Audience Relevancy and Context Are Key

By Dan Hagen, Media Contacts

We have been running video creative for our clients for some time at Media Contacts and have found that, if used in the correct way, it can significantly increase a campaign's performance. The key is to avoid flagrant use of the creative and to ensure that it sits seamlessly into its hosting environment. Business audiences react much more positively to either user initiated video or 'break bumpers' within editorial video content, whereas the consumer audience is much more accepting of more intrusive formats.

As with all online advertising, users will be more tolerant and positive towards video/audio formats if the placement is relevant, i.e. a PS2 ad on a gaming site where the user base are highly likely to have faster connections. Where the placement is more generic, e.g. Yahoo/MSN homepage, there is a greater danger of annoying the user if the ad is not self-initiated. Many of these homepage ads now have a feedback facility, and there is always a small percentage of individuals who will leave negative feedback. For this reason, the media and creative decisions need to be planned with the context in mind.

With the continued growth of broadband in the home, heavier formats will become more and more acceptable, enabling greater creativity and better brand building possibilities for the medium. User connection speed detection allows further segmentation to ensure users receive the optimal video creative for their connection speed.

Dan Hagen, Head of Data at Media Contacts, is based in London and runs online advertising for Intel for EMEA, Camelot (UK National Lottery) and Ask Jeeves.

The Industry Needs Metrics

By Alison Reay, Yahoo! UK

The Internet advertising industry needs metrics to demonstrate how online can increase brand awareness, so it is great to see research like this that will enable media owners like Yahoo! to better advise customers on how they should be using online.

To date, one of the challenges of video ads has been getting them to work for dial-up users as well as those with broadband. However, it is now possible to overcome this with video technology products such as Yahoo!'s adTV, that allows high definition video creative to be viewed with a standard dial-up connection.

As a result, online now offers brands the opportunity to reach audiences through video/audio ads as well as static formats. At Yahoo!, we have worked with many brands to encourage the use of video formats in order to further engage with consumers. In May 2004, the Warner Bros' campaign to launch the film "Troy" was the first cinema-length (two-minute) advert trailer to be streamed online. Since then the format has been widely picked up, and we are now starting to work with brands like Sony and adidas to produce audio ads for our Internet radio channels on Yahoo! LAUNCHcast.

We have learnt that it is vital for creative to be monitored, as it rarely works for a TV ad to be transferred directly onto the Internet. The audience and format need to be carefully reviewed and specific creative developed to engage with the widest possible audience.

In the future it would be interesting to see how online video and audio ads compare to other media.


Alison Reay was appointed UK Sales Director at Yahoo! in August 2002, and in November 2004, she was promoted to Pan-European & UK Sales Director to capitalise on the recent rapid growth in the number of Pan-European advertisers. With the rest of the sales team the objective is to target the existing Pan-European budgets of advertisers such as Apple, adidas and Levi's who traditionally use TV channels such as MTV and Eurosport.