Tag Archives: mills

Online Video

Value Not Viral

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A couple weeks ago I was at General Mills speaking to marketers along side the Pillsbury Doughboy. Come to think of it, it was a lady who marketed the little fella’s crescent rolls. But I prefer the first way I recalled it, so roll with me.

Somehow along the way I stopped using “entertaining” and “educational,” and started using the term “value.” It seemed to be a core tenant of good brand videos online, and a far cry from most advertising. When we have the option to watch (or not) valuable content will always trump advertising. There are a handful of Crescent videos that show how to cook home made meals using the rolls. Hey let’s teach people a skill they see as valuable (which favors our product), instead of beating forever the “reach, frequency, single minded proposition” drum.

The idea of value (for viewers and the brand) kinda stuck. Just this weekend I shot some video for MSNBC Small Business that asks businesses to think less about “going viral” and more about how to create value. While conventional wisdom says “value” is entertainment (cute, funny, twisted, surprising, bazaar, outrageous, dancing, babies, music), a lot of companies are going the simple “how to” route, and search-engine optimizing their video content to answer customer questions.

Go looking for a cake recipe and you’ll probably find a video that was produced for Betty Crocker. It’s content supported by ad dollars and it’s smart. Yesterday I went searching for a replacement for my digital SLR that died from a son-induced tripod spill, and I would have been thrilled to find an objective shopping guide. If it was produced by Canon, Olympus or Panasonic/Lumix I might have been skeptical. But if a manufacturer did produce it objectively it would have meant a lot to me.

In keeping with the “value” over “viral” theme, check out Revision3’s Jim Louderback identifying 7 opportunities you might have overlooked about online video. He talks about tapping YouTube stars (I was quite influenced in my camera purchase by the choices of my favorite YouTube personalities) and about the power of how-to. His seventh has an acronym “OTT,” which I believes he means as “over the top.”

Hey that reminds me. I have a digital camera blog I forgot about.

Killer Video, Nalts, Online Video, popular videos, Video Sites, Viral Video, YouTube

Appear Better Informed About Darfur in 3 Minutes: The Onion Makes Me Cry

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Darfur. We both know how serious it is, but we’re not sure exactly why or where it is.

The Onion (helping you seem more informed”) has produced this fantastic parody of news analysis. It’s called “How Can We Let Darfur Know How Much We’re Doing For Them.”

picture-10.pngI’ve never laughed as much in preparing a post for this silly blog- in fact cried laughing (to use a bad pun). The Onion, I hope you know, is a website/print publication that has made the single finest transition to online-video content. The Onion News Network is as well written as the website I used to eagerly anticipate each Wednesday (in fact, it was literally the only website besides Google that I checked routinely in the early part of this century). But the acting is what cinches this. The acting is better than amateur online-video content, and most of television.

Watch each of these actors and realize how easy it is to believe that they’re real analysts and you’re not supposed to be laughing- the cadence, the off-camera glances, the “pile on” comments, and the timing. Folks if you’re watching, I’d kill for a cameo. No charge, and I’ll get their with 24-hours notice. 

The onion logoAccording to Wikipedia, (but watch out because The Onion reminds us Wikipedia is prone to error), The Onion launched The Onion News Network, a daily web video broadcast that had been in production since mid-2006. An early story featured an illegal immigrant taking an executive’s $800,000 a year job for $600,000 a year. The Onion has reportedly invested about $1 million in the production and has hired 15 new staffers to focus on the production of this video broadcast.[11] Carol Kolb, former editor-in-chief of The Onion, is the head writer.

In a Wikinews interview in November 2007, Onion President Sean Mills said the ONN has been a huge hit.

“We get over a million downloads a week, which makes it one of the more successful produced-for-the-Internet videos,” said Mills. “If we’re not the most successful, we’re one of the most.”

TheOnion has a YouTube account (with an atypical banner that allows viewers to drop directly into its podcasts, website or RSS) since March 2006, but its videos are all relatively new to YouTube (past several months). As of this post, I have about 35,000 subscribers on YouTube, and The Onion has about 13,000. I’m willing to bet that the network has twice as many subscribers as me by the summer.

I’ve often said that quasi professional content is on the rise, but this isn’t fair to call “quasi.” The only reason this content isn’t a better version of SNL is because there’s not enough of it, and perhaps it appeals to a smaller segment of the SNL audience with primarily news parody. Then again- it works for Jon Stewart.

See: FDA recalls pot pies because they’re hungry and the plight of lost hikers.