Right now, the two main ways newspapers get advertising video is to repackage a TV commercial or get a vendor such as Digital Media Communications to turn a print ad into something that is very video-like.
There may very well be a newspaper shop producing original advertiser video, but I don’t know about it.
Video is now very cheap to produce but the question is: who will shoot it for publishers? The newspapers (i.e., NY Times), for example, are training reporters to become pseudo-professional videographers. But you’re not going to ask the YP sales force to shoot commercials, notwithstanding the fact that YouTube and related sites have conditioned people to tolerate “production values� that fall below agency/Hollywood standards. (bold added)
Why not? Why couldn’t an ad rep walk into an advertisers store with a point-and-shoot and get a few shots, return to an advertising artist who would edit the clips and create the online commercial?
At this stage, most small business owners would LOVE to have a video commercial on the web, even if it wasn’t as slick as an ad agency might produce. It’s called coming in at the low end. It’s called disruption.
Amen.
We’re finding advertisers love video no matter what it is. Our most popular video ads are YouTubes of TV reports about the company that the client posts and we repurpose into a 300×250 banner.
And as soon as we get some more cash in hand, everyone in our shop, including our ad rep, gets a handicam.
But for higher end stuff, there are some cool ideas I’ve seen for a network of pro-am videographers from people smart enough to execute it.
Spotrunner is doing this for TV. Advertisers go to their web site, pick a template and customize it. Then Spotrunner buys cable TV air time for the ad. It eliminates the ad agency. It’s not perfect – the ads are somewhat generic – but it’s far cheaper and more efficient than the legacy system. I don’t see why Spotrunner (or some other clever entrepreneur) couldn’t do this for web video. Hmmmm…