by Jaffer Ali, CEO of Vidsense-
I must admit that anyone reading Part 1 of The Way Out For Publishers, would be hard-pressed to find therein a prescription for what ails us. That's because I felt it necessary to first triage the patient, who it turns out is much sicker than we thought. The results indicate the need for a radical yet simple restructuring of the media ecosystem.
For publishers, it means admitting the truth behind what the miserable click thru rates suggest: Advertising is no longer a viable intermediary. What does this actually mean?
It means that advertising is no longer a welcome and trusted middleman between audience and advertiser. Click rates of less than .1% illustrate a total breakdown of this essential engagement process. The advertising model is broken. Advertising cannot deliver the message when it is being ignored in every medium.
Advertisements have been the carrier wave for the message. Online advertising has seen the decline of banner click thru rates from 5% in 1998 to the miserable .1%. So if advertising cannot deliver the message, advertising must become the destination.
Once we admit the model is broken, we can move to a solution. Simply put, PUBLISHERS NEED TO USE THEIR CONTENT TO DELIVER THE AUDIENCE TO ADVERTISERS. I use bold type here for a reason, and I repeat: PUBLISHERS NEED TO BUNDLE CONTENT WITH VISITOR AND DELIVER BOTH TO THE PAYING ADVERTISER.
For example, imagine a Sports Illustrated cover story on Tiger Woods. Now further imagine that when you visited SI.com there was a headline for the story, a brief paragraph about it, and a link, which when clicked on, sent you to a special landing page on Nike.com where you could view the chosen article in its entirety.
You have just bundled the content AND the visitor to Nike. And Nike will pay on a per-click or per-visitor basis for that content AND the visitor. Content + Visitor to the Brand website = SUCCESS.
Publishers need to view content as a means to an end, and not as the end itself. As has become painfully apparent, content for content's sake has no dollar value. It only assumes business dimension if and when it drives traffic to a paying advertiser. This diversion of your own traffic may seem counter intuitive, but ask any brand if they will pay more for content IF THE VISITOR IS ALSO ATTACHED? Of course they will!
Publishers need to appreciate that they are in the advertising business, not the entertainment business, and that the audience doesn't care where they consume content as long as they get what they want. In fact, they prefer sites with less ad clutter (See Google and DrudgeReport.com for an idea of minimal ad clutter).
Of course publishers cannot effectuate this change without the active support of brands and advertisers. For brands, this means understanding that their online futures will be better served by challenging the popular albeit false assumption of advertising as intermediary and by re-positioning themselves instead as welcoming destinations.
It means that marketers and brands must view their websites as the real nexus of engagement. Once they do, the rest is easy
Is this a huge leap of faith? Absolutely not!
This is the way it used to work and the way it still can work today. P&G's soap operas, Hallmark Theater, Texaco Theater, Geritol’s Ted Mack Amateur Hour, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom...trusted names all that understood the value of brand as destination.
Some brands are already nibbling at the edges of this renaissance in theory and practice. Coca Cola has built numerous microsites to engage audiences. Lexus uses webisodes that engage the audience and drive traffic to their site.
I understand this road is not without pot holes. But utilizing quality content as the mechanism to drive engagement has ALWAYS worked, and will work again. The economic equation for bundling the visitor PLUS the content portends a clean bill of health for the entire media ecosystem.
Publishers seeking to control the branding process on their own sites have a losing hand. Advertisers who have bought into this failed model have faired no better and are missing real opportunities. Engagement should rightly occur -- and reasonably can only succeed -- within the exclusive, controlled environment of a brand's own website.
If any publisher or advertiser wants to discuss this further, feel free to email me at j.ali@vidsense.com or give me a call. We can create our own future together.
Jaffer Ali is CEO of Vidsense, The Video Snack Network. With more than 100,000 advertiser-friendly video clips licensed from major film and TV studios, the Vidsense Video Snack Network of more than 50,000 safe-for-work websites delivers millions of qualified visitors directly to advertiser websites on a pure Pay-Per-Visitor (PPV) basis.
