Vlogging touted as next ad frontier
VIDEO WEB JOURNALS
Just when the average Internet user was wrapping his head around blogging, along comes vlogging: personal video and audio Web journals. While the Weblog can be a confusing and unpredictable morass of stream of consciousness written by anyone who cares to contribute, vlogging could be the refinement necessary to finally attract advertisers to the blogosphere.
“ We’re brainstorming with specific clients about using different forms of technology and this is something that we have talked about,” says David Nichols, founder of Canadian experiential marketing company Inventa.
“I think the key to any of this type of marketing is it’s got to be true to what it is. Create a promotion and say we’re going to name it the Coca- Cola vlog and how your life is with Coca- Cola. Here’s some pictures to show. It can build on the passion people have for brands and they want to share that passion,” Mr. Nichols said.
While vlog pioneers began posting their work a few years ago, it’s only recently the number of vloggers has started to swell, albeit on a small scale. The Yahoo video blogging group boasts approximately 1,200 members, while the Apple iTunes podcasting feature supports vlog subscriptions. This is small potatoes compared with the blogosphere where, according to Weblog search engine Technorati, there are more than 12.5 million blogs.
Yet, the disparity in numbers doesn’t extend to the nature of content. Like blogs, many vlogs consist of personal stories, contributed by the famous and the unknown, and in various levels of sophistication. Rocketboom.com, which posts a daily newscast of “top news stories to quirky Internet culture” provided, in part, by correspondents, is an example of one of the smoother vlogs.
Its founder, Andrew Baron, said it costs about US$25 to produce each three-minute daily installment, and believes there is real potential to make money from advertising.
“If we were to put a 15-second ad at the end of all of our shows, that would garner us a quarter of a million dollars annually,” Mr. Baron told a CBS reporter last month. “ That is sort of what the value is of our show right now,” he said.
Still, the ads have yet to appear.
Jay Aber, president of 24/7 Canada, which specializes in Internet advertising, said that blogging and vlogging share similar shortcomings in terms of their saleability to advertisers.
Both mediums are “ quite scary” to mainstream advertisers, said Mr. Aber, because there is no way to predict what the content might be from one moment to the next.
“It’s not like advertising in the National Post, where you can be sure what the content will be. It’s the wild wild west,” Mr. Aber said.
He said it’s difficult to achieve the required aggregate the advertisers are looking for, both in terms of a large enough audience and enough reliable blogs on which to place ads.
Having said that, Mr. Aber thinks blogs and vlogs could work for the right kind of customer — someone, for example, such as Virgin Mobile, a division of British businessman Richard Branson’s splashy conglomerate, which projects a cool, hip and edgy attitude.
At Inventa, which specializes in devising ways to encourage consumers to interact with brands, Mr. Nichols sees vlogging’s potential in enhancing marketing campaigns.
“ We have promotional teams and we encourage them to interact with the consumers. Say that they are travelling across the country and they have a great interaction with somebody in Winnipeg. If they want to continue the relationship, they could follow along the team’s vlog as they travel across the country,” Mr. Nichols said. “I think it’s a great way to extend the experience.”
Unlike text-based blogs, Mr. Nichols said the vlog message is easily transmittable, and since there are no language barriers, a vlog has currency around the world.
“ The barriers [to embracing vlogs] are to do what you know and what is safe. Traditional advertising is safe, and the experiencemarketing that people understand — and is what we do now — is perceived as a lot more safe,” Mr. Nichols said.
Added Mr. Aber, “For many Canadian advertisers, running a banner ad on a conventional Web site is risky, so I think the demand will be muted for the next little while, unless your product really caters to an edgier demographic.”
Financial Post
gsuhanic@ nationalpost. com