started shifting their dollars immediately. As they do that they’re looking for scale and they’re going to be challenged to find scale when they execute on an individual site basis so with us they have the ability to get a television type of scale. And we’ve been working with Comscore for a long time being able to translate GRP, so we’ve seen immediate impact on that front. On the original programming front we’ve seen a pretty significant interest in demand in the last week and a half.
iSPOT: Are you saying that advertisers have already started changing the way they’re making buys?
Fishman: The day of the strike, I started going crazy, pushing my sales team. There was no activity for a few days related to the strike. Then the second half of the second week of the strike we started seeing a lot of impact from advertisers we’ve been talking to about general buys all of a sudden coming to us with seven figure opportunities saying, “Can you guys handle this kind of inventory in this amount of time?”
iSPOT: So existing clients are spending more?
Fishman: Yes, as well as some new clients we haven’t seen activity from but all of a sudden are reacting to it and looking to us to do a bigger execution than they ever have and looking at seven figure campaigns for a two week flight.
iSPOT: Are these advertisers moving from TV online?
Fishman: Absolutely.
iSPOT: Are they running basic TV commercials online?
Fishman: For the most part it’s basic TV unless they have other online creative.
iSPOT: Are the ads appearing on your network sites?
Fishman: Yes, across the network and the contextual system. We have all kinds of content coming from our partners from iVillage to Fox News and the Associated Press to Business Week to CNET to College Sports TV, close to 40 partners who have given us content for syndication. As it comes into our library, it is tagged with metadata and relevant keywords. For example, a video of Barack Obama talking about the environment will be labeled Obama, politics and the environment. Then we match it and if you go to a site like Usatoday.com that we rep and syndicate, you’re reading an article on how the environment could play a key role in the election. On the page where the article exists we own a piece of real estate and we have the ability to target according to phrases in the text and we can populate the page with links and thumbnails to five or six videos that are contextually relevant to the article. We populate it with links and users have the ability to watch the video content on those pages. It grows our reach, because we can go out to any site on an advertiser’s behalf and offer premium content and additional inventory for the publisher. As TV dollars are shifting over, advertisers are comfortable with the syndication to move their dollars into the general rep side of the business.
iSPOT: Do the ads play as pre-rolls?
Fishman: Yes, but we do other things like overlays. At the end of the day pre-roll is fully engaged with sight, sound and motion. We use overlays as a supplement to pre-roll. One of our shows is the Fantastic Two which McDonalds and Honda are sponsoring. McDonalds built pre-rolls that welcome visitors and any time there’s a McDonald’s product in a show, there’s an overlay that points out the product placement. We also do hotspotting for Honda. We use other types of ads as a supplement to pre-roll as opposed to a substitute for it.
iSPOT: Can you mention any specific examples of clients that have bought video ads in response to the strike?
Fishman: I can’t without their permission. I can tell you that this strike is something we’ve been anticipating for a long time and gearing up to position ourselves to be the proper outlet for it. We started working with Comscore about three years ago building their video rating product to provide translation from CPM impression-based media to television GRP. For two and a half years it was stagnant. Only in the last six months have we seen demand for it, but in the last two weeks we’ve seen much more demand from every agency out there. They ask us to translate if they’re putting together an online buy what that means as far TV rating points, what’s the translation from the cost per points. In the last two weeks, advertisers have been asking for it which is a direct indication that they’re looking to shift TV dollars online. We’ve also seen advertisers ask us to share new original programming ideas. One of the auto advertisers we’re dealing with plans to be making 10 to 15 programming investments in the first quarter of next year.
iSPOT: Where does your original programming play?
Fishman: It plays across our network the same way as our syndicated licensed progamming. We push it out to relevant sites on the web. Our first show Cube Fabulous had a home site destination of cubefabulous.com but we also syndicated it out to over 500 sites and it generated over 200 million views by providing broad syndication.
iSPOT: How does being able to do that affect ad buys, especially in light of the strike when you compare those numbers with TV numbers?
Fishman: We translate that unique reach into GRPs. We’re able to provide it with much greater accuracy than what you get on television. We provide exact numbers and direct metrics for users who are fully engaged with the videos.
iSPOT: And when you provide those numbers you can assume they’re watching the ads.
Fishman: We provide data on the ads as well as the programming. Our ad server can track everything from time spent to where people are jumping off from pre-roll ads to providing engagement metrics with original programs and their product integration. We provide info on how many actually saw that and what percentage of programming they watched. We have overlays and hotspotting and we can report on that kind of engagement, too.
iSPOT: What impact will the strike have on advertisers who move their video ads online?
Fishman: What’s interesting is now we’re starting to see a lot of advertisers that are making a significant leap into online video. The evolution of online advertising started years ago with text links, then moving slowly into banners, animated banners, floating ads, rich media and video. What’s happening now is some TV advertisers are making direct leaps into actual video. One of our advertisers was a major TV advertiser that didn’t follow the natural evolution and made a full jump into brand programming and video. I give them credit for taking a leap of faith and moving in the right direction very quickly.
iSPOT: How do you include product integration in an ad buy?
Fishman: The way we sell our original progamming is on an impression basis. If at end of the day an advertiser is doing a media buy based on the investment level, they’re getting integration into the show. McDonalds was buying pre-rolls in front of each episode but because of the buy we were guaranteeing them integration within the show. We don’t just insert the product, we let them get involved in the scripting phase. They bought the concept on treatment, we shared the concept for each episode, we gave them treatments with plot lines such as characters who want to save a buck, which works with the McDonalds integration.
iSPOT: Those advertisers buy integration as a bonus?
Fishaman: They buy CPM, a certain number of pre-roll impressions, but at that investment level built into the pre-roll CPM is the product integration. It makes it much easier from the standpoint of execution. We’re guaranteeing media impressions and distribution. We guarantee a unique reach against a specific demographic. A lot of people are creating original programming out there but the differentiating factor is the distribution. We can guarantee a unique reach, like providing 200 million impression–that’s real scale, that’s television scale.
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