Targeting and Addressability Means Quality Trumps Quantity in Online Video Advertising

Here is an insightful article in MediaPost’s Online Video Insider. In it, SpotXchange CEO Michael Shehan talks to Dueno Group, Publicis’ Senior Vice President Tim Hanlon.

There are many great nuggets from this interview. One thing of note is how Hanlon feels that the new medium’s ability to target allows (or will allow) advertisers to focus on quality rather than quantity, which is a huge sea change.

He notes:

…technology allows traditional programmers and ad sellers to offer advertising in a more sophisticated manner. This unbundling has historically been a tightly wrapped packaged of availability, buttressed by a less than elegant measurement system (example, Nielson) that has given us a relatively crude measurement device called ratings, and demographically oriented at that. We are now able to measure more granularly. That brings an increased sophistication of audience definition that goes far beyond a generic grouping.

Hanlon goes on to say that new technologies provide opportunities that make the game “really less about mass and scale and more about targeting and quality…. the only way to achieve the scale that marketers need to be successful is for agencies and marketers to aggregate numerous audiences on their own.”

Clearly this is what the niche content players and micro-television networks like Next New Networks and Revision3 have been thinking for some time. The big questions are:

- Will media buyers agree with this (and when)?
- Will higher quality audiences through better targeting translate into higher CPMs (and when)?

I’ll let you know as soon as I have the answer. Please do the same.

6 comments January 8th, 2008