July 31, 2007
Shashi Seth, Head of Monetization, YouTube.com
Rebecca Paoletti, Director, Video Strategy, Yahoo!
Patrick Moorhead, National Manager, R&D Advanced Marketing Solutions, Avenue A | Razorfish
Chris D’Alessandro, Group Director, Customer Insight, Organic, Inc.
Moderator: Curt Hecht, Executive VP, Chief Digital Officer, GM Planworks/Starcom Mediavest Group
Rebecca: Video search is not as important to core clients as media that is relevant to the brand. The off network piece is important as well. Reaching your users wherever they are, walking down the street, whatever…
Patrick: It’s almost the Holy Grail. We need to redefine contextual to mean what the user means at that moment.
Chris: If you are looking at an awareness company, it’s not the Holy Grail.
Curt: How does this scale? How are the agencies? Pre-rolls?
Rebecca: The trend to distribute us towards pre-roll. We are far away from dynamic video smart ads. What they search for. Dynamically delivered video is hard to deliver. Dynamic video is a long ways away.
Patrick: I disagree that we are far away from dynamically generated video.
Curt: Who is digging in on this?
Chris: Emerging and bleeding technology is getting there.
Curt: Are you talking about testing and learning?
Chris: Search is always part of everyone’s repertoire.
Rebecca: Shopping and merchandising makes a lot of sense. We have huge testing and learning going on right now.
Curt: Marketers will have to deal with versioning of creative.
Chris: we’ve had to segment sites. What kind of content do we deliver?
Patrick: We have to measure this stuff from an optimization of media dollars. The same investment can service a much broader audience. Campaign management tools will catch up at some point. Look at things holistically; it’s half about people management.
Shashi: Traditional click through and engagement numbers are not sufficient. We need to come up with standard metrics across the board.
Audience question on pre-rolls and potential attrition to smaller sites.
Shashi: When we announce our ad unit, we will take all those things into account.
Rebecca: We only use it for premium inventory. We balance the pre-roll with the length of the content. We’ve done a lot of testing in this area and found it had no adverse impact.