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US-based
company Adwired is making a push with its online content and
payment management solution for TV commercials. The service
helps TV commercial creators and content rights owners to
generate revenue out of previously aired TV ads.
The company has set up a 10,000 commercial strong database
from various TV commercial content owners, which can be accessed
online, by subscribers after payment.
Private industry users can buy TV commercials for non-commercial
use. Members who have made their content part of the database
are paid every time their commercial is sold.
Adwired protects the copyright ownership of advertising ads
through its pioneering deployment of Microsoft's digital rights
management technology on the Internet.
A file is encrypted so content cannot be viewed without an
electronic key. Once a high-resolution file has been purchased
it can be downloaded to the member's desktop.
A member is able to view the commercial from their computer
or record the commercial to videotape to show the client.
They can also order the commercial from Adwired but they can
not retransmit the encrypted images over the Internet. "This
extra measure of security safeguards content from being distributed
for free," points out Adwired's senior technologist Kelly
Dunn.
TV commercials have been copied off the TV screen and sold
for research and for competitive brand studies by ad agencies
since the sixties. Commercials are purchased by the agencies
for new business pitches, account supervisors purchase their
competitors' newest spots, subscription sites on the Internet
sell individual ads and some market their own Best of Collections.
Adwired founder Whitney Rauh estimates that a $100 million
revenue stream outside the longstanding licensing agreements
that govern normal public commercial use exists.
This diversion of intellectual property for private trade
use "fed a cottage industry on steroids for forty years of
unregulated growth until it burgeoned into the 800 pound gorilla
no one dares confront today," says Rauh.
"Every legitimate stakeholder loses," said Rauh. "The performers
miss out and most importantly, the legal content owners are
totally ignored," she adds. In the US, the intellectual property
owners are the advertisers; never once have they been paid
when their commercials were sold to the trade. Rauh has been
hoping to change that through Adwired.
Curiously,
a few privileged content owners successfully claim compensation
for resold work even before Adwired. Major networks and broadcast
outlets are uniquely positioned to profit from the after sales
of their content. "The fact that the TV monitoring companies
pay some broadcast stations $13 for each content resale, acknowledges
the content owners' right to claim payment," reveals Rauh.
Adwired has modeled its repayment mechanism after those begun
by the performing rights associations. "Just ten years ago,
ASCAP and BMI first began distributing royalties received
from TV & radio stations back to advertising agencies. Today
these sums are quite significant. Over the next ten years,
we hope to achieve the same level of compensation on privately
used commercials," discloses Rauh.
Adwired will distribute major portions of the collected fees
back to both content owner and the agency (which supplies
credits and the performer's contact information).
Adwired recently received groundbreaking permission to showcase
the 2002 One Show winning commercials in a public section
of their site from the Screen Actors Guild, AFTRA, and the
American Federation of Musicians. The One Show winners are
the first commercials in advertising that are DRM enabled.
They can be accessed at http://www.adwired.com/ with only
a simple registration.
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