Today the Internet Advertising Bureau announced guidelines for rich media advertising. This industry association has a tremendous amount of credibility with the press and the market place - both buyers and sellers. The involvement of the industry is strong, too, so though it’s difficult to create standards that make everyone “happy,” the standards are instituted by all when they are ratified.

This quote, from a MediaPost article, by Jeff Lanctot perfectly expresses the value of ad standards:

Jeff Lanctot, senior vice president for global media at Avenue A | Razorfish, said the guidelines were an important step for the industry. “The more closely aligned publishers and ad servers are on operational standards, the more efficient digital channels will become for advertisers,” he said.

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I had a friend return from Phoenix yesterday very upset with her investor and his total disregard for their partnership agreement. In fact, she’d tried to get him to sign the agreement before production commenced on her video podcast. But the lure of private jet travel to an exotic location to film several episodes of her new show got in the way of finalizing her deal.

It seems she’d found someone to bankroll her podcast and before she could complete production on all of her shows, he pulled the plug. Beyond having an understanding of how they would  monetize said content in the digital domain, they had a huge disagreement on the rights and who owned them in this new digital domain. (He might even continue the show - her idea - with another host for all she knows.) Moreover, to make her deal even more complex her show was going to be marketed and potentially sold in television syndication, too. So perhaps that should have been a separate deal altogether, or should it have been?

That raises another interesting question. Who ultimately owns the rights to your show if a Network or Cable outfit wants to migrate your content from the Web to television? (As my partner Richard wrote about in his posting below, it may all be moot once Apple TV converges all content to one programming module.) But it is absolutely essential that if you have partners, that ownership is very clear from the get-go. It’s easy to understand the migration from TV or film to podcasting, but even then I’m sure we’ll start to see messy lawsuits once podcasts become more and more monetized by sponsors and/or ad sales.

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Being in the online advertising market for over 10 years, it is evident that there are a big changes happening. Last month at the most recent ad:tech in New York all the talk was around the need for ‘new’ online advertising products. Video on the web took center stage. In fact, the biggest elephant in the room was the horrid nature of pre-roll video in today’s web video content market. Everyone was just shrugging their shoulders, “Yeah we know it (pre-roll video) is ineffective and produces a poor user experience, but there is nothing else available”. This was the general sentiment among top advertisers and online media vendors such as Ogilvy, GM/Planworks, Fox, P&G, YouTube, NBC, etc.

New Models Coming

The public secret today in online advertising is that PPC based advertising is saturated. Banners are sliding into the land of irrelevance. As more and more online advertising dollars flood into the online sector, new advertising media will capture most of the revenue. What will the new advertising media be? It will be in the form of “Vertical Media” and “Social Media”. We are already seeing a flourish of vertical ad networks developing. Social networks are where the most exciting and relevant digital advertising solutions are developing. Social networks have unique micro-targeting capability and amazing behavioral measurement capability. The big question is, “What is the ad unit?” It’s targeted Microcontent. The growth in microtargeting networks is outpacing the inventory of Microcontent. There isn’t enough inventory of Microcontent ads. This is causing huge dissatisfaction among microtargeted community users who are jammed with irrelevant video ads.

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I first want to congratulate the winners of the elections! I think we have great board members and look forward many great things they will accomplish. I myself did not win the position I wanted on the advisory board. Am I disappointed? Yes a little. Do I plan on letting that be the end of my relationship with the ADM?
Hell No!!

I am in for the long haul.

I want to be part of the Association for Downloadable Media as it moves forward to do great things!

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Now that we’re formed and on the eve of announcing our election results, I’m eager to accelerate our visibility. We’ve been briefing press this week and I’m starting to find bloggers that I don’t personally know (;8) writing about the ADM.

Here’s a nice post from Mark at Mashable about the value of the ADM.

And here’s another post from BBDO, a major ad agency, saying there need to be standards for podcasting advertising. Obviously, they haven’t heard about us. (Yes, I posted our URL with my comment on the blog.)

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I have a confession to make, actually several…I don’t Twitter, I don’t watch television (except on planes), I don’t use Flickr, and I barely blog. Not the sort of electronic resume of someone who has been stuck in the gap between media and technology for 13 years. However, these qualities actually make me a part of another group that is important to everyone that works in the downloadable media (and every other form of media), the audience.

With the fundamental pillars of media and audience behavior shifting as they have never before, we are faced with a number of challenges and opportunities that we have never had to deal with all at once. Ten years ago, in 1997, we were all just getting a glimpse of what media could become. If you can imagine it, Tivo didn’t exist (unless you count it’s conceptual precursor; WebTV). The iPod wasn’t a part of our daily lives, even though there were MP3 players, the integrated experience we now know to be so critical was years away. “Must See TV,” was just that, a destination for most of the US television audience on Thursday night.

What a difference a decade can make…today, we control television on our schedule, not the other way around. Our entertainment finds us when it, and we, are ready. Advertising has begun to blend, out of necessity, the action and reaction that we caught a glimpse of in the early Internet, and the engagement that we traditionally associated with broadcast and cable television. Also, the notion of presence and mobile connections to our friends, peers, and coworkers have been forever changed by applications and networks that create a virtual deluge of information wherever we are.

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Integrity.

Most people gravitate to people with it. Something to be said about a person who you can trust. You know he or she has your back. You know you can call them the middle of the night to ease you out of a tight jam.

How about brand integrity?

Do you have a favorite brand that you know “has your back?”

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On Wednesday I had a discussion with my partners from Adlateral and German Über-Podcaster Alex Wunschel about the difficulties of monetizing German podcasts.

We quickly agreed that the size of the market (maybe just about a quarter of the US in reach) cannot be the reason. Advertising financed media works all around the globe no matter how big or small the market is, no matter if the market is defined by language, distribution, geography or any other parameter.
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The ADM is an organization formed to streamline revenue generation in the portable media space and one of the essential parts of selling advertising into content is the insertion order, typically referred to as the “IO.”

The big media companies extending their content into downloadable media have insertion orders and/or they get the IO’s from the agencies that book business with them. Any monetization of podcasts with the big media companies is probably being rolled into existing media buys that include online advertising.

For individual podcasters to have a seat at the table, they will need an IO template too.

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Many if not most understand the timeshifting benefits of podcasts and other downloadable media; you can listen to or watch your favorite programs where you want to, when you want to and on almost any device you can imagine. But perhaps no aspect of downloadable media is more striking than its complete disregard for borders.

Whether you are producing a fifteen minute personal podcast about the local music scene, or managing a major media house’s hourly news video podcast, you probably have an audience in dozens of countries worldwide. Since your show is not tethered to a terrestrial broadcast station or a cable operator’s network, it can be downloaded (almost) anywhere in the world… and probably has been. But that widespread distribution raises some interesting questions:

• Do you know where your audience is?
• Do your feeds actually work with the local aggregators and distributors worldwide?
• Do your advertisers and sponsors really want to reach all of your audience?

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