Future of Online Video

The future of Online Video looks bright.

There will be a growing number of opportunities of marketers in the online video space as the net and its technology evolves, and that’s really one place we’re headed now, besides the virtual online world.

You might have already seen this, but those of you who haven’t, I thought this was REALLY cool. This is a commercial called, “Dove Evolution”, a 75-second viral film created by Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto, was uploaded to YouTube on Oct. 6, 2006. Since than, it has been played more than 4 million times, got TV and Print media exposure, one of the most blogged about videos and more links than you can imagine. This was a campaign for real beauty for women and only cost about $50k to make! 4 million views and for $50k…good tradeoff?

Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg.com and Revision3.com, gave a very interesting presentation on what and where he thinks the online video advertising space is going. Now, he pointed out a major problem. There is no consensus in the industry as to what the standard should be to advertise in video (pre-roll, post-roll, etc.). Adelson displayed a video on the big screen as to how we can solve the problem of “annoying” the viewer, and suggested a great way to advertise in online video is…product placement IN the actual show, movie, commercial, etc. DiggNation podcast was also used as an example.

Adelson’s Example:

This video illustrated how to place a product, at the end of a show, without annoying the viewer and marketing the product or brand with more sense of reality and authenticity rather than a pop-up.