Streaming Media West 2005 Wrap-Up Part 2

Streaming Media Advertising Vendor Showdown
Moderator: Dan Rayburn, executive vice president, StreamingMedia.com; Panelists: Larry Allen, GM, Ünicast; David Breckling, CEO and president, Eyewonder, Inc.; Jesse Chenard, CEO, Dynadco; Marc Hernandez, director of sales, western region, Eyeblaster

Dan Rayburn moderated a "showdown" between several vendors selling advertising within streaming. After clarifying that the vendors might not be fully representative of every offering out there, he proceeded to have each vendor show their solution working on a customer site.

Marc Hernandez, director of sales for the western region of Eyeblaster, was the first demo vendor. The New York-based company, which has been around since 1999, implements "digital marketing solutions" in rich media, including Flash ads. Content creators and ad agencies pay them to produce ads, and they’ve been used in more 10,000 campaigns by over 500 agencies. Their CPM (cost per thousand impressions) rates range from $1 to $5. Their demo involved a Levi’s ad in which Flash video allowed viewers to interact with the ad, etc.

EyeWonder has also been around since 1999, providing "products, services, network, and expertise," according to CEO David Breckling. They recently launched six worldwide offices and work with many of the Fortune 1000. They make banner ads, in-stream ads, and in-application video ads. The in-app ad product works within client applications such as AIM and ICQ. Their demo was an Ameritrade ad that started to play automatically; then a popup/rollover menu appeared in the ad, and the actor in the ad told you to click some of the menus. It was sort of like a "choose-your-own-adventure" where different media plays depending on how the user interacts. EyeWonder hosts, serves, tracks, and reports on the amount of ad response, so they're different than a one-stop shop. Breckling emphasized that they don't have to just repurpose TV ads; that interactive ads using the new medium were better. They offer CPMs between $0.25-$3.00, so they can go down to cheaper ad inventory categories than can Eyeblaster.

Dynadco CEO Jesse Chenard commented on the "showdown" aspect of the talk and said he was coming from a different perspective. He cut to the chase and said his product supports $0.50-$1.00 CPMs. Chenard, whose background is in streaming media, not advertising, and said he doesn't look at things from an advertiser’s standpoint, but it wasn't immediately clear exactly what they did. His product leverages existing ad server technologies. He also claimed the Dynadco Video Hub, their product, apparently does better reporting, which results in higher CPMs. (I couldn't really correlate that with the CPM numbers he gave at the beginning of the talk.) They claim their secret sauce is "Ad-inStream," but the slides went by too fast for me to figure out what that was. His demo was "The Late Night Fox Show," where they stick different pre-roll/mid-roll advertisements into an online streaming show. Dyandco's technology seemed to be working in both Flash and Windows Media situations. They mentioned automatic video translation in a slide, but once again he blazed through the slides too quickly.

At one moment Jesse commented that he seems to get tasks "the night before" they need to get done. In a brief moment of camaraderie, all the panelists agreed that their customers demand very short turnaround for getting Web campaigns deployed.

Ünicast was purchased by Viewpoint, a public company, in January, but they’ve also been around since 1999 (most of these companies seem like dot-com survivors). Their uniqueness is that they push a customer application, an enhanced toolbar, and integrate it with custom desktop applications. They have a creative services team to actually shoot the video and do 3D modeling. He listed several automakers, including BMW, Chrysler, and Honda, for whom they do high-end advertisements. They were recently bought (January 2005). They had also been around since 1999. Ünicast played a sexy advertising video with industrial/techno music to get viewers excited about their product offerings—a simple, yet effective approach for a tired audience at 4 p.m. in their last session. The umlaut in their name is a tad pretentious, but after Allen made his tongue-in-cheek comment was that they did a similar thing to Eyewonder but "with more rhythm," I knew they were self-effacing enough to pull it off. Allen says the company is "focused" on four things: service, creative, data, and innovation. (I wonder when people will realize that "focusing" on a laundry list of initiatives is, arguably, itself unfocused.) Reiterating the "everyone's on a tight deadline" riff, he described his service and creative offerings. They showed some veryhigh production-quality video ads that they had on MSN and AOL Web sites. When moused over, the ad expanded into a complex, bigger roll-in ad. By using rollover, instead of click, and providing offers within the ad for the customer to expand it to full screen, they seemed to have really engineered a good solution to user interest and interaction. While the other presenters sort of "rolled-over" their rollover support and didn't emphasize it, Allen really sold it and made it clear that the company’s focus is on making sure users really zoom into the ads and get engaged. Showing their 3D emphasis, they had an almost full-screen 3D auto-running walkthrough of a vehicle, with a form on the right to capture the user as a lead to buy that car. Of all the presenters, their solution really seemed like the deepest.

Rayburn came back to the podium and asked them a few questions:

Question 1) How do you know what your end users want? All the ads are user-driven micro-sites within Flash; how do you know what they want?
Hernandez: The agency tells us. They want stronger reporting, more interactivity, [and increased] interaction times.
Allen: It comes down to permission-based marketing. It's advertising as content. They're interested in the car; they want more information. A while back, pop-ups got very annoying; now, its about user engagement, and getting the users to interact with the brand by their own choice. But the end user doesn't want to leave the page they're on—hence the micro-site.

Question 2) These days you can't tell what technology is used to deliver the video. It seems like everything is now Flash—is that true? And is it all delivered via Flash Server?
Breckling: We've been in the industry forever, and streaming servers don't work as well and they cost more. It's only when you have Screen Actor's Guild rights issues that you have to use streaming [as a form of DRM].

Question 3) Talk about ad lengths - 0:15, 2:00 ads? How long is optimal?
Chenard: 30 seconds is the best. Last year, there was a five-second Cadillac ad and many people remember it well. There was another ad, 18 seconds, that he talked about, making the point that odd lengths are possible because they aren't constrained by TV spot limitations. There will be 2-minute ads. We’re trying to get the right ad to that end user. The length is variable.
—Damien Stolarz