Web video isn't just for stupid pet tricks. It's driving the Internet's future.
By Brent Schlender, Fortune editor-at-large
Published: Fortune Magazine, September 7, 2007
(Fortune Magazine) -- It's time to retire "surfing the Web" from the Dictionary of Internet Jargon. You hardly ever hear it nowadays because that's not what most of us do when we go online anymore. We don't surf; we do specific things - e-mailing, instant messaging, shopping, Googling.
And according to two recent studies from Cisco and the Online Publishing Association (OPA), what people do more than anything online is consume "content": look at videos and photographs, read the news, and get the lowdown on friends and celebrities at MySpace or Facebook. In other words, we've become Web potatoes.
This is a big deal. For one thing, the more time people spend online, the more attractive the media become to advertisers. That's why Google (Charts, Fortune 500) recently started experimenting with overlay ads on YouTube videos. Get used to it.
But there are other consequences. When a politician's gaffe or a waterskiing squirrel or whatever gets hot on YouTube, the sudden surge of petabytes or even exabytes of digital data can tax the Internet infrastructure. (To give you an idea, one petabyte is one million gigabytes, or the numeral one followed by 15 zeroes; an exabyte is one billion gigabytes, or the numeral one followed by 18 zeroes.)
When you add in all the new stuff that's moving online - telephones, videoconferencing, high-definition TV, as well as much of the computing interactions of business and government - some even predict digital brownouts.
The OPA study measures how Internet users spend their time, while Cisco's white paper tracks how and where the bits we consume come and go. So they are counting different things. But they arrive at pretty much the same conclusion: that consumer usage of the Internet now is growing much faster than - and is about to outstrip - business and government traffic. Consumer content, especially video, will drive the Internet for the foreseeable future.
Both studies are full of interesting, if debatable, statistics, observations, and predictions. The OPA's Internet activity index contends that a typical Internet user spends 47% of his time online looking at content, 33% communicating, 15% shopping, and 5% Googling or using other search engines.
The definitions of those categories, however, are a little fuzzy, and the search figure seems strikingly low, although the OPA emphasizes that search activities have grown as a proportion of Internet time by 35% since 2003, when they accounted for merely 3%. (To me, however, that statistic implies that search engines might be getting worse.)
Cisco's white paper, called "The Exabyte Era," strenuously asserts that the Internet is in no danger of "collapsing under YouTube traffic, nor is it likely to," despite the fact that in North America online video transmission has swelled to 18% of all Internet traffic in 2007, from 7% in 2005, and will grow tenfold by 2011. Cisco (Charts, Fortune 500) also estimates that consumer traffic, which is expanding at a 57% annual clip, compared with 37% for all Internet use, is on the verge of blowing past business as the biggest user segment of Internet activity.
Of course, you also have to consider where these numbers are coming from. The OPA is an industry association whose primary mission is "to advance the interests of high-quality online publishers before the advertising community," and obviously it's in Cisco's interest to portray its own growth potential as unlimited.
But in a general sense they're right because, as the wild popularity of YouTube has shown, video and the Web were made for each other. It's only a matter of time before most video - even plain old TV - will be delivered to the living room via the Web.
So here we are. The Internet is on the threshold of becoming synonymous with all media and communications. Fifty years ago it was military largesse that fostered the origin of the semiconductor chip, the computer, and the Internet. The needs of business took information technology to the next level as corporations retooled chips and computers and software and networks to automate much of their operations.
And now, not so long after the turn of the 21st century, the most exciting things emerging from IT are a result of consumers' unquenchable thirst for something to watch. Surf's up.
By Jack Neff
Published: Advertising Age, August 27, 2007
You've probably never heard of Tork, though you may have wiped your hands -- or other things -- on it. And you've certainly never seen a TV ad for it. But starting this week, you might see an oddball video ad for Tork featuring germophobic janitor Eddie, particularly if you purchase paper products for public restrooms.
Tork, from giant -- if obscure -- Swedish paper marketer SCA, is an unsexy brand in a highly commoditized business with a modest-by-consumer-standards marketing budget. It also may represent the future of online-video advertising.
Just as the Colt .45 made everyone in the Wild West the same size, online video is acting as an equalizer by giving small consumer and B-to-B brands the power of video once conferred on only big-budget TV advertisers. "It's like 'Mad Men' meets everyman," said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
"Whether or not you can get something to go viral, the idea that video is so much more affordable is going to make a big impact," said Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer of TNS buzz-tracking firm Cymfony.
Another option
Even if small brands reach highly targeted audiences only through direct mail, e-mail or trade publications, they now have the ability to use the other parts of the mix to drive people to their videos.
In Tork's campaign from Avenue, Chicago, the brand's first video advertising is integrated with media it's used in the past: B-to-B magazines, direct mail and e-mail, said Don Lewis, senior VP-sales and marketing for SCA.
Up to now, the question has been whether online video can replace TV for big brands. The jury's still out on that. For every big success -- such as Unilever's Dove "Evolution" or Nike's Ronaldinho videos -- there are thousands of wannabes lodged deep in the long tails of viewership lists.
Part of online video's power for small brands is simply the law of small numbers. It doesn't take a huge audience to move the needle for a small brand, as Kimberly-Clark Corp. found when 65,000 views and 115,000 blog mentions of its Duckbill dust mask helped grow sales of the brand 30% in the past year.
Same theme, new medium
But the other part of that power is allowing brands that can't afford TV to do what essentially are TV ads. Duckbill's quirky ads were also classic side-by-side demos in which it kept black goo out of people's mouths and noses much better than Brand X.
"In the short term, I think [video] simply becomes an add-on [for small marketers]," Mr. Nail said. "The two or three thousand dollars it might cost isn't going to take much from anything else. Down the road, I think it could cut very significantly into the more expensive things, like direct mail or even sales calls."
Tail Devil, a skateboard accessory that produces sparks, has generated 15 million views from two viral videos, one billed as a version of the Pamela Anderson sex tape, another promising what turned out to be a bogus "Jessica Simpson nipple slip." Both were mainly product demos.
The videos helped drive online sales, said Bryson Richardson, director-operations for the marketer, 3 Guys on Fire, which has annual sales of around $1 million. The videos generated "surprisingly little negative reaction," he said, but the tactic probably would create more flak now that it's been done.
That raises the question of whether someone will fence the viral range before the sheepish graze it bare. Already among YouTube's millions of posts are about 6,000 real-estate listings. With the potential for millions of other small advertisers to jump onboard the free ride and the Google unit pushing its new ad model, how long before it starts enforcing its rules against commercial posts?
By Katherine Noyes
Published: E-Commerce Times, August 24, 2007
Nineteen percent of consumers polled in a recent IBM survey said they spend six or more hours a day online; 9 percent of those surveyed spend a like amount of time watching television. Twenty-three percent of respondents reported using a portable music service such as iTunes and 18 percent have an online newspaper subscription.
The Internet is beginning to overtake TV as the preferred medium of consumers around the globe, according to a new survey sponsored by IBM (NYSE: IBM) .
In the survey of more than 2,400 households in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Australia, the IBM Institute for Business Value found that 19 percent of consumers said they spend six or more hours a day on the Internet, compared with only 9 percent who spend a like amount of time watching TV.
Sixty percent reported spending between one and four hours on the Internet each day, while just slightly more -- 66 percent -- spend that much time watching TV.
"The Internet is becoming consumers' primary entertainment source," said Saul Berman, IBM media and entertainment strategy and change practice leader.
Voice of Youth
Not surprisingly, that trend is particularly pronounced among young consumers, the study found.
"The TV is increasingly taking a back seat to the cell phone and the personal computer among consumers age 18 to 34," Berman explained. "Just as the 'Kool Kids' and 'Gadgetiers' have replaced traditional landlines with mobile communications, cable and satellite TV subscriptions risk a similar fate of being replaced as the primary source of content access."
IBM conducted the survey in June via the Internet.
Wireless and In Control
The survey also asked consumers what types of electronic devices they use, and found that 23 percent of respondents reported using a portable music service such as iTunes; seven percent reported having a video content subscription for their mobile phones; 11 percent reported a PC-based music service; and 18 percent reported an online newspaper subscription.
"Consumers are demonstrating their desire for both wired and wireless access to content: An average of 81 percent of consumers surveyed globally indicated they've watched or want to watch PC video, and an average of 42 percent indicated they've watched or want to watch mobile video," said Bill Battino, communications sector managing partner for IBM Global Business Services.
"Given the rising power of individuals and communities, media and entertainment industry players will have to become much better at providing permission-based advertising and related consumer-driven ratings services," he noted.
New Roles
Indeed, as computer prices fall and increasing numbers of people use the Internet every day, IBM predicts that advertisers are going to have to make drastic changes to the way they communicate with consumers in order to reach them. Consumers want control of attention, content and creativity, IBM said, and advertisers will have to respond.
"IBM sees advertising agencies going beyond traditional creative roles to become brokers of consumer insights; cable companies evolving to home media portals; and broadcasters and publishers racing toward new media formats. Marketers in turn are being forced to experiment and make advertising more compelling, or risk being ignored," the company said.
Variations on a Theme
While the fact that the study was conducted on the Internet no doubt had some effect on the results, since consumers who aren't online wouldn't have been included, the results do tend to match up with the results of some other recent surveys.
Last fall, for example, a Burst survey of U.S. college students found that 34 percent of such students spend more than 10 hours a week on the Internet, compared with only 19 percent who spend as much time with radio or TV.
On the advertising front, meanwhile, an early August report from private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson and research firm PQ Media predicts that Internet advertising will reach US$61.98 billion by 2011, surpassing newspapers as the nation's largest ad medium.
Control Freaks
"Young people are consuming media very differently than older ones do," Paul Gillin, blogger, podcaster and author of The New Influencers, told the E-Commerce Times. "The Internet is a part of their lifestyle -- they regard it as a utility, and they know how to use it more intuitively than their parents do."
Control is at the heart of the issue, Gillin agreed. "The beauty of the Internet is that it is completely on-demand," he said. "People want information when they want to consume it, and they don't want someone else to tell them what they can see and when. That was part of the tyranny of the networks, and people are breaking free of it."
As IBM concludes, the result could be a host of new challenges for marketers.
A Complicated World
"Across all media audiences are fragmenting, making the world much more complicated for marketers," Greg Sterling, founder of Sterling Market Intelligence, told the E-Commerce Times.
"Marketers have for a while been trying out rich media, search, and other advertising vehicles, but nothing has been perfected so far," he noted. "Search is historically the most successful of new strategies, but it's not simple. Much of online advertising is still very experimental for many of these companies, and it's not clear yet what works best."
It's also not clear TV audiences are going away, Sterling added, given that other studies have found TV still holds a dominant position.
The Opposing View
"I don't think the Internet is making television obsolete, or that people favor the Internet over TV," said Leo Kivijarv, vice president of research for PQ Media.
"Other data indicates the opposite, and TV is unique in that it requires engagement for a minimum of a half an hour, or two to three hours for sports fans," Kivijarv told the E-Commerce Times. "The Internet is more popular at work, but people will still spend almost twice as much time watching TV."
Ultimately, as video is increasingly delivered over the Internet, the question of which medium will win may disappear.
A Disappearing Distinction
"What is television?" asked David Hallerman, a senior analyst with eMarketer. "As more video comes online, and when TV gets delivered over the Internet, is that Internet advertising or TV advertising?
"By the time the $75 billion U.S. advertisers spend on TV ads starts to lose ground in any meaningful way," Hallerman concluded, "the two media will more mixed."
In other words, TV advertising and Internet advertising may end up one and the same.
Medium Delivers More Depth--for Half the Price
By Abbey Klaassen and Megan Mcilroy
Published: Advertising Age, August 20, 2007
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Christine Arnholt felt a bit woozy. And anything that conjures up symptoms of seasickness is not a good thing in cruise marketing, noted the VP-marketing services for Carnival. But as she leaned in for a first-person video view of a waterslide trip down churning rapids at funshipisland.com, it just felt so, well, real.
"Isn't that cool?" she gushed.
The new site is a virtual tour of a Carnival cruise, where visitors can try out everything from the ship's piano bar, sundeck and karaoke lounge to onshore activities such as 4x4 cruising. The idea is to pique interest by showing what to expect, since fewer than 18% of North Americans have been on a cruise.
The site is an example of marketers' increasing sophistication in their use of online video to create not just linear demonstrations that look like TV commercials, but interactive, virtual experiences.
It's an evolution enabled by higher broadband penetration, more-sophisticated web-development technology and a continued rise in TV-ad skipping, which is leading marketers to question the effectiveness and efficiency of the medium that has long been at the center of marketing plans.
Central expression
Brian McAndrews, who last week traded his title of aQuantive CEO for an executive role at Microsoft, said in April, "The website is replacing the 30 as the central expression of a brand." In most cases, rich-video sites can be made for half the cost of a 30-second spot, according to people who have done them.
Plenty of detractors say the web will never be a replacement for TV's reach and ability to create interest, but there's no denying the depth of experience a website allows. A "significant" percentage of the 500,000 people who visited funshipisland.com in its first month spent 30 minutes on the site, said Susan Kidwell, VP-client services at Avenue A/Razorfish, which manages Carnival's account. On Boeing's NewAirplane.com, millions of people have spent an average of 12 minutes exploring the nooks and features of the DreamLiner jet.
Of course, just because you build it doesn't mean the sales will come. Chris Parkin, VP-product marketing for analytics provider Omniture, said it has found that as companies made investments in technology and raced to build rich internet applications and video websites, conversions went down. "People got tied up watching video and forgot what they were there for," he said. But through an iterative testing process, marketers refined the process enough to meet or exceed their conversion goals.
Few have tapped technology
Video-rich sites are still fairly confined to microsite status; few marketers have tapped the technology for the front page of a main site. Some of that may have to do with the difficulty of optimizing rich-video sites for search -- a challenge that will soon be eased by the introduction of new technology, said Dorian Sweet, executive creative director at Tribal DDB. Its first rich-media site, in which a fictional family shows off family-friendly meals and entertaining tips, lives at mealstogether.com.
Mr. Sweet said a lot of consumer-package-goods marketers are still very TV- and print-oriented. "The decisions they make are around the same criteria ... connecting emotionally with users in a certain way," he said. "Technology has allowed us to do things like mealstogether.com and others where we can bring them together."
Things never done before
As any interactive creative director will tell you, it's not about reproducing TV on the internet. The Boeing site "was purposefully shot and planned for the web," said Patrick Sarkissian, president of Sarkissian Mason, which created it. Web programmers were onsite at the shoot, working with the directors.
As web sophistication ratchets up, interactive agencies are being asked to do things they've never done before. "Most brands we work with, what they really want is a good solution," said Bruce Henderson, senior partner-group creative director at Ogilvy, New York, which has created virtual-video sites for client Six Flags. "Some would prefer you do everything; some would prefer you go to a production company."
Organic, which created an interactive choose-your-own-adventure film for client Jeep, partners with production companies on some projects, but "we want to make sure we have our own degree of expertise," Creative Director Sam Cannon said.
By Enid Burns
Published: ClickZ.com, July 26, 2007
Over half of online adults share a hunger for online video, while 19 percent watch or download video on a typical day, according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project report on online video.
Those who pursue video favor sophisticated content. Sixty-two percent of online video viewers express a preference for video created by professionals, versus 19 percent who would rather watch video produced by amateurs. Eleven percent remains agnostic to the skill level of the creator. YouTube, which provides a mix of consumer-generated and professionally-produced video, is frequented by 27 percent of the online video audience.
Commercials and other forms of video advertising, whether users sought the content specifically or saw ads in the form of a rich media banner or in-stream placements, were viewed by 13 percent of online video watchers, the report found. Additionally, advertising-driven events like the Super Bowl tend to act as motivators for people to seek out ads online. Two percent report watching ads on an average day.
"We wanted to pick up on the Super Bowl effect of people using the Internet to watch commercials or ads after the fact," said Mary Madden, senior research specialist at Pew Internet. "Also, there is a whole rise of commercials that look like they were generated by individuals in their living rooms, but [were] in fact funded by some marketing campaign."
With some overlap, content categories such as news, comedy, movies and TV, music, sports, commercials and political videos are regularly watched on the Web. News is among the most popular, partly because news organizations were among the first organizations to invest in online video. The format also lends itself to Internet browsing patterns.
"News has a foothold in this realm," said Madden. "The nature of news content is short, bite-sized clips. They lend themselves to online." Madden also notes news accounts for a significant portion of content on YouTube.
Unsurprisingly, Broadband adoption has increased the supply of video content and ad inventory. Three-quarters of broadband users have watched video online. Among those relegated to dial-up, Madden said, "one in three have watched online video."
Young adults, and particularly males, are more active in watching and uploading content. "Young adults are what we call the most contagious carriers in the spread of online video," Madden said. "They are more likely to share links, more likely to upload video themselves, and feed the discussion of online video with things like posting comments and rating content."
While a larger portion of consumers watch online video at home, the study finds one in four users watch at work. "While some of that viewing may be work-related, it is a sign of the new coffee break culture where video snacking replaces heading outside for a jolt of caffeine," said Madden.
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