Every good idea on the Internet spawns a gaggle of imitators — although the imitators typically claim they are not. But as video and online video advertising becomes increasingly mainstreamed (from the verb “to mainstream”), the Spot Runner clones are coming.
Spotzer was the first and most visible. Now MarketingVox reports on Pick-n-Click from Omnicom (which goes well beyond video). And somebody recently pointed out to me Video Ad Factory. There are others now out there as well. (Conduct a search for “Spot Runner” on Google and you unearth them.)
As video becomes cheaper and easier to shoot and obtain it becomes a near commodity, but not totally. Spot Runner has shown the way for these other businesses that follow. And as the Internet becomes a “dashboard” for all media buying we’ll similarly see more “commiditization” other ad inventory.
Yet doing anything effectively still requires human experience, relationships and expertise. This is the scuttlebutt and the the apparent lesson that Google is learning with the reported problems regarding dMarc and its radio efforts.
In these shifts and changes, costs may come down and some jobs may be eliminated by more efficient platforms but humans will be central to ad creative and media buying for a long time to come.
These video buying/ad creation services also help to bring a wider range of advertisers into the medium (i.e., SMBs) than might otherwise be the case. That was Spot Runner’s original ambition.
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Related: Check out Spot Runner’s Reach Local proxy site with tracking phone number (compare direct navigation), which appeared in Google as I searched for the site to grab the URL.
April 9, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Greg,
Commiditization ad inventory along will not make video advertising become “mainstreamed”. At VideoAd Factory, we are trying to make the local online video advertsing adoption process alittle easier for the SMB segment.
April 10, 2007 at 4:44 am
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