This morning, I did my first ever moderation job (spoken on countless panels…this was the first time doing what I do for a living: asking questions), at the OMMA Hollywood conference.
Our panel came after the opening keynote speech by Albert Cheng, EVP, Digital Media, ABC Television Group, where he talked about among various things, importance of brands etc. Nothing fancy, but he gave us one good jumping point for our panel…his half-controversial statement that ” in ad-supported programming service, we would prefer not to allow [Yahoo and Google] to disintermediate our advertisers from our content.”
The portion from his speech: “Google and Yahoo sell advertising on the strength of their slicing and dicing the markets into tiny pieces and deliver targeted advertising to the right consumers. But without video, these ads could deliver information, but not the halo affect around it. That’s the reason why Yahoo and Google want to be players in broadband video programming. But it is very expensive to invest in content production, which is why they want to borrow ours instead of producing their own, and we have a slight problem with that. In ad-supported programming service, we would prefer not to allow them to disintermediate our advertisers from our content. I believe advertiser wrapped inside the entertainment medium is more effective than paid search in the long run.
You can download the audio of his speech here (17 min., 4 MB).
Anyway, after these statements from him, I put him a bit on the spot on our panel, and pitted him against Scott Moore, VP of Content Operations at Yahoo, also on our panel. Nothing much came out of it, but at least it was interesting. Others on our panel were Charlie Tillinghast, President & Publisher, MSNBC.com; Erik Flannigan, VP, Programming, AOL; Brian Grey, Senior VP, General Manager, FoxSports.com.
Unfortunately, I forgot to turn on my iPod for our panel, and don’t have much to report. All in all, it was a robust back and forth between all of the panelists is all I can say…if someone else writes up our panel (MediaPost people might, then I’ll link to that…I’ve also asked them for their official audio recording, if they can give us…I’ll post that if I get it.)
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