They analyzed Q1 performance in online video from 2009 and 2010 and summarized their findings as such:
Online video views has grown dramatically: 40 percent for broadcast media networks. 300 percent for web-based media networks. Spike is attributable to newspapers (37% jump) and magazines (70%)
Online video production has grown dramatically: Newspapers (up 190%), magazines (up 60%), music labels (up 64%), radio (up 62%).
Engagement levels vary by media type: Average length of viewing stream (in minutes:seconds) by media type broadcast networks (2:53), music labels (1:50), and newspapers (1:41).
Completion rates vary by media type: Percentage of people by media type who finish watching videos – newspapers (41%), magazines (39%), broadcasters (38%), and music labels (29%).
Twitter referrals create the highest level of engagement (longest viewing times): Broadcast networks (1:52), magazine publishers (1:23), and music labels (2:33). The exception is newspaper publishers, which see the highest level of engagement from viewers who find their content via Yahoo! (1:20).
Lastly, Brightcove claims that the majority of publishers in their study plan to launch ad-supported mobile video within the next 6-12 months.
I love stories of people sidestepping gatekeepers. At WordCamp in San Francisco, Karl Vogel of QuestionCopyright told a great story of how one animator and filmmaker, Nina Paley, chose to distribute her film, Sita Sings the Blues, completely open source. The open source distribution was so complete that she even let other people profit from her film and the character likenesses. You could, if you want, show her film at a theater, charge admission, and keep all the money. Or you could sell products with images of the characters on it and keep all the money.
Unbelievable.
Paley didn’t make a fortune, but she did make money, about $90K in profit.
Except for a music licensing deal that cost her $50K (she had to take out a loan to pay it), Paley didn’t deal with any gatekeepers, or have any additional film distribution expenses beyond site hosting fees. She made her film completely free via an open source platform and made money using these techniques:
More great news coming out of the itiBiti platform. We’re still in the BETA phase of the lifecycle, and already we’re seeing very positive metrics emerge.
A few of the highlights:
Over 60% of those consumers directly targeted by brands in a closed environment have downloaded the application
64% of the users engage with the application regularly. When compared to other social media applications, this figure is very substantive (e.g., Twitter only sees 1/4 of its potential audience engage)
Active Consumer Engagement with itiBiti is averaging 2.4 times per day, with an average length of 6.8 minutes
And underscoring this is the fact that no major marketing or brand push initiatives have been undertaken up to this point. All of these figures are coming from organic growth, and early adopters. Consumers are responding & engaging.
More and more brands are seeing the value in customized desktop applications. It’s critical that within a fragmented media arena every opportunity to continue a discussion with consumers is utilized. And in the desktop lies an avenue of untapped merit…
I remember attending a computer trade show years ago in Vegas (I believe it was Comdex. Gives you an idea how long ago) and seeing an endless array of portable video players. At the time, the Apple iPod had come out, but it had yet to release a video version of its digital player. I went to talk to a few of the manufacturers of the media players about their devices. After the obvious discussion of how big the hard drive was, the resolution, and the price, I asked what I think is the most important question with media players, “How do you get the movies onto the device?” Everyone I spoke to just said, “Oh, we have software for that.” Did they have a demo of the software? No.
It’s no surprise that none of those media players are around today.
Apple at that time had already proven the successful marriage of device (iPod) and application (iTunes). It was truly simplicity. I remember when I installed my iPod for the first time, I was blown away at the simplicity. It just found all my MP3s and sucked it into the device without any difficulty. It was the best consumer product experience I had ever had. Many competing products claimed, “Oh, you can just bring all your music into our device,” but it was far from simple.
Hey tablet PC makers, don’t let software be an afterthought
I made the claim in a previous article (If everybody loves Super Bowl ads, then why don’t advertisers always make Super Bowl-quality ads? on Spark Minute) that all ads during the Super Bowl should have pointed people to a website or some type of social media interaction. In a single 30-second advertisement, I argued that it’s very difficult to introduce a new concept in an ad and then motivate people to purchase.
Prior to social media advertisers solved that dilemma with frequency. There was this theory that if a person simply sees an advertising message three or four times that’s all the motivation they’ll need to purchase. In my early days of advertising (prior to the public proliferation of the Internet) I designed these programs that did regression analysis that showed the success levels of reach and frequency, the two critical variables in traditional advertising campaigns. By early Lotus standards, these simple line charts were state of the art and my analysis really impressed the client. I look back at it now and I’m amazed I wasted my time on so much BS.
They created a controversial application that got people talking.
They created an application specifically targeted towards their demographic, young men.
When the online anger took off, they immediately responded and apologized if some saw it in bad taste, but that their intention was humorous. Here’s the tweeted apology.
They invited feedback.
They saw that the discussion was trending on the hashtag #pepsifail and tagged their tweeted apology with it. This first and foremost guaranteed that their apology would be seen, but they also accepted the community decision that this was how this story would be classified.
What did the PepsiCo/AMP brand do wrong?
The application’s content was not unique, it just played off of tired stereotypes.
It could have been funnier. AXE’s commercials and content are funnier because they create a completely over-the-top male fantasy. And AXE’s content really pokes fun at the male fantasy. This one didn’t really poke fun at male behavior, even though that was AMP’s tweeted intention. Rather it stereotyped women in an often unflattering way.
Having done standup comedy myself I know that offending people is an unfortunate part of the business. It’s hard to get away from it. There are very few comedians that don’t offend anyone. Even Jay Leno who is about as squeaky clean as you get actually has a mean streak as he makes fun of people for their ignorance in his “Jaywalking” segments.
Ultimately, was this application, the community response, and AMP’s response successful? I think it was successful for the following reasons.
I didn’t even know what AMP energy drink was before this happened. I’ve now “discovered” AMP.
Nobody died and they had an open and honest dialogue with the community about the application, and their intention. They didn’t cave to pressure and pull the application down (the usual response). Rather they engaged in a very open conversation. We’ve seen true social media failures where the communications department runs in around in circles trying to hide their mistake. Those epic failures live on as what not to do in social media. This will not live as one of those examples. Instead this case will live on as an example of how to spin a mistake into a win in social media.
They got TRAFFIC! As of Friday last week all of 150 people had download the program. Today, Wednesday, they have over 17,000 downloads, according to an AMP spokesperson I talked with. UPDATE: I talked with the AMP spokesman again, and it turns out those numbers are very dated. As of Thursday morning they had nearly 77,000 downloads of which 75,854 came AFTER the story broke on Mashable. They’re now the #2 free entertainment application, and #12 overall in free applications.
What do you think? Can you argue with success like that? Do you think the PepsiCo/AMP iPhone application was a success or a failure?
Leo Laporte is a long time veteran of radio and TV broadcasting, and now owner of the TWiT (This Week in Tech) network which offers a cornucopia of online tech programs. I worked with Leo at TechTV (formerly known as ZDTV), the ill-fated 24-hour cable news network devoted to technology and the Internet that lasted only six years. I was the editorial supervisor on both of his tech help shows, “Call for Help” and “Screensavers” at TechTV. Leo was a great guy to work with and what we all knew back then was that Leo was one of a kind. He was the only person who had massive tech knowledge, and years of broadcasting experience, plus was great on camera. While there are plenty of people on camera today that talk tech, there is no one that equals Leo’s breadth of relationships, knowledge, and experience.
I just finished 15 interviews for a series I produced called “Making Money from Podcasting.” A summary article is available on the Mashable site “9 Successful Techniques for Making Money from Podcasting.” One of the repeated comments in the article was “What about Leo Laporte?” And they’re right, I should have interviewed him, but there was a reason I didn’t. Given Leo’s experience, to some level he’s simply not repeatable. Yes, one can build the model that he’s built with TWiT and enjoy some success, but you still wouldn’t have the background connections and experience he has. I remember when Leo started TWiT, my comment was, “If Leo can’t figure out how to make money from podcasting, nobody will.”
Luckily Leo did figure out how to make money from podcasting. A lot of it. In fact, $1.5 million according to him during his speech at the Online News Association Conference in San Francisco on Friday, as reported by Pete Cashmore of Mashable. He produces TWiT with a staff of seven and a yearly budget of $350,000. Watch his presentation where he talks about the plans to launch CNET and what it would cost to launch a 24 hour cable network about technology. Leo did some research and at the time he came back to say it would cost $50 million a year and you would lose money for the first five years. He also pointed that CNN didn’t make any money until ten years. So using that logic, you’d spend somewhere between $250 to $500 million dollars before you’d see any profit. At the tome, CNET chose against it. Quite a risk back then. And it’s a risk that doesn’t exist today.
Watch this video (about 40 minutes) where Leo goes through his whole history of “The Site,” ZDTV, and now TWiT. Specifically, he talks about how you can make money finding niche audiences that are passionate. It’s rather fascinating.
In the early days of online video, so many aspects of production and monetization mimicked traditional broadcast programming. Online videos were simply repurposed TV programs with interstitial advertising. While some of that is still in play and is working very successfully, like on Hulu, interstitial TV-like ads are not the only way advertisements can be placed in an online video.
As a video producer, before you contemplate an advertising insertion technique, ask yourself, “What are the advertisers’ goals?”
Brand awareness?
Do they want people to actually conduct an action, such as pick up the phone and make a call or go check out a site?
Should the advertisement simply entice people to go and buy their product?
You need to know these answers in order to provide the best benefit for the advertiser. In some cases you’ll have complete control of the advertising insertion decision, and in other cases you’ll have no control. Depending on the brand you want for your program, control of ad insertion may or many not be necessary.
Here are some of the common methods for ad placement within online video programming.
Overlays and picture in a picture – The advantage of this technique is that it doesn’t stop the video programming. The disadvantage is it distracts from the video programming by covering up the content, adding non-relevant information, or actually shrinking the viewing window. YouTube started doing overlays with its top tier programming. Online video ad network VideoEgg has a whole series of different overlay and picture-in-a-picture ad placement formats.
Pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll – This is the most popular, most used, most successful, and most complained about advertising insertion technique. I believe the reason online interstitial advertisements get so much guff is because they’re a direct descendant of traditional broadcasting. There’s a feeling that the online experience should not be a repeat of traditional media. But as much as people complain, specifically about pre-roll advertisements, they are still immensely successful. Hulu has proven that this model can definitely work if you’ve got high demand content.
In program advertisements – This is where the talent of your show reads the ad or makes a mention of the product in a way that it naturally fits within the editorial and programming of the show. Online video network Revision3 does this with many of its advertisers.
Product placement – Similar to in-program advertisements, a product is placed and instead of an actual advertisement, the product becomes intrinsic to the show’s story and programming.
Should the program’s producer or the ad network determine the ad’s placement?
Producers don’t necessarily have to suffer arbitrary ad placements. They can place the ads where they want to place them. Companies such as Visible Measures track viewership of videos within the video and can determine at precise moments when viewership is at its highest. With that information, producers can determine where to insert an ad or a product placement or an overlay. In an interview I conducted at The CMO Club last year in New York, here’s a short piece of advice from Matt Cutler, Visible Measures’ VP of Marketing on where you should and should not place an online advertisement.
As Cutler advises, insert ads as early in the program as possible and also where the attention is at its highest. But that’s just general advice for all videos.
If your advertisers are in line with your editorial, you can actually place ads alongside your editorial. For example, if you’re talking about video editing, then an ad for a Flip Mino camera alongside would be completely appropriate. A few years ago I was attending Jeff Pulver’s VoIP conference (no longer owned by Pulver) in San Jose and I was impressed by a demo from a small company then called Vidavee (last year they were bought by Vignette). Vidavee made it possible for producers to determine the exact moments within their shows that they wanted overlay ads to appear. Using the Vidavee service, the more clicks an ad got, the more money the producer would receive. Therefore, it made sense for the producer to find those best moments. But finding those moments was purely a creative decision and not an audience measurement decision like what Visible Measures provides.
If online video producers want to make more money, they need to get more involved with the advertising insertion process.
What other suggestions can you offer for placement of online video ads?
Ultimately, was this application, the community response, and AMP’s response successful? I think it was successful for the following reasons.
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