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Just read an interesting article on AdAge today, which talks about a sharp decline in percentage of users who click on online display ads. Couple this with recent numbers of online ad spend decline and you’ve got yourself a pretty scary picture of the state of content monetization. But is it really?

Semi, or unrelated display ads, are not like other links on the page. They usually bring no utility or immediate value to users; more like “content high jacking” than “content monetization”. It’s no surprise then that people are fed up with this noise. We do still click on things  - to get to more relevant content - so click-through is not dead, just getting smarter.

I think it’s got something to do with the packaging. When we visit web pages we very easily separate between “content” and “noise”.  The former is what we came in for, while the latter is what we have to put up with because we are not willing to pay for the real content. We’re obviously less likely to click on the “noise” which drives its price down, making it even more difficult for good content providers to survive. It’s not the underlying content though, it’s the ineffective way of associating the message with a call-for-action.

One of the main reasons for this, I believe, is the lack of relevance due to weak contextual association. In order to have an effective “participation” from viewers, one has to bring closer the enabler (primary content) and the CFA or ad (secondary content). There are two dimensions to this. The first one is space: if it’s relevant to the content then couple it with the content, don’t just throw it into the same container (page) and expect the two messages to stick. The second is time: most content is fundamentally linear (text you read through, video you watch though, or audio you listen to) and comprises of lots of smaller pieces of information (a sentence, a frame in a video or segment of audio). It is those pieces, rather than the big piece, that could be monetized, just like hypertext links to relevant/contextual content are being followed.

The ultimate goal is to personalize this, to get the right message delivered to the right person at the right time in the right context. Lots of progress is being made towards these goals by my company (Overlay.TV) and others.

Click-through is not dead, it’s just getting smarter.

[Orginally posted at  http://kishkush.com/2009/10/01/is-click-through-really-dead/]

Time for an update on what's been going on at Overlay.TV. A few months ago we launched a new platform called Overlay.TV for Retail. At the time, the focus on our site was split between user-generated content and our new eCommerce video platform, but it became clear in the months that followed that interest in the UGC side was dwindling and that our energies would be better spent if we concentrated solely on our retail platform. It wasn't an easy decision to make as we had some very loyal users, but we felt that the new platform needed all of our love and attention, especially in these early stages, in order to deliver the best possible product  to all of our clients. Check out the revamped site to see how our focus has changed and to find out more about Overlay.TV for Retail.

So, with our sites set on making Overlay.TV for Retail the most widely used eCommerce video platform, we thought it was time to have a coming out out party of sorts, and what better place to do that than in Las Vegas! Myself and some of the gang from Overlay.TV traveled to Vegas for the Shop.org Annual Summit 2009 at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino where we set up shop in a 10x20 booth.

The Summit was 3 days of non-stop meet and greets. Not only were we able to introduce ourselves to loads of people from all over the world, but we were also given the opportunity to see what's new in the world of online retail. What we heard a lot was that online retailers are looking for new ways to integrate video, product and user-generated,  into their sites to better engage existing customers and entice new ones. It's not just about pushing products and shopping, but about building a community of like minded consumers and giving them the ability to share their experiences with others. If you you missed the Summit, check out the Shop.org Blog for recaps on the show and keynote speakers. Thanks to the Shop.org crew for putting together a fabulous trade show. We couldn't have asked for a better coming out party.

Stay tuned, because over the next coming weeks and months I'll be posting stories and examples of how our clients are successfully integrating the Overlay.TV for Retail onto their sites.

What's this you ask? I can win a Wii? How?

Well kids, you may recall a few posts ago I told you about a very special tool we launched called ijustine.overlay.tv. Basically it's a free product endorsement backed by none other than the Internet herself, iJustine. Well now you can review a product and maybe win a Wii. Go to ijustine.overlay.tv, create your product review, iJustine will pick what she thinks is the best one, and Overlay.TV will give that lucky person a Wii! OMG a Wii!! The winner will be chosen on March 17th at SXSW, the last day of the Interactive portion.

For more info on how you can win a Wii, watch the clip below from iJustine's new show, Ask iJ.

In theses times of economic uncertainty celebrity endorsements, for some, may be very hard to come by, and frankly fiscally irresponsible. But fear not my cash strapped friends, well known online personality iJustine, aka the Internet, is here to help. iJustine is willing to schill your products for you, and do it for FREE! iJustine and Overlay.TV have partnered together to create the first free online celebrity endorsement tool, and it's not just for the business minded. Users who just want to share their opinions or review consumer products can also use iJustine as their celebrity mouthpiece, because after all everything sounds better when it come from someone famous! And it's ridiculously easy. Just go to ijustine.overlay.tv and ... wait! I'll let iJusitne tell you herself:

Here's an example of what your iJustine endorsement or review could look like:

Over the holidays one has time to think about things. Looking back on social media trends of the past year, such as increasing Twitter usage, and the current economic situation, one finds one’s self asking the following question:

Can companies afford to use Twitter?

In situations like the current economic downturn companies are looking to reduce cost and/or increase productivity. We’ve all heard that social media is being touted as a low cost means of establishing an online presence. Company profiles are showing up on Facebook and executives are communicating with customers on Twitter. Services like Twitter are free to use. Free is good. But how much does it really cost the company when corporate executives use Twitter?

Before I start on the analysis, let me say we love Twitter. Having said that, I took a look at the Twitter usage of three executives: a light Twitter user with an average of 20 tweets per month; a moderate Twitter user with an average of 110 tweets per month; and one heavy Twitter user with, on average, over 500 tweets per month (names withheld to protect the guilty).

Now let’s assume that it takes one minute to post a tweet. Let’s also assume that for each tweet we post we read five others. Each tweet we read is not going to have the same response time.  If we read five tweets for every one we post, one tweet may take three minutes to read if, for instance, we are directed to external items, another may take one minute, and the other three may take thirty seconds. For arguments sake, let’s say that for each tweet we post we spend about 5.5 minutes reading other tweets.

Therefore each tweet posted is equivalent to 6.5 minutes of one’s time. For the light user that translates to 70 minutes of Twitter usage a month. For the moderate user that’s 385 minutes and the heavy user it is 1,750 minutes per month.

All of these executives work at the same company yielding 4095 minutes, or 63.25 hours a month on Twitter-related activities. That is 819 hours a year. If each executive has a loaded cost base of, on average, $88/hour that’s an investment of $6006 per month or $72,072 per annum.

That is a significant investment in a “free” service.

That’s not close to the total investment either. If you have an environment where the executives are using Twitter the employees of that company are likely following them on Twitter as well. If the executives are accessing Twitter at work, so are the employees. The cost of using Twitter is thus even higher than $72,072 for the company.

There are lots of arguments in favor of using Twitter. Companies can track what people are saying about their product and respond in real time. It provides branding and PR opportunities as well as the ability to track trends. Twitter also allows corporations to put a professional yet human face on their company, be it through customer service representative or an executive. It is another opportunity to build relationships. The list of great things that Twitter provides goes on and on.

Twitter definitely has value, I’m not questioning that. Rather, I’m questioning whether or not Twitter provides the best value in time and money spent for your company. What could those executives do with their 819 hours a year to build the business? What could your employees be doing in those untold hours they spend tracking the executives on Twitter? If you had $72,000 to invest in your business what would you do with it?

Wendy is my friend, and has been my friend for many years. She has seen me through a lot of hard times, always making me feel better about myself in the process, and now Wendy needs my help. Wendy has gone and made a video, a viral video, that is not doing as well as she had expected and, hopefully, I can lend a hand.

The Wendy to which I am referring is of the eponymous fast-food chain Wendy's. And I wasn't joking when I said she's been a good friend and helped through some hard times. The Big Bacon Classic, or Combo #6 Biggie fries with Coke as it's known in the drive-through world, has been my go-to meal for many years now and has seen me through many a bad day. So naturally I was delighted when they introduced their Baconator, which was brought to my attention through some extremely clever commercials describing Baconator eaters as "meatatarians." Funny stuff.

Anyhoo, I was sent this article from Advertising Age about "Crazy Lettuce," a viral video Wendy's has developed and its mixed reviews from the online community. So here's where maybe I can lend Wendy a hand regarding "Crazy Lettuce." At the end of "Crazy Lettuce" there is a URL to meatatariansunite.com where you can sign-up and get a coupon for a dollar off a Baconator sandwich. Delicious. The problem was that when I read the URL I read it as 'meatatarian institute dot com' and not 'meatatarians unite dot com' and of course did not get the right website when I typed in the URL, a step which is frankly annoying even if I had typed in the right address. It would be much easier if you could just click on the URL right in the video and be taken right to meatatariansunite.com, or even better have the coupon hidden in the video itself. If only there was a company that could do that. Oh wait, I work for a company that can do that! Here is the Overlay.TV take on "Crazy Lettuce." Find the coupon, or if you can't (which I doubt) then just click on URL at the end of the video. Enjoy.

One of the overlooked features of Overlay.TV is how easy it is to integrate us with your existing analytics package, be it Omniture, FireClick or any package that utilizes transparent gifs to deliver the tracking pixel.  This can be done in a couple of minutes to any video, and of course you have the option of adding other widgets to the same video (product, clipart, text, etc).

To do this you first need to generate the report or goal in your analytics package and determine the increments of engagement.  For example, if you have a 3 minute video, you probably want to measure how many people made it to 1 minute, 2 minutes and 3 minutes respectively.  Whatever page you embed the video in will record the number of views the player gets, and the player itself will measure how many people hit play.  This last stat is available in any Overlay.TV video by clicking on the info pane at the bottom right.

Once you have generated the 3 pixels, you simply advance your video to the appropriate point in the timeline and open the Link widget.  In the Image field, paste in your transparent pixel.  Complete this for each of the pixels you have created.  Now you go ahead and embed your video in your page, start building traffic, and let the pixel and your analytics package do the rest.  To get the most of your experiment I would create a custom report that graphs usage statistic across the 3 pixels.  This will measure drop-off engagement etc.

If you are using other widgets like the products in our affiliate catalogues I would suggest placing them near that pixel, either right before or right after based on what you want to measure or understand better.  This will then give you a map between engagement and revenue or referrals, which will make your report even more powerful from an ROI perspective.

I am planning on building an example of this with a report - so if you would like me to do it to your video, leave a comment here with a link to your video and a way to contact you and I will work with you on this.   If you have other ideas or analytics issues you are trying to sort out, let me know and I would be more than willing to work with you on them.

For a lot of reasons, I've been thinking a lot about video lately - not only in terms of how it can help build brands and community through social media and PR, but specifically how we can understand what the results of this brand and community building mean.

In most cases, unless you're spending a ton of money on analytics packages and hosting videos internally, you get one metric about your online video efforts - views.  In many cases, what a "view" means is not even particularly clear - is it based on people watching a whole video or just the first few seconds?  How are offsite views counted?  In general, measuring views of a video is a blunt metric that gives a general idea of how many impressions a video gets.  Once again, we're measuring eyeballs.

Katie Paine, of KDPaine and Partners, often calls out measurement companies and consultant for focusing on impressions in online media, when what really matters is action, and I think it's just as important for understanding how online video fits into the architecture of persuasion.  Consider which is the more valuable insight - knowing the number of people who watched some part of a video, or knowing how many took action at a specific point in a video, and the percentage of people who took action as a result of one message versus another.

One of the reasons that this has been on my mind in the past few months is due in large part to the fact that one of my clients - Overlay.TV - is making this type of measurement possible by allowing content producers to make any video interactive by adding links, text, animation or even video-in-video and in-video chatting.

So now, in addition to measuring impressions, by simply adding a few elements to a video, content producers can measure, through their existing analytics software, how many of those viewers actually took action and visited a site, purchased a product through an affiliate, or entered the sales funnel as a direct result of the video.  By using the chat widget, they can also gauge real-time reactions to a video and begin to understand more about the content they're producing and how it relates to the audience.

Overlay.TV came out of beta late last week, and is now available for public registration.  It currently offers a number of widgets that make it easy to add measurable interactivity to any video in just a few seconds.  If online video is part of your marketing mix, I highly recommend checking it out and experimenting with the tools.  Overlays can be as complex or simple as you need, so it's easy to add a few quick links or create a fully interactive video, and even easier to measure the actions that come out of it.

As online video evolves as a marketing medium, measurement that goes beyond impressions and allows marketers to better understand how a video drives action will be more important than ever.  To see it in action, check the newly-launched Overlay.TV or read about the company on TechCrunch.

[Originally posted at http://www.ryananderson.ca]

Why in-video context inference is so difficult

Google AdSense changed the world of online advertising, using standard Information Retrieval techniques to match ad inventory with web pages. This has opened new possibilities for advertisers to get a better bang for their buck and send the right message to the right audience. Can the same be done for video? Easier said than done.

Web pages lend themselves nicely for textual analysis. Not only can content be stemmed, counted for term frequency and enhanced semantically, cues in an HTML document such as headings, page title and metadata provide a much richer base for context inference.

Video, on the other hand, is a much tougher nut to crack. It is unstructured to begin with and has much fewer metadata elements that could be of any use in drawing semantic conclusions. Nevertheless, video is what web users are now consuming more than ever. The number of clips served daily by video sharing and premium content sites is staggering, and so is the ever-increasing time users spend on online entertainment.

It is, therefore, not surprising that more advertising dollars are now being diverted to online media on the expense of traditional TV campaigns. However, the fundamental question still begs – can this money be spent more effectively delivering not only the right message to the right audience, but also at the right time?

Time introduces the most challenging factor in video advertising. While concepts discussed on a web page are linear for reading but parallel to access (the whole page shows as one piece in the browser), scenes in a video are temporal and can only be consumed sequentially. Not only do we need to wait for content to be streamed to our client before we can scan it, skimming over the timeline is not quite the same as scrolling up and down a web page. To this, lets add lack of anchors and in-content links to realize that inter- and intra- navigation in a video space is very different from navigation in hypertext.

So how can advertisers tap into this elusive medium and deliver contextual messaging? Currently, with great difficulty and without much success. One can obviously use the surrounding textual information of the embedding page as well as look at the video title, description and tags to make some assumptions as to what the video is all about; but that would be like drawing similar conclusions based on a whole web site rather than at the page level – to use a web analogy. Nothing in and around the video can actually tell us much about the particular scenes or even define when those start and finish.

Better tools are, therefore, needed - if visual data is of not much help then how about audio? That, indeed, is the flavor of the month in contextual video advertising with companies using speech-to-text techniques to transform audio-visual data to temporal text signals to drive good old semantic analysis. Alas, verbal information only captures a small fraction of what actually goes on in a video. It is enough to consider narration over background visuals in a documentary or the stylishly rich details of a music video clip to see how so much information is lost in this translation.

There is no silver bullet to automate this just yet. No clever algorithm – trained, unsupervised, adaptive or other – can come close to an average person’s ability to easily describe what they see in a video. Any person, you say? Why not use plenty of those then? By the laws of large numbers, they’re bound to reasonably describe it collectively.

Stay tuned for the next post on crowd-sourcing context inference in video and why advertisers should care.

When it comes to advertising, content alone is not enough anymore. If we rely purely on a narrative then we as advertisers end up battling Hollywood for attention span. The silver bullet in this battle is to not only infer context, some information about where that user is and what they are doing, but also to relate that context to the activity stream of the user, and if possible tie it in with that stream.

As a viewer it is arguable that we can find this kind of intrusion Orwellian. And in many cases, left in the hands of direct marketers, without strong creative campaigns to support this advanced kind of buying, it will be regarded as ultimately intrusive. We need to resist the urge to go out and buy ads right into activity streams that are ultimately task-oriented. If I am reading or even writing an email, viewing family portraits, then I am engaging in a type of task that has a logical beginning, middle and end. Given this one could argue that this is a bad time to try and reach me with a message, even if it is mail or image oriented.

BUT, if you can intercept my intent, and offer me a different way to engage in the task that has some benefit that I wasn't previously aware of or hadn't acted on yet - then you can gain my attention and insert your experience into that dialogue.

This requires the highest degrees of collaboration between client, agency, creative, media planning, ad platforms and publishers - sophistication that many would argue is not readily available today. There would obviously need to be workflows created in order for this kind of activity to reach the mainstream, but in the interim I am looking for good case studies that bend these paradigms together successfully and engage audiences in a highly relevant, timely and effective storytelling exercise that has direct impact on the outcome for the user in that experience.

The following video gives us a view into how top agencies such as Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, R/GA, JWT and radical.media are thinking about this. Very interesting times indeed...

This video shot as part of the Young Lions series at Cannes 2008 was sponsored by Nokia.