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Jeff Einstein is a true digital media pioneer, and a partner in The New EPA, a creative strategy and branding boutique from the Brothers Einstein. The New EPA helps select rapid-growth clients protect their media investments with superior creative and brand strategies.

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Broadband and Wireless: It’s All About TV

Written on
July 25th 2008
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by Jeff Einstein  |
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internet_tv_small.jpgADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — Despite misguided (though well-intended) claims by egalitarians and media reformists alike, broadband and wireless access are not at all about heady things like enhanced communications, democracy or equal access. Broadband and wireless are all about television, plain and simple. It’s why every digital device, large and small, now comes with a TV screen. It’s why television will far more profoundly affect the Internet than the Internet could possibly ever affect television. And it’s why the Internet is so rapidly transforming from an information-based medium into an entertainment-based medium.

Digital broadband and wireless technologies offer film studios and TV networks unfettered access to the Holy Grail of syndication platforms. In the months and years ahead, tens of thousands of hours of classic video and film will be digitized, repackaged into bite-sized clips, and distributed as self-contained, mobile and, importantly, economically viable content units.

Video portals will serve merely as staging grounds/fancy server farms for videos clips invoked across hundreds of thousands of websites catering to every conceivable demographic and psychographic profile. Likewise, millions of hours of video content will be narrowcast to tens of millions of digital mobile device screens. Far from destroying television (as some early digerati predicted), the digital media have made it all but impossible to turn it off. One cannot throw a brick nowadays and not hit a TV screen.

Harnassing the firepower of TV

That said, early attempts to harness the economic firepower of television online have been frustrating at best. Pre-roll :15 and :30 commercial spots lifted directly from television campaigns have done little for online advertisers, except increase attrition rates. Although why anyone would expect an online viewer to suddenly sit through a commercial spot that they wouldn’t watch on TV in the first place remains a mystery to me.

The same toxic clutter that afflicts advertisers on broadcast and cable TV afflicts them online, where consumers have no patience whatsoever with anything that threatens to intrude on an otherwise seamless user experience. And therein lurks an existential conundrum for online brand advertisers: The entire digital infrastructure (a trillion-dollar investment) has been designed to facilitate rapid, friction-free movement from one screen to another, while effective brand advertising relies on the exact opposite. Effective brand advertising relies first and foremost on its ability to intrude, to compel consumers to act – even and especially if they don’t want to watch the ad.

For years now, digital marketers have prayed for functionally unlimited bandwidth to create a richer brand advertising experience that could compete with TV. Now that the 800 lb. gorilla is here, however, there seems to be precious little food in the intrusion-free digital pantry to feed it. Video’s ability to attract online viewers is not the issue: witness the uncontested appeal and popularity of YouTube and numerous video portals. Yet while consumer-generated video offers proven appeal to viewers, advertisers remain passionately unenthusiastic. Much consumer-generated video is simply too unsavory, and much of what isn’t consumer-generated has been pirated or obtained and distributed through questionable channels. Either way, the risks associated with online video to date far exceed the gains for most brand advertisers.

Visionary online video initiatives

The more visionary online video initiatives, however, have already anticipated the objections noted above. Indeed, online video guru Jaffer Ali not only anticipated them, he seems to have designed and built the Vidsense video advertising network specifically to exploit them.

“Each of the 20,000 partner sites in our network is designated as safe-for-work,” he says. “And all of our more than 80,000 video clips are licensed. We want to insure family-friendly, wholesome and legitimate video options for advertisers.”

But savory, legitimate video content solves only half the dilemma. How do you intrude with a brand message in a medium that tolerates no intrusions? The Vidsense answer is deceptively simple and remarkably effective. “We get the consumer to request the intrusion,” says Ali.

Each Vidsense network Web site features one or more prominent “content units,” a small collection of thumbnail videos culled from the Vidsense clip library. Consumers select the thumbnail(s) that most appeal to their sensibilities and predispositions. Each thumbnail click invokes a popup window that delivers both the consumer and the video to a designated sponsor site where the requested video clip plays – surrounded by the sponsor’s brand environment. “Viewers get exactly what they request,” says Ali, “and advertisers control the entire commercial environment just as they did decades ago in the Golden Age of radio and TV.”

What all of the above suggests is that we are stepping back to the future in a kind of retro-evolutionary waltz. The media future ahead of us will tolerate only those diversions and intrusions we demand, and the branding environments we encounter en route will seek less to sell and more to capitalize on our status as willing co-conspirators in an accelerating and undying quest for entertainment. It’s all about television – again.



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Reader Comments.

Although you’d like to believe your own thoughts, please accept that they are nothing more than that, a thought you accidentally had.

Personally, every time I see a video on the Internet I run the other way, click as fast as I can.

Video/TV on the Internet is a time suck and for those with lots of spare time on their hands its a great way to pass the time.

However, cuz the roots of the internet was in information transference, its still best used for that.

So, as an obvious TV junkie pretending to have something on the periphery of “tech” keep your thoughts to yourself, its where they belong- in your mind- now go watch Golden Girls

Posted by Jules Bucci | 12:45 am on July 26, 2008.

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