While the internet yellow pages and city guides are selling advertorial video for small businesses, the biggest player of them all continues to aggressively pursue this emerging opportunity. Google has teamed with SpotMixer to give small businesses the ability to churn out their own videos and traffic them on Google’s Adwords network, both online and on TV. SpotMixer allows small businesses to upload their own video, combine it with file video, add graphics and edit it into a commercial spot or longer-form advertorial video. Google provides the ad network, which now includes quite a few television partners.
Google’s ultimate play here is giving its advertisers the ability to target its video ads on TV by zip code as well as audience — combined with its existing online products — enabling a whole new universe of video advertising to the tune of billions of dollars. (For example, a restaurant can’t afford a TV ad that goes out to an entire market, but they can certainly afford it if it’s targeted to a particular zip code.) Meanwhile, local TV companies are neglecting this opportunity because of their prohibitive cost structures and lack of technological investment. In the next 4-5 years, it’s quite possible that pure plays will challenge local TV stations in the video advertising business in total dollars across any medium. Now, wouldn’t that be interesting?
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Cory,
This step by Google should help connect the dots for folks. Local media should now see that adsense was a Trojan horse. Google has been positioned (first through adsense, then through radio advertising, now spotmixer, etc.) to own relationships with local businesses. Meanhwile, TV stations, radio stations and Newspapers (supposedly the very media that supposedly command the local advertising dollars) have been helping Google (running adsense on their sites, sales partnerhsips) build relationships with local businesses. Every time a company signs up for adsense with a $50-$500 account, it is a new relationship for Google and a lost relationship for local media. Google is funneling money out of the local market. Local media is enabling it.
Enabling it? In some cases but it also may be “the coming thing” and local media may not be able to stop it . . . without radical change. How many local media companies are open to that?
Google AdSense provides a way for small businesses to advertise with a very low barrier to entry — you don’t need to talk to a sales rep, you don’t need to sign a contract, you don’t need a credit check, and you don’t need to build an ad (at least, for text ads you don’t).
I have little doubt that people would use local media for these transactions if they could offer a similar system. But that’s the problem: they don’t.
Google is now scaling their system up to start nipping at the mid-size business on multiple platforms, and TV stations need to find a way to compete. It’s kinda like classified ads, where the newspapers got so comfortable doing things a certain way that they basically refused to change in the face of a revolution.
How do they plan to get the ads on TV ? Cable most likely ? How do you target TV to specific zipcodes….am I missing something ? Has Google created a brand new form of TV broadcasting that I haven’t heard about ?
We can certainly learn alot from them. Of course, a large part of the problem is the advertiser and their ability to understand what they can accomplish on the different platforms…
My own belief is small business owners use video ads within their own web sites and marketing material before venturing into the video advertising. If small business owners had a local media outlet to use video to promote themselves, this in my opinion will be next logical step.
I think that by 2012 video ads will be mainstream and text ads will start to look dated.