Mobile Video Advertising
The Marriage of Showyou and OMD
Showyou, a video viewing app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, recently announced a partnership with the marketing and communications agency OMD and six of the brands it represents: Levis, Showtime, Mountain Dew, Monster, and Brooks running shoes. Showyou will be making these brands’ video advertising an “organic part of the Showyou experience” for three months.
This could have significant ramifications for mobile advertising. If successful, it could give marketers something they have long been hankering for: an effective, unobtrusive type of mobile video advertising.
As Michael Carney points out—with appropriately brutal honesty—“Mobile advertising is a joke…For all the promise of mobile devices extending Web browsing and content consumption to an anywhere, anytime experience, the inability of brands to effectively deliver their marketing messages is like an albatross hanging around the neck of the entire sector.” What Carney means is that advertisers haven’t quite unlocked the puzzle of how to craft engaging mobile video advertising
Seeking the Elixir of Viewer Engagement
OMD’s brands aren’t going to be simply displaying advertisements on Showyou. They are going to be trying something different.
Showyou released a statement about its alliance with OMD, saying that “With mobile apps — and in particular with video apps like ours — we felt there was an opportunity to re-make interactive advertising into something more effective, more fun, more useful. Into something better for brands and advertisers and people who use our service. Where…ads aren’t a nuisance cost’ but instead benefit consumers.”
Each of the six OMD brands will have their video ads rotated on the main grid of the Showyou app. Of the 15 videos that will appear on the app’s main screen, one or two will be paid advertisements from these six brands. These videos will look just like the other videos displayed on the app; viewers will be able to watch, share and comment on them with ease. Most importantly, the videos are going to be self-consciously unobtrusive. This is in keeping with Showyou’s aim to eliminate the “nuisance cost” of advertising.
A Different Approach to Mobile Advertising
What makes this approach different from other mobile advertising schemes is that, unlike pushy pre-roll ads and overlays, viewers will choose to click on and view the ads. They will not be required to watch them. This is a radically different approach, as OMD’s VP of business development Taz Patel is aware. Patel says that “In this environment, engaging with a brand is also a matter of choice, meaning that Showyou delivers a more relevant and meaningful connection with consumers.”
This emphasis on the freedom of the viewer to opt-in to the advertising they consume represents a novel way of looking at advertising. If the partnership between OMD and Showyou proves beneficial to the former, marketers will have finally unlocked the secret to engaging with consumers on mobile devices. And, in the future, they will be compelled to create video content that viewers will—of their own volition—watch.
Showyou’s founder and CEO, Mark Hall, is hoping for precisely this result. Hall says “We hope to push the industry forward and show how to properly do mobile advertising well. We think that treating brand content as a native, organic part of the app experience, rather than jamming a banner in, is best for brands and, more importantly, for our users.”
Of course, this assumes that viewers will actually watch the advertising content that Showyou posts. If viewers greet video ads on Showyou with apathy and indifference, marketers will be facing the same quandary that is currently bedeviling them. But if this effort succeeds or shows promise, it’s likely that we will see other video platforms and advertisers use it as a model for future approaches.