Ahh, the promise of interactive advertising. A completely new paradigm. Let’s remember one of the original promises of the economics of Internet advertising: for the cost of producing just one broadcast spot, you can have a website that millions can see, without even paying for the media. As true as it was, and, perhaps even more so, still is – it seems so simplistic now. Banners. Value Adds. Viral. MySpace. YouTube. Media titans once again doing battle over the landscape of the Internet. It all seems so complicated, so dot com all over again, and yet new. Web 2.0 is a buzzword, of course, but I think we can all see that things are different now.
Why this is relevant to the topic at hand, however, is because of what we’ve witnessed in the realm of the Internet and Video. We all know about YouTube, of course. It’s changed everything in ways that surprised many of us. But it’s more than that. It’s iMovie. It’s iPod videos. It’s DIY. It’s the Subservient Chicken. And it’s something else.
Video is what ad agencies know. It’s what production houses know. It is the staple of a multi-billion dollar industry. And when it comes to this big bad thing called the Internet, it’s a way of viewing the Internet that advertisers can all understand. We believe that the phrase “viral video” arose almost entirely because it really made advertisers feel pretty good. Funny videos? Hey! We can do that.
But let’s not forget the original genius of the web. It’s interconnected, of course, but it’s also interactive. There are so many new tools at our disposal. Would the chicken have been as funny if it had a bunch of buttons that said “play video number 1,” “play video number 2,” etc.? Sure, there are times that playing a video over the web is pretty brilliant. Right now a series of three videos we made for Milwaukee’s Best Light have received over 4 million downloads on YouTube. It’s crazy. And it’s working. Viral videos can be useful, but they are but one tool in an arsenal.
One of the things we’re most proud of is that someone put our anyfilms.net site on Wikipedia as an example of interactive film1. On television, we are passive viewers who watch a series of frames pass before our eyes. We can change the channel and passively watch another set of frames, or we can get up and walk away. That’s about it. With interactive video, we can change the order of these frames. We can affect what is in the frames. We can get frames more to our liking. We can make the frames. It’s a ridiculously larger palette, and it’s one that we don’t want to throw out just because it’s a more complicated task to produce. Let’s always remember that interactive video is still in its talking head phase – we’ve only just scratched the surface.
Now, there’s something else we want to discuss with you regarding video and the Internet. Remember the original value proposition we started this section out with? For the cost of producing one broadcast spot, we can make a whole site and reach millions of people. Well, that falls apart, doesn’t it, if the website also includes a bunch of video that we produce in the exact same way as we do for television. If we make a website, and shoot not thirty seconds of video, but, say, 5 minutes of video, and do all of it with the same production values and budgets as we would a broadcast spot, well, then, it wasn’t cheaper than that spot anymore, was it? It was actually exponentially more expensive. We tell you this not because we don’t want you to give us millions of dollars to produce your interactive video content (believe you me, we do, we do), but rather because it’s important to keep in mind that if we change that original value proposition, in many cases, our goals and needs change as well. Sometimes this is a good thing – witness Fallon’s groundbreaking BMW films – and we can all rock it. Sometimes, though, we actually love Internet advertising because it can be cheap, so we need to keep it cheap.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course. Web video, though getting better all the time, is a lot lower resolution than television, and especially HDTV. Awesomely and wonderfully, this won’t be the case very soon, but it still is now. There is a level of polish that you may not need. And not only that, the rise of the DIY, of the YouTube and the iPod has given rise to a different kind of aesthetic in web video that we can tap into. It doesn’t always have to look like a million bucks. Of course, there are times when it needs to, and in those cases, give us the resources and we’ll make it look like a million bucks. Amazingly, we can make something look like a million bucks for about $500,000. We’re magic like that. This is a joke. Sort of.
The final thing to keep in mind in all of this, then, is that your web video shoot is not a broadcast shoot. Chances are good, that in this day and age (and again, this will change soon in the future, we feel it), your website, the banners we’re building, any viral boosting, etc., and the web videos we’re making for you are all still costing, in total, less than a broadcast spot or two. This is awesome. We’re a different kind of company, and we’re used to this. Our cost structure is different than broadcast. But it’s important to remember: you didn’t pay us enough to put six people from your company in a fancy hotel, or even to really cater the shoot in the way you’re properly used to. It’s not because we’re cheap, it’s because the economics of web shoots are still fundamentally different than those of broadcast, and we all need to scrimp a little bit to get the job done on a smaller budget. This probably goes without saying, we realize, but if it’s your first web job, and you’re used to the cushy world of broadcast advertising, well, welcome to the world of the cheap. The Internet, though sucking up more of your money every year, is still the poor cousin of advertising. And, by the same token, the shoot might not have PAs. The shoot might not have the size of a crew that you’re used to. Try and not compensate for this by, say, sending our creative lead out to get coffee. Just a thought.
1 Wikipedia Interactive Film Article, as of Jan. 31, 2007. Originally uploaded by a bloke named “Peter S.” on March 1, 2006, bless him. Check his history page. It definitely wasn’t us. We don’t know anything about Dubai. I mean, seriously, look at us
