Video Advertising - Keep it open!
I am thrilled about the eMarketer stat — behavioral targeting is projected to grow to a $4.8 billion market by 2012 -- and it seems online video will be taking over the majority share of that. One of the barriers that has been raised to behavioral targeting with online video is the fact that the cookie data (which stores the users behavior, enabling the ad network to decide which ad to display based on the users behavior -- aka behavioral targeting) often resides in the player -- which, of course, are not standardized. Eric Franchi raises the issue in his article <a href="http://blogs.mediapost.com/video_insider/?p=164">Behavioral Targeting and Online Video: Making It a Reality</a>: “Cookie data may be utilized to deliver video as it does now for display, but not in every player format (formats being Flash, Windows Media and Real Player to name a few).”
We came across this barrier recently when trying to integrate an ad network into MediaMall. Since we use our own player that enables the video to play on the TV vs. PC, we needed an ad network that didn't require the cookie data be stored in the player. We found that, in fact, the logic for using cookies can reside in the page, in standardized jscript, regardless of what player is being used to actually play the media. And that cookie intelligence can then just instruct the player (whatever player it is) to play a given ad once it makes a decision on what to play. Both <a href="http://www.tremormedia.com">tremormedia</a> and <a href="http://www.spotxchange.com">spotxchange</a>use jscript in the page vs. logic in the player. So — the fact that so many ad networks bake their intelligence/logic into the player, instead of keeping it in jscript in the page, which is video-format agnostic will slow the growth of the category. I hope to see more ad networks adopting the open approach!
