The growing appetite for online video, especially in younger generations, provides an opportunity for marketers concerned by the declining efficacy of advertising in television, radio and print media.  

The takeaway in this post is not legal, it's creative. Marketers who populate their online space with re-purposed or adapted television advertising won't get far for too long. Those who instead hire real talent to go where others have not gone will grow with today's audiences as they mature.

Keep it real

The message is - marketers should get hip, get wise, get wired and connect with their audiences. Stop the guff, keep it real, keep it real. Want a referral for Internet talent to keep it real? Talk to us. 

Take the crowd I expect are the biggest users of YouTube and online video - people under 30 years of age. Since the 1950s we've seen time and again how much profit is made by training younger generations to be consumers, and to remain hooked as they mature.

When the teenager was invented in the 1950s the term was hyphenated ("teen-ager") due to its recent coinage. They consumed music, lots of it. They still consume music, but now they call it music video. And they've taken video online and mobile, with devices such as the illustrated gizmos 1 and 2 released in the United States. Their children are a video and digital device generation, using both younger than ever. 

Even with not so original or engaging content, marketers have the chance, while Internet video advertising is young, to cut through rising levels of advertising noise and reach customers addicted to their screens - anywhere, anytime, any screen.

But why waste the real opportunity? It's time to use real talent, and cut some slack for creative digirati spirits.

Two additional lessons are evident from the history of media in the last century.

First, outmoded styles of expression will die, just like vaudeville, silent movies, concept albums, multimedia on CD-ROMs, and plain text enewsletters. That's why re-purposed or adapted TV commercials are such a bore online.

It's time for wired marketers to hire really creative video, image, graphic design, multimedia and software talent. Talk to us, we know quite a few or we know clients or contacts who'll find them for you.

Fragmentation and disintermediation, not displacement 

Second, there will be market fragmentation (ie media and advertising market segmentation). Media fragments, old media is not just simply displaced by new media. This adds complexity to content and marketing plans.

Fragmentation and disintermediation are part of the same phenomenon. Fragmentation will increase, as will its complexity. There's evidence of this even within the Web 2.0 online services market.

The Web 2.0 niche software services and social networking market of two years ago is centre stage, now ever-expanding, and at the same time cannibalising and reinventing itself. Sounds contradictory? Well, it's not. It's fragmentation and disintermediation at work.

If you need more detailed explanations on how to make video and the Internet work for you, hire people who will both explain the developments, and help you play the field. See also the further viewing and reading list at the end of this post.

While there is opportunity, a role for talent and a need for creativity, you won't get far if you do not plan to defend your space against:

• the advertising explosion; 
• market fragmentation and disintermediation;
• proliferation in new product launches, new brands, new channels, new touch points etc.

Where is law in all this? While it will play catch up, as discussed in our last post (Internet video advertising statistics and law) there's no legal revolution out there. However, laws relevant to use of the Internet are evolving at an astonishing pace (just look at what Google is doing to copyright laws worldwide) so there's no substitute for remaining alert and ensuring legal compliance.

Internet video - and related empowering information, technology and communications facilities and devices - can help a company's product rocket to the top, and dive just as fast, in the event of online illegality.

Follow the 80/20 rule - secure talent and focus on the big creative, market and technology story 20%. They will create tomorrow.

Noric Dilanchian is a former president of AIMIA - http://www.aimia.com.au/ and helped it in the mid-1990s to become Australia's national industry association for e-commerce, internet, and interactive media developers.

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Further viewing and reading list 

• Barry Diller on the Media pointed to in Lightbulb's Barry Diller on media and corporate governance. In the first part of this interview Diller says that professionally produced content will own tomorrow.

• PC World  |  September 2006 pages 104-114, Video Everywhere, article by Jim Feeley.

• Television versus online video: Viacom to YouTube: "I want my MTV"  |   YouTube's IP revenue sharing model  |  YouTube in copyright licensing negotiations.