Beyond the fact that 30 second spots just aren’t being watched as much anymore, here is the real problem with messaging at versus content for a customer:  The online world is flat. And while changing messages for cultural differences may have worked in a world where international media never collides, the Internet and places like YouTube have changed this dynamic forever.  

Now the very messages that are shaped for one culture, are recommended to someone from another culture.  Youtube and other video portals generally don’t care if I’m from the US or from Japan, they only care that I just watched a McDonalds commercial. Mixed messages, and brand confusion is inevitable.

Brand messages seem to come and go faster than people are able to consume them. Throw in cultural differences and you have a real mess.

Utility is much more universal. That’s where brands need to play.

(To view the two McDonald’s commercials,  you need to click to the posting…I guess you can’t compare two videos easily in Tumblr?)

Online video measurement

mikehudack:

I just came from the Comscore online video advisory meeting.  Surprisingly, I’ve been thinking about online video measurement ever since.

A lot of people at the meeting were focused on developing advertising ROI metrics for online video.  It occurs to me that there’s a problem with this.  We don’t have accurate measurement of reach and frequency for online video yet.  How can we say how effective advertising in online video is if we don’t have accurate third-party audience measurement?

We need to attack this problem one step at a time.  In layers.  The first step is developing an accurate third-party accounting of audience size and number of views on per-distributor and per-show levels.

Armed with this accurate audience measurement we can develop tools and formulas to convert Internet metrics into metrics that CMOs are used to: GRPs and TRPs.

Having done this, we can begin to measure the effectiveness of in-video advertising.

Ultimately the goal should be to get to a simple formula:

Dollars Spent/(Audience*ROI Metric) = Results

Yes,  this is part of it.  But there is a whole other layer which is more important to the brand than it is to the content creator:  Per type of integration.

How brand and content mingle together in the online space (beyond just sitting “between the cracks”), and what is most effective, is really at the heart of it.

I want to add another motivator to my list: Teach me

One of the most obvious reasons why people keep going back to a destination is because they actually learn something. Knowledge is not recognized (enough) as a value exchange in advertising. Whether that translates into advertorials, or open forums, or access to inaccessible minds— brands should be supporting more causes for the brain.

I’m realizing more than ever that the “how to” is more important than the “how come.”