Brian Grey Blog

I gotta hand it to Starcom – they are taking the bull by the horns. In this case, the bull is the challenge of scaling video advertising online – and the horns, well it’s the effort to make buying online video as easy as it is to buy a :30 second spot on TV.

By bringing together some big distributors and programmers (e.g. MSN, Yahoo, CBS, Hulu, etc.) and advertisers (e.g. AllState, CapitalOne, etc.), Starcom is forcing the big players into the “Pool” in the name of standardizing the ad product offering across the web.

What I like is that some real user testing will be done in this effort – the plan will include beta testing two ad formats that emerge from preliminary rounds of focus group testing. Hopefully user experience – not just advertiser happiness – will be the top criteria because after all the biggest obstacle to big video ad dollars today is still the fact there just ain’t enough quality video streams.

And, as a guy who has spent a lot of years sitting between a product/programming team and a sales team that consistently resulted in many cycles and iterations going back and forth to get a sale, this effort has a huge potential side benefit of helping clear the way for programmers to program and for sales people to sell.

Why is this so critical? Like I said above, everyone needs more streams -and a big part of that equation is creating quality content and delivery experiences. If you let programmers focus on that and at the same time can standardize around a couple ad experiences that are good for marketers…well, you just might accelerate the growth in online video ad revenues.

So on behalf of everyone in the digital media business let me be the first to thank Starcom in advance telling everyone to “get in the Pool”!

Sunday’s NY Times highlights a couple emerging video search technologies – VideoSurf and Digitalsmiths. I haven’t played around with either one yet, but it raises an interesting question:

Is video search more helpful to content creators or distributors?

The tug of war between content and distribution has been going on for years. As a new medium emerges, there is limited distribution concentration and the cost of producing content is relatively expensive. Think about broadcast television in the 70′s – 3 “channels” and a finite array of professionally produced programs.

Now think about video on the Web circa late 2008. Millions of websites or “channels” (sure, some with bigger audiences than others) and the cost of producing content falling every day. The notion that a few distibutors can control content delivery is as foolhardy as believing that winning content will be delivered by a few producers every year.

The proliferation of video content and distribution options makes me think there’s a new “middleman” in the equation: video search. Whoever can truly create a search tool that gets me exactly the video I want to watch, when I want to watch it, may actually be able to make some money in the video foodchain.

Or at least get bought by a distributor or content producer trying to win the tug-o-war.