It is encouraging, at least, that some advertisers are experimenting with Internet video advertising and not just applying a different form of the traditional interruption advertising model online.
The two current predominant Web video advertising models are the tradition interruption method in the form of either a preroll or an ad in the middle of the video. The other form of video advertising is the overlay ad that Google introduced on their YouTube videos.
But both methods are still forcing commercial messages on an audience that hasn’t specifically asked for those messages. Like traditional TV advertising, it’s a crap shoot. You’re likely to reach people who will be receptive to your message, but the vast majority will either ignore it or be annoyed by it.
Keyword search-based advertising has taught people that, like nearly everything else these days, advertising can be consumed on the audience’s terms, not the advertiser’s.
If you’re going to depend upon third party content to find your audience, you’ve got a delicate balancing act to do.
The trick to really making video advertising work is to eliminate the actual advertisement entirely and replace it with hyperlinked product placements. Instead of being assaulted by a commercial message you didn’t ask for, you would be able to mouse over any video element to discover ads. So, for example, if you really liked the tie a character in the video you are watching was wearing, you could click on that tie and be brought to the merchant’s purchase page for that tie.
What we need is a video markup language that allows us to create interactive video. The World Wide Web Consortium‘s Synchronized Multimedia Integration Langauge (SMIL 3.0) is the most likely vehicle to accomplish this.
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