Larry Kless,
Email Interview
with Chris Grayson

What's your background?

By profession, I am an Art Director/Creative Director who lives and works in New York City.

I moved here in the mid-90s to get involved in the burgeoning internet world. I got my first break in 1995, while working in the in-house design department at Morgan Stanley. I won a competition to design the company's first intranet for Morgan Stanley Trading. With this one piece of online work in my portfolio I then got work on the IBM account at Touchscreen Media Group— an early boutique web-shop started by a former IBM employee that acted as the interactive partner to Wells Rich Green, who was at that time agency of record to IBM. Even at that early stage I had an interest in web video, but the bandwidth was not there yet. Like most interactive shops, Touchscreen also did CD ROM and kiosk development which could handle more multimedia content than the limitations of bandwidth could handle on the web. I had the opportunity to develop video in the form of 3D modeled animations for some of these projects. That was my first experience with video (my age is showing).

Since my arrival in New York I have sometimes worked staff, but more often as an independent consultant/freelance creative to some of the city's largest agencies as well as smaller boutique shops. I have been fortunate to work in many market categories including tech-sector B2B, consumer electronics, automotive, financial, alcohol, candy and family entertainment; for brands like Philips Electronics, Nikon, Time Warner Cable, SAP, Intel, American Express, Chandon Sparkling Wines and others.

2008 projects include the online music licensing site, ThinkMusic.net, and the launch of M&M'S Premiums. More recently I've been branched out beyond creative development to a broader role of marketing strategy consulting.

How did you get into online video?

We take in 90% of what we know about the world around us through our eyes. As an Art Director, visual communication is my business. If a picture paints a thousand words, then moving pictures paint a thousand words, thirty times a second.

What drove you to start the site in the first place?

Well, you may have noticed that I have another page on my site called "Portal", which has search fields for google, wikipedia, dictionary, etc., links to all the major international news outlets and English language versions of foreign news services, as well as a few other resources. This was originally a page I built just for myself. I kept it buried in a hidden directory and set it as my browser start page on both my home machine and my computer at the office. At that time I was working at an advertising agency called Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer (which has since been renamed EuroRSCG North America). People at my office would ask me for the URL and some suggested I should put it up on my website, so I spruced it up cosmetically and included it as part of my site. I've now had some version or other of that page going since 1998.

Around that time I'd also been considering creating some kind of online video directory. Since the early days of AdCritic and iFilm, I'd been toying with the idea. Video content on the web was somewhat scarce and a directory page would have been tasked with scouring the internet, collecting obscure links to content. It was an idea I had put on the back burner. Today the web offers a near inexhaustible variety of video. So the need for a directory became quite different— a filter to quality content in the deluge of online video.

How and when did you start the OV Guide (big idea, fill niche, etc)?

Then came YouTube and Google video. I remember the first time I saw YouTube. I was working at Ogilvy when a co-worker and fellow Art Director, with the unlikely name of Al Green, showed it to me. That was in early 2005. Today Al is the Executive Creative Director of Digital media at McCann-Erickson, San Francisco.

It was shortly after that, that I saw an Arabic language knockoff of YouTube. No attempt was made to be subtle— it appeared they had simply lifted the code straight from YouTube and just changed the logo. It was an easy model to copy. At that point it was obvious these sites were going to proliferate like rabbits. The user generated content sites I list in my directory are only English language, and merely the tip of the iceberg at that.

In December 2006-January 2007 I overhauled my digital presence— built a new website, relaunched my blog, GigantiCo, on the Squarespace platform, developed a Second Life SIM, and initiated some other self marketing efforts. I included a link to "Video" on my blog's navigation. For too long it only had a "coming soon" page. I played around with doing a video of the day, but that was always meant as a placeholder for what was to eventually be the GigantiCo Online Video Guide. The initial idea was to have a featured video atop a video directory. But after experimenting with the video of the day it became an additional task and I didn't want to burden myself with the constant maintenance. The value-add of a featured video seemed minimal, especially compared to the time investment and it became a distraction from the greater goal of building the directory.

Over the last few years broadband has reached into more and more homes and online video content has continued to grow. When and where appropriate, it is something I encourage my clients to incorporate. In the last few months the Interactive Advertising Bureau has attempted to establish guidelines for online video ad units. This will make it easier for marketers to develop for this media channel without the production issues involved in developing for many different proprietary standards. A recent study by Integrated Media Measurement has found that Americans do 20% of their episodic video content viewing online. While overall US advertising spending is expected to fall anywhere from 35% or worse in 2009, digital marketing is projected to have continued growth, with a healthy portion of that to be in online video based ad units (up to $1.9B in 2009 from $1B in 2008, according to Forrester Research). While print media, especially newspapers, cannot pull enough ad revenue to cover their operating costs, online media outlets can barely develop video content fast enough to accommodate the demands of advertisers. This past week The New York Times did a story on the Discovery Channel's ramped up online video efforts that gives a perfect anecdotal example (the irony of the source is not lost on me).

How did you collect all the resources?

I had a bookmark folder I continued adding video links to. Because of my work, I stumble across these things all the time. I just kept collecting them— both online video sites and companies that offered products or services for producing, distributing, marketing or in some way managing online video content. It was really about two years ago that I began to actively organize links.

Who are you targeting with the OV Guide?

The site has two targets:

Consumers of online video— People looking for quality content.

Professional video developers— This includes both producers of online video content, and advertisers who wish to use online video as a media marketing channel.

The professional video resources directory runs down the right margin, and is actually a much lengthier directory than the consumer video links in the body of the page. The expectation is that the consolidation of the consumer content will bring traffic, but that the professionals will return for the industry links.

What is the overall purpose of the OV Guide?

I hope to provide a quality resource for online video marketing, video content and video development. There is, of course, a bit of self interest— As an advertising professional who develops both online advertising campaigns and websites, I hope to get some exposure out of this as well. I will concede that this is not a completely altruistic effort.

On a personal level, I also have great interest in the internet as a distance-learning medium, a tool I feel the educational sector has been slow to leverage to its full potential. Online video, and live streaming video offer huge opportunities in the field of education that have barely been tapped. I'm especially enthusiastic about the potential of resources like EduFire, which offers live one-on-one video tutoring. I dedicate a large part of the consumer directory to educational programming. Schools like Harvard, Yale and especially MIT should really be commended for making so much of their lecture content available free on the internet. And TED is probably my favorite site on the web.

What's in store for the future?

One feature I would like to incorporate, should time permit, is a roll-over blurb that gives a two or three sentence description of each of the sites in the consumer directory. But that is a time intensive task that could be a ways off. I do develop this in my spare time.

My realistic expectation is to update the directory at least quarterly. On the consumer side I hope to expand the Arts & Culture listings. Otherwise much of my focus will be on the professional links down the margin.

Thank you so much for taking an interest in the directory. Whether online viewers or professional developers, hopefully others will find that it a valuable resource.