The online video streamers, including YouTube, Yahoo!, Hulu, AOL and Vevo, are back with their David vs. Goliath act, hoping to siphon off a bit more of the $70 billion Madison Avenue spends on TV programming.
This year new media are wheeling out star entertainers to build respect. For example:
* Snoop Dogg will be DJ’ing at a party for Maker, a network that groups popular YouTube creators and sells them to advertisers.
* Digitas, the ad agency coordinating events, is drafting comedian Steve Martin and singer-songwriter Edie Brickell for a marketer discussion.
* Yahoo! chief Marissa Mayer, meanwhile, has hired The Lumineers to help sell a new package of SNL clips.
“No one has the silver bullet,” said Shelby Saville, managing director of Spark in Chicago. “No one has the prime-time hit like broadcast, but everybody’s making big investments.”
The star power runs into Madison Avenue skepticism. Ad buyers attending the so-called new fronts, a combination of new media and up fronts, the annual attempt by TV executives to grab advertising guarantees, which starts in two weeks, have been slow to be convinced that streaming content will deliver the same bang for its TV-buying buck.
In fact, some buyers are griping that a sizable percentage of all that was shown at last year’s first new fronts didn’t materialize.
TV ad dollars dwarf digital video ad spending, but the growth of the digital side can’t be ignored. According to eMarketer, TV ad dollars are expected to rise just over 3 percent in 2014 to $68.54 billion, while digital video is poised to leap 39 percent, to $5.75 billion.