A Totally Different Upfront

With plans barely laid for 2007, the 2008 upfront is just around the corner, with some folks already having begun. But "that" upfront relates strictly to media planning and buying and leaves the content that will fill those buys out of the discussion. While this isn't the chicken and egg discussion between media and creative, the explosive growth of online video placements have outpaced agencies' ability to develop content that is relevant and specific to the media in which this video will run.

The following eMarketer charts show just how significant online video is, and is expected to become.

Not surprisingly, ClickZ reports on DoubleClick's data that banners containing video drive much higher click rates. The data here isn't perfect and doesn't account for multiple clicks/user and other issues, but the article does point out that in a medium where users vote with their time, delivering content related to the site environment that is both interesting in the first few seconds yet short enough to deliver the entire message is crucial. Theoretically this makes all the sense in the world. If an ad is going to appear on a golf site, the video should be golf related. From a practical standpoint, this is a video production, banner production, and online ad trafficking nightmare which will eat up agency resources and drive retainer fees through the roof.

This is where media, creative and account need to work more closely together than ever. Think about how it looks when you shuffle a deck of cards. Done right, one card from each hand folds in as the card from the other hand follows, and so on. Imagine four or five hands trying to do this into one deck all at once - an image no harder to conceptualize than creative, media, account, production, and the client all working 100% in sync with each other as plans move forward. Just like the potato sack race, no one is going to get anywhere by trying to run off on their own.

The benefits coming from an agency who can pull this off will be huge. Imagine an upfront video shoot tied to each different category within the media buy. Sports footage for sports sites, newscaster-like footage for news sites, product on a beach for travel sites, and so on. This footage would be used to creative multiple ad formats and creative executions which drive higher response through higher relevancy within the site environment.

The question will be whether most, if any, agencies can accomplish this in reality. It is hard - really hard. It takes a significant amount of organization, planning, and discipline. Most importantly, no one gets paid any more to do it this way than the old way. It's just the price of entry into a more complex, customizable media landscape.

Yankee Google Dandy

The breaking story today that Google is buying DoubleClick is concerning for the short-term with the potential for a told-you-so in the long-term.

Google is the search powerhouse, taking the majority of spending in paid search, the category that is already the largest online spending category. But until now, online display has not been dominated by any one player. DoubleClick may be the biggest when compared to others, but DoubleClick alone cannot control the market on its own like Google could with search. Changing that would be a bad thing.

The reason is that as I've mentioned before, Google's complete lack of transparency in its AdWords product is deceitful. They'll contend that so long as companies can generate a positive return on their investment, it's not important to see the how and why of what's going on behind the calculations. That may be so, but price gouging has never been the foundation of enduring success. Bringing this opaqueness to what is currently a wonderfully transparent category will only frustrate advertisers and stunt the tremendous growth online is currently experiencing.

I personally believe ad networks are a great model for online display, but the biggest complaint against them is the lack of transparency, even if the network offers a fully disclosed site list. For instance, Which sites did your campaign actually run on? What percent of the campaign ran on each site? How did (at least) certain categories perform compared to others? These questions often keep advertisers away not just from networks but online altogether. Despite these concerns online has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years and that growth has been projected to continue. Those projections would change if online display became more opaque rather than more transparent, leaving less questions answered than more.

But why the reference to the Yankees? Well, aside from the short-term monopolistic and transparency concerns, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sure seems to be behaving like the New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner as of late. You may remember that in the late 1990s and early 2000s George Steinbrenner signed almost every top free agent available with the goal of building the unbeatable team. Of course, for the fans of almost any other team it was just depressing. Who had a shot?

It turned out a lot of teams had a shot. From 1996 to 2000, the Yanks won four of five series. However, despite the highest payroll in MLB, the Yankees haven't won any championships since then. Individually, they have many of the best players at each position. Collectively, they couldn't get the job done.

Google was fantastic at search and built the best search team out there. With YouTube and now DoubleClick, the executive team's focus keeps getting divided. While it seems like Google is building an empire, this might just be the beginning of their end.