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Sarah Novotny is a contributing editor at Adotas. Sarah grew up in San Jose, California. Her educational and professional career have taken her to both Los Angeles and New York City where she received a B.F.A. from NYU. As a writer, Sarah has free-lanced for various publications focusing primarily on traditional advertising and media reviews. When not writing and editing for Adotas, Sarah is continuing her acting career in various theatrical and film/television productions.

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Panache: Ad Delivery Standards Could Limit Creativity

Written on
Aug 20, 2008 
Author
Sarah Novotny  |
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Panache: Ad Delivery Standards Could Limit Creativity

ROBINSON: Well, there are a few controversial aspects. Depending upon who you talk to, you’ll get different viewpoints. One key issue is how brands can be associated with user-generated content (UGC). But this has been debated fairly extensively, so let’s address some others.

One key question is how publishers are going to make money in online monetization. We know bandwidth and streaming costs will come down for both publishers and consumers. It is clear that consumers are going to the Web for entertainment they previously watched on traditional television. And water cooler talk is now about guessing what percentage of television consumption will be in “new” TV (internet distributed). But we’re also hearing a lot of talk focused on how to make money. Making money means efficiency and efficiency means the ability to scale. Television and HTML ad buys scale. They scale because technology is behind the scenes, and is never an issue.

In online video advertising with all these player technologies and different implementations by major publishers and multiple distribution points, how are media buys going to scale? Until buys can scale, there won’t be efficiencies. Until there are efficiencies, media buyers won’t be there. And, until media buyers are there, publishers won’t make money. But consumers are there, so a solution is desperately needed.

ADOTAS: In your experience, what are the most common missteps companies take in using the online video medium?

ROBINSON: I wouldn’t really call them “missteps,” they should be looked at more as what are the “next steps” to take and how is my business going to be impacted in three or five or 10 years from now. It took many years from the time cable television first started laying cable to becoming the powerhouse they are today. But the leaders in that industry 30 years ago had great vision and execution of where they wanted to be in 10 years, and most important, how to get there.

At Panache, we are working with some world class publishers, both smaller companies and traditional programmers. We haven’t seen anyone making any missteps with regard to strategy. That said, there is going to be a lot of learning from the first steps, and I think programmers are now ready to start taking their “second steps.” I’m also a believer that companies (both major publishers and newer companies like Panache) need to try a few steps to get it right. I can’t go into the steps we are taking, but I will say our focus is on what we think the publishers’ and advertisers’ third and fourth steps will require in terms of ad platforms.

ADOTAS: What else does Panache hope to do to make an impact on online video advertising?

ROBINSON: Well, we just finished outlining key initiatives for our next feature release and the focus of our business is enablement – who we are enabling and why we want to focus on enabling these constituencies. We look at the market and keep coming back to who will be the major players in say 2012 and how we position and focus now to be the platform for these groups. While I can’t share details, I will say that we’re very confident in our understanding of how the business will unfold that we have the right focus in terms of customers, partners and product benefits for our customers and the larger ecosystem.

ADOTAS: What do you believe is the key to staying viable and yet agnostic when it comes to forms of advertising?

ROBINSON: Early on in this business it seemed that many groups were focused on supplying in-video advertising for Web video. But many brands weren’t and still aren’t there yet. The majority of streams are UGC content, which has its own set of challenges when it comes to monetization. So, companies with forms of advertising are still figuring out how to sell.

Our purpose for being agnostic is the recognition of two factors: the reality that there is going to continue to be many ad formats, and the ability to accept any media buy as the key to scaling efforts and motivating the buy-side to more quickly move to Internet video. As Panache stays focused with regard to our business, our belief is that you are either an ad network or an enabling company. This is how aspects of the last Internet growth played out and how the TV market developed. Panache is an enabling company and our platform enables publishers to monetize their video connecting any player to any ad format from any ad server. And we work with many ad networks and format companies as well, providing them with “enablement.”

ADOTAS reached out to a few of Panache’s clients to gauge their experience with the company. Here’s what they said:

The CEO of Twistage, David Wadler stated, “In the online video space, monetization capabilities have grown significantly in importance — even in the past few months. When we learned about what Panache was doing, we were extremely excited to integrate it into our white-label video offering. What’s really great about it is that it allows publishers who are adding video to the mix to leverage their existing ad serving capabilities, reducing training and new infrastructure investment and increasing ROI. This was very much in keeping with the Twistage model, and once we integrated, created a very compelling story for our customers. Above and beyond the practical benefits of using Panache, the ‘eye candy’ aspect of their ad delivery system is a critical differentiator. Content providers can now design ad experiences in an almost cinematic way and in so doing, really ratchet up the level of user engagement with the brand.”

“We have been working with Panache for approximately 18 months. We met Panache’s CEO Steve Robinson at an event about two years ago and quickly realized that Panache’s dynamic and flexible ad delivery platform was just what we needed to successfully monetize videos played on Break.com. When it comes to monetizing Web video, there are really only three ways to sell advertising. The first way is to put ads around the video (which is probably the least sustainable model), the second is to insert pre-roll advertising (which users hate) and the third and most effective way to monetize video in our minds is in-video advertising, where interactive and non-intrusive advertisements actually appear inside the player,” said Nick Wilson, CTO of Breakmedia.

“Panache provides a very important technology platform that enables the easy delivery of interactive and innovative ads into video and allows us to schedule these ads to appear when and where we want throughout our Website, all without having to encode advertising into the player. This permits our ad sales and development teams to stay focused on creating relevant and innovative ad campaigns that, thanks to Panache, can be changed on the fly to fit our clients’ needs without us having to dedicate expensive engineering resources.”





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