Time for Change
by Todd Yates on Jan.18, 2009, under Industry Trends
Tuesday will bring us a new president and if his campaign promises hold up – change. Regardless of your political affiliation or opinions (which is not the subject of this blog), things are changing, both in the world and in our business.
2009 will continue to bring changes to the film, television and advertising industries. The single largest change afoot is the rapidly increasing use of the Internet as a blended distribution vehicle for television programming and video advertising. At this point, no television property is complete without a web site and the web is increasingly being used as a vehicle for distribution. I offer some recent and poignant examples:
1. FOX streamed the recent BCS championship game live for the first time in the history of the game. The feed did not include FOX’s TV feed — a tactic that has become the norm for broadcasters trying to make live online coverage complement, not replace, what’s on TV. Online angles included an overhead cable-cam, a shot isolated on quarterbacks and shots (and audio) of each school’s band.
Tuesday also brings the unprecedented partnership between CNN and Facebook covering the inauguration ceremony. There is a reason that Barrack Obama won the “Marketer of the Year” award from Ad Age.
2. The almost epidemic use of the Internet based video ad campaigns. Shootonline now profiles an increasing number spots that never hit the broadcast airwaves. Check out these examples:
JCPenney’s | Beware of the Doghouse spot.
Dodge’s RAM Challenge
Honda’s Cinematic “Dream the impossible” Documentary Series Campaign
The fact that advertisers are spending significant dollars on online or hybrid campaign like the RAM Challenge is a strong signal that the Internet has become a viable outlet for mainstream video advertising as bandwidth available to consumers has been exponentially increasing. Online video viewing rose 34 percent over the past year. The latest data also shows that 77 percent of U.S. web surfers watched online clips in 2008 and one analyst predicts a 45 percent growth in the coming year.
Here’s to change in 2009 . . . .
