Online Video Advertising

Online video advertising is a fairly recent technological breakthrough that is prevalent and significant to advertisers, media companies and Internet users all at the same time.

The popularity of online videos has taken the Internet by storm. YouTube is a cultural phenomenon that allows users to gather, share and critique videos. YouTube is it's own community and many who go there find comfort, share knowledge both through entertainment purposes and by gathering information.

YouTube even has an informative piece on the future of online advertising.
Not only entertainment, but news organizations and informational broadcasters use Internet video in conjunction with traditional forms of media to generate advertisers and gain viewership. CNN, for example, is a large news television station and conglomerate of generating news and informing the public. However, with it's website, it gathers viewers and with adding recent videos teamed with the stories it uses technological convergence to its advantage and gains more readers.

Advertisers can use this as a means to increase profit margin and to direct ads to a demographic audience and appeal to the mass audience of Internet viewers.
Many websites have blogs, videos and user generated comments. I can log on to YouTube and write pretty much anything that I want about a video, just as on a blogpost you can write comments and people can comment on your comments. Is this a nuisance or a goldmine?

Like with any technological breakthrough, it has its advantages as a goldmine, but it also has its disadvantages of being a nuisance. Sometimes through news stories and entertainment, it can be a nuisance to read things that people have written with no means of subject matter or relevance. However, this provides an advantage, because people's voices can be heard, without restriction or limited speech. It gives the user the power, just as in citizen journalism. People can use their voices through this medium and obtain a sense of community and it provides feedback to advertisers, producers and web analysts who are trying to break down demographics and appeal to emotion needs of the consumer.

The advertiser conundrum is finding a way to generate clicks or views of online videos without causing intrusion and gaining profit. When I am on a website, and I click on a link and it directs me to a video that I didn't want to view, I get agitated and annoyed by the intrusion. I can see people's frustration when they are online as well.

To solve this problem, one way, I believe, is to include advertisements within the video in the mid roll ads or post-roll ads. Mid-roll ads can be an advantage because you gain customer awareness, post roll ads can be an advantage because you have the customer and they are still watching, however, people can easily close a window. Pre-roll ads are difficult as well, because they immediately intrude on the customer, just as mid-roll ads interrupt a viewing segment and break viewer's concentration and patience.

In general, I think there is one way to resolve the problem of intrusion and still be able to achieve the advertiser's profit margin and to appeal to certain demographic representations of society. Advertisers can do this using contextual targeting. Although some may see it as a form of privacy-intrusion, advertisers can use your information and contextual targeting methods to better serve the customer and make sure they appeal to their needs and values, just as behavioral targeting.
There is no answer to finding the Holy Grail of Online Video Advertising, as discussed in the article.

Online video advertising is very new and still undetermined as far as the most beneficial and user-generated aspects of the adverting world. However, the basic knowledge of the advertising system, using creative techniques, contextual targeting, understanding where and when people view ads and inventing new methods to reach this media-savvy online audience still exists and is important to maintain and alter to reach the public.