Commercial ad campaigns driven by what consumers are watching
A few weeks ago, I read an article about Pepsi giving Hulu a “blast from the past” (read here) with retro ads that are targeted at dated content which Hulu is streaming on their site. To us at Moogi, this advertising model is very interesting. But yet, why exactly would a brand as mature as Pepsi want to allocate such a significant portion of their marketing budget towards developing Ad campaigns customized for dated shows from the 70’s and 80’s? From our perspective, we believe that contextualizing video ads for television shows is the optimal way to reach audiences and more effectively monetize television shows.
The historically successful audience demographic based video advertising strategy that has worked for programmers targeting living room viewers, will not work on the internet. The internet is a completely new field. Both programmers and brands better be ready to play ball if they want to successfully score with consumers. (Sorry for the awful soccer analogy) This is definitely an instance where Pepsi’s maturity and lead should be followed. In our data business, it is indeed exciting to see a brand with street-cred recognize the value of looking at/into the actual show, the vehicle through which their brand is being sold, for inspiration to develop attractive ads that can successfully reach fans on the internet.
We strongly believe that every data point that can be aggregated from a show, organized and linked to that same show, the source of relevance, will inevitably create value for brands and their advertisers as they target consumers. In the case of Pepsi, a viewer is watching reruns of “Miami Vice” on TV, there’s no way to reach information relevant to the show – the funny pastel blazers, muscle cars, awesome 80’s tunes etc. Pepsi’s push for a context based advertising solution creates a way to connect audiences with the context under which the show exists – in this case, the time-period when the show was created. Moogi, similarly, is creating a platform to allow brands to leverage “context” in their objective to reach audiences, providing programmers and content distributors with a diversified solution to better leverage the web in order to more effectively monetize shows, and more importantly giving audiences the ability to look deeper into shows. Without this triangulation, brands contextualize, programmers monetize and audiences are gratified with info, replicating the traditional demographic based commercial placement model won’t work for the internet.
Has Hulu really figured out the optimal strategy for monetizing their ever-growing library of premium content – television, feature films, documentaries etc? Time will tell. However, they are slowly moving in the right direction. Google figured it out with search based ads. Programmers and content distributors alike will need to figure out the right solution. For now, it’s just great to see Pepsi taking the risk, to hopefully reap the reward of successfully reaching audiences through a context based video ad solution. When the rest of the industry starts to realize the value and step forward to make a change, Moogi will be there supplying the necessary data to help facilitate the transition.
