The Contest

AdRants reports CBS and AOL’s intentions of running a contest to limit the amount of DVR usage. In this scam creatively named ‘Gold Rush’ CBS will place clues throughout episodes, commercials, and AOL sites to give viewers a chance to win $2 million in gold.

This is a poor effort that will probably result in annoying product placements (an effort to appease advertisers) in shows to keep a dying advertising model afloat. The networks have proven a viable online model that should be fully embraced as a secondary revenue model to balance what is lost through DVR technology.

Now, is there a way to beat DVR? I don’t know it’s a tough one. We’re going to see a lot of product placement, and that just sucks. I really think the way to beat DVR is to move your primary broadcast medium to the net. Granted this is years out but the market that has bought into DVR as it has gone mainstream will be the same market that adopts IPTV. There are far more creative ways to do advertising in an interactive medium.

And, now that Google has entered the video advertising arena they may have answered the prayers of big media by using an evidence based advertising model and applying it to video. Watch for partnerships like that of CBS and AOL right after AOL’s purchase of Lightningcast which ironically is a targeted video ad distribution model (Google copying?).

Mike Arrington doesn’t think this model will work. I agree and disagree. Google’s current implementation of this model will not work but it took them two years to fine tune the AdWords model into the giant that it is. So, I would say they are getting in on video advertising at the right time and just might have it tweaked to perfection by the time online broadcasting becomes a mainstream medium.

tags: google,media, sem, marketing, AdWords, tv

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