No one was really questioning Glam’s desire to brand their remnant ad network as the premium online channel/category for reaching women online offering access to important demo with the reach only networks can provide.  What everyone was wondering was when the house of cards would collapse – you just can’t pay $3 for what everyone else was buying for $.25.  Publishers (and I know a half dozen personally) were all waiting for the house to fall and Friday it did.

It’s hard to turn something that the market values at $.25 into something someone wants at $3.  Glam has been trying and seems to have hit the same wall that publishers hit when selling direct – for whatever reason high quality sites with a decent brand and strong community often can sell 30% of their inventory at premium (essentially retail) rates and leaving the rest as remnant (wholesale rates).   Glam’s publishers had it good for awhile, but as they say if it sounds to good to be true in the end it often is.

Having worked in the online and keyword based advertising for a number of years, this issue has its roots a long way back.  From stories that I have been told, this dates back to what can only be best described as a holy war between Whenu  and 1-800-Contacts.  The story goes like this (and having told it to be people familiar with the Utah lobbying scene and online internet advertising law-making no one has ever thought it to be untrue so I tend to believe their must be a seed of truth to the story).  1-800-contacts sued Whenu for KW targeting ads against 1-800-contacts web site.  Unable to win in court, 1-800-contacts, a Utah based company, pleaded its case to the Utah legislature with a large amount (all legal) of donations to the Utah legislature.  This lagresse resulted in an anti-Whenu bill effectively banning Whenu’s targeted ads being shown to Utah users.  Unfortunately based on the dollars and sob story of how 1-800-contacts business was being ruined by Whenu, they also got Utah to ban KW based targeted ads in the same bill (collateral damage).  Fortunately, 1-800-contacts ability to buy legislation has its limits as the bill was ultimately overturned in federal courts.

And not having learned it’s lesson the first time,  Utah is back again trying to save the world from KW advertising with a its most recent legislative volley.  It will be interesting to see when Utah’s legislature finally wakes up from the trance of its business backers to realize the folly they have been lead on.  If Utah was being considered for a Google server-plex anytime soon, I have to imagine this killed any of those thoughts.

Update: ClickZ does a little investigation into the motives of this law and seems to corroborate my story about Whenu and 1-800-contacts.  Amazing how easy it is to buy a law if you were to believe the story.

David was looking at the space and wanted my take on it as venture play.  Thinking about it for a second (and I have experience in cable tv and in online video – going back to the earliest, earliest days of that market thanks to my experience co-founding SimplyTV.net) – my answer was video marketing seriously lacks an addressable market.  Video advertising beyond the core (ie. local car dealers, mortgage companies, political campaigns and humongous CPG companies) is a long, long way from crossing the chasm to becoming a mass market phenomenom.

The problem with video is that so few marketers have any experience using it.  They don’t know how it works, how to produce it, how to judge it, how to report on it, or how to buy it.  Seriously how many companies have ever used video advertising in this country? 10,000 maybe?  How many use it regularly? Less then 1,000 more likely.  Therefore no matter how easy someone like Spot Runner makes it – it isn’t anything any substantial number of marketers have any comfort with.  And that’s hugely important – when 250,000 marketers are familiar with search marketing and are comfortable using it and millions more with yellow pages advertising.  The last thing most people have the time and energy is to learn something new.  Seriously how many people over the age of 25 have ever even edited a home movie?

Now that last comment raises a key point because the under-25 set is the YouTube generation.  They are being raised in era of ever cheaper camcorders and camera phones with video capabilities.  They are being raised learning and thus knowing how to express themselves using video.  So in 10 years when they start their marketing careers they will be looking to use video because they know how to communicate and judge video.  Then you’ll be looking at a market that might truly be interesting for spot runner, et al.  But tjhat’s a decade from now and as I wrote the other day – being early is good as being wrong.