Ad-Tech London Report
Today SEO Tutorials attended the Ad-Tech London event at Olympia. Unfortunately, we were only able to attend for the afternoon sessions, and will not be able to make it to tomorrow’s seminars, but it was still worth the trip.
One interesting seminar that we did manage to attend was the “Video advertising killed the TV star” presented by Russell Berry, Business Development Manager for Eyeblaster.
Eyeblaster provide rich media ad technology and allow advertising professionals to create, manage and measure cutting edge campaigns.
Russell’s talk was basically going over video ad campaigns Eyeblaster had run in the past, and how TV adverts had been reused in innovative ways to encourage user interaction. This interaction, said Russell, is very important, as the internet is a dynamic and interactive thing, and simply showing the same adverts that are shown on television, without any other thought or modification, seems to miss the point of the internet.
The clips that Russell showed the audience included a video for The Apprentice, where the viewer is given a number of shots of a car, and they build the advert by choosing what shots to play, and in what order. This was very interesting, as just seeing the finished video ad would not be that enticing, but putting the viewer into the director’s chair means they think more about what the finished product is.
Other interesting ideas they did with video advertising included a King Kong advert which could go full-screen; a Mr Bean ad where the character is cut out and placed over the website, and knocks on the glass of the screen; and an advert for a Johnny Vegas television show, where the ad expanded into an entire mini-site which users can visit without leaving the original web page.
It was interesting to see what the future for video advertising could be, and how it differs from what we are used to seeing on television, where there is no interaction.
Key points to take away from the seminar were:
- Video must complement the brand - people will associate the quality, originality and style of the creative with the brand, so make sure it fits
- The video itself must be high quality - a low resolution, shaky, blurred, pixelated video will do more harm than good to the brand
- Bandwidth targeting for users - the bandwidth users have varies, so make sure you can target them all accurately - this means that some users will be able to recieve high quality wmv files, where some will be able to get Flash, or other types
Here are a couple of photos we took on my phone during the conference:
