I am very happy to see our friends over at Next New Network land a nice AMEX deal.
Former Wallstrip and Moblogic host Lindsay Campbell is back on screen.
She’s hosting a “branded entertainment” show for New York startup NextNewNetworks and sponsor American Express called ‘Small Business Rules’.
(…)
The show is branded entertainment for American Express and will be distributed on the company’s “Open Forum Idea Hub” site.
Considering that carpet-investor (as in carpet bombing investing, not investing in rugs) Ron Conway has dubbed branded content the next “billion dollar opportunity”, I fully expect more of these deals. In fact, I know that you will see more of these deals because “the 30-second ad is dead”, consuming online video is twice as popular as searching for stuff, and pre-rolls - while effective - are a nuisance a la pop ups.
However, just for a second, I want to play devil’s advocate.
Between us, seeing how most of these “branded entertainment” ideas hit a wall and NO one watches them even on large portals such as YouTube, I am starting to think that video producers (such as N3 or our own WatchMojo.com) are better off continuing to produce really good content that is strictly informational and entertaining and then license these to marketers to use on their sites (basically as we did for Coca Cola on MySpace, and will be doing for McDonalds shortly).
So while I love this aspect of AMEX’s plan:
Episodes won’t be posted on YouTube, with the thinking that the content is designed for small business owners coming directly to the American Express microsite, rather than random passerby video surfers.
So while I like the notion of placing videos on a client’s site/microsite to offer more value to the marketer, as a user myself and playing devil’s advocate, I think it’s possible that in a day and age where savvy web audiences are one search away from knowing the client paid to be in the content, the whole hypothesis of branded content has yet to be proven effective for marketers, let alone pan out with audiences.
Let’s not kid ourselves, for online video advertising to become material - let alone surpass search advertising - we need something FAR more effective for marketers and FAR more scalable than these branded entertainment initiatives.
Small disclaimer: I don’t want to be a hypocrite, we are ultimately pitching the same kind of packages to marketers… and while we listen to clients and watch trends and as such entertain these branded entertainment opportunities, a part of me tells clients how it is: yes, the line between advertising and content is becoming blurry, but be careful how blurry you try to make it because users are not stupid and ultimately we need to get the content seen.
This week we crossed 75,000,000 all-time streams. We did that without cramming commercial messages in the content. In the end, if you build it (good content), they will come… they can mean users as well as advertisers… but without the audience, the content is akin to the tree that falls in the forest.
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