Online Video Use Rises in April

By Enid Burns, ClickZ, Jun 9, 2009

Through its YouTube property, Google tops online video sites in April for U.S. audiences. That’s according to data from the comScore Video Metrix service.

Across all video sites, Internet users viewed 16.8 billion online videos in April, an increase of 16 percent over March. YouTube saw significant increase in video viewing, which contributed to the month-over-month growth.

Google’s video use increased 15 percent over March levels. The search giant served 6.8 billion videos, accounting for a 40.7 percent online video market share. Across Google, YouTube accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed on the property.

Here’s how the top U.S. online video properties stacked up by number of videos served and percentage share of videos for April:

• Total Internet: 16.8 billion; 100 percent market share
• Google sites: 6.8 billion; 40.7 percent market share
• Fox Interactive Media: 513 million; 3.1 percent market share
• Hulu: 397 million; 2.4 percent market share
• Viacom: 315.2 million; 1.9 percent market share
• Microsoft sites: 288.3 million; 1.7 percent market share

In a month of record video viewing on Google, nearly 152 million U.S. Internet users watched an average 111 videos each. The NBC and Fox property Hulu accounted for 2.4 percent of videos viewed and just 4.2 percent of all minutes spent watching online video. The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes.

Forget ‘Dancing With the Stars’ — Bring on the LXD

By Todd Krieger , April 14, 2009

As a fan, supporter, and huge proponent of Web video’s power to be a launching pad, a destination, and a marketing vehicle, I was pretty excited to learn of Agility Studio’s freshman effort, "The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers," also known as LXD.

You can see the trailer for the program here on director Jon M. Chu’s YouTube channel.

"LXD is a multiplatform franchise with content that will span Internet, live events, wireless, instructional video, film, television, licensing and merchandising," said Scott Ehrlich, Agility Studios CEO, in a news release, explaining why Agility is going with Chu. "It is the quintessential project our company looks for. It has multiple revenue streams and, in Jon M. Chu, a premium talent who is fluent in all media and known for consistently delivering great product."

This approach, in addition to the stellar production values, is exciting. Not to mention that Agility has secured brand integration in the form of a deal with PUMA — something it managed to do very early on. The series, which will officially hit in coming weeks, begins with a 10-episode first volume to familiarize people with the concept — a good-versus-evil scripted series set in the world of dance crews.

Agility Studios, announced with a bang in November 2008, is the brainchild of industry vet Scott Ehrlich, who started the company with Larry Tanz and Keith Quinn, both formerly with LivePlanet. (For those of you keeping score, that’s the Matt Damon/Ben Affleck production company that brought the world wonders such as "Project Greenlight." For a laugh, here’s a young Shia LaBeouf from way back when.)

In addition to these production heavyweights, Agility brought in Shannon Pruitt to be Senior VP, integrated sales and sponsorships. Pruitt’s experience at Mark Burnett Productions ("Survivor") and FremantleMedia ("American Idol") is something not always seen in digital studios of this size and in the end may be the straw that stirs the drink.

Chu is something of a brand name, having directed "Step Up 2: The Streets." On a budget of less than $20 million, it grossed $150 million worldwide.

But more than having a "name" director on the Web, his approach, using YouTube to find his dancers and being ingrained in the community, makes this franchise feel like it’s truly of the Web. And when I say ingrained, Chu and his crew performed at the highly produced YouTube Live event, which took place this past November. (If you can spare five minutes, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more joyous celebration of dance than this over-the-top extravaganza that the LXD, Chu’s homegrown dance crew, put on for "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" live at Caesars Palace.

To date, few have managed to pull off this combination of YouTube firepower and industry heavyweights who know their way around licensing, distribution, marketing, promotion, and solid brand integration. And as YouTube ramps up its desire to be a destination of choice for major brands, the LXD and those "franchises" that follow are definitely ones to watch.

 

Biography

Todd Krieger, SVP for Denuo, has been doing pioneering work at the crossroads of media and technology for over 15 years. He’s continually sought new ways to develop and monetize content, regardless of the platform on which it’s distributed or consumed. In a newly created role at Denuo, Todd is responsible for the oversight and expansion of the agency’s West Coast operation, with a focus on growing the company’s content practice. In this role he seeks to demystify the changing landscape of content creation and distribution for clients, ensuring greater monetization for content owners and more efficient delivery of messages for marketers.

Prior to joining Denuo, Todd was executive producer at Yahoo Media Group where he developed and launched multiple entertainment properties and oversaw the creation of multiplatform programs. Before Yahoo, he was the senior manager of business development at Microsoft TV.

Newspaper Sites Earn Higher Marks for Video Innovation

By Enid Burns, ClickZ, Apr 9, 2009

Newspaper publishers are becoming more proficient in their use of online video, both producing more content and garnering more views.

Video platform provider Brightcove said that between 2007 and 2008 newspapers increased the number of videos uploaded to the Brightcove platform from an average 186 videos per month to 638 per month. The total number of videos uploaded in 2008 increased by 1,500 percent.

Additionally, the number of video views has grown. In Q1 2009, the company’s newspaper customers streamed 42.8 million videos to their visitors, compared to 15.3 million video streams during the same quarter last year. That represents 365 percent growth in the number of video streams by Brightcove newspaper sites, the company noted in a blog post this week.

"The newspaper companies are becoming more capable of creating original content," said Brightcove chairman and CEO Jeremy Allaire. "They are seeing as a real driver in the time consumers are spending on their site."

The most common ad unit associated with this video content is a :15 pre-roll with a 300 x 250 companion banner. However many local advertisers won’t have a :15 spot and will run a :30 pre-roll in its place.

From an ad sales standpoint, Allaire noted the challenges are greater for smaller regional newspapers than for larger publishers. "What we’ve seen with video, especially with regional [papers], is initially they don’t have enough online inventory to immediately sell," he said. "They might not get as much of a premium on the CPM."

To produce video, many newspapers now have staff capable of being on camera, handling production, and creating multimedia presentations. Some papers are hiring former television producers and many are producing higher-quality video.

"There’s clearly a focus on increasing the production quality," said Allaire. "The higher the production quality the more compelling it will be to users, the more interest and higher return on the product."

New Model in Online Video Advertising Holds Promise

By Jeremy Lockhorn, ClickZ, Dec 29, 2008

Video is perhaps one of the most powerful arrows in a marketer’s quiver. Few would argue its raw emotive potential nor its nimbleness with telling great linear stories. It requires the right talent, of course, to leverage the medium appropriately. But in the hands of a gifted artist, there’s practically no limit to the power of video as a marketing tool.

The Web has brought a spate of new ways to use video, ranging from viral to pre-roll spots to in-banner streaming and so on. There’s been an explosion of video content making its way online — lots of it is crap, but there are diamonds in the user-generated rough and more professional content find its way online. Growth in both categories is creating more inventory that brands want to be associated with.

For me, though, online video had become boring until recently. I’ve grown tired of the pre-roll debate. I love new formats like overlays, but they’ve been around for a while and haven’t yet gotten the traction they deserve. The ABC player and interactive ad formats were hot at first, but there’s little scale there yet. I think Hulu is really interesting, and I like the way they’re thinking about the ad model and pushing some new interpretations (allowing the user to choose which spot from a particular advertiser they’d like to watch, for example). But beyond that, yawn, at least from a media perspective.

But, suddenly, video is interesting again — due primarily to some startups creating some new(ish) categories of video businesses. I don’t have space to examine all categories in a single column, so over the coming months, I’ll look at a few of these different businesses. Today we’ll get the ball rolling with prosumer ((define) generated advertising (PGA?).

Prosumer-generated advertising is my term for this new way of thinking about crowdsourcing video assets. Many brands have long been hesitant to advertise on user-generated content sites. While some brands have had success with turning their brands over to communities and asking them to produce advertising/commercial message (the Doritos Super Bowl program comes to mind), others have reaped unexpected results (Chevy Tahoe). Uncertainty and lack of control strike fear into many brand managers.

PGA may be part of the cure. These companies go out and find the best creators from the UGC sites, sign them up to a network, and work with brands to issue assignments and requests for video assets. Current (formerly CurrenTV) may well have launched this idea in 2005 with their viewer-created ad messages (VCAMs). Other players in this category include XLNTads, GeniusRocket, and Zooppa. Zadby is another company doing something similar, but with a slightly different approach (more on that shortly). You might also put TurnHere into this category, although its model is slightly different, having built its network more from film schools and independent producers.

For the most part, though, these companies operate with a simple process: brands create a brief, provide assets as desired, and turn the network loose. The companies function as sort of an intermediary between the brand and creators, aggregating video submissions, rejecting content that is off-brand or inappropriate, and delivering the best submissions back to the brand. Most of the companies run these programs as contests, meaning that the creators are doing spec work in hopes of landing the prize. The intermediary companies require varying levels of "licensing" or start-up fees from participating brands — but either way, the net result for the marketer is a bunch of video assets to choose from at a fraction of the cost of typical video production.

You’re likely to get a lot of crap back, but you’re also likely to get some really great stuff. I’ve seen case studies where some of the work that comes back is nearly broadcast-ready in terms of production value and creative quality. It’s an amazing idea that has potential to turn the commercial production business on its head. It will again challenge agency business models, but I believe it’s something we must embrace rather than fear. Most of the companies I’ve spoken to report that they’ve done campaigns with and without agency involvement, and that the agency-led projects usually produce the best results. It still falls to the agency to uncover key consumer insights and craft an appropriate creative/messaging strategy. Even with this new model, there’s clearly a need for agencies to play a role and provide tremendous value.

The companies also report that marketers deploy the video assets in different ways. Some take the finished videos directly from the creators and use them online as pre-rolls, viral videos, or even site-side video content. Others use the approach to generate a broad swath of ideas, taking the best ideas and running them through more traditional production channels. Still others use the PGA process to uncover new film making talent.

Zadby’s model varies slightly from the above process. Its assignments are more like requests for product placement, and it falls to the content creator to develop the product integration approach. Marketers effectively are relinquishing more control to the creators — a risky proposition for many brands. In return for taking that risk, though, marketers get the benefit of a performance-driven pricing model, where the final cost to the marketer is based on the number of views achieved by the content. It’s an interesting twist on this model.

What’s becoming increasingly clear is this: social media has ushered in a new era of digital marketing. Brands must become comfortable with the fact that the consumer is squarely in control. Brands must be willing to participate in conversations and relinquish some of the brand control they are used to having. Prosumer-generated advertising may just be the baby step needed to get more marketers over that first hurdle.

Biography

Jeremy Lockhorn is director of emerging media and video innovation at Razorfish. He is a member of the agency’s advanced marketing solutions (AMS) team and is focused on interaction with video across all platforms. He supports cross-discipline client teams with research, education, and ideation. During his 10-year tenure at the agency, his various roles have centered on the intersection of media, creative, and technology. He is a frequent speaker on emerging media.

Give Consumers Choice: Ads vs. No Ads

By Jeremy Lockhorn, ClickZ, Mar 23, 2009

Online video consumption continues to grow rapidly. Depending on which research you believe, online video is either stealing viewers from primetime television or driving more viewers to TV. Whatever the case, there’s tremendous pressure on the business models for practically the entire ecosystem. Growth in online video ad spend continues but is largely the result of adapting the TV model and reducing the ratio of ads to content — a model that likely cannot, on its own, fund quality content like "24" or "CSI." And TV ad spend has held its own despite the challenging economy. But increasing DVR penetration, digital distribution, and an increasingly fragmented audience would seem to indicate that current TV ad budgets can’t hold up forever.

NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker has said that the rise of TiVos and other digital recording devices as well as online video snacking have forced broadcasters to change their business models, yet "their replacements…are not necessarily ready for primetime."

Debate and experimentation with different ad and business models will continue for some time. I don’t have the answer or a prediction for where we’ll wind up, but I do have a suggestion: choice.

Digital media have put consumers in the driver’s seat. Consumers control when, where, and how they watch video, including the interruptive advertising embedded in the video. In addition, barriers to entry in terms of video production and distribution costs have become much lower, creating an absolute explosion in content volume. Quality varies widely, of course, but the simple fact is that people are now presented with nearly unlimited viewing options.

In this world of infinite choice and full control, advertisers can buy eyeballs (reach) but can’t buy attention (engagement). You’ve got to earn attention.

Fortunately, some of the same things driving this shift are also creating opportunities to earn that attention. Precise targeting and dynamic assembly of video assets can be used to make video advertising so relevant that it doesn’t feel like advertising anymore. Brands can produce entertaining video content that is sought out rather than avoided. Video itself can be used as a social medium, enabling brands to earn attention by talking with, rather than shouting at, their audiences. And so on.

In this swirling mass of experimental efforts to earn attention, choice has been overlooked. If consumers are in control, why not embrace it? They expect it. We’ve trained them to, with instant access to a massive wealth of content online and the ability to time shift and fast-forward content on TV. It’s hard to put that genie back in the bottle, so maybe we should stop trying.

What if we gave people even more choice instead? The ultimate expression of this idea would be a simple choice at the beginning of any on-demand content experience. Would you like to: A.) Pay $1.99 (or whatever) to watch this content with no advertising, or B.) Watch free with ads embedded? And maybe take it a step further by presenting the viewer with a menu of ads they’d like to watch. This could be at a brand level or even a category level; I’m interested in ads about cars, running shoes, and technology, but not laundry detergent.

For me as a consumer, it’s the ultimate way to watch. I’ve got a DVR and fast-forward through ads. It works, but it isn’t the best experience. I’ve also got an Apple TV that I use occasionally to download primetime TV content. It also works, but it’s not always worth paying $2.99 for HD episodes that I can get for free elsewhere. If I could get that stuff on-demand for free with relevant ads that I’ve chosen, then my viewing would suddenly switch to nearly 100 percent Apple TV.

Consider the accountability as well. The data that marketers would get back in terms of viewer preferences would be incredibly valuable. This raging debate over show ratings, ad ratings, and C3 (define) would end abruptly; or at least would fall back to a discussion about whether people leave the room when the ads come on. One could argue that when a consumer chooses to view an ad, she is by default engaged in the view. So the nebulous idea of engagement might finally have a clear quantitative corollary — time viewed. And if brands are built by creating relationships, and relationships are built through conversations and time spent together, how valuable is that kind of grounded engagement metric?

Choice may well be the ultimately business model. What do you think?

Biography

Jeremy Lockhorn is director of emerging media and video innovation at Razorfish. He is a member of the agency’s advanced marketing solutions (AMS) team and is focused on interaction with video across all platforms. He supports cross-discipline client teams with research, education, and ideation. During his 10-year tenure at the agency, his various roles have centered on the intersection of media, creative, and technology. He is a frequent speaker on emerging media.

Strategies for Making Video Ads Go Viral

By Christine Beardsell, The ClickZ Network, Jan 15, 2008

When marketers first threw around the phrase "viral video" like it was a noun a year ago, I laughed out loud. Who’s to decide if a video goes viral? I couldn’t understand how the phrase had found its way next to units like "banner ad" and "pre-roll" on the media planning check list, as if creating a hit video on YouTube was as easy as creating an Eyeblaster unit on Yahoo.

Today, I’m not so quick to laugh. With time, money, and the right strategy, pretty much any video can get click rates that would qualify it as viral. Over the last year, a number of seeding and syndication options have emerged that make it easier for a video or a series of videos to go viral.

Organic Seeding

Although still the largest video network, YouTube has a lot more competition than it did a year ago. That means there are a lot more audiences advertisers can seek out, evaluate, and engage. An organic seeding plan is about finding which communities fit best with your brand, then uploading the video across these multiple networks.

Remember: although uploading to video networks is free, building an organic seeding plan is a lot of work. Advertisers must be at least as smart as a YouTube star. And that means knowing who the key influencers are within each community, building an overall trust, and understanding SEO (define). Don’t be scared to tap into social video enthusiasts within your own agency to seed. They may have already done some of the heavy lifting for you.

Once your brand has an established presence within each community, you can take advantage of free organic seeding tools like TubeMogul and Vidmetrix.

Paid Seeding

Face it, even if you become an expert at organic seeding, the competition is tough. Very rarely is a branded viral video going to take off organically. Some degree of paid seeding is a must if you want to rise above the clutter.

To start, find out what paid placement plans each video network site offers. YouTube will want top dollar, but you’d be surprised how inexpensive some of the smaller sites are. Seeking out new and emerging communities is key. And by sprinkling paid placements around several smaller networks, you’re much more likely to touch key influencers who will spread your video for you.

A second option in paid seeding is to hire an expert. New companies like Kontraband’s The 7th Chamber and Viral Manage are popping up every day. They also offer tiered plans that include viral tracking and blog/forum seeding, which could be more cost effective.

Syndication

If you’re planning to do more than one video and want to engage an audience over a longer period, there are also both free and paid syndication options available.

For one, if you spend money on a microsite to house your video, make sure to add the various free RSS buttons. Bloggers and vloggers (define) have been doing this for years. Let your viewers decide where and how they want to view your videos.

For another, set aside budget for social network video widgets. While Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo are spearheading the space right now, Google OpenSocial has opened the doors to several social networks, like LinkedIn and Friendster. If your video goes viral, building these widgets is the best way to reach these viewers multiple times.

Lastly, don’t put money into video banners. They don’t allow for the full experience, and you’ll only drive people to your advertising video content. We all know that banners, even video banners, are too easily ignored — especially when you have to turn the sound on! There are better ways to spend money on reaching beyond the major video and social networks. Take a look at syndicating through companies like Broadband Enterprises. It has partnerships with thousands of sites and offers measurement and tracking tools.

Conclusion

At what point does a seeding strategy make a viral video just another form of interruptive advertising? Video communities are savvy and notice when brands become too pushy through paid placement.

Advertisers will always have a difficult time playing in the viral space. People want pure entertainment. Even the most minimally branded videos are often rejected.

Next time, I’ll explore how supporting entertainment with brand utilities is one brand content model that’ll change the face of online advertising and entertainment.

Biography

As director of content integration at Digitas, Christine works across all brand teams to lead the creative innovation of motion media content. She has a unique and varied set of skills that weaves media, tech, and channel smarts to inform deep interactive experiences for clients such as American Express, Samsung, and IHG. At the advent of the digital revolution, she established Digitas’ Final Cut Pro media lab and has since scaled it across offices.

Christine has a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art in New York City, where she focused her studies on motion media, interactive design, and photography. Her work in the industry has contributed to top honors including silver and bronze Cyber Lions, a Caples Award, an OMMA Award, New York Festivals Awards, ECHO Awards, and The One Show Awards.