The New eCommerce Reality: Every Company is a Media Company

September 09, 2010

In "Every Company is a Media Company" author Tom Foremski accurately points out "When every company is a media company this changes more than just a company's PR/communications department -- it changes nearly every aspect of an organization." He adds, "'Every company is a media company' is the most important business transformation of our times because every company is affected. It is also a massive business opportunity for so many businesses."

In this week's Jack Myers Media Business Report delivered yesterday to subscribers, I shared proprietary economic insights on companies ranging from Wal-Mart and Whole Foods to Johnson & Johnson and P&G that are investing significant organizational and financial resources in building media properties. These media assets are not intended only to deliver marketing value, but to generate enhanced economic value and enhance the companies' shareholder value. While websites, mobile applications and social media are the visible tip of the iceberg for many companies' investments in media ownership, they are also developing place-based digital media and expanding their event and experiential marketing commitments, which will represent nearly $18 billion of marketers' expenditures this year.

Event and experiential marketing has traditionally been approached as a series of one-off consumer outreach initiatives by marketers. Now they are being reconsidered as renewable and sustainable media properties that can often be partially or completely self-funding.

As mobile scanning capabilities in the U.S. become as developed as they are already in several Asian and European countries, both retailers and brand marketers will invest in building direct marketing, couponing and promotional apps that are designed to drive traffic and generate real-time response. These apps will increasingly put marketers directly into the media business as they seek to generate ancillary revenues from endemic and non-endemic partners.

With consumers living in a mash up of apps, blogs, RSS feeds, links, text messages, tweets, self-generated content, social networks and location-based promotion, strong media brands will extend off the screen and page into merchandise and consumer services, while strong product and service brands will morph into media properties. Progressive media companies and marketers will become indistinguishable and undifferentiated.

To comment, visit www.jackmyersthinktank.com. JackMyersThinkTank and MediaBizBloggers are free and underwritten as an industry service by corporate subscribers to Jack Myers Media Business Report. For subscription information, visit www.myersreport.com. Visit the archives of JackMyersThinkTank and MediaBizBloggers. Jack Myers can be contacted directly at jm@jackmyers.com .

Tags: online advertising , social media , web 2.0

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What is Premium Online Video?

July 07, 2010

 

Premium Online Video [vid-ee-oo, noun, derivation Web 1.0]: Video consumed on-demand, on a computer or other Internet-connected device. Content must have previously been consumed by a great many more people, simultaneously (see: linear, analog, TV Guide) on a non-connected video viewing device (i.e. your television set).

That's true. Look it up.

It's hard to argue that if there really was a definition of premium online video today, it would read much the same, whether you were setting out to describe the concept from a viewer's or advertiser's perspective.

For viewers, more than production value or even celebrity, premium is a matter of value consistency. If I tune into "30 Rock," there's a high probability that I will be entertained in a specific way. That is still extremely hard to find in content that isn't primarily distributed on TV first. Viewers also derive value from a shared experience on and offline.

Marketers also assign a premium value to consistency -- it helps them align messages and assure that their brands are appearing in the right place at the right time.

What else separates premium video from everything else?

A food-products client recently told me that their entire online video strategy comprised something called a "TV replacement" initiative. Yes, that means they take some money from linear TV and shift it to the exact same programming online.

Fair enough. Maybe that's exactly what they should be doing. That's probably not what the TV networks really want in the long run, but that's fodder for a different article.

But think ahead a few more years. Ok, say 10 years. All TVs are IP-connected, mass audiences are substantially harder to find, and so on. What will the new measure of premium be when the TV Guide definition fades away?

First, consistency of the product on every level remains important, at least for brand advertisers. If they are aligning with content they consider to be premium, and are paying a premium for, it has to look tomorrow more or less as it looked yesterday.

Second, it will attract a loyal audience. The premium moniker hangs on the audience having a real relationship with the content, because when a marketer taps into that relationship, they get significantly better ROI.

Data, of course, is the third and most important measure of the new premium. Not just a few meta tags of information, but deep knowledge about how and why the content was produced, its historical relationship with a wide range of viewers, and unique information about its component parts. Data about the viewer and the content will combine with the unique passive rating of a video view (if I watched it, I liked it) to deliver a significant improvement in alignment of viewer and advertiser.

Today, consistency, loyalty and rich data don't often come together outside of content that first appeared on television. TV producers and networks are just beginning to understand the challenge of owning the definition of premium in a way that works for their future business.

But outside of TV, anyone producing ad-supported content should be thinking about these same three core markers of premium value to advertisers. Strip away the TV Guide valuation of premium, and think about how to establish consistency, loyalty and data in a way that suits your model for production and distribution.
 

Tags: online advertising , online videos , viral videos , web 2.0

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How Online Video Can Increase Your Sales By 30%

July 01, 2010

By Jeff Bullas

The use of online video is continuing to grow and develop as higher broadband speeds become more widespread worldwide and the appetite by the younger generation for viewing rather than reading.

The old chestnut phrase , “A picture is worth a thousand words” begs the question, “How many words is a video worth?”

Zappos (an online shoe retailer) does shoes and social media remarkably well and utilizes online video very effectively.

They use video to engage with the buyer as much as possible. Their use of video to create “virtually” the reality experience of a bricks and mortar store, as if the buyer were in store and “more”continues to evolve.

They use online video to

* Describe their shoes
* How to use the product
* To demonstrate

Note: The videos are about the products, are with real Zappos employees and not models or actors… a bit of authenticity happening here, not stock photos with incredibly handsome and beautiful people.

They are testing interactive video on their site for Nike products. The company has launched interactive product videos.

The website provides the following 9 Functionalities, Features and Future Plans

* Allows viewers to click on items in the clips before landing on product detail pages.
* It can signal to consumers if an item is out-of-stock, discontinued, or part of a special offer.
* If the viewer mouses over a shoe in a video, it becomes highlighted, alerting the person that the item is clickable.
* Users are then taken to a product detail page in a separate browser window where the item can be added to a shopping cart.
* Zappos.com’s media player also allows shoppers to post the videos to their Facebook and Twitter profiles while the clip continues to roll.
* The 10 product videos currently on the site are each around one minute long.
* plans to leverage the interactive videos by incorporating them into its user-generated-content program (UGC).
* Its “Daily Shoe Digest” is one of the few e-mail newsletters — in any niche — featuring UGC (User Generated Content) 100 percent of the time.
* Site visitors will be encouraged through future marketing messages to create product video reviews that will also have the interactive features.

Selling products directly from online video content, known as “hot-spotting,” is an advertising niche that’s growing slowly but surely. For instance, earlier this year, H&R Block began utilizing YouTube’s annotations allowing viewers to click on specific items in a video linking to a landing page or another video. And last year, clothing brand Express sponsored Vogue magazine’s online reality show, Models.Live, which featured clickable overlays in a manner combining product placement and direct response marketing.

So what are the effects of using video?

Zappos’s experience has shown “It obtained increases of 6 to 30% in conversions ..for products that use video”.

Note: This has prompted Zappos to strive for 50,000 videos !!! next year (they have about 8,000 currently), they will include “10″ fully working studios in house in 2010 to handle all of it.

Zappos, last month partnered with Overlay.TV and rolled out “Engagement Pages” for specific brands, where the videos engage users with clickable overlays. These overlays allow users to shop within the video content, pull up additional information and click through to product specific landing pages. Users can also record product video testimonials directly from the engagement pages.”

Online at Zappos you can see the shoe from “7″ angles and “3″ different magnifications (see Nike page at Zappos) and the screenshot below.

Note: This goes a long way to overcoming the issues of online shoppings “experience gap” that shopping at bricks and mortar store provides.

This is starting to show how “real” an online store can become, as online video enables a more pervasive and integrated experience within an ecommerce website.

For a good resource on Online Video “Best Practices“ click here

So how are you using online video to good effect? Like to hear your stories and the tools and apps you are using.

Tags: internet TV , online advertising , online videos , viral videos

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Finding the Right Mix of Online Video Ads to Display Ads for Optimal Results

May 06, 2010

A recent ComScore research that showed only 16% of internet users clicked on a single ad during March 2009. That is down from 32% two years earlier.

So is it time to stop analysing CTR’s so religiously, and for the industry to adopt new ways to measure the relative success or failure of online campaigns? I believe the answer is a resounding yes, and in the case of video pre-roll advertising, it should have never been measured that way in the first place.

So ComScore set out to see if display and video advertising had any tangible benefits beyond the click. They used a test and control panel, and a series of brands, and measured the percentage of the control group that visited the advertiser’s website without seeing any advertising, and then looked at the test group, and measured the same.

Looking at ad campaign results:

• if the test group were exposed to video advertising between 1-5 times it resulted in a 3.3% uplift in visits to the advertiser’s website, without clicking on any advertising.
• Straight display advertising achieved a 1.2% uplift in visits, if the consumer was exposed between 1-5 times.
• With  6-9 exposures the percentage uplift dropped for video to 2.9% and increased for display to 2.4%
• With 10+ exposures the uplifts were 4.3% for video and 3.8% for display.

What’s interesting is that video is a clear winner when measuring 1-5 exposures, but display effectiveness catches up with more impressions. This is great news for the industry, as it will no doubt help convince marketers that online brand advertising can increase awareness and spark the quest to find more information, even if users don’t chose to click as soon as they see the advertising.

It also looks as if a mixture of video and display creative are along the right track to deliver immediate uplift, as well as slow burn uplift. Leveraging automated video commerce solutions like Activate can tubroboost ROI for online marketing initiatives.

Tags: ads , comscore , online advertising , video social media , viral videos

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