Well we’re clearly in the bubble burst of online-video sites. Stage6 shut down, and Revver was sold. Who’s next?
Tag Archives: Video
The Marketeter’s Cheat Sheet to Viral Video
You’re running a brand that is trying to “dip your toe” into social media and online video, and you’re facing some important questions:
- Is my brand right for this?
- How can I experiment without ending up as a “case study” failure?
- Can I convince my company that we should do this?
- What are my options for developing compelling content and distributing it widely?
Here’s a quick guide that encompasses a lot of topics we’ve covered on this blog. It’s the “least a marketer or agency needs to know” about online video, and will give you a roadmap for a good program.
- Step 1: Determine if your brand is right for online video. Is your brand compelling and simple, or complex and direct-response oriented? If you’re a consumer-product goods (CPG), it’s a no-brainer. If you’re in a complex, crowded, regulated and boring industry, it’s going to be more difficult.
- Step 2: Keep it quiet. The more senior management and attorneys you bring into a pilot, the more internal battling you’ll do before experimenting. Get some “air cover” from an executive sponsor, and avoid excessive internal scrutiny.
- Step 3: Let go. Your marketing message is critical to you, but if your content is driven by an advertising objective it’s at risk of being a flop. If you want to go viral, you’ve got to entertain first and promote subtly. There are countless case studies on this, and it’s an inarguable fact. If you buy media, your ads can be boring. But if you expect people to share your video, it better be entertaining, provocative, sexy, funny, outrageous or at least interesting.
- Step 4: Develop a creative brief. Don’t make it too narrow, but give it some focus. If you ask people to make a funny video that includes your brand, you’ll get a lot of stuff that may or may not support your objective. But if you require creators to insert a series of “unique selling propositions” then you’ll end up with ads instead of entertaining videos. With my smaller clients, I develop the brief. Larger clients often already have one, and simply need ideas or video content.
- Step 5: Engage creators. You have four options here.
- Option one, you can hire your agency to create video content. This gives you control, but most agencies (advertising, online, and public relations) lack experience in social media and online video in particular. I’ve found this to be extremely expensive, and often the agencies lack the expertise to make the videos “not suck” and get the videos widely viewed and “seeded” in the right places.
- Option two, you can hire individual amateurs. This gives you access to people that know the medium and have established audiences. Some smaller brands (and larger ones) contract directly with people like me, InvisibleEngine, Rhett & Link and Barely Political (just a few creators that are interested in building entertaining, promotional content). This keeps things safer, but requires some oversight since you’ll need to interact individually with these companies or people.
- Option three, you can run a big, public contest. These are still quite common, but rather expensive. You’ll spend a lot on media to promote the contest (money I’d prefer to see brands use to promote the brand itself). You’ll also get a lot of lame content, but hopefully a few winners.
- Finally, you can contract with a third party that can represent a variety of proven creators. For example, a few large brands have contracted with Xlntads to help reach a collection of experienced amateur creators (note: I consult with Xlntads, and run its creative ad board). There are probably similar brand/creator models that offer this service, but I’m less familiar with them. I see this as an evolving industry that can either contract directly to brands or via agencies. For instance, Daily Motion has brokered between certain major advertisers in France, and works from the agency’s creative brief to identify, engage, pay and leverage the presence of appropriate creators that produce content on the site.
- Step 6: Get the videos seen. If you want to buy media, you can run your videos as advertisements on a variety of sites. The second and third tier video sites are especially receptive to giving prominence to promotional content in fairly inexpensive media buys. If your content is good enough, you can hope it will travel “viral” style: people will share it with friends, post it on their blogs, feature it on their websites. There are three magic tricks that make this work:
- First, your content has to be good.
- Second, it really helps to leverage the distribution and audience of known creators. If an amateur has a popular blog or YouTube channel, this gives you a much better chance of wide distribution.
- Thirdly, you can “seed” it yourself or have the creators, third parties or agencies do it. This “seeding” involves reaching out to appropriate online properties, channels, discussions, forums and blogs. If it’s good content and you reach out to people politely your chances increase. I’ve seen bad videos that get lots of attention, and good videos that die. So this third step is non trivial and often overlooked.
- Step 7: Evaluate. Did the videos get lots of views and positive feedback? What did the comments say? Did people take a measurable action after watching the video? Keep your expectations in check: few marketing videos break into the millions of views, and very few of those viewers will take an immediate action (visiting your site, and making a purchase). These videos will, however, help your rankings via Google and other search engines. So maybe the next time a prospect is searching for your brand on Google, they’ll find your brand-friendly videos instead of a competitor’s content or disgruntled customer. This is a powerful and often overlooked outcome of a good video pilot.
- Step 8: Scale as Appropriate. Most online-video marketing projects are simple experiments to help brands learn and “test the waters,” and few have scaled radically. However some brands have been so excited about results with online video that they return annually with programs that are hard to miss.
With a few exceptions, I haven’t yet seen many online-video pilots driving significant, immediate sales for a brand. But I have seen online-video initiatives that have increased the awareness of the brand, and changed the attributes and preference of target consumers (as measured by awareness trackers). Most of my clients have enjoyed an online presence they wouldn’t have gotten on their own and found it a good investment. A few have confided that more people watched my stupid video than visited their big, bloated agency-developed website (which contained a variety of expensive videos they produced). It’s much easier to reach people on the highway of YouTube than to hope they’ll stop at the little rest stop you create (which is usually a huge expense and a “throw away” at the end of the project).
Other suggestions? Bring ’em on. This is a blog, for crying out loud.
Politics and Viral: McCain and Obama Music Video Parodies
This is the year where viral video will, no doubt, shape the election. And while this blog cannot possibly keep up on the political satire that’s overtaking YouTube, this one felt worth a mention.
Barack Obama’s speech inspired this music video featuring Black Eyed Peas. It’s called “Yes We Can.”
That spawned Election08 (comedians in LA) to produce a music video called “John He Is.” And here’s another parody by BarelyPolitical called “John McCain: No You Can’t.”
Candidly, I’m laughing more at the amazingly simple video by BarelyPolitical that features John McCain prank calling Hillary Clinton with a burp and a fart. Now that’s political humor for the common denominator.
YouTube as Marketing Channel: Live With Bloomberg
Marketing Consultant Toby Bloomberg (Marketing Diva Blog) is hosting a radio/podcast show on the topic of YouTube as a marketing channel. It’s live tomorrow night (Tuesday, 6:30 PM EST). I’ll be a guest along with Ben Relles, creator of the wildly viral “I Got a Crush on Obama” and Barely Political.
Here are the details:
- What: YouTube/social networking video sites: Play Toy or Credible Marketing Strategy? Kevin Nalts and Ben Relles join Toby to explore if video networking sites like YouTube can go beyond “cool” to a credible marketing strategy. And by the way, how do you get a video viewed by thousands?
When: Tuesday, 2/19/2008 6:30 PM ESTWhere: (718) 508-9924 (or visit Toby’s channel on BlogTalkRadio, but note this link activates the last show with a preroll audio ad).
The Devil is in the Device: How We’ll Consume Online-Video Via BoobTube in 2008
I’m going out on a limb here, but I predict that independent web-to-tv boxes will be (albiet perhaps temporary) an inevitable part of the pending collision between our television sets and Internet. We’re past that debate about whether TV or online-video will prevail. There will be a hybrid model, and quite frankly I can’t wait to consume my online-videos with the ease of TiVo surfing. I just don’t watch television anymore and the cable and telcom providers have made that an easy withdrawal.
Months ago, I would have bet that cable and telcom monoliths could successfully dominate this space with their own connectivity, equipment, and customer base. But Verizon’s latest release of its Fios TV video interface has convinced me of otherwise. It’s rather hopeless, and we should expect nothing more.
Despite continued investments by cable (Comcast) and telcom (Verizon) providers — which includes fiber and expensive capital — they’re going to be dissintermediated in the short term. Sure they’re winning customers with competitive bundled deals for cable, phone and television. And they have a built advantage because we want a turnkey solution and it’s hard to bypass them unless you want a satellite. But they’re big, slow, and focused more on securing their market position than innovating.
While the bundling (phone, TV and internet access) is quite economically tempting, the television ‘user experience’ is what real-estate agents call functional obsolescence– it’s a deal breaker. For the past year I’ve suffered through Verizon’s slow, counter-intuitive, buggy and frustrating television interface and would have canceled long ago but for my wife and kids’ desire to watch news and children shows. A few weeks ago, Verizon rolled out an entirely new interface, which is prettier but almost as convoluted. Comcast, last I checked, wasn’t much better. I miss my delightful, buttery TiVo experience, and have two TiVo units depreciating because I can’t figure out how to get them to play nicely with the Fios-mandated Motorolas. And I’m not willing or able to pay a third recurring fee: a TiVo service fee, in addition to my monthly TV bill and rental equipment toll. If only I could just dump the Motorola and pay Fios a cable fee alone.
You see, Fios TV forces me to rent a Motorola media box (actually, I could rent a digital converter, but that doesn’t cost much less per month). I rent two of these stupid units (living room and bed room) and they communicate with each other like Hollywood stars in their 3rd month of marriage.
I expect a cable bill. But a monthly “rental toll” for a mandated unit is reminiscent of Ma-Bell charging $5 a month to my grandparents for a “model T”-like rotary phone (which everyone seems to overlook until the parents die, someone has to clean up the estate, and the children discover they’ve paid thousands in years of renting a phone that could have cost $2.99 at Walmart).
Meanwhile, I almost tossed my AppleTV months ago, but have recently been spending a lot more time using it. It cost about $300, there’s no recurring fee, and the interface is getting better. I can enjoy any video I download or import as an MP4 (and my handy VisualHub takes care of the conversions for videos I download elsewhere). More importantly, it’s how I’m beginning to consume a lot of my YouTube videos.
On the negative side, iTunes has its share of limitations: a paltry video-purchase selection via the iTunes store, a ridiculous rental service I won’t soon use again (after a “Live Free or Die Hard” expired before I ever started watching it), and this baffling confusion of trying to synch media across various iPods and Mac accounts.
And frankly, I’m quite sick of being deprived by Mac of sharing or viewing my purchased videos and movies– legally, across my own digitalia.
That makes me so angry, I’ve starting to resort to getting movies via other mischievous means. Last night I even fell for a Google text ad that boasted a $35 one-time “free movie downloads for life” scam. For my impossible-to-refund fee, I received a special log-in website, password and instructions… which basically provided me a link to LimeWire (a free p2p tool). Caveat emptor I suppose. I was reminded of when, at the age of 9, I bought a “remote-control ghost: flies as high as 100 feet” from a comic book ad. Eight weeks later I received a white plastic bag, a balloon, and 100 feet of string. Even Sea Monkeys and the Ant Farm were better deals.
But something promising occurred quietly in the past week. AppleTV pushed out an upgrade, and now my YouTube viewing is slightly closer to the experience of watching videos via YouTube.com directly.
Initially, YouTube viewing via AppleTV provided a fraction of the experience permitted on YouTube. I couldn’t even look at my subscriptions or sort recent videos by creator. This limited YouTube interface is part of the reason I dumped my iPhone after two weeks (AT&T’s poor connectivity was another reason). But now I can at least go beyond watching the top YouTube videos of the day. I can view a random subset of my subscriptions (for odd reasons, they only let me peer into my first dozen or so, which is a bit constraining when you’ve subscribed to 800 people).
If you’re not a YouTube addict, the AppleTV makes less sense, and Apple won’t soon penetrate the market with these units unless they improve the interface further, renegotiate failed content deals and partner with electronic manufacturers or bring down the unit price.
So what’s ahead in 2008?
- First, AppleTV needs to start embedding ads. As a creator, I’m not getting profiting from viewers using AppleTV and neither is Apple or YouTube yet. If Apple wants to leverage near ubiquitous high bandwidth, thereby circumventing or coexisting with cable/phone providers, it’s going to have to find an ad-supported model first.
- Watch for similar boxes that are inexpensive and provide access to online-video via television. I still haven’t opened my free Sling Box so maybe that’s a step in the right direction?
- If the programmers and networks (CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc.) were more organized, they’d cooperate to build a model that could dissintermedia cable and phone monopolies (or at least develop a media-friendly model that offsets the power of these dominatrix-like “last mile” providers. But that’s unlikely because the media companies hate each other, and monopoly legislation would hamper it.
- Instead, watch for a startup (whatever happened to Joost?) that creates something similar to the AppleTV experience: elegant, content rich, ad supported and no mandated monthly fee initially. They’ll share ad revenue with media companies or amateurs and create inventory that piques the interest of advertising networks.
- Once a few of these independent boxed units establish a base, they can begin charging a modest monthly fee. Heck, I’d pay AppleTV a few bucks a month just to ensure I can view YouTube without the current restrictions. How am I to choose between Lemonette, Renetto
- Naturally, the electronic manufacturers are trying to squeeze into this space, but it’s not a play built for either a phone company or consumer-product electronic manufacturer. The interim winner will be one that — ala Apple with its recent offerings — puts the user experience above all else.
- There are probably other players creeping into this spaces of which I’m not even aware. Know of any?
Bubble Bursting for Video Creators Hoping to Monetize Content?
Online-video creators are sobering up after an intoxicated 2007, as they realize that the “road to riches” via online video is fraught with challenges. Business Week proclaimed “amateur video hour” as over in December. Crackle and other sites migrated from UGC (user-generated content) some time ago. And here are some quite recent data points that, alone, aren’t really newsworthy but tell a sad story together:
- Metacafe set a higher bar for revenue-sharing “Producer Rewards” program, much to the dismay of some creators who saw their popular videos drop from the program (see Metacafe forum).
- Revver, the pioneer of online-video revenue sharing, was sold for pennies.
- The initial participants of YouTube’s Partnership program (which shares revenue with creators) hit their one-year anniversary in March. Although YouTube and its creators are not permitted to disclose the specifics, I do have sources that reveal early participants received fixed fees that (in some cases) allowed them to quit their day jobs. The rest of us joined when YouTube had adjusted the program so that we’re paid a percentage of ad revenue, and I can’t disclose specifics. Compared to nothing, it’s welcomed cash. But it’s far from enough to live on.
For sure, some creators are doing well with sponsored gigs, DVD sales and rare television contracts. I’ve managed to augment my income by creating sponsored videos, and have done fairly well in the past 6 months. But it’s certainly not enough to quit the day job, and I’m not patient or risky enough to hold my breath for a lucrative television contract.
Solution 1: Pay for Content?
With few exceptions, viewers don’t yet pay for amateur content. This is especially true for early adopters of online-video, who have enjoyed free video, including amateur stuff, copyrighted material via YouTube, and free movies & music via P2P sharing. As the mainstream audience moves in, the market for paid content will increase, but mostly for professionally produced and well marketed video. Perhaps we’ll see a third-party aggregate some second-tier amateur content and develop a paid subscription model (especially if that content can be fed into PC, mobile and television). However an individual amateur would inarguably lose the vast majority of their audience if they required the audience to even move to an alternative channel (their own ad-supported site) or charged for it. Even Howard Stern lost most of his audience when he moved to Syrius. So it’s no surprise that I’ve sold only four copies of the “Best of Nalts” DVD.
Solution 2: Ad-Supported Content
As much hype as we’ve seen about consumers avoiding ads, this is the most viable, sustainable model. Simply put, good content won’t sustain for free, and amateur content hasn’t a prayer unless it’s supported by ads. Currently, this model is rate-limited by two sad realities. First, advertisers have been slow to buy ads around amateur content — even YouTube doesn’t appear to be selling its full inventory of InVid (overlay) ads. Secondly, there’s not yet broad enough distribution of this content.
I’ll argue that good video content and consumer demand exists, but people there aren’t yet enough viewers of amateur content to warrant significant dollars from advertisers. And we’re in dire need of an easy vehicle to view UCG via our mobile and television boxes, which will increase both viewer demand and advertising inventory (my next post will explore web/TV devices, which I believe are the lynch pin here).
Ad Blindness and Online Video
The more we surf online video the more savvy we become about content versus advertising.
A marketer recently told me he was pleased by the impressions he got from a YouTube homepage advertising buy, but…” I finished his sentence for him.. “your featured video didn’t get a lot of views.”
I told him we’ve been trained that the YouTube featured video is an advertisement, and he said he was working on ways to produce a more provocative headline or thumbnail. This “learned ad blindness” (I just coined that) was true with Revver ads, where virgin viewers would click the end-frame ad out of curiosity while the regulars learned to move to the next video. Revver is now adopting overlays jam packed with what appears to be Google Adsense Ads. Meanwhile, Adsense itself is under performing. Jason Lee Miller of WebProNews wrote recently about performance declines of Google Adsense, and one of his theories is:
“People are ignoring ads at a higher rate, and this has been evidenced by eye-tracking studies, especially when the ads appear in the places they expect them to appear.” (Note: to reinforce Miller’s point, I’ve displayed an image tracker of where eyes go when viewing a Google search-results page… hot in the top of organic area and rather cold on the ads).
So what’s the solution? Is it constant rotation of ads so they masquerade as content or perpetually innovative ways to interrupt, arouse or tantelize? YouTube’s “videos being watched right now” is a combination of sponsored videos and popular ones. They’ve changed the name of this section several times, but I believe it remains an advertorial blend.
That’s not the answer long term. Your most trusted sources of media (television, print, radio, web) usually make it abundantly clear what’s an advertisement and what’s content. Google pioneered this delineation by giving a color to ads while some engines continue to advantage advertisers in the “organic” listings with something called “paid inclusion” that creeps me out. The “advertorial” game, where advertisers sponsor what appears to be objective articles, is for the bottom feeders.
My first job after college was for a small Georgetown newspaper where the editor literally put a small white fence between the editorial and advertising department. I proudly stood on the content side, and the newspaper went bankrupt in 9 months. It was what prompted me to attend business school and move to the marketing side. I’d need to shower more frequently, but I’d at least have some control of my destiny.
The solution to “learned ad blindness” (copyright Kevin Nalts) is making ads that appeal to viewers and targeting people based on relevancy. If I’m in the market for a car, I want your car ad. If I’m not, it better have dancing clowns, hot models and site gags. If watching videos about the new overpriced talking parrot toy in late November, I’m probably ready for a 20% Toys-R-Us ad. See my next post (Cherry Chocolate Rain) for an even better example of when advertising does indeed become content.
Initially advertisers were terrified by technology that would block ads — from FireFox plugins to TiVo remotes. I’d content the greater barrier is the technology of the human mind, which learns quickly to discriminate between valued content and noise.
Like my old boss used to say, “even an amoeba learns by repetition.”
Online Video Contest for HomeCamera.com
The nice thing about moderately promoted online-video contest is that your odds are really good.
HomeCamera.com (a free home surveillance system) asked if I’d do a sponsored video. I offered instead to promote a contest if they’d give out some of the D-Link wireless cameras (see image below) that are being sold with HomeCamera preconfigured. They sent me a demo unit and I was impressed, since it’s not easy to do this with your webcam on your own. 
The service is free now, and allows you to monitor your home from almost any device worldwide. I’m going to be interested to see how people tackle this video contest (see here for details). What would you do with HomeCamera? Spy on your kids? Track your home or pet? Check in on an aging parent?
So here’s my YouTube video promoting the HomeCamera contest, which runs through March 1. I’m not a judge, so – hey- I wonder if I can enter? Again- decent odds of winning a D-Link, and the grand prize is a flight to Singapore. Oh- and accommodations included for up to 4 nights. They’ll even toss in a return flight.
Free Online Monitoring Via YouTube
Marketers debate whether they should engage in online video, but there’s simply no excuse for not paying attention to what’s being said about your brand. There are good services that can do comprehensive audits (such as Buzzmetrics). But here’s the poor-man’s solution…
Subscribe to your brand’s name on YouTube. If you’re Coke and you’re not at least scanning videos that are tagged with the word Coke, then you may miss something important. It’s as simple as registering on YouTube and going to your subscriptions. Then enter your brand name in the “tag” section, and you’ll have videos waiting for you if they use your name in the tags.
There are other services doing more comprehensive, advanced and ongoing monitoring by turning speech into text, and then analyzing the content in sophisticated ways. But this is a nice place to start. It’s as easy as setting a “Google Alert” for your brand name to ensure that news and major blog posts aren’t missed.
OMG a Good Article About Viral Video Marketing?
Oh it’s so rare when someone writes an intelligent article about online video (aka viral) marketing. And it’s pretty funny when you’ve never heard of the author but she happens to work for the digital agency you employ in your day job.
Anyway, here’s “Strategies for Making Video Ads Go Viral,” by Christine Beardsell (Digitas) via ClickZ. Christine explains paid and organic “seeding” of videos, which is not very well understood. She references two companies I hadn’t heard about: Kontraband’s The 7th Chamber and Viral Manage, which apparently seed videos, and offer tiered plans that include viral tracking and blog/forum seeding.
She also observes that a little money can go a long way with smaller video sites, and I’ve also found that to be true. I once got a promotional video past one million views by throwing a modest media buy to a second-tier site for some premium placement.
I’m not sure I agree that online video banners aren’t effective. In general, it’s true that banners are ignored. And auto-play banners are repulsively annoying. But I do believe there’s a role for embedded video in interactive, rich media ads. I found her thoughts about RSS and videos interesting, but caution people from thinking too many people will RSS for commercial videos. Get a well known YouTuber to mention your brand and you’ll get exponentially more visibility for far less money than your agency will charge for a FedEx.