Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with John SanGiovanni, Co-Founder and VP of Product Design at Zumobi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you see the evolution of video in that context? I agree with you about what you said about long form content – reading an article while at a doctor’s office makes a lot of sense. But presumably there is also a video element to this, right?

John SanGiovanni: Totally. Video in our mind takes a few different stages. We do a lot of video advertising inside the brand experience. We are always trying to think about how to present the content in a way that is respectful to the user and organic to the presentation. Most people, when they think about video on mobile, think of it as a 15-second pre-roll before a piece of video content. That feels more disruptive than organic to the content. It just feels like the way we would have done it three years ago. We have done a major campaign with Boeing, where they wanted to create compelling content about their manufacturing processes and sustainable engineering techniques. They created long-form videos about their manufacturing process. We then blended that content in and presented it to their audience. Once users drilled into the Boeing brand experience, they were wrapped up in lots of great long-form video content.

The key distinction here is that we typically request our brand partners to give us longer form content. There was a time where everybody was talking 15-second pre-rolls. I think that is the wrong direction for video on mobile. In brand advertising, the opportunity is to really tell a story and provide longer form content. We are running a campaign right now with Lincoln, where they have different artists re-imagining other artists’ work. We have a seven-minute video of a re-imagining of David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision.” You can watch the seven-minute-long vignette inside the brand experience, which is really cool.

SM: The 15-second pre-roll thing is because in TV advertising it is the duration of that video that drove the pricing structure, right?

JS: Yes.

SM: Is that also true in the kind of advertising we are moving towards or is it going to be more view-based? How is the pricing structure going to evolve?

JS: If the brand buys into our vision of these elegant and organic experiences, then the correct way to price it is by engagement – time inside the experience, not just click-through, but what are the different things the user is doing inside the app experience? The user spends 12 minutes inside an app, whether they are watching the video, engaging with social media, uploading photos or playing games, the brand doesn’t care, as long as it resonates with their current brand messaging and they are achieving engagement.

SM: How does the publisher charge for that?

JS: The publisher prices it as media. Right now these campaigns are typically charged as a very high CPM.

SM: If somebody clicks on a video, plays the video and spends 12 minutes on it, it is still counted as a high CPM engagement metric?

JS: Today, yes.

SM: What you are saying is that there are going to be more dimensions in terms of the tracking and engagement metrics? The duration of engagement in an app is going to be part of the pricing structure?

JS: In the future, yes. The challenges right now is that most of the media buys are not set up to be instrumented in that way. It is easier to buy and sell media as a CPM in 2013. But I will believe if we are successful in creating this new class of advertising – native mobile advertising that creates long-form experiences – there will be such an opportunity for us to think about clever, creative and performance oriented ways to measure engagement inside the app. The easiest one is time. It doesn’t matter what they are doing on the app, as long as they are spending a lot of time on it. But for native mobile advertising, there are all kinds of things you can put on the price sheet. You can put whether or not they have added a movie premiere to the calendar of their phone, or whether or not they have uploaded pictures of their car to your photo roll, etc. There are different ways to price that type of advertising. But we are still a couple of years away from there being enough scale for that to happen.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with John SanGiovanni, Co-Founder and VP of Product Design at Zumobi
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