Video On Demand Boggles Some, Not Adrants

At the AAAA's Conference in New Orleans this week, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts discussed his company's adoption and rollout of video on demand and how that will enable both Comcast and advertisers to serve the specific needs of individuals. During his speech, Roberts announced a partnership with Rentrak Corp. which will yeild monthly VOD metrics including counts for VOD-enabled boxes per market, views per month, unique box views per month and total monthly minutes viewed.

Discussion from the panel netted little additional insight into the understanding of VOD's potential for sustaining an advertising model.

To us, it's simple. VOD will simply be a video version of the Internet's point and click navigation scheme. Watch a program, see something of interest, click on it, show pauses, shifts to video of item of interest and so on. Product placement won't have to be so blatant. If a viewer likes what an actor is wearing, driving, eating, touching, etc., click on it and get more info about it. In fact, marketers won't pay for the actual product placement but, rather, pay for the link to the screen/video that contains more info on the item.

Of course, marketers will still engage in product placement efforts so that their product appears and can be clicked on. It's not a perfect model and we know you'll shoot holes right through it but we think it has potential.