We know online video consumption is continuing to grow on platforms like social media; but how is this going to change the industry? A highly distinguished panel sat down on the last day of Advertising Week to discuss the new trend. The panel consisted of Helen Lin the President of Digital Investment & Partnerships at Publicis Media Exchange, Jason Blanck the Director of Partnerships at Hearst Digital Media, Lou Paskalis the Senior Vice President of Enterprise Media Planning in Investment and Measurement at Bank of America, Ben Smith the Editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed and Matt Derella the Global Vice President in Client Solutions at Twitter.
To start the conversation off, Twitter and Buzzfeed showed their partnership and how they are adapting to the recent trend. With this new relationship, they are bringing live morning videos hosted by Buzzfeed to Twitter. They are starting this initiative to create conversations beyond words on Twitter.
“It’s the most exciting time in my career to be a marketer,” said Paskalis. He says that online videos create a sort of organic connection between the brand and the consumer. When thinking about the conversations you have in every day, they are in real time. Real time conversations equate to authenticity. Brands have always strived towards conveying authenticity to their consumers. Online videos are just the new way to do this.
From months to moments, publishers are just moving their content to short, digestible bits. However, the quality of the writing must stay the same. The challenge with this is making sure that the content is relevant and making sure it’s translating to love for the brand. The way to do this is through data and AI. This is the way to make sure it’s content that your consumers and clients want.
Aligning with the marketer is extremely important to make sure that the data and the content aligns. To work together, marketers need to share the results of the data to the creatives. This is because the marketers don’t have the resources to be creative and the creatives don’t have the resources to collect data like marketers can.
However, with marketers and advertisers producing videos, this creates competition with networks. “Networks are going to have to cater to the platform,” said Lin. “If they don’t evolve they aren’t going to win.” However, networks still have advantages like machines to produce ultra-content. But, advertisers have the consumer’s engagement.
The session wrapped up with the panel’s outlook into the future. Blanck says that publishers need to make a massive shift towards videos and AI needs to play a much larger role in producing quality content. Paskalis believes that audio is going explode.
Whether it’s video or audio, marketers and advertisers need to work together to make sure that quality of the content continues to get better and better regardless of the platform that it’s on.