Yesterday I was at the really enjoyable Online Video Monetisation Summit hosted by Brightcove UK. I felt the speakers really brought entertaining thought leadership, examples and expertise to the podium. The packed room was thoroughly engaged for the entire event and some really great questions were asked.
The takeaways for me from the event are generally thematic but incredibly insightful:
- UK online video advertising spend is relatively low at £30M compared to the 4Billion odd streams consumed over the course of last year. Obviously something isn't quite connected yet.
- The market is fundamentally fragmented which means, argues Konrad Feldman from QuantCast, traditional panel based measurement won't work and needs to be restructured for the Internet. Mediacom echoed this as the main challenge for Media Buyers. There is too much "Buying on Faith" and not enough hard demographic data to encourage an opening of the floodgates.
- Tim Hussain from Sky Digitial hit the nail when he passionately urged members to remember that this industry is still in its toddler years. At only 5 years old we still need to build maturity and formality into the system.
- Both Chris Gorell Barnes, from Adjust Your Set, and Rhys McLachlan, from Mediacom, focused on how content is king (albeit they did so from different angles). AYS argues that in the interactive age of the Internet passive prerolls won't cut it. Branded content is the next revolutionary step - combine the story with the brand As Seen at M&S TV. Mediacom echoed this theme by reminding everyone that in the Internet users are spoilt for choice and freedom of selection (it's the "most data rich platform ever"). In the infinite channels landscape content needs to stand on its own and thus the story in the content, the emotive hook to draw the user in, is key to any success.
- And to close it off, Jeff Whatcott, of Brightcove, did a sanity check for the audience. He underlined how important it is for a company / video-based business to know where they are on the maturity curve in this industry. With relative positioning a monetisation growth path becomes much easier.
All in the all the event was a massive success and big thank you goes out to our Live Streaming Production partner Jackshoot who produced a seamless and beautiful stream for the entire event.
We have a recording of the event and will be making it public soon - just want to get some post production done first. Something tells me that we'll be doing more of these ;)
Also anyone looking to leverage the QuantCast and Brightcove integration, it's a piece of cake with step by step instructions here: http://developer.brightcove.com/en/articles/quantcast-analytics-module
-- Cameron Church