Worst of 2007: Next-Gen Advertising Models

Advertisers, content owners and service providers struggled mightily this year, and without a sorely needed result, to find successful ad models to support the distribution of video over the Internet, and to a lesser extent, wireless.

Internet Video sites, such as Bud. TV, are struggling to find profitable advertising models.

Perhaps nowhere has the dearth of information for business decision making and the changing audience viewing habits been more evident than at the NCTA and NAB conferences this past spring in Las Vegas.

And the buzz at the Cable Show was about distributing content over the Internet, traditional service provider networks and wireless nets, but the shared sting was on how to monetize these efforts with realistic marketing methods.

Mega-advertiser Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc. (AB) set the tone for the event by admitting its three-month-old Bud.TV Internet video site had not met expectations and had been relegated by May to the status of an incubator for the company to test ideas and initiatives.

As if these topics were not enough to underscore the fluid and unpredictable nature of big content business, attendees at the NAB conference seemed unable to find essential value in — and ad models for — mobile TV, with the failure of ESPN Mobile not far in the rearview mirror.

Instead Bob Zitter, CTO of premium content giant HBO, focused his two presentations on lessons learned from trying to pump video over wireless connections to small screens on handheld devices rather than big, wall-mounted ones.

While Zitter opted for the walk-before-you-can-run approach to educating the audience, a top Google executive seeking partnerships for YouTube delivered a promote-first/monetize-later pitch that offered no insight on creating or identifying ad models, but instead focused on generating traffic for online destinations using his company’s vast assets.

Less than two weeks later, speakers at the Cable Show lamented the lack of tools and data needed to measure audience viewing habits and trends effectively at a time in which more options compete for consumers’ attention.

And, following the everything-affects-everything-else doctrine, cable and content companies emphasized the need to shift from a quantity- to a quality-based advertising sales strategy. With this targeted approach, clients focus on a few interested viewers rather than 100 possibly uninterested viewers.

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