Bob Garfield, writing in his MediaPost Garfield at Large column, recounts his experience attempting to determine whether “expensively produced video ads fare better or worse online than unbranded user-generated videos harvested from the Internet and simply shared by brands.” User-generated videos did, in fact, perform best but that’s only a small piece of what Bob uncovered.
Working with a video-seeding consultant who, after a bidding process, selected Giant Media to seed 600,000 video views for Sovereign | Santander, Bob discovered some supposedly industry-standard practices he found a bit seedier than expected.
Granted, just about every segment of online marketing is rife with a certain percentage of less-than-altruistic business practices but when it is laid to bare like Bob has done here, it’s not so easy to turn a blind eye as we in this space often do.
Give his column a read. Is this just business as usual or are there nefarious practices that need to be brought to light and, ultimately, squashed?
