Nice Try, Google
Posted: July 1st, 2008 | Author: Maha Rafi Atal | Filed under: Business, Technology, Video | Tags: branding, Dove, Google, viral marketing | 2 Comments »Google thinks they’ve struck gold with a new scheme to monetize online video. They’ve hired Family Guy’s Seth McFarlane to produce some short (1-2 minute) webisodes of a new series to run on their AdSense network. Advertisers can run their schtick in the intro to each episode.
Tapping the Family Guy viewers is a good call, and going for short videos, rather than TV-show length episodes, makes sense for the web audience, used to two paragraph blog posts and 140 word tweets. But as an ad project, this will fail. Within weeks, I predict, viewers will be downloading the webisodes, stripping out the ad portion and uploading them to YouTube!, just like they do with ordinary TV shows today. In fact, the best web-video ad-ventures involve putting adverts onto YouTube! as content, a la Dove Evolution.
Not sure if every brand can opt for that approach, but I’ve yet to see another feasible pathway.
Of course, given that Google owns YouTube…
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