For years,
Still, the search giant has made no secret of its desire to take a much bigger piece of the entire advertising pie, even from television. That means appealing not just to direct marketers that are the main search advertisers but to brand marketers that want to do image advertising to influence people whenever and wherever they might want to buy something. And that means, more than anything else, video ads.
Today, Google announced a new program called Partner Select intended to make it much easier for advertisers to automate the process of placing video ads not just on YouTube but on "select" but so far unspecified websites investing in "top-quality video." What kind of websites? Google didn't say but gave a clue by providing a quote by a Time Inc. video executive. YouTube began offering a similar program called Google Preferred earlier this year, allowing advertisers to place ads just on the top 5 percent of content producers, but the new program expands that to the rest of the Web, or at least a select part of it.
In addition, Google announced a way for advertisers to reserve ad space in advance through the DoubleClick system: "This new option is meant to help streamline what today can be a cumbersome process, involving days of back-and-forth negotiations, dozens of phone calls and sometimes, yes, a fax machine," Neal Mohan, Google's VP of display and video advertising products (the latter, not coincidentally, a recent addition to his title), wrote in a blog post today. "We hope brands and publishers will be able to spend less time on logistics and more time building partnerships and winning creative and content."
Mohan said the programs are intended to allow brand advertisers to buy online video ads at a much larger scale than they can easily do today, a process known in display advertising as programmatic. "It's no wonder that video is really becoming the dominant form of content consumption," he said at an annual customer event webcast today held by Google's DoubleClick display-ad operation in Scottsdale, Ariz. Online, he said, interaction is joining the classic sight, sound and motion of TV video. "The elements are there to make online video a brand marketing channel, one that uses a format advertisers have been familiar with for the past 60 years."
Josh Jacobs, global CEO of Accuen, ad giant Omnicom Media Group's online ad trading desk, said at the event that the big brand marketers that are OMG's clients today use television to engage with audiences, but he contends they can do that better online, especially to reach younger audiences. "At OMG, our clients are moving more and more of their spend to digital, and it's becoming more and more programmatic," he said. "So we need to bring the content together with programmatic to offer a true alternative to television."
It must be said that it's not clear how popular the video ad exchange might be. Mike Shields at the Wall Street Journal talked to a number of ad folks who aren't so sure about it. Plus, it's hardly alone, with
In addition, Google announced a way for advertisers to reserve ad space in advance through the DoubleClick system: "This new option is meant to help streamline what today can be a cumbersome process, involving days of back-and-forth negotiations, dozens of phone calls and sometimes, yes, a fax machine," Mohan wrote. "We hope brands and publishers will be able to spend less time on logistics and more time building partnerships and winning creative and content."
He believes that unlike on television, separate ads that run before videos aren't the big opportunity, even though they're still the main video ad revenue generator today on YouTube and other sites. "Integrated advertising where you become part of the story," he said. For instance, he pointed to race car driver Jeff Gordon and Pepsi's "Test Drive" ads, which had a form of entertainment built into them. (You can view one of them here.) Awesomeness TV, he said, is starting to do that.
You can watch the full 75-minute DoubleClick webcast here:
