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Download to iPhone or iPod If you want to learn how to set-up a Google AdWords account and start placing ads to sell merchandise from your website, this video is for you. Perhaps the best way to teach others how to use Google AdWords is by concrete example. Thus, today’s video shows how we set-up an AdWords campaign to sell copies of our market research report, Future Developments in Video Advertising. First, we show you what the report for sale looks like. Second, we illustrate the difference between Google AdWords links and Google Organic search results. Third, we demonstrate how to set-up a “landing page” as an entry point at your website for those who click on ads deployed thorough AdWords. There are three features to the page. One is a video summarizing five major conclusions in the market research report offered for sale. Another is a link to a free prospectus requiring those clicking on it to first provide name, email address, and phone number information. This transforms them into sales leads. Finally, a text summary of the video is available for those who chose to read a synopsis of the report as opposed to watching a video summation. Fourth, screen capture software provides step-by-step video instructions describing how to set-up an AdWords account and organize your first campaign. Factors covered include (1) geographic targeting, (2) network selection, (3) device inclusion, (4) key word selection, (5) pricing, (6) ad construction, (7) calls-to-action, (8) budgeting, (9) weekend exclusion, and (10) landing page targeting, among others. Google’s third quarter financial results document that AdWords use is leading the way as a sign of overall economic recovery. In short, it appears that advertisers are first returning to the Internet before incumbent media channels such as TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. This could have profound implications for the future of advertising in general. Not only do sponsors seem to prefer the Internet per se, but they may also become conditioned to the AdWords practice of only paying for ads that users actively select. As applied to future video advertising, sponsors may come to demand that they only pay for video ads that actually get watched. For example, they recognize DVR users often fast-forward through commercials. But if sponsors apply the AdWords convention to video commercials, they’ll only pay for commercials that get watched. This could be the subtle, but most significant, implication of the fact that AdWords advertising is leading the recovery of the entire advertising industry. To learn more about how your business can exploit or adapt to such changes, feel welcome to contact us. You may also want to consider buying our research reports Third Generation Television and Future Developments in Video Advertising.

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Download to iPhone and iPod here. Last week I was on a panel at a conference for the Entertainment Law Institute of the Texas Bar in Austin. Our panel topic was “The Future of Video Distribution”. This video podcast summarizes my presentation. Andy Grove, who was the last of the three original Intel leaders to leave, liked to encourage employees to ask “What if?” questions. He felt they could lead to new discoveries about future change. Thus, we ponder, “What if all video were on the Internet instead of Cable TV?” Consider the impact on three constituencies, (1) Consumers, (2) Sponsors, and (3) Copyright Holders. Consumers will benefit in four ways. First, all programs will be available on demand. Broadcast schedules will be irrelevant and there will be no need to remember to TiVo anything. Second, shows will be viewable on any screen from mobile phone to TV. Third, content will be searchable. You’ll find what you want to watch by Googling it. Fourth, the Long-Tail will stretch to near infinity. Sponsors gain a number of advantages. First, viewership will be measurable. Second, commercials can be held accountable. Sponsors might be able to choose to pay for only those that actually get watched. Third, ads can be interactive thereby generating sales nearly instantaneously from the viewers. Fourth, ads can be addressable in a variety of ways including demographic, geographic, and behavioral targeting. Copyright Holders also stand to benefit. First, Internet distribution provides a Global market. Second, revenue opportunities for Long-Tail content become viable because there is no need for a minimum economic production run as would apply for DVDs. Hollywood studios will be able to sell downloads from their back catalog that are seldom available in the form of physical DVDs. Third, consumers will be able to make impulse purchases since the Internet is constantly available 24/7. Fourth, the Net provides opportunities for multiple revenue streams. Among them are (1) rentals, (2) downloads, (3) subscriptions, and (4) advertising. Inevitability. For the past 30 years we’ve been gradually attaching an increasing number of appliances to our TVs. In the first half of that period the devices were not Internet-connected and included items like Cable Set-Top boxes, Video Tape Players, and Video Game Consoles. However, during the last 15 years most such appliances are Internet-connected. Examples are laptop computers, Apple TV, (modern) Video Game Consoles, and even the iPhone and iPod. As a result, the TV is being transformed into a dual function device. In one context it remains a TV as we have always known it, but in a second it is becoming a giant window into the Internet Cloud. Thus, the question is not “What if all video were on the Internet?” but instead is “When will all video migrate to the Net.” To learn more about how your business can exploit or adapt to such changes, feel welcome to contact us. You may also want to consider buying our research reports Third Generation Television and Future Developments in Video Advertising.

Download to iPod or iPhone If you would like to learn how to watch movies on your TV that were downloaded to your iPhone, this video is for you. Every iPod or iPhone owner knows they can buy digital music at Apple’s iTunes online store. Most also realize they can rent or purchase movies and TV shows there as well. Finally, many are aware that numerous free video and audio podcasts, some including popular TV shows, are also available. However, few understand that it is not difficult use iPods and iPhones to watch the movies stored on the portable units through a conventional flat panel TV. Today’s video shows how to do it. Apple sells two types of cable assemblies that can connect the iPhone and iPod to a TV. One is termed Component and the other Composite. The Component assembly provides a higher quality picture, but it also uses more jacks. Both assemblies retail for $50. At first glance, the wiring looks complicated for two reasons. First, it is best to provide an external power supply to the portable devices so they don’t drain their batteries. Second, and more importantly, Apple does not support the HDMI standard which can transport video and audio over a single cable. Thus, while both audio and video exit the iPhone and iPod from a single socket the constituent signals must be delivered separately to the TV. In the Composite assembly video is input to the TV via a single wire and audio enters as a stereo signal via two more wires. The Component assembly inputs the video to the TV with three wires (one for each primary color) and also uses two pins for stereo audio. A textual description makes it seem more difficult that it actually is. That is why we urge you to watch the video. The fact that consumers can easily play through a television the movies and TV shows they downloaded on their iPhones and iPods has further implications. The public is becoming increasingly aware that the flat panel TV can also readily function as a giant monitor for a variety of Internet-connected devices. In addition to iPods and iPhones, other popular examples are laptop computers, video games, and specialized appliances like Roku. Ultimately this has profound implications because it induces a trend toward more frequent viewing of Internet Video on the TV.

Phil Leigh If you would like to learn how my media usage changed during a recent period of enforced idleness, this audio program is for you. Owing to medical leave during the past two-weeks I have been relatively inactive at the office. This led to an increase, as well as a change in the pattern of, media consumption. Today’s podcast explains how. The equipment and services available in my home include CATV and broadband Internet access along with a flat panel TV that is connected to both a TiVo and a laptop computer. The laptop functions as an Internet Gateway for the TV. Thus the flat panel unit can function as either a conventional TV or a giant monitor for the Internet-connected laptop. The selection-of-function is done with a conventional TV remote unit merely by pushing one button. When used as a monitor for the laptop the Internet Explorer browser is controlled from the living room sofa with a LogiTech remote mouse and keyboard. On a typical day I would first check the TiVo “Now Showing” selections that had been recorded. About half the time I was not interested in watching the recorded shows most of which were selected by the TiVo service as opposed to ones that I programmed. If there was nothing in the “Now Showing” inventory, I would start channel surfing live TV in hopes of finding something worthwhile. Generally I could not locate anything worth a grown man’s time. However, when I did, I would let the show buffer while I went to my home office to check email and read articles. After TiVo buffered about 30 minutes of the desired show I would return to the living room to watch it. The buffering normally enabled me to watch the entire show without having to look at any commercials because I would fast forward through them. When there was nothing on TiVo or live TV that I wanted to see, I would go to my home office and search imbd.com for interesting movie titles. For example, I browsed the top 250 movies as rated by imbd.com website visitors and found 8 – 10 that I wanted to see. To find them I would first check to see if the movies were available for rental from Amazon-Video-on-Demand through my TiVo. Only a couple of them were available. One I bought and the other I rented. Both were downloaded directly to my TiVo. The first download did not work and I had to call both Amazon and TiVo to get it fixed. The second one worked okay. Second, if the movie was not available at Amazon-Video-on-Demand, I would search for it on free websites such as YouTube. Surprisingly, I found a couple of the movies there. They had to be watched in ten-minute sequential segments, but there were no commercials and it was free. As noted, with the laptop as Internet Gateway I was able to watch them on the flat panel TV screen in my living room. Third, if nothing was available on TiVo, live TV, Amazon-Video-on-Demand, or places like YouTube, I would visit Hulu.com. Generally, on Hulu I chose to watch old movies.  Selecting titles was aided by the helpful reviews of Hulu.com subscribers. Once again, I watched them on the flat panel TV by using the laptop computer as an Internet Gateway. Although they were free, I had to endure the commercials. Fourth, sometimes in the process of searching for movies to watch from the home office PC, I would discover long-tail content that was only available at websites like YouTube. For example, I read a fair number of novels each year and was able to find video interviews with some of my favorite authors. Generally, I watched them on my desktop PC, but sometimes I would watch them on the flat panel TV in the living room. The experience left me with three major inferences. One: We channel surf because we don’t like what is on TV. It is not a cliché to say of cable television, “Hundreds of channels but nothing to watch”. Channel surfing is a habituated practice that points to a future characterized by a video-centric Internet where all content is searchable and immediately available. Two: After only limited exposure to services such as Hulu.com and Apple TV and Amazon-Video-on-Demand rentals, consumers are going to abandon video rental stores like Blockbuster. Their frequency-of-visits to Blockbuster will tail-off sharply. Three: The Long-Tail is going to be far more important than the established media companies would like to think. If consumers can’t find your stuff conveniently at YouTube, Hulu, iTunes, Netflix streams, or similar services, they’re going to discover other shows to like. If you don’t believe me, experience it yourself. Searching videos on YouTube is like channel surfing on steroids. Guys who channel surf the TV are already telling you their not finding what they want. Once they get habituated to surfing for videos on the Web via the TV set, the time they spend on CATV networks will steadily decline.

Phil Leigh If you would like to consider the implications of a video-centric Wikipedia, this audio program is for you. As reported in Technology Review, the Wikipedia Foundation will soon be launching an editable online video encyclopedia. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is the World’s seventh most popular website. Consider how often you visit the site and ponder your reaction if many of its articles provided relevant video. In our analysis, the implications of a video-centric Wikipedia are profound. Perhaps the most important result will be transcendence in the public perception of media itself. The walls separating earlier silos of radio for sound, television for video, and newspapers for print, will collapse. In response, our culture will begin to routinely use the Internet as a mixed-media resource. This will lead to an expectation that users can access media on-demand in whatever form desired whether it be text, graphics, animation, video, or audio. Consider the following. First, the Wikipedia could become the-center-of-gravity for news. It could replace television, radio, and newspapers as the preferred destination.  Topics can be updated nearly instantaneously from a large number of self-policing “journalists”. Furthermore, the updates might include on-the-spot video and audio recordings. Finally, since most topics were prepared earlier as Wikipedia articles, each addition is automatically connected to an abundance of background and context along with branching links to sources and related material. Second, after a critical threshold of Wikipedia articles contain video we’ll expect the website to be available on TV. If the set-makers and CATV operators don’t provide it then we’ll connect our TV to a computer. That way the TV can function as both a monitor for the (Internet-connected) computer as well as a conventional TV. For example, consider someone with an intense interest in the history of World War II. Eventually, a video-centric Wikipedia will have an abundance of public domain video footage posted and indexed within the applicable article.  Moreover, the videos will be continually updated with new postings from archives from various nations. Third, once a video-centric Wikipedia is accessible on our TVs, we’re going to require a user-friendly search device. For example, a Yahoo Widget that merely transports us to the Wikipedia home page is going to be all but useless. We must be able to navigate to the desired content easily and also to explore related articles without difficulty. Such needs may imply a consumer preference for (as yet unannounced) browser-centric TVs as opposed to a Widget platform. Fourth, if Internet access to copyrighted TV shows and movies is too expensive, or limited, viewers are going to start watching other Internet videos. A video-centric Wikipedia is merely one example. But it is a potentially profound one since it is already such a popular website and has the potential to grow infinitely.

Download a Free Prospectus for: Future Developments in Video Advertising Download Video to iPod or iPhone If you would like to watch an example of a successful Internet video ad format, this video is for you. MTV conducted a research study to discover the kind of video ad format that works best for their streamed music videos. The results are important because we infer that they’ll apply to Interactive television as well. The project concluded that a five-second pre-roll followed by a temporary translucent overlay along the lower third of the screen of the ensuing music video provided the best results. To see an actual demonstration of such an ad click on the above player. While the results of the survey are significant, it is dismaying that the press release failed to contain links to videos illustrating the formats tested. Not one of the three involved companies, MTV, Panache, and InsightExpress, seems to understand that demonstrative videos can be embedded in such releases. If they do understand it, then they don’t seem to realize the advantages of demonstrating the video ad formats as opposed to merely describing them with text. Major video-centric media companies should stop complaining that the Internet is not generating enough revenue for them if they fail to use the Web’s multimedia characteristics in such obvious opportunities. It’s the 21st Century and time to get rid of PR firms that still seem to think that most press release recipients only read them after they have arrived via postal mail. To learn more about the future of television advertising, check-out our July ’09 market research report entitled Future Developments in Video Advertising .

Download Free Copy of Prospectus: Future Developments in Video Advertising Download Video to iPod and iPhone. If you would like to learn why product promotion campaigns will replace advertising campaigns, this video is for you. Traditionally advertising campaigns are executed by media buyers. Ad preparation, termed creative work, is done by the advertising agency. The sponsoring company determines the campaign budget and contracts with a media buyer to place the ads on the appropriate media. The media buyer determines the optimal allocation among television, newspaper, radio, Internet, and other formats. The buying organization also determines how the ads will run in each media. For example, they will decide which TV shows will get the ads. They seek to optimize the demographic match between the show audience and the profile of customers for the advertised product. From the beginning the sponsor is focused on the advertising process. Ad agency selection is based upon a judgment of agency skills in ad creation. Media buyer selection reflects the sponsor’s assessment of buyer’s effectiveness in ad placement. The process will be different in the future. In the years ahead, sponsors will think in terms of product promotion.  It is a larger concept that advertising promotion because it takes into consideration how the sponsor will use media directly, as well as indirectly, within the promotional campaign. Direct media applications are those that the sponsor can implement autonomously without a media buyer. Examples include promotions on the corporate website, email, Twitter, press releases, and YouTube postings, among others. Aside from the obvious use on YouTube channels, the use of video can augment the effectiveness of each example. In contrast, advertising is an indirect media application of the sponsor. He relies upon the media buyer to place ads on properties that he cannot access directly. Aside from the conventional examples of TV, newspapers, and radio other examples include third-party websites like Huffington Post, or Sportsline. Significantly, however, they not include Web properties that sponsors can use themselves such as YouTube. The replacement of advertising promotion by product promotion carries a number of implications. First, the marketing executives at sponsoring companies will need to enlarge their job description. In addition to optimizing indirect media (advertising) returns they must also maximize returns on direct media applications. That means they’ll have to learn more about how to make direct Internet contact with customers effective. Learning about online email campaigns is only a starting point. They must also learn about how to use YouTube, FaceBook, and Twitter, among other applications. Since the Internet permits interactivity they must learn how to deploy applications that engage users. For example, an online game that users find entertaining might be an excellent brand promotion tool. Second, promotional materials need to be tailored to the intended media application. Videos for television might be longer than videos for the Internet. Similarly, videos embedded in an email campaign or press release might be different that those on the corporate home page or those on third-party websites. Some may contain calls-to-action, whereas others may not. Third, advertising will follow us around. We’ll see one version of conventional TV and another in Internet streams to fixed devices such as desktop computers. Our mobile phones will get yet another version. The ads will follow us into elevators equipped with built-in screens and we’ll see special versions on electronic billboards at airports and even on the highway. Length: This video is 4 minutes long.

Click Here to Download Free Prospectus: Future Developments in Video Advertising. Click here to download video to iPod and iPhone. If you would like to learn why search will become a crucial part of future video advertising, this video is for you. Once video migrates to the Internet the search function will become crucially integrated with video advertising. This applies to both short and long form programs including TV shows and movies. As discussed in our Future Developments in Video Advertising research report, there are three reasons for our conclusion. First, viewers will search for the video programs they want to see. YouTube has already surpassed Yahoo to become the second largest search engine. Consumers love having long-tail content available, but they cannot find what they want without a search engine. Over time each of us will exhibit a pattern of searches enabling video ads to be targeted for the type of video programs we watch. Second, sponsors will learn to enhance Google AdWords by linking to video landing pages. Instead of structuring an AdWords Click-Through to link to a landing page that merely contains text and graphics about the advertised product, future landing pages will make increasing use of video. For several generations TV demonstrated the power of video to stimulate consumer demand. A broadband Internet enables sponsors to harness that power in conjunction with AdWords at their own websites without reliance upon ad agencies or media buyers. Third, YouTube recently started offering contributors the opportunity to place overlay ads on their videos. The process is similar to AdWords but is concentrated on videos within the YouTube community. Consider the hypothetical case of a producer with a popular YouTube instructional video explaining how to connect HDMI-equipped laptop computers to flat-panel TVs. This enables the TVs to display Internet videos and provides for unlimited Internet access via the television. A computer company like Acer may wish to place overlay ads on the video for its laptops that have HDMI sockets. The computer company would bid for YouTube-specific AdWords like “computer-to-TV-connections”, “Internet-Video-on-TV”, and “HDMI computers”.  Thus, viewers watching the instructional video could easily click-through to Acer in order to buy an appropriate laptop, to wit, one with HDMI sockets. Length: This video is about 5 minutes long.

Click here to download a Free Prospectus for  Future Developments in Video Advertising. Download this video to iPod and iPhone. If  you would like to learn why future video commercials will be shorter, this video is for you. In our new research report, Future Developments in Video Advertising, we predict that video programming will migrate away from Cable TV and onto the Internet. Furthermore, we conclude that the great majority of consumers will expect to watch videos for free in ad-supported formats as opposed to paying a fee for rental or purchase of copyrighted content. Thus, it is crucial that future video ads be more effective than previously.One way to improve the consumer experience, and thereby amplify demand for video programs, is to reduce the time allocated to commercials. For example, at Hulu.com viewers can watch TV shows from ABC, NBC, Fox, and some Cable Channels for free in an ad-supported environment. Typically an hour long TV show can be viewed in 48 minutes because Hulu.com cuts back on commercial time. In our analysis there are three reasons that Internet video can economically justify a reduction in time dedicated to commercials. First, there is no need to set-aside advertising slots for a local TV affiliate. Typically this amounts to a “savings” of six minutes per hour. Second, unlike DVR owners, viewers of Internet video cannot fast-forward through ad-rolls from websites that transport them as streams. As a result a higher percentage of consumers actually end-up watching them because the ads cannot be easily avoided. Third, the Internet enables new types of ads that do not disrupt the underlying video program. One example is the clickable overlay, which often appears along the lower border of the video for 10 – 15 seconds inviting the consumer to click-through for more information, or to even execute a transaction. Given the IP addressing and other techniques inherent in the Internet, advertisers are better able to target such ads than on CATV systems. Length: This video is about 3 minutes long.