A lot of talk at this week's iMedia Agency Summit on Amelia Island was about spyware. One of the things becoming alarmingly apparent is that most people, even in this business, are having a tough time defining the term and differentiating if from adware. For the most part, everyone agrees that spyware is the work of the devil himself and that adware is okay, but no one's been able to explain why in a succinct fashion.
And if people in this industry are unsure, Joe Consumer is completely at a loss when it comes to what's good for his computer and what's bad, which is why people are supposedly deleting cookies at an alarming rate. Sadly, the U.S. House of Representatives wasn't much help this week when they sent two half-baked bills to the Senate, one suggesting fines for spyware creators, and another suggesting imprisonment. What can you expect from hearings when the very first day of them was interrupted by an unidentified plane flying too close to the White House?
As one industry observer put it, "the House vote has essentially handed the ball to the Senate, which… is not ready to take action yet."
Even if the Senate runs with this ball, I doubt they'll get very far. Politicos haven't proven very valuable when it comes to matters of the internet (except Al Gore, of course, who's about to receive that Webby Award for contributions to our medium). Frankly, I wish they'd stay out of our business altogether. By the time they pass another toothless law many moons from now, the industry will have mostly fixed the spyware problem.
Before the lobbyists come after me with baseball bats (I'm in Washington this week; they're everywhere), allow me to take you on a brief stroll down memory lane so that I may explain my skepticism. I remember covering the first FTC Spam Forum a few year ago and being baffled at how little the people tasked with setting the action agenda really knew about the subject at hand. Most of them still had their secretaries print out their email and knew next to nothing about how the medium actually worked, let alone how to fix the problem.
As a result, the legislators did come up with the much-criticized CAN-SPAM Act, which spawned several high-profile spammer hunts, the outcomes of which somehow escape my memory for lack of significance. But by then, most email providers already had fairly decent spam blockers in place, and the email industry as a whole had agreed on a set of best practices that effectively saved it from extinction. Sure, no spam blocker is perfect, not every email marketer is conscientious, and I still waste quite a bit of time ridding my inbox of annoying offers to enhance everything from my non-existent stamp collection to organs I don't have, but as a whole, you have to agree that email marketing has come a long way toward cleaning up its act.
The point is, this industry is pretty darn good at policing itself, and I believe that a solution to the spyware problem will come from within. Anti-spyware software will continue to evolve. Joe Consumer will soon understand that cookies can be beneficial. Legitimate marketers (adware) will continue to force out the offenders (spyware.) And, all of this will happen before Washington decides to form a working group to establish a subcommittee to nominate a committee to make recommendations of next steps to the rest of them.
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but history suggests it, don't you think?
But, enough about that. An interesting study crossed my screen this week that offers some useful information for online video advertisers.
Remember last week's IAB suggestion that online video ads should appear before (pre-roll,) during (mid-roll,) or after (post-roll) online video content? Well, according to rich media provider Viewpoint, pre-roll ads are better branding vehicles than the other two, which are better DR drivers. Viewpoint ran about 40 million 30-second online video impressions for four separate campaigns over a period of eight weeks, and Dynamic Logic surveyed about 3,800 online viewers who were exposed to the ads to find that pre-rolls were the most effective at increasing brand awareness. Additionally, people didn't think that online pre-rolls were as annoying as TV commercials and responded better to full-page ads than to in-banner video.
Some of the findings are almost intuitive, but -- as with any such study -- before you change everything over to pre-roll 30-second full-screens, some questions come to mind. First, the sample size isn't all that impressive, which is neither here nor there, and the researchers didn't reveal the results for the other campaign formats or how much lift they brought to each of the branding metrics.
Second, keep in mind that Viewpoint acquired Unicast some time ago and Unicast built its business on full-page video.
Third, as Mitch Rose, VP of Marketing at Viewpoint competitor PointRoll, rightly pointed out, "Interesting that the findings say that the video format most closely linked to TV (pre-roll) has the least negative association while TV has the highest. TV has the highest because most consumers do not like commercials. They reluctantly accept them. More often they go to the bathroom, change the channel, pop some popcorn or fast-forward with the DVR/TiVo. In the world of pre-roll they do not have this option. If they want to catch the sports highlight they must first sit through the spot with no opportunity to TiVo or change the channel."
Fourth, the annoyance metric seems odd because in-banner video used in this study was "auto-initiated," meaning that it played automatically without the user's input. According to Rose, this represents a very small amount of the in-banner video delivered on the web. Most often, he says, a user has to mouse over the ad unit or click on it to launches the banner video. This would mean it would have extremely low negative associations, as the user would only initiate the video if he were interested. Auto-initiated video is quite a different story, wouldn't you say?
And finally, to climb back on my pony of advocating the move away from 30-second spots on the web in favor of web-specific video, at the first-ever iMedia Podcast this week, Real Branding's Executive Media Director Jason Kelley and Klipmart's CEO Chris Young revealed that the optimal length for online video ads is 22 and a half seconds, based on their experience with clients. Less than 22.5 is too short to move the branding needle, and more than 22.5 is a waste of time, they said.
Young promised a white paper on the subject shortly. Also, keep an eye/ear on the iMedia site in the coming weeks for the full Podcast, which touched on many of the above issues.
iMedia editor-at-large Masha Geller is the founder of interactive marketing and corporate communications constancy Geller Public Relations in New York. She has been covering the interactive advertising industry since 1999 as the former editor-in-chief of Mediapost.com, and is a widely published thought-leader in the interactive arena.
