This Dan Greenberg story in MediaPost is good news to online-video advertising enthusiasts. Seems the “gap” is closing, and online video is moving into critical mass. Did I just say “critical mass”? Oh well.
Dan provides 5 reasons:
Big brands be making video content investments
Top agencies be making online video a practice/priority
Agencies are creating titles like “director of earned media” (a residual of PR)
We’re developing better metrics than fargin’ clicks. Remember that clicks are like hits (which stood for “how idiots track success”) and impressions aren’t impressions unless they make one. Don’t be a click prick.
Forrester and Nielsen are validating this approach with reports. Whatev.
Anyway this is good news to online-videophiles. Yeyy the market is catching up.
AppleTV is slick and all. But Roku's packed with content, and darnit I like that little purple clothing tabOnline-video on your TV is not this difficult anymore.
Sure most BlueRay disc players have the ability to stream YouTube and other content. But it’s 2011.
Walk away from anything that requires physical media and, gasp, has moving parts.
Here are 8 plus ways to stream videos from the Interweb to that big-ass monitor your mama calls an HDTV. CNet reviews the collection, and generally comes down with the Roku 2 as the winner above the AppleTV. I have both, and was an AppleTV raving fan who purchased horrific amounts of content I was too lazy to seek out for free. Then the AppleTV started giving me password and synching problems, and the new $99 TV-rental model felt unfair. So both have been paperweights for a few months, but the Roku is still an easy way to stream my all-you-can-eat Netflix movies.
Roku 2 XS 1080 for $99 is a pretty sweet deal (Amazon affiliate links). Easy startup, and there’s plenty of default content in addition to YouTube and Netflix. Seriously that little fabric tag is almost as cute as a Chumby octopus.
Worship me. I am Chumby.
AppleTV’s $97 model is decent, but a step backward not forward. Had Jobs stuck around, this might have gotten interesting.
WD-TV Live Plus Western Digital thing. Doesn’t come with wifi built in, which is like sending it out without a friggin’ power cord. CNet liked it, but the readers didn’t.
VeeBeam: Some reviews say it’s easy to install, but it simply provides a wireless delayed stream from your laptop to a TV. Seems like a cheap connector would make more sense. Am I missing something?
A Friggin’ HDMI Cable (from laptop to TV): Finally, if you’re going to tie up your damned laptop, how about connecting a stinkin’ $5 HDMI cable directly from it? I’m not seeing the appeal of choices 6 and 7, when a simple cable does most of the work without lag. Depending on your laptop, you may need an adapter to have it HDMI ready, but remember that HDMI is an HD cord that carries audio and video.
So that’s my modification of the CNet article, but keep in mind that there are other options, ranging from TiVo and your stupid cable-TV box to various videogame players that will achieve much of this (and may be sitting idle in your home).
Suck it Chumby. I was around longer and can do more.
Sure we want to share online video directly from our iPhone without the torture of downloading, synching, editing, compressing and uploading. But can the online-video mobile market sustain a middle-man brand/app for this activity? Or will this ultimately resolve itself when mobile devices standardize on how they behave with existing video sites?
We had it rough...
I enjoy some of the unique and free tools that connect our mobile phone’s video with social media sites, but I don’t see many of these sustaining. It’s simply too hard to keep track of various apps, tools and websites… While these puppies solve an immediate need, it seems hard to imagine more than a couple players serving the void between mobile device operating systems and more popular video-sharing sites like, um, YouTube. It’s a redundant, confusing, crowded and poorly differentiated landscape… and most of the names/brands are forgettable or horrible.
That said, here are a few options with different strengths and weaknesses, and most rely on Twitter/Facebook for login, so perhaps they’re just hoping to get acquired by the highly profitable sites. 😉
SocialCam boasts as the "easiest place to share videos" and is iPhone and Android compatible.
Today I read aboutSocialcam, which is basically a social-media video sharing app that was spawned by Justin.tv and uses Facebook for login.
Viddy is the "Instagram" for 15-second-or-less video creators
Then there’s Viddy, which caps you at 15 seconds, gives you Instagram-like filters for retro/cool effects that will certainly age like fine French milk. It allows you to launch your video elsewhere, but has a bit of community too. It improved off of the now-RIP 12-Second TV, which in 2008 was an early entry, and died last November.
TwitVid is one of the earlier entrants with a name that is easy to remember.
TwitVid has been around for a few years. But now twitpic offers video uploads too, so one seems redundant.
Yfrog, which is a name I’ll forget in 10 minutes, offers a unique ability to play the shared video through less usual viewing formats, from wmv, .flv, .mpeg, .mkv, .mov, .3gp, .mp4 to the archaic but quaint .avi format. The even more forgettably named twitc (which I’ve already forgotten) offers some cool ways to organize your videos regardless of what website is hosting them… and allows you to organize them into various albums for sharing across other sites. That’s fairly differentiated, and difficult and unlikely for any video-sharing site to do solo.
But wait. There’s more (see review)… Twitlense, ZocialTV (the poorly named winner), Bubbletweet and Screener. And probably loads more.
Forget FEMA and television newscasters. How’d the web do for live coverage of Irene? Surely I’m not the only guy bored by our local coverage, as Yahoo Buzz puts “Hurricane Irene” as the third-most searched term on Yahoo (after the words Facebook and YouTube).
So how are we doing? Well the online-video coverage is varying about as much as the weather in the U.S. right now… from amateur (consumer generated) weather footage and news reports to the coverage of the Puerto Rico street shark, let’s have a look…
Yes. Video prerolls are both growing and declining. The good news for viewers is that we saw fewer prerolls. But we saw more “polite prerolls” (option to escape) in Q1 2011 as reported by AdoTube/eMarketer. Since this doesn’t include YouTube data and presumably a small sample of total online-video ad streams it does need to be taken with a grain of (Morton’s: when it rains it pours!) salt.
Viewers will appreciate fewer prerolls (as reported by AdoTube), and advertisers will enjoy more "engagement" modelsThis "Right Guard" ad begs for engagement. Did you notice the "close" button?
Forget prerolls, friends. The increasingly competitive ad networks have a whole sleuth of weapons in their online-video ad formats that range from the innocuous “polite pre-roll,” to a bit more ominous names like in-stream takeover, ad selector, in-stream skin, inside-out roll, interactive overlay, video-in-video, interactive gaming overlay, data entry and capture, branded player, over the top, and beyond stream. I believe that Seroquel example, placing a “reminder” ad without “fair balance” adjacent to depression content is (shhh) a violation of FDA guidelines, but I digress. ANY of these ad-format names beats the “fat boy” branded by Point Roll.
Take a look at some of the bold “engagement” formats presented in AdoTube’s ad-format gallery and you’ll see why viewers are, according to eMarketer, about 30% likely to engage in an ad… even when not forced (hence the term “polite”). You’ll also see that it’s often not clear there’s an opt-out available.
The eMarketer report, titled “Options for Online Video Ad Viewers Leads to Higher Engagement” is encouraging. With online video being one of the leading (if not #1) fastest-growing portion of a marketer’s “media mix,” advertisers will want and expect formats that achieve their goals: from branding to engagement. This chart is important to viewers because it shows that “cost per impression” remains the dominant percent of spending. In “cost per impression” (often called CPM, or cost-per-thousand), the advertiser simply pays a few bucks to reach 1,000 eyeballs without much accountability.
"Cost per impression" still leads, but more interactive "engagement" ad formats are increasing (Brightroll Data)
While few of us welcome more aggressive online-ads, this also substantiates a business model to fuel the medium’s growth. While it’s easy to complain about intrusive ads (especially as the pendulum seemed to swing dangerously to the advertiser’s benefit in the past year), it’s a vital element to online-video’s maturity. If the advertisers don’t get what they need, friends, we won’t be seeing our content for free.
There are three ways to increase “engagements” in this online-video advertising medium, and I’ll list them from best to worst in order of sustainability: novelty, creative and targeting:
Novelty: A new ad format generally enjoys a period of high engagement that’s deceptively high. We’re curious about what the ad does, and may not realize we’re engaging, so it’s not necessarily suggestive of purchase intent. In early February, a debut YouTube customer of YouTube’s “skip this ad in x second” preroll told ClickZ he was seeing a 30% engagement rate. That’s far higher than we’ll see as a norm, and a tribute to the novelty effect.
Creative: Great creative always wins, and this is a fairly enduring trait. While overall engagement might slip when we’re “numb” to an ad format (like monkey-shooting banner ads, or even the “InVid” format that creeps up on YouTube… the best creative wins the best attention, engagement and results.
Targeting: Ultimately the most sustainable and important characteristic of a high-engagement online-video ad is its ability to reach the right target. I can engage in a tampon ad, but it’s not going to sell more maxi’s. But if I get a rich-media ad over (or adjacent) to my valued content, then we’ve got a win-win-win (advertiser, publisher, viewer). That’s where we can expect Google/YouTube to be better in the long haul, but it appears the sophisticated advertiser networks are ahead. These ad networks marry data from a variety of sources to serve ads invisibly on the videos across a variety of websites.
So what are the takeaways to advertisers, video sites and us viewers?
First, the options available to advertisers means that online-video ads will begin to get as aggressive as other forms of interactive ads. This has positive and negative effects, but as long as it’s targeted it’s sustainable.
YouTube, which reports very little about its ad performance, has not radically departed from its debut formats, with the exception of breaking its early commitment to make pre-rolls optional. Now most pre-rolls are mandatory, but we can opt-out of some after a few seconds (at which point the “opt-out” means the advertiser pays YouTube and the creator less).
Ads are a vital cost-offset for those of us that have been enjoying free video content for 5 years and would like that to continue without avoid pesky Hulu-like subscription models (unless a “value ad” bonus to the cable contract, assuming we haven’t “cut chord.”).
And finally, Morton’s salt can be trusted. Trusted I say.
So the NextUp YouTube winners are in NYC right now… receiving loads of love from Google/YouTube. It made me happy seeing the next generation of amateurs… and to see that Google/YouTube still encourages them even while commercial content is on the rise on the world’s second-largest search engine.
I was invited to speak to the 25 of ’em, and here’s my presentation. If you were one of the wanna-bees, don’t fret. I asked if they’d be picking a new crop 3 times until I got the answer I wanted to hear… yes.
After I cranked this presentation out, I realized I’d been billed as the marketer. So this deck actually represented only half my time. During the rest I decided to play the role of an amalgamated product director, and I replaced my “Nalts” hat with a blazer. I asked them to pick a product (they said Coke), then I proceeded to explain my goals, hidden agendas, beliefs about YouTube and my understanding about product placement and sponsorship. I couldn’t help but point out that Coke gives out free products on the streets of NYC but no swag to people that have hundreds of thousand views daily. Hmmmm.
I told them I wanted to sell more Coke so I could become Chief Marketing Officer, and that I was mostly concerned with reach, frequency and single-minded proposition. I wanted to leverage emerging media, but I deferred YouTube spending to my media agency. And I wouldn’t know how to begin to tap YouTube creators… frankly I’d be scared they’d harm my brand (as a product director, of course, I wouldn’t realize I could review/approve any sponsored videos).
Lots more detail in my free eBook or Beyond Viral, which you really should just go ahead and buy. And dont find any thpelling erars.
Grant Crowell, one of our favoritest writers at our favoritest websites (ReelSEO), tackled the subject of online-video webstars and their sponsored videos. He interviewed Hitviews‘ Sam Levine. Check it out…
I used to write quite often about online-video contests because for many brands, that was their online-video strategy. It’s similar today when brand’s create a Facebook page to check off that nagging “social media” objective.
A lot’s changed in the past years, and Jared “The Video Contest King” has reengaged, even musters up some praise for Poptent (the video contest site he’s criticized before). I found this quote especially interesting…
Yes, $7,500.00 for a contest victory for three weeks work is decent pay, but if you really worked for three months, because it is the true frequency rate of your ‘wins’, than you now are netting about $26,000 per year. I pay more than that in rent alone.
This is a good reminder that, with some certain exceptions among recurring Poptent winners, few are making a “living” with online-video contest winnings.
Key Point: I would urge those pursuing contests to do so as a) a creative outlet, b) a way to build a good reel, and c) an additional income source. This is true for YouTube as well… a handful of stanky rich creators making way more than your salary and mine combined. Lots of people making what we’d consider a fantastic second income. But if money is the primary motivator, it’s not a safe bet.
The Sour Patch Cannibals are nice proof that there's gold in 'dem quasi-pro amateur hills
Beardy’s “Video Contest News” has some nice coverage, and even offers occasional production tips (I liked this one since I’m always having audio problems with my DSLR camera as a primary video recorder). We like Beardy’s homeless theme, which reminds us of our WillVideoForFood name.
Poptent Neil Perry told me the company has received increased investment, hired a team of sales people, and are beginning to attract larger brands that align with the company’s original vision (where the content is used on television not just online-video).
Weeks ago (during PattyTube) we crashed the Poptent office and binged on loads of new contest entries. Years ago many looked like bad CableTV ads, but the ones we watched were damned-well close to agency work. Common- who else loved the “Sour Patch Cannibals“?
Collaborations by independent creators with specific talents — like writing, acting, production, editing, music — are on the rise according to Tim Breslin, the mad genius behind Poptent’s technology.
King Jared teamed with Joel Berry (aka Tavin Dillard on YouTube) to create a Poptent entry for Trident Gum (titled “Grease Monkey Business,” which is a far cry better than the “consumer-generated” entries of past.
What was the best season of SNL you can recall? Wait let me ask it a different way: which of these years did you like best and why:
the Belushi years
Eddie Murphy
Dana Carvey
Chris Farley
Tina Fey
And why is it that 85% of the best potential comedy fail one one singular account? What’s the missing ingredient that could have made a funny bit a “Cowbell” moment? The fuckin’ ending. The same is true with speeches, movies, books, television, human interactions and online video.
Good people know how to start and carry a conversation. Great people know how and when to end one.
That ends today’s abbreviated lesson. But if you want to read one of my most important and stream-of-conciseness posts, click “more”
