Posts Tagged youtube

Where’s Waldo…I mean…Dexter?

This is an ad for the new season of Dexter – a TV show in the US. It allows users to click on the video to locate the star of the show and move on to the next level. If you fail to spot him you get to try again, if you do spot him and manage to click on him in time then you get to go to the next video in the series. It can be highly frustrating – especially if like me you are unable to locate him on level 4 and give up in the process.

Games are well proven to increase a user’s engagement with advertising – the in-built human need to solve a puzzle gets drawn out in all of us, couple that with video footage and we can’t help ourselves, the mouse finger gets twitchy and before you know it you’ve spent half an hour chasing a guy around a video and you still can’t see him. You win this time Dexter but wait until I am hangover-free and then we’ll see who is the quickest on the video-clicking draw.

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Video is a big cornerstone of Yahoo!’s strategy

Yahoo has embarked upon a major marketing campaign to try and increase it’s presence and relevance as an online media giant. One of the areas that they are intending to focus on is video and while their numbers seem a little small in comparison to YouTube it is worth remembering that a higher percentage of Yahoo!’s content is professional and therefore good space to advertise around.

Yahoo! have also gone through something of a revamp of their web properties, mail has a new interface, Flickr is now ‘from Yahoo!’ and they are starting to tie them all together. Given the well publicised deal with Microsoft on the search advertising side it is clear that Yahoo! has to do something to differentiate itself, they are masters of the display advertising market and it would make sense for them to focus on video. They are a little late to the game but in their case I think that this means that maybe they can learn from other’s mistakes and get such critical things right as frequency capping, targetting and reporting that they have for standard display advertising.

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How do you know if your video is working?

If you are not someone who cares about how well your videos perform then stop reading now. If on the other hand you are one of those people that is using video on their site to promote something or are sending videos out into the wilds of the internet in the hope that they will be viewed by thousands of people before bringing you untold riches then read on.

The great promise about using online marketing is that you can measure the success or failure of your campaign and therefore optimise the content, placement, reach or frequency to maximise what it brings to you. I am sure that the vast majority of advertisers entrust these activities to their ad agencies who perform them diligently and therefore squeeze every last conversion from their advertising dollars. In the real world it can be hard to find time to make sure that everything is working or budget to re-edit a video or make sure that the video is in the right place with the right call to action. So if you are using video how can you measure, track and optimise this?

create engage convertEyeview Digital provide a platform to help companies to make and manage their videos and then provide detailed reports on how they’ve performed. This helps the site to test and tune their video to provide the best performance, how long is too long, male or female voiceovers, big flashing red arrows or the subtle approach.

In an ideal world this kind of testing would be happening anyway but Eyeview have a tool which will help sites to maximise the benefits of putting video on there in the first place. You can try their quiz here to see if you know it all already, I won’t reveal my score, I should have done better!

If you are in the business of releasing your videos into the wild and are curious to see where they perform best and what happens after people have seen them then Tubemogul may be able to help you out. They provide a simple system which lets you distribute your video across multiple channels with a single action and then tracks the success of that video. They gather the statistics from the video sites and provide you with graphs showing viewership, drop off over time, traffic sources and many others.

tubemogul traffic sourcesThis is especially important given the recent news that YouTube is planning on partnering more with video producers who publish viral content (Techcrunch write-up here). Traditionally this has been a no-go area for YouTube who have not wanted to sell advertising around amateur content that carries a higher risk of causing offence or being disrespectful to the brand. If you are a content producer and can now gain some financial reward for your work from YouTube then having another system to monitor the success of your video must be a good thing.

In the same way that the search marketing industry (SEO) required tools to control and monitor text ads across multiple search engines (frankly the need for this has decreased with the demise of several of the search engines) Tubemogul allows you to perform a similar function across multiple video sites.

Of course you could just carry on regardless and hope that your videos are being successful for you but wouldn’t you like the peace of mind that you are getting the most out of them that you can?

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YouTube jumps into the Pool

The Pool is a group of publishers (MSN, Hulu, CBS) and advertisers who have been corralled by Vivaki – the Publicis enterprise. Their aims are to figure out how video advertising can be standardised across multiple platforms and how the process can be streamlined. Without doubt their aims are worthy, media agencies and publishers alike want this market to grow and to be successful, is this the best mechanism for achieving that? Well that rather depends on how much other agency groups will sit up and take notice of what they are doing. After all if Vivaki do create some ’standards’ how much notice will Omnicom, Group M or Aegis take of them?

The Internet Advertising Bureau has been working with technology providers, publishers and agencies to define the Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) and the Video Player Ad Interface Definition (VPAID), these standards are designed to make it easy for agencies to buy across multiple publishers. The second version of the VAST standard is already under discussion which should hopefully formalise some of the woollier areas of the first attempt. If the technology providers such as DoubleClick, Eyewonder, Eyeblaster et al can help the publishers that they work with to adopt the standards then this should naturally lubricate the market.

Of course the Pool has one advantage over the IAB’s efforts. Vivaki buys advertising space and therefore has some teeth with which to persuade the relevant parties to get involved and to collaborate on developing the formats and standards that will make life easier for the advertisers. The IAB relies upon the musketeer attitude of all for one and one for all in the hope that those involved see the value of making the market grow.

How it will all pan out remains to be seen but the general direction of these efforts is a positive one.

More discussion here: Clickz, NewTeeVee, Mediapost

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Fedex uses 1-2-3 minutes instead of 30 seconds

fedex guyThe North American advertising community is fascinated by what happens at half time in the SuperBowl. A 30 second spot can cost millions of dollars and act either as a springboard for a campaign or as a sumo competition for the biggest brands. When FedEx decided not to advertise in the last Superbowl it cited the fact that it would be inappropriate during the economic troubles. Instead it would focus on online video advertising.

The result has been online for just over a week now, the branded YouTube channel has four 3 minute videos which are spoof infomercials. It is a brave move, the humour may not be up to the quality of the Daily Show but it is funny-ish. Some of the comments left on the page are not very complimentary but then FedEx is getting involved with people directly and doesn’t seem to be moderating those views that are negative. One niggle that I have with the brand channel is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to get from there to the FedEx site itself which, if the ad is working, is what I should be wanting to do.

The important thing about this campaign isn’t the method of delivery or the quality of the creative, the major shift that is happening from TV to online video is the story here. Hopefully it will meet FedEx’s success criteria, hopefully they and the other brands that are watching their actions will stick with it and work with their agencies to make their online video advertising 1-2-3-Succeed!

More information and interviews can be found on The New York Times.

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ITN to launch YouTube book club

According to the good fellows over at NMA – ITN are to launch an online book club. Will it work? Only time will tell but it does demonstrate one of the ways that online technologies are being used by older media companies to attract a new audience.

Find out more here nma.co.uk

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