Vquence, an Australian start-up in online video technology, and SignUp Media Limited, a media measurement and analytics company, today announced an exclusive strategic sales and marketing agreement covering North America and the United Kingdom.

Vquence was founded by veteran entrepreneur Chris Gilbey, former CEO of Lake Technology, Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, former Multimedia Science Leader at the CSIRO ICT Centre, and John Ferlito, serial entrepreneur with several network service providers.

SignUp Media will offer Vquence’s VQmetrics service as an integral part of their suite of measurement tools to effectively measure and track viral video campaigns using Vquence’s database of 50 million videos. SignUp Media will have access to metrics on videos on YouTube, MySpace.TV, Dailymotion, Vimeo and other social media sites providing online quantitative metrics for brand and reputation monitoring.

“Internet video has become a critical component of the overall media landscape,VQmetrics will help our clients better monetize their content and show them how viral video may be contributing to successful campaigns with consumers” said Paul Mewett, COO and founder of SignUp Media.

Dr. Silvia Pfeiffer, Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder and Director of Vquence, is very excited about the new sales opportunities. “SignUp Media have very experienced and extremely well connected sales and marketing executives which will open up markets to us that we would otherwise not reach. Our respective visions of the future of the measurement market match and we can foresee huge opportunities beyond video together.”

Terry Foster, CEO of SignUp Media said, “We are excited to announce this strategic partnership with Vquence. Dr. Silvia Pfeiffer’s vision and thought leadership in social video metrics are second to none”. Foster sees tremendous growth and demand in this space over the next 3-5 years and believes this partnership is a key element in the next phase of SignUp Media’s growth.

About SignUp Media Limited

SignUp Media provides tools and content that allows companies to use information to make better and more informed decisions. SignUp Media’s monitoring tools and products combine research intelligence, quality content, text-mining methods and visualization capability into powerful solutions that give you the ability to track and document the effectiveness of your communications activities. www.signupmedia.com

About Vquence PTY

Vquence’s mission is to measure every aspect of the consumption of socially published video online. We provide enterprises, marketers and consumers with detailed statistical data to satisfy information needs relating to social and online video. Vquence captures quantitative measurements of video use, and further provides audience reach and behavior information. www.vquence.com.au

I stumbled about it because four key areas that Vquence works in are mentioned as exciting new opportunities in his blog post about the topic:

• Digital video (esp. getting Internet video onto the TV)
• New analytics companies (in the vein of Compete.com, Visible Measures, Localytics, etc.)
• New forms of media/reporting/content creation
• Social media and marketing

I can only agree!

There are some interesting observations:

The Pepsi ad, while tops on views, comments, and number of ratings, actually didn’t rate as highly as the the others. My guess is that it has more informative than entertainment value and thus does not excite people as much to make a high rating.

The Bud Light ad received lots of views, but didn’t really engage people to make comments or ratings. People probably just agreed that cutting back on beer is not a good idea.

The SoBe 3D Lizards ad raised interest and comments, but wasn’t really rated either even though there were lots of special effects and the cool idea of a 3D ad.

The Bridgestone Astronauts ad was rated the highest, but it didn’t receive anywhere near the same number of new views as the others.

A similar effect is visible for the Hulu ad, which came second in rank, but has even less views than the Astronauts.

Now, other sites have also published rankings for the Superbowl ads, so let’s compare our outcome with that of others:

The methodologies between these rankings are very different. The USA Today is an online survey, the Nielseon IAG one is a panel, Tweetbowl measured the number of tweets on a particular ad, and Vquence the number of views on YouTube of the ads. However, there are some similarities.

Clearly, there are some common winners:

• Doritos – Crystal Ball
• Careerbuilder.com
• Doritos – Power of Crunch
• Pepsi – Refresh Anthem (now at 1.5M views at YouTube!)
  
• Pedigree
• Bud Light – Meeting
• Bridgestone – Potato Head

Some other are only on one top 10 list:

• Cars.com
• Budweiser – Clydesdale Generations
• NFL (isn’t even on most lists of ads shown)
• Etrade – Singing Baby
• Pepsi Max – I’m Good
• Hulu
• GoDaddy – Shower
• GI Joe
• Star Trek (though I am uncertain this one is the actual ad)
  
• GE – Scarecrow
• HR Block – Death and Taxes
• Miller – 1 Second

 Feel free to make up your own personal favorite. I really quite like the last one – a one second ad by Miller of a guy screaming “High Life”.

Their target audience were 25-35 year-old mostly mail IT guys in SMEs, which indeed hang out on social video sites. They published a sequence 3 videos, which were a mix of live action video showing work situations and animation using World of Warcraft characters to stylize emotional reactions to office situations.

Here’s what they learnt:

A. Shorter clips get more views

B. Animation ghets more play than live action

C. Search engines drive a decent amount of traffic to video sites

D. They doubled their traffic by actively commenting on blogs and posting opinions in communities and including a link to their video

E. They think more links and more connections will yield more traffic.

F. The burden of creating interest is entirely on the publisher. Unlike TV or cable channels where no matter what you do somebody will watch your stuff, there is no baseline audience online.

This is important information for when you are planning a video marketing campaign online. In contrast to traditional marketing channels, there is indeed much work necessary after you have published the video, since social media is about getting a communication going with your viewers rather than simply throwing an ad at them. If you take the time to get into the conversation, you will get a lot out of it for your marketing campaign, but also for your product.

Head over to iMedia to read the full article.

On 14th November, a video explaining the decision is published as the main channel video, together with 20 3-minute clips from their productions and 3 documentary style videos. The channel page is nicely designed with typical Monty Python imagery and has a simple link to their “Daily Monty Python” website. The explanatory video encourages people to watch and distribute the free clips, while at the same time pointing out the intention to sell more DVDs of the full videos from the Monty Python store. Each of the 20 production clips has a URL to the full DVD on Amazon in their description. No fancy overlay-ads are used.

Barely a week after the publication of the clips, NewTeeVee reports success of the strategy: apparently a 16,280% increase in sales of DVDs in Amazon!

People like the organised YouTube channel to get a quick, pre-sales overview of their works and entice a new generation to content that hasn’t had any new releases since 1983. They like the easy of linking to a site where they can get more information and buy the full DVDs, who come with extra material and therefore extra incentives to purchase. The secret of the YouTube channel is to use it as a pre-sales marketing instrument – as a way of viral advertising by using extracts of original content.

At the same time, Monty Python has refrained from upsetting their biggest fans and not issued take-down notices on clips that were published on other channels on YouTube. Our suggestion would be to use fan clips for further advertising. It seems a sensible move, since MontyPython’s own clips are by far not a complete set (yet?), and since the fan clips are often of as good a quality and have view counts in the millions that the newly uploaded Monty Python clips haven’t quite achieved yet.Therefore, if somebody searches for a particular Monty Python clip, they will most often land on a fan-uploaded clip. Why not make use of the already existing virality to further drive DVD sales?

Monty Python also has a square focus on YouTube in this activity. Checking MySpace.tv and Dailymotion, there doesn’t seem to be a similar channel there. This is another oppportunity missed for diversifying the activity and gaining a broader audience. In Europe, for example, Dailymotion’s take up is larger than YouTube’s. And a different kind of audience hangs out on MySpace to YouTube.

Overall, this is an example of a well executed and successful viral video advertising campaign. It shows respect for the fans, it provides the right teasers, and it provides subtle links to where to buy the full content.