Online video considered very valuable for marketing, video search still difficult

In a report / interview eMarketer published today, it becomes clear that online video search is still a difficult area for marketers. The problem lies in the fact that it is still hard for video publishers and online video sites as YouTube to determine the content of a video accurately. Automatic systems such as speech-to-text work, so far, only well on videos with captioned text such as the news. The news is not considered particularly good content to target advertise with, since it is hard to target people based on the news content.

Content recognition of videos still has a long way to go before videos can be automatically tagged for advertisements. This is why Google is offering a good deal to the publishers on YouTube: in the near future they expect the publishers to help Google select the right advertisement for their content manually.

In the mean time, advertisers realize that online video ads can be a very valuable medium for their campaigns:

For a medium that has still to prove itself on the major networks (video ads have so far been mostly available on peer-to-peer video sharing sites), marketers have a lot of faith in video advertising.

Clipblast! CEO Gary Baker says on eMarketer that video recognition is evolving, but it will still take about a year to tag the news live. Until video publisher sites can define the content of its videos automatically and immediately, we think it is better for advertisers to select and check the content they advertise on, or deal with trusted publishers that selects the content to advertise on, manually.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Video Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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