Re-Billboarding Online Videos Points to an Even More Dull Corporate Media Future

I guess that's the promise of the future: your very own little customized advertising sphere following you around through all of your online media travels. It already exists half-formed. Facebook's ads now are pretty much all tailored to my recent Google searches or Amazon purchases (with more supporting sources, surely), so far as I can tell. Also as far as I can tell, it seems pretty hopeless. I'm typically not so interested in being pitched the thing I've already searched for—or bought. So, my recent public browsing history is welcome to follow me around and, hey, it's a handy reminder that all of this data is being sold in the first place. We could all use that.

That sphere is reasonably translucent at this point in online advertising, but never doubt the desire of advertisers and internet mediators (like Facebook and Google) to make it entirely opaque. That is, every direction should hold some customized ad; not just the margins and interleavings of a Facebook page, but the very essence of content. A "suggested" post in a stream of discrete shared items is one thing, but the promise of the Mirriad ad platform is quite another. In case you missed it on the Colbert Report, the Mirriad scheme involves manipulating portions of music videos (and other vieo content), posted on Vevo or YouTube-via-Vevo, such that they include ads. These ads were not present in the original video and, what's more, they can be swapped in and out according to the whims of the participating platforms andor ad buyers.

Mirriad's COO, Ted Mico, boasted to Billboard that "contextual ads," ads that are part of an individual's own personal ad sphere, are just around the corner. "We're probably capable of doing it by the end of the year, nine months maybe," he said. I wouldn't doubt him.

In its own words, the essence of Mirriad: "MIRRIAD TRANSFORMS PREMIUM CONTENT INTO MEASURABLE INVENTORY AVAILABLE FOR SALE AS AD UNITS."

So, even the non-social media you consume is poised to become a kind of awkward mirror, as opportunities to peer outside the you-sphere disappear. It will be that certain variety of annoying for a while, the one where this sucks but not really enough to do something, and then, hopefully, uncanny: a purely corporate and accordingly monstrous version of oneself. Except really boring; I think the word is ennui.

The Billboard piece is expectedly stoked because, well, it's Billboard. The money woes of major labels are its woes. And if re-billboarding is an additional revenue stream for the music industry, it's one strictly for those major labels. Vevo, after all, is their creation and one of a comically small pool of things the music industry has gotten right (for itself) since being disemboweled by the internet.

It's reasonable to say that re-billboarding is a phenomenon bound to the upper reaches of video popularity and corporate rights ownership. The process of swapping in a new ad on an old video still takes a couple of days (a good sum of money, talentwise), which is already longer than a smart underground music video might have taken for its entire production. That said, I can't readily come up with lower limit on ad swapping turn-around times and can imagine it even becoming fairly automated in the future, with major label video productions building in ad-ready surfaces to ease the process.

So, figure on this ultimately being another channel for creative corruption, with corporate bosses handing down bonus ad requirements to directors/producers already squeezed by the manifold pressures of a big budget production. Look, I don't care if it's supposed to be underwater, the video needs more flatness. I have virtual billboards to sell!

Fortunately, I don't see an obvious way for this to trickle all the way down to the music video "real world" of no-budget creativity. Those videos, even those showing up on Vevo, remain in the control of their respective arists or indie labels. The whole re-billboarding concept would seem to rest on the site having the full rights to the manipulated video (which must also force some awkward arrangements with directors, who are are now required to deliver an "unfinished" product). Regular preroll ads (the ones the viewer has to watch to get to the actual content) don't depend on copyright ownership, and the general Vevo arrangement is to split the revenue from those ads with the actual owners.

All that's to say is, insofar as re-billboarding is adding money to to the music industry, that money is flowing 100 percent to the top. The bottom and middle and upper-middle are left to keep hoarding Spotify pennies and door splits. Nothing changes, but for the viewer, it's the promise of another sharp of mirror lining the inside of their increasingly boring content sphere.