The Jury’s out on video Brand advertising and Brand Jury

Two weeks ago the UK Media Guardian had a little inset in their paper on the state of advertising. To sum up, advertising as we know is in massive flux, if not in crisis. I will write about this crisis next.

But this week Techcrunch talked about the imminent launch of Brand Jury. A website that hopes to solve some of the problems video advertisers currently face with the acendency of the internet, and audience control (The Groundswell).

Brand Jury tries to bring ads to the people for rating and feedback, before they are released or broadcast to the wider public. It’s about introducing so called social media into the video advertising production process.

Brand Jury’s Bill Nones says:

“By using Brand Jury, you can have a direct impact on how the ads that you are forced to watch in the future are presented to you.

You currently have two options – suffer through the ads you already see, or take great lengths to avoid them. We are presenting a third option — tell the advertisers how they can better reach you.

Advertising is a fact of life, and you can’t avoid it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a say in how it is executed. Just don’t expect advertisers to “lighten up” on their own accord.”

Well advertising is not quite in such a secure place as Bill will let us have. A lot of people are very good at avoiding ads, and in particular interruptive TV ads.

I have some more doubts about this service, doubts that were also voiced (more clearly) by some of the commentators on the Techcrunch post.

AliB – September 26th, 2008 at 2:17 pm PDT

I don’t think an ad’s effectiveness can be measured by what the consumer thinks of the “advert” itself.

For example, Headon’s ad is the most annoying ad and least attractive ad I have ever seen, but I never forgot it. On the other end, I have seen many advert’s that I loved, but afterwards I didnt even know what the brand name was, or what they were trying to sell.

And…

Sekhar Ravinutala – September 29th, 2008 at 8:50 am PDT

…. My point/opinion is that your site is more useful qualitatively (written feedback by viewers) than quantitatively (rating stats). Qualitative feedback is definitely useful because it usually brings up points the advertiser never thought of. I’ve presented my videos to audiences and have ALWAYS found discovered stuff like aspects that aren’t clear to them (i.e., where the audience don’t “get” the ad). If I were you, I’d be pushing that part more than the rating stats. It’s like having focus group screenings. The crowd-sourcing oriented quantitative voting feedback might work in businesses like Threadless, but not so much for ads IMO.

and…

Fatknuckle – September 28th, 2008 at 7:15 pm PDT

… The only problem with your assumption (and its quite a large one) is that people aren’t going to take the time to tell the content producer that an advertisement is “good” or “bad.” They simply will vote with their pocketbooks.

Not to mention if I am a content producer why would I use this as a defining measure of efficacy? Say I post something to brandjury, everyone tells me it sucks. Thats a response of small subset of a defined target base which may or may not be who I am going after for a client so it i inconsequential to me anyway.

So in effect it becomes useless from the user standpoint (I’m subjecting myself to ads without anything in return) and from a producer standpoint ( I am getting nothing but a simple emotional response from an undefined demographic.)

Now if there is a large user base in a variety of demographics and you have managed to find a unique data binding path between users/responses and content) then its a whole different animal and could be useful. But thats a pretty big if given even the gorillas haven’t been able to do particularily well (but the goog is certainly trying)

I dig the name though.