Sight Motion Sound

Today was TIMA’s (Triangle Interactive Marketing Association) second lunch and learn of the year and the topic of discussion was video. Although I must admit I was a little disappointed that the lecture wasn’t spent watching all of our favorite youtube videos like the dramatic groundhog or the Bert and Ernie Metal Drumming (go ahead search for it… totally funny.) I did actually learn a little something too.

The first speaker was Randy Kilgore who now works for Tremor Media as the Chief Revenue Officer. Randy opened his presentation with a youtube video that was entertaining it was well done parody of the famous “you can’t handle the truth!” scene in a few good men…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYEf8XZKlUU… its full of advertising lingo that I found to be funny but made me feel a little nerdy at the same time. The same way if you would feel if you cracked a joke about the planet Endor at a star wars convention and everyone laughed, defiantly catered to the right audience. (Two consecutive blogs with a star wars reference…10 dork points yes!). He then went on to explain how video on the internet is basically broken out into four groups; Pure play video, which consists of sites like youtube, Hulu.com, and Veoh, Portals which consist of sites like yahoo, AOL, and MSN, Destination Video Sites like ESPN.com and Wallstreet.com and finally network video sites like Tremor.

Randy then touched on all the different types of video advertising pre-roll, post roll, in banner etc… but what I found most interesting about this was the comment he made about effective length of video ads saying “they can be as long as they need to captivate the consumer” the standard 15 or 30 second rules don’t always need to apply, and the notion that 15 second ads perform better that 30 seconds was false in reality many cases 30 seconds performed a lot better than 15. He then spoke directly to the creative people in the audience asking “how long have people been telling you what size and what length ads had to be?” then explaining that video does not have rules set in stone about length.

The next speaker was Ben Weinberger who co-founded Digitalsmiths which had created the “ground breaking” software Inscene. This was impressive to say the least, with the ability to scan video and analyze it quickly with face recognition, scene recognition, voice pattern recognition, and even the ability to target certain objects within a video. This is a technology that will allow advertisers to better target their ads behaviorally, for example if you were watching a episode of The Apprentice online and Donald Trump’s watch came into frame at the exact same time a Rolex banner appeared the ad could carry more relevance. This is a new targeting technology that they are just scratching the surface of and I’m sure it will change the way we as an industry do online video buys and behavioral targeting.

…Oh Yeah! and I got a free Frisbee!