Seat at the Table

As I sit here and analyze a client’s video content on third party entertainment sites, it seems that web video is accelerating the shift away from pushing people to branded online destinations is over.  With Web video, the era of distributed branded material may have truly arrived as we focus more on driving branded content like Web video to existing online communities. 

This is more of a shift of focus than a switch.  Since the Web exploded, communications professionals – from PR to advertising – have been focused on driving to traffic to destinations.  This was true whether it was for informational purposes (such as in PR or branding programs) or for sales.   This is like focusing marketing on getting people to go to a store just to learn about the product instead of teaching them through the magazines they read and the TV shows they watch.  It can be a lot of effort for relatively little return. 

Now efforts are shifting to distributing branded or messaging carrying content.  The focus is moving to getting information to all the appropriate places where consumers congregate.  Go where the consumers are, put information in the context that they, and the community in which they congregate, naturally appreciate. 

The three main drivers of this shift – social networking, Web video video and personal portals like Netvibes of My Yahoo that are driven by RSS feed – have gained an enormous amount of momentum the last few years.  However, marketers have only experimented with these sites and remained focus on driving traffic to proprietary sites. 

Ad budgets will focus on driving traffic to third part sites.  We already see micro-versions of this with Facebook ads driving users to branded Facebook pages.  Next we might see a Yahoo based ad driving a user to a branded video channel on Heavy.com or section of Dailymotion (disclosure: a client).

But a careful balance will have to be sought.  Advertisers will still want to capture that traffic and not simply invest to build up traffic to someone else site.  I would not be surprised to see some third party sites make it easier for advertisers to register users on those sites.