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January 2007 - Strategy Magazine
Media

Roll 'em: Online video ads are de rigueur for the new year
As the inventory of Canadian video content continues to build, 'boom year' bragging rights are streaming towards broadband spots

by Patti Summerfield
page 29

Online search advertising is so last year. And while the online space changes as mercurially as the weather, pundits are predicting that streaming online video will be the hot ad placement opportunity for 2007.

Although Canada lags slightly behind the U.S. in this area, a perfect storm of a bulked-up Canadian inventory of video content and a veritable explosion of consumer demand for broadband entertainment have come together to make online video advertising effective, accountable and increasingly mainstream.

All of Canada's major conventional broadcasters, and most of the specialties, are bulking up the video on their websites and the video advertising within that content. At the end of 2006, CTV signed a digital deal with Warner Bros. International Television to acquire the Canadian broadband rights to The O.C., Smith, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Each 44-minute show contains five commercial breaks: one pre-roll, one post-roll, and three in the body of the show. The target length for each spot or promo is 15 seconds and will be slotted on all five channels of the CTV Broadband Network: CTV News, CTV Shows, MTV, eTalk and Discovery Channel.

CTV reports that for episodes one and two of The O.C., the first of the U.S. network dramas to debut online, 120,000 streams were ordered up in the first 10 days.

CBC is the latest broadcaster to offer streaming video advertising on its site. Bob Kerr, director of business and platform development for CBC English television, expects ads will be reasonably short, 15 seconds or less, and will be rotated fairly frequently. The evaluation tools are in place to measure how many people are playing the video and results so far are positive.

Kerr says, "The Rick Mercer Report is obviously one of our premier programs and the traffic we're looking at for the past seven days indicates Mercer is getting a lot of hits (over 400,000 during November). The numbers we're getting really seem to bear out the fact that there is an appetite for video online."

Jennifer Stothers, national sales director for AOL Canada, says AOL.ca is not at parity with the U.S. in terms of the amount of video on its site, but is set up for increased demand in 2007. "Broadband hit critical mass in the U.S. and that's driving major advertisers like Unilever and P&G to get on the bandwagon with streaming ads."

She says U.S. advertisers are using online video to repurpose and extend their TV efforts, citing the American Express "My Life, My Card" campaign. Amex wanted to run the commercial created for the Oscar telecast simultaneously on AOL. To fully leverage the Web, the spot was shortened, and for about 25% of its offline budget, Amex was able to reach almost 16 million AOL users and double the effectiveness of the campaign.

Mila Mironova, marketing manager for Nokia Canada, is hoping for a similar boost with the company's "pushtostart" video ad campaign, which launched in December to target the young adult demo on Yahoo.ca. The video ad and supporting television teasers on MTV and MuchMusic are for the Nokia 6133, a multifaceted phone that is so easy to use only one hand is needed. All media drives consumers to pushtostart.ca for a 2001: A Space Odyssey-style video about the left and right hand battling it out to see who operates the phone. There are games to play - hand tennis, hand racing, and hand blast - as well as a product demo and contest.

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