Web Video: behold the message, not the medium

We’ve been doing a lot of work on web video for our clients recently. Every project requires it these days, for obvious reasons: video is a more compelling (and intuitive) way for advertisers to get their message out. In other words, the same thing that’s interesting about television for advertisers is interesting about web video. It depicts the landscape, activity, sound, and emotion the way we naturally perceive it.

People have no problem sitting back and watching hours of programming on the web. Witness the sudden rise of Hulu over the past several months to become the number one online television viewing channel, already ahead of the TV network websites that have been broadcasting television and web video for years:

Great news for our business (more work!), but nothing new about this trend in general for anyone who’s spent hours combing YouTube for the latest cat trick clips. What is new is that there is a new player, a new streaming method, a new plugin, a new overlay format, a new subclipping feature, etc. every week it seems.

This may sound obvious, but I wonder whether any of these things really matters. At some point, web video technology and functionality will find some equilibrium point in terms of how it works, what it does, how ads are served. When that happens, these things need to become universal for web video to become a viable and self-sustaining advertising medium.

And when that happens, it’s the message that will count. I don’t remember what kind of television I was watching when I watched the most exciting hockey game ever – the USA-USSR Miracle on Ice at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980.

But I sure do remember watching it. Ditto with the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the Chinese protesters facing down tanks in Tienanmen Square, and 9/11 among countless other video experiences, including advertising. (Admit it: you choked up a bit too if you are old enough to have watched those AT&T phone home commercials).  At some point, we won’t remember whether we watched something on a flat-screen TV, a laptop, an iPhone, “Surface” table, or something else.  But our memory of the content will persist.

Web video is about the the message it conveys, not the way it does it. We’ll continue to obsess over the latest development technique or player, or format, but it’s the production value of the content that counts now and in the future. Someone, somewhere will remember that stupid cat video long after we forget about YouTube.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 12:26 pm . 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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