The success of TV ads on YouTube

March 29, 2009 – 8:23 am

This blog entry was written for iMedia Asia.

One of the biggest fears in our industry is that online video will replace TV, and the consequences this will have on advertising and broad audience reach. According to recent research reports, the notion that online video is pushing TV out of the market is at least partially mistaken – instead, both, TV and online video viewership are continuing to increase.

With time-shifted TV increasing over-proportionally, and therefore people increasingly skipping ad breaks, new and more effective forms of advertising on TV are increasingly necessary – such as sponsorships, overlay ads, or clickable product placements. However, the traditional ad breaks will not fully go away – they just need to be used more effectively.

The important finding in the reports is that 31 percent of Internet activity occurs when consumers are also watching TV. Almost every third person uses the Internet while watching TV! Surely, this is an opportunity that advertisers must not miss!

The Superbowl ads show the way: this year, almost 70% of the ads had a URL embedded and planned for interaction with their customers after running the ad. The role of TV ads is changing: they are now a start to online user engagement. Advertisers have to be aware that consumers have their universal look-up tool at hand as they are watching TV and are keen to type in a URL and follow it to explore new products, play an online game, or interact in some other way with the brand that is advertising on TV.

Even now, TV ads are still a very good means to reach a large and diverse audience and seed consumer interaction. The minimum of user interaction that a TV spot should provide is that a copy of itself can be found online and shared with others through a link. Having your TV spot uploaded online is a great means to seed a viral ad to an audience that is used to sharing through their social networks.

You just need to check out view counts on some of the top Superbowl ads of this season to see that their online impact can be enormous:

A good Australian example is this Toohey’s ad, which was uploaded by a random user and achieved more than 500K views. Toohey’s would have gotten a lot of information about their audience and possibilities to re-connect to that audience had they published it themselves.

So, the next time you roll out a TV ad, also roll it out online and don’t wait until one of your customers does this job for you out of sheer frustration that it is not otherwise available.

Set up a channel on YouTube, through which you publish it. That gives your ads a common home and an authorised place to live. It also allows you to check out YouTube Insight metrics to analyse the composition of your audience.

Since YouTube is regarded by most as the default online video search engine, it should be your first call to upload it there. Another site to consider is MySpace.TV – if you have a MySpace page for your brand or campaign, you should also have your video ad at MySpace.TV. There are plenty of other sites that may be relevant depending on the audience you are targeting.

When you upload the video, also make sure to fill in the metadata with lots of information – this is your means of performing Search Engine Optimisation within YouTube and makes your video turn up in the “related videos” box of other videos more often.

Also consider making your TV ads more interesting for an online audience. Some recommendations for making interesting video ads for online were recently published by Daniel Flamberg at iMedia: make them short, funny, and use animation. And don’t forget to include a URL in your TV ad so you can direct your customers to the right place of engagement.

Some Video ad collectors on YouTube:

By silvia | Posted in Campaign, Creative, TV Ads, YouTube | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

VQmetrics launch

March 21, 2009 – 9:13 pm

This week we launched the VQmetrics product into the Australian market with an event in Sydney organised with the help of Slattery IT. We had around 40 people turn up – a good mix of advertisers, agencies, investors, friends, and other interested parties. The venue was totally awesome on the Blacket Hotel’s rooftop bar and seminar room, and we had the perfect weather to take advantage of the rooftop bar.

As the CEO, I had the honour to unveil the new product: VQmetrics. I put together slides and a demo video of VQmetrics to explain what we do and what VQmetrics has to offer over and on top of other metrics services. The first third of the talk introduced the VQmetrics service, the second third talked about how imprtant it is for advertisers to be present in social video – in particular on YouTube – and in the last third I presented some case studies of ads and how they performed online.

The slides are on Slideshare and here:

The demo video (as yet without explanations) is on YouTube and here:

Beyond VQmetrics, I also explained the services that Vquence offers, which go beyond the mere use of the Dashboard metrics service and into consulting. We can offer help for every stage of a social video campaign – we have measurements of social video networks data to undertake market research and gain media insights, we can recommend ways of rolling out a campaign and estimates of impact, we can execute the uploads, the video SEO, and the seeding, we undertake ongoing monitoring, campaign impact audits, and provide recommendations for improvements, and we provide concluding analyst reports.

The mood at the launch was very relaxed and we got lots of great feedback. Thank you so much everybody who made the time to join us on a busy Thursday evening!

By silvia | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Why you must have a product/brand representation on YouTube

March 14, 2009 – 12:32 pm

Looking at the recent comScore statistic of video hosting sites, YouTube has now passed 100MM viewers per month and grabs 43% of the market. Not only is YouTube the dominant video publishing site on the Interent – it is also the dominant video search site.

Anyone looking for your brand or product on YouTube should find your channel and your videos over everybody else’s. If that is not the case, you better go and fix it! Create a channel and upload some of your corporate videos, even if they are just copies of your TVCs.

This situation reminds me of the beginning of the Web, when not everybody had a Web page. YouTube is a repetition of that, just for videos only.

Your channel page is an additional piece of real estate through which you can communicate your message and which you can monetise. In addition, regard the YouTube channel as an advertising space for your other Web estates – in particular if you are a video content publisher.

For example, if people are looking for videos on the recent Victorian Bushfires, they would go to YouTube, where they find mostly poor quality user generated content. So, even if you have the best videos on the world about the Victorian Bushfires, people won’t find them unless you make them aware of your content on YouTube und thus direct them to your Web estates.

Another important fact to note in this context is that videos – in particular YouTube videos – are 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google search results than any other Web content. This is another argument to support using YouTube videos as a means of SEO for your other content.

By silvia | Posted in Campaign, Tips, YouTube | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Against the call for regulation on bloggers and dark viral campaigns

March 12, 2009 – 1:02 pm

I spent the last two days at ad:tech Sydney and have come back highly inspired. There are a few blog posts in the pipeline – here is the first. :)

On Tuesday I attended a panel on “Effects Of Transparency: Cash For Comment And The Dark Marketing Debate” by David Lee and Julian Cole. They presented a comprehensive list of dark marketing campaigns, some of which were successful and others backfired. The take-away message was that it is in general a bad idea to keep the consumer in the dark and that transparency needs to become a requirement for marketing campaigns.

It was proposed that the best way to achieve transparency is through the development of a regulation for online marketing campaigns within one of Australia’s leading digital industry bodies AIMIA, AFA, or mfa.

I’d like to respectfully disagree. I don’t think we need a police force for online marketing. The Web is quite a self-regulating environment and all the poorly executed campaigns learnt very quickly that the truth comes out no matter if they want to. Do we really need a law to forbid us to leave the house without a coat in winter, because we could catch a cold?

Who are we trying to protect? Every poorly executed dark campaign has backfired either on the brand or the agency. Has it really had such a negative effect on society that we need to bring out legislation?

Even a call for an “industry code of practice” is too much IMHO. Do we even know what we are asking for and what we are restricting? Let’s not restrict our creativity before we have even explored the new medium and its possibilities in full.

Instead, what we need is education. Education on what works and what doesn’t. After all, the medium is still new and we are all still trying it out. We will get burnt for a bit before we understand the rules under which it works.

For example, there are some very good dark viral video campaigns that are very successful and have not created any negative reactions – not from consumers, not from the mainstream press, not from politics or society. Just check out the first and second example on my blog on “dark viral videos and witchery“.

What we need are “best practices” – examples and case studies of successful campaigns that people can replicate. This will not restrict creativity, but will give those that are uncertain about how to make best use of a new medium the tools to execute successfully. It does not restrict those that are more creative and open to experiments to find out how to make the most of the new medium.

By silvia | Posted in Campaign, Industry News, Opinion | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Searching on Twitter

March 10, 2009 – 6:02 am

The Twitter phenomenon is probably rather well known by anybody online now: a messaging service that can be your most immediate source of news items. I use it to share one-line news items, share when I posted a new blog post, or anything else that may be interesting to my friends and is just a short message not worthy of a full blog post.

For monitoring what is being said about a certain topic, brand, or even video, Twitter provides since recently a search interface. The default search return tweets from “just now”. However, Twitter search has an awesome set of very intuitive operators that can be used with the search keywords. There are useful things such as putting a smiley :) or :( behind a query to indicate you want a tweet with a positive/negative attitude, or adding a since:{date} and/or until:{date} to indicate the time frame within which you wanted the tweets. I wished all of these operators were available for Google searches, too!

The only thing that is annoying about the Twitter search is that it doesn’t resolve the tinyurls that people’s long urls get turned into. Thus, it is impossible to search for links to, e.g. specific videos on YouTube. I think Twitter should implement that improvement and put both, the tinyurl link as well as the resolved url into their index for each post.

By silvia | Posted in Tips | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Online celebrity advertising

March 6, 2009 – 6:30 pm

One generally accepted valid approach towards producing a video ad that will go viral online is to approach a person that has already achieved a reputation on YouTube for their quirky, interesting, sexy, or otherwise attractive videos and use them in the video ad.

We have such an online video celebrity right here in Australia: Natalie Tran and her communitychannel on YouTube which has more than 150,000 subscribers. Her videos have amassed more than 64MM views according to WAToday- that’s even more than AC/DC who have 53MM views. Her highest scoring video has more than 11MM views!

Here’s your challenge: I am expecting to see at least one viral video campaign come out of Australia with her as the star. Do it right, and you’re bound to have a tremendous viral success.

By silvia | Posted in Campaign, Creative, YouTube | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Creativity with YouTube

March 6, 2009 – 5:54 pm

Not an advertising related post, but about being creative with online video. A guy called Kutiman from Israel used a number of videos from YouTube to create original music by mash-ups. Check out his awesome tracks. I think a new music culture was just born.

By silvia | Posted in Creative, YouTube | Tagged , | Comments (0)

The value of YouTube to business

March 5, 2009 – 4:48 pm

I just came across an article by Jan Ozer called “YouTube means business“.

On the examples of an attorney, a real estate agent, and an international leader in bathroom and kitchen fixtures, he explains why they use YouTube to publish video and what impact that has on their business. A very worthy read.

By silvia | Posted in YouTube | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Long-form video ads on the rise?

March 3, 2009 – 7:25 pm

Recently, I’ve been noticing a new trend: some viral video advertising campaigns are no longer the typical 30-50sec long, funny spot. Instead, there are long-form ads that are more like short-films with a proper story. Interestingly, they are so well made that people share them across the Internet and actually watch them from start to finish.

Here are some key examples:

1. In September 2008, Pantene Thailand created a 4 min long and very touching film about a deaf girl that wants to learn to play the violin. There is no mention of Pantene other than at the end with “You can shine” as the message. The video comes across rather like a sponsored short film and is a pleasure to watch. It has attracted across its rougly a dozen copies on YouTube about 500K views.

2. In January 2009, Gatorade launched “The Quest for G” – a series of short videos that follow a warrior on a quest playing on a lot of topics including Monty Python and the Jabbawockeez. The full 7:34 min long series can be viewed below, but the most views are actually on the videos published by Gatorade on their whatsg channel: this video alone has more than 1.2M views.

3. Something very different comes out of Canada. The Purchase Brothers created a short film called “Escape from City 17″ about the Half Life computer game. It is 5:30 min long and has almost 2M viewers. While this was not a marketing campaign, Valve could have asked for no better publicity than this video created by independent filmmakers.

It seems that the old short-form requirement for video ads to go viral is no longer. We may enter a new era with an increasing amount of engaging, story-telling long-form ads. Or something still funny like this eBay/Backstreet Boy parody by Weird Al Yankovic.

By silvia | Posted in Tips, YouTube | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Ad opportunities in online video on the rise

March 2, 2009 – 2:25 pm

According to AccuStream iMedia Research, there was a 24.3% increase in professionally produced content on the web in 2008, mostly caused by broadcast companies joining the online publishing revolution.

David Hallerman from eMarketer reckons that “the sharp escalation of professional video content on the Web—mainly from TV networks—is creating a viable base for brand marketers”.

Add to this the standardisation efforts of the IAB for in-stream and companion ad formats for video and you can foresee a lucrative new advertising market emerge around online video.

By silvia | Posted in Industry News, Standards, Tips | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)