Fairfax Digital Media commercial director, Ed Harrison.

EXCLUSIVE: Fairfax's Metropolitan Media division is to abandon its controversial autoplay policy from September ahead of a major expansion of its online video offering that will position the publisher as a rival to TV networks.



The u-turn follows media agency UM’s public admonishment of Fairfax for using autoplay in video units, which enables an advertisement to play automatically (Adnews.com.au, 31 March 2011). Until today, Fairfax has stood by the video format.



Commercial director at Fairfax Digital, Media, Ed Harrison, told AdNews autoplay will be phased out in the “coming months”, but not before September as clients had already forward booked the video format.



Harrison said the decision was taken after months of talks with agencies, but denied the agency backlash was behind the move.



“Autoplay has been important in one big way and that’s to get our audiences heavily exposed to video consumption on Fairfax websites. Our brands are not known for their video content, so now we have a very broad audience to consume video content.”



Fairfax will now expand its online video services launching IPTV services to help build an evening audience and become less reliant on the news-heavy daytime audience.



“We will be making some significant investments in long form. The reason that it’s a strong play for us is because the majority of our audiences fall across the day. IPTV allows us to take our upscale educated daytime audience into the evening.”



Fairfax will also launch standalone video channels following the success of Domain TV, with a dedicated channel for automotive site Drive, followed by stand-alone channels in business and technology, supported by exclusive sponsors and pre-roll ads.



Harrison played down Fairfax taking on the big TV networks but said: “We’d like to think of ourselves as a competitor to the TV guys, but over time we very much see ourselves as part of that.”



Harrison said the expansion will see the publisher attempt to sell video inventory far in advance, adding that a number of group buying points had already agreed to move negotiations forward.



He said: “We’ve been having conversations with our ad agency partners about creating the right model for monetising”, the estimated $50 million online video market.



New online video services will be supported by marketing activity, including cross-promotion across Fairfax brands.



For the full story, read today's AdNews.

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