Amusing branded Halloween video from Axe

T-Mobile Parking Ticket

T-Mobile have done it again with another highly entertaining piece of video!

I came across this within an expandable super-banner on the front page of YouTube.com. I launched it and wanted to share it with the world which is where this campaign fell down a bit for me, because although it was in a YouTube player and on YouTube.com (albeit within an ad-unit) I couldn’t find a way to share it directly out of the advert.

I went to the trouble of searching for it afterwards because I work in online & mobile video, but how many sharing opportunities were lost from the casual viewer? I’d say a fair few, and it’s ironic really consider T-Mobile tell us that ‘Life’s for sharing’

Great video though, really enjoyed it!

Very clever video/social campaign from Peugeot

To win a week with their favourite Peugeot car, users were asked to click and hold onto the car for longer than anybody else. Video meets social meets the human need to compete!

Users could see how other people were doing, and while they ‘held on’ they were subjected to a plethora of facts, figures and sales story from Peugeot.

Very clever, and succesful campaign – love it!

Ian Carrington from Google, talking about mobile growth (video)

14% of all Google searches are from mobile devices and other cool stuff, including Google Translate.

Ian Carrington gave this presentation at IAB Engage for Mobile earlier this year.

Video increases engagement, which can improve your sites Google search ranking

Online video is the fastest growing advertising medium right now, and the time spent watching video online by consumers has never been higher.

Publishers have known for a while that having premium video content on their site has enabled them to make more revenue through advertising, but what many publishers maybe don’t realise is that having engaging video content on your site can actually improve your Google page ranking.

Rather than me tell you, listen to SEO expert, Bruce Clay in this video.

Great branded content video from Nike – old, but worth another look

Nike have a great knack of producing great video stories, with their brand at the center, and this video is no different.

I love the Rooney misplaced pass in the final minute that leads to his thoughts of being vilified, before putting in the extra effort to win it back and his thoughts then immediately starts leaning towards his expected hero status!

I am only surprised that the YouTube views don’t seem to have climbed into the millions!

Online video advertising research missing the point?

http://www.reelseo.com/tubemogul-pre-roll-video-ads/

TubeMogul Finds That Most Viewers Never See Pre-Roll Video Ads

The above headline from Reel SEO, and the research it introduces from Tube Mogul, is of almost no value to anybody as far as I can see. It seems to be judging a sites video performance based on the homepage alone, and as I will explain below this is rarely the page where most of the video views occur.

I spent three years working with online video on one of the biggest UK newspaper websites, and we realised fairly soon after launching video that placing it on the homepage is not the answer to generating significant video views. As a result, video rarely featured on the homepage thereafter, and so the percentage of viewers watching video on that one page will of course be low. Apart from that, the percentage is of little interest to any advertiser because they would be buying video advertising on a cost per thousand video plays basis, not on the number of unique users that visited any given page.

The homepage is often a more fleeting stepping-stone to multiple article pages. It contains the top news of the day in brief, with links to the in-depth stories elsewhere. So the user lands on the homepage, decides which stories they wish to read, and then clicks to an article page containing that story. From experience, I know that video will get many more plays if it is relevant, and embedded into an article than it ever will on the homepage. It is also worth noting that a fairly small percentage of the newspaper sites overall traffic comes to the site via the homepage, and that Google often takes users directly to the article the user is interested in.

The newspaper site I worked on achieved many millions of video views with this ‘article page’ strategy, and very few of them relied on a home page position, so I would suggest that knowing the percentage of homepage visitors that watched video is of little or no use to advertisers and their agents.

The Take Away on Reel SEO reads:

“… So you blow loads of cash on video creative and trying to get your pre-roll ads into the pre-roll mix on the site that has the full-length episodes whether it be a broadcaster or whatever. You put all your money into that campaign and get a really low ROI and can’t figure out what happened. It’s simple. Not as many people saw those videos as you were hoping even though you pushed out perhaps millions of impressions.”

The line that reads ‘…not as many people saw those videos as you were hoping’ demonstrates to me that the author doesn’t understand how pre-roll advertising is traded.

A buyer will buy a number of video plays, and pay a cost per thousand plays to achieve that goal. They will then often third-party track their campaign to ensure that the booked number of impressions is delivered.

No buyer that I have encountered in the many years I have been working in online video advertising has ever paid based on the number of unique users on the site/ homepage, and so this statement appears to be wholly incorrect.

I’d love to hear your views, using the comments on this blog!

Funny ‘doggy dentures’ video ad from Pedigree

This ad made me laugh the first time I saw it, and still does! Very good.

My favourite video advert of the year so far by far!

The Force: Volkswagen Commercial

Really emotive, beautifully shot advert from VW, with the Star Wars score… absolutely love it!

When you make adverts this good, you don’t have to spend as much on media … this beauty has been watched nearly 40m times on YouTube already, at no cost!

What is stopping brands from producing shorter pre-roll lengths?

For me the conversation about pre-roll lengths started in September 2007, when I joined Telegraph Media Group to launch Telegraph TV. Previously I had worked at a TV production company, and it was the norm for advertisers to run 30’ creative on the giant Blink TV screens that we managed at music gigs and festivals across the world.

In the digital space though, shorter lengths are important. As well as working with video as a medium I also shoot and edit it, and while I am no Spielberg I am capable enough to know that making a 10 second version of a 30 second advert is not rocket science.

I also know that the view through rate of 10 second adverts compares very favourably when compared with 30 second creative, and I know that video advertising investment is growing significantly, so why are so many brands relying on their 30 second TV spot to do a job online?

The mind-set of a consumer online is very different from that of somebody watching TV or Cinema. The lean-forward, active, fact-finding state of mind displayed in somebody online can be a very powerful proposition for brands, but I think in order to maximise that opportunity advertising has to be tailored to the environment.

I also believe that there is an unscientific, yet direct correlation between the size of the screen and the acceptable length of video advertising. Sat in a dark cinema, with no distractions and no chance of you getting up to make the tea or to put the washing on (my wife would tell you there is no chance of me doing this at home either) then a 90 second advert is likely to be acceptable. As the screen gets smaller the attention span decreases with it as the possible distractions increase. So in order to still engage these people, the creative length has to reduce as well. Maybe to a 30 on TV for example. Online you are one twitch of your finger away from leaving an advert if it is deemed too long, so once again the length of the pre-roll should reduce. The IAB Video Council recommendation is 15 seconds for online video pre-roll advertising; I would go one step further and recommend a 10 second creative length online. On mobile I think it should be shorter still, but that is another conversation.

If the creative agency are briefed at the very start that the creative needs to be adaptable to online, then there should be no reason why a shortened version of the TV/ Cinema advert could not be planned and created. At the moment, too many consumers are watching a smaller proportion of a longer message, and surely that is worse than them watching all of a shorter message?

Great viral video from Coke

I love this ‘Happiness’ stunt by Coca-Cola on a college campus, but assuming the students were unaware that this was a stunt, that surely means the first girls was technically stealing? )

It’s had over 1.2m hits on YouTube so its obviously made a connection with the consumer.

A game-changing TV for Video on Demand

The Sony KDL-52NX803 52” TV.

Wow. I want one.

This TV connects to the internet wirelessly, and enables the viewer to watch video that sits online, through their 52” TV set. Sony say that the TV boasts the following features:

> Ultra-slim minimalistic Monolithic Design

> Built-in Wi-Fi for online content & services

> Smooth, blur-free detail in fast-action scenes

> Built-in tuner for easy access to Freeview HD

As well as that, the TV has widgets which “help you keep up-to-date with news from your favourite websites while you watch TV”

If TV’s like this start to become the norm in the next five-ten years, we will surely see video explode into biblical proportions?

If it works as well as it says it does, this TV is my next ‘must have’ gadget for 2010.

Did you Know? 5.0

These ‘Did you Know?” videos are really thought provoking, and interesting.

We played one of the previous videos in this series at a recent sales conference and it really stirred the creative juices.

Google ad perfect for a Valentines Day tweak

This viral video advert for Google is surely begging to be tweaked for a Valentines Day special?

It shows the journey of a chap from a trip to Paris, to meeting a girl, wooing her, moving to Paris, then getting married and having kids.

It’s a nice, visual way to show how the search engine is central to people’s lives. A bit like the modern day J.R. Hartley!

Awareness Test

This is old now but a really, really clever piece of viral video that is well worth another look.

Nolan’s viral

Nice little viral video for Nolan’s cheese.

Video on mobile, social media and the future

Imagine a future when the mobile internet is ten times faster than today, and therefore uploading video messages via the mobile web would be fast. Imagine your phone being equipped with a video camera that allowed you to shoot a 30 second video, while adding your own spoken work to the video file as you record.

Imagine what Facebook and Uber Twitter would look like in that future. Amazing.

Currently you can of course upload videos, but the sound is usually pretty dire unless you record in a quiet place. By adding a mic that allows you to direct your voice straight into your handset, the experience would be massively improved. By allowing people to add a voiceover to video, you enhance the creative possibilities and give birth to a billion film-makers around the world.

Rather than Tweeting or updating a Facebook status with text messages, you could be so much more creative and shoot a little video for your friends and family to see.

It could be angst-filled video showing the sea of orange signs all reading ‘delayed’ with your commentary on the pain your feeling. It could be introducing a new life … hello world, this is my beautiful baby Charlotte who was born at 7am this morning weighing a super-healthy 11lb … it could be a video showing two pairs of shoes in a shop, with your voice explaining your dilemma and asking for advice on which ones to buy.

The functionality could also give rise to citizen journalism, where people all over the world report on events that they witness in real time. Anything from the traffic accident that has brought Tottenham Court Road to a standstill to a bomb threat. Real time news, from real people in Real Player!

The possibilities are endless.

All we need is a fairly simple tweak to the functionality of smart-phones and a quicker mobile internet before this would be mainstream, but surely this functionality will play a significant part in the future of social media and video on mobile?

Dwell time is vital to marketers looking to build a brand online

I have long been an advocate of dwell time.

If you are advertising anywhere, you need the reader, viewer, listener to be engaged in the content for long enough as to give your advertising message a chance to engage. On the internet however, there are billions of page impressions that last mere seconds, and they are often cheap as chips and still over-priced in my opinion. If the user clicked away from the page before your advertising had even loaded properly then the page impressions was worth nothing. Simple as that in my eyes.

UKOM, the new research tool from Nielsen, released its first set of data for January 2010 earlier this month and I am hopeful that agencies and clients will start to use this data day-to-day. Not only does it allow planners to measure reach and frequency for digital against other media, it enables them to measure dwell time. Not being able to measure the reach and frequency of digital has been a huge barrier to clients investing more money in digital, despite their customers spending more time online, and I hope that UKOM will prove a success at unblocking that pipeline.

If UKOM does encourage clients to spend more brand money online, then video advertising is perfectly placed to capitalise because the dwell time on video pages is usually higher than on pages with no video. With video advertising you can combine the powerful persuasive forces of sight, sound and motion creative with the right audience, and while they are spending some time in one place.

I have worked on countless campaigns where a multiple ad unit roadblock of video pages has delivered a significantly higher click-through rate that the advertising that was running on other parts of the site. Audience + no clutter + dwell time = engagement.

It will also encourage publishers to make richer, more engaging content rather than chasing page impressions because that will have a direct bearing on the bottom line. That can only be good news for readers and brands alike.

New Observer TV ad

Wielden & Kennedy produce another fine advert, this time for The Observer.

Sadly, I doubt it will make much difference to the circulation though as the paper just saw a 16% drop in circulation year-on-year according to January’s ABC figures.

http://tinyurl.com/yep627e

Branded content; the future of video communications

I think that as long as your brand can tell a story that adds value to the consumer while extolling the virtues of your brand then you should make branded content core to your marketing plans. Almost all other forms of communication are around other people’s content, whereas with branded video you ARE the content.

So, if you’re BMW with the Story of Joy then maybe make an online video series that sees the presenter show consumers around some of the most joyous places in the British Isles, in a BMW of course.

If you’re a rice brand, then show people how to make perfect rice using your brand like Tilda and Media Contacts have just launched on AOL – http://tinyurl.com/yzzkbnq The one thing I would say about this campaign though, is that I couldn’t find it on YouTube which is far from ideal.

There is a useful, interesting story for almost any brand to tell, and if you start with the consumer in mind, you can make that branded video content appear in their search results. “How do I make perfect Rice” in Google for instance could yield a result that includes the Tilda Rice example. “Great days out in England” could be how consumers find the BMW content. Look at sites like Videojug.com – they make a business out of answering peoples search queries with video answers.

YouTube gives everyone a massive opportunity to distribute inexpensive video content, that offers value to the consumer while educating them about your product or service.

I have worked on dozens of branded content deals at the Telegraph, and whenever there is market research carried out alongside the campaign, we have found a positive uplift in consideration and awareness.

So in order to make your branded content work, I would humbly suggest the following pointers which are born out of my experience in this field to date:

1. Make it about what the consumer wants first, and about your brand second
2. Make it short and sweet – 3-5 minutes is long enough in most cases
3. Agree a distribution deal with a relevant partner site, but always put it on YouTube as well
4. Search for and contact all relevant bloggers, and offer them your content
5. Point to your content in other communications

Branded content can be inexpensive to produce when compared to TV advertising, and the engagement is nearly always higher when a consumer spends 3-5 minutes with your brands as opposed to 30 seconds with a TV spot.

I think that branded content will play a huge part in the future of online video, as it enables the publisher a much needed revenue stream and the advertiser the chance to have longer, deeper conversations with their customers.

Guardian publish online video advertising supplement

Working with the IAB and it’s members,  the Guardian have today published a supplement on the subject of online video advertising.

It was put together  in conjunction with sponsors i-Level, Ooyala and Video Plaza and distributed with Media Guardian today.

It is also available online here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/video-advertising

Red Bull YouTube channel – a blueprint for all brands?

I love what Red Bull have done with their YouTube channel, and if the stats are to be believed, I am far from the only one!

There have been over 850,000 channel plays and a staggering 41m total uploaded views!!!

All really entertaining, professionally produced content, and branded in a way that is both heavy yet somehow unobtrusive.

It’s unobtrusive because it feels like it should be there. Rally cars for instance are always boot to bonnet full of branding, so having a car plastered in Red Bull branding just feels right.

It’s the perfect trade-off. Entertaining content that the user wants to watch, with great ‘on brand’ advertising for Red Bull.

Love it!

Great example of branded content with Dom Joly and Volvo

Volvo wanted to communicate the fuel efficiency of the Volvo v70, and I think Channel Flip have put together a really nice solution that sees Dom Joly and Rufus Hound ‘attempt’ to take the car from Marlow to Milan on one tank of petrol.

It’s a really interesting way to communicate what is a fairly dry subject.

I think branded content has to play a far bigger role in the evolution of the web. With publishers and broadcasters looking for ways to better monetise their sites, and advertisers looking for non-disruptive ways to engage the huge audiences that can be found on these sites, then surely branded content is a win-win situation.

At TMG we have run several successful branded content campaigns, and I am really keen to work on more this year. They allow us to create interesting content, that also communicates the brands message, with no need to use disruptive advertising formats like pre-roll.

If anyone else has examples of great branded content, please post the link in the comments box below.

Video: Guy Phillipson from the IAB explains UKCOM

This month UKOM released its first set of data, and Guy Phillipson from the IAB explains how it will help agencies and clients spend more brand money online.

John Smith’s TV ads

I was reminded the other day about the Wardrobe monsters – one of the great John Smith’s adverts that starred Pete Kay.

Who could forget ‘No such thing as wardrobe monsters, it’s the burglars that break in through the window you’ve got to worry about’ …. what about ‘Top Bombing’ and  ‘cos I wanna put a snooker table in there and the kids are scared of your moustache’

A fabulously entertaining series of adverts, that are probably among my favourites of all time.

For old times sake, here they are again.

Make your own Doritoes TV advert!

I was happily watching stunning HD on Vimeo.com and I was served an MPU ad from Doritos.co.uk. In a twist from the norm, the ad was inviting me to make an advert for Doritoes, which I would imagine as a campaign did very well on Vimeo.com

I looked into it, I’ll be honest, but my videography skills are still in their infancy and so I gave it a miss.

I love the idea though. A great way to get wannabe film directors and camera guys involved, which will in turn engage with their followers, friends and family on social media sites and sites such as Vimeo and YouTube.

Google to test TV search

Could be interesting.

http://tinyurl.com/ycbf2ga

A time-based model for online advertising is here!

Unanimis, the premium ad network, are to launch a new ad model that will see brands pay for advertising based not on impressions, but on time spent with the campaign.

I have long since been banging on about the importance of dwell time, and so I’m very excited about this news.

Publishers at the moment are remunerated for the number of page impressions they can generate, irrespective of how long that page impression lasts. I would argue that 10m page impressions that last no more than 2 seconds each are practically worthless, and I would far rather have 10,000 page impressions that lasted a few minutes each.

A time-based model would encourage publishers to create more ‘sticky’ content, which would in turn encourage brands to spend more money on digital. Time and again on Telegraph.co.uk we see really strong results for campaigns that roadblock our video channels for the following reasons:

1. The audience is right for the brand

2. The environment is contextually relevant to the campaign

3. The 100% share of voice means the brand in questions has stand-out

4. The dwell time on these pages is usually around 4 minutes.

If we are collectively going to convince brands to follow consumers online in a big way, we are absolutely going to have to provide audiences and environments that keep the user in one place for longer than a few seconds.

I hope Unanimis have success in bringing this ad model to market, and that more brands, networks, agencies and publishers follow suit.

Funny Specsavers advert

I love the new Specsavers advert that is a parody of Lynx ads of recent years.

Can’t help but think that Specsavers are helping to sell Lynx deodorant as well as glasses as well though!

When dwell time is measurable…

In light of the recent announcement from Unanimis, stating that they will be launching a time-based ad model for online advertising, I expect the debate around dwell time to pick up pace. That makes me happy, because I have been banging on about the importance of dwell time for yonks! )

I don’t think anyone can argue with the logic that says if your advertising impression is viewable for longer, then it has a better chance of making a connection with the user. If you do disagree with that, then this post really isn’t for you. )

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume that we all agree that there is a minimum required dwell time needed for an advertiser to have a chance of making a connection. Let’s assume that the absolute minimum dwell time per page required is 10 seconds spent on the page.

Let’s also assume that while the benefit to the advertiser continues to grow in line with the number of seconds spent on a page that the increased benefit will eventually hit a ceiling after which the maximum benefit has been achieved – at this point no amount of additional dwell time is necessary or valuable. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s say that ceiling occurs at around 300 seconds.

That gives us a swing of between 10 seconds and 600 seconds.

To keep things uniform, let’s assume that the base CPM we are working with is £25.

So, the questions as I see it them, are as follows:

1. If advertisers are currently paying £25 for a thousand ad impressions with no guarantee on how long each impression will last, then what happens to that CPM when the advertiser is able to measure the length of time the ad will be exposed for?

Do the sites that hover around 10 seconds per page get sub-£25cpm, with the sites over 43 seconds (the internet average according to ComScore) able to charge more than £25cpm?

2. For the current rate of £25cpm, what is considered an acceptable dwell time to justify the cost? Is the internet average of 43 seconds the benchmark, or is it lower than that?

I think that most likely agencies and clients will settle on what they consider being an acceptable dwell time for their £25cpm, and then try to drive down costs on sites not living up to that benchmark.

Call me cynical, but I can see the sites offering nearer 600 seconds of dwell time per page being able to increase the current CPM’s by too much, which will end up driving down market prices.

In the short-term agencies and clients will be happy with this new negotiation stick to beat publishers with, but I believe it is too the long term detriment of the online video market in my opinion as in the long term, it will mean that publishers will have less money to invest in video content. A bit like TV now, the budgets to make programmes is pinched hard and as a result we have schedules full of ‘cheap to produce’ or ‘reality TV’

If the quality of the content is not high, then the audiences will not watch, and this has to be a bad thing for the growth in this sector.

Your thoughts as always would be welcome below.

Another cool ad from Specsavers

Live video streaming case study

Live video case study

At Telegraph Media Group, we recently embarked on our first real foray into live video streaming.

The video in question was Tony Blair giving evidence to the Chilcot enquiry about the Iraq war.

We used Quick TV to make that live video interactive, with a poll embedded into the player which enabled the user to vote on how credible they considered Tony Blair’s evidence to be.

If the nation were mostly voting for it to be credible the bar would become mostly green. If the nation were mostly thinking that he was telling porkies, then the bar would be mostly red. This was all voting and streaming in real time, with real time results.

The evidence was streamed on Telegraph.co.uk from about 10am until 4pm with a break for lunch, and we had over 120,000 page views in the time, with the average dwell time on the page being over five minutes!

There were over 240,000 votes cast in that time.

An encouraging introduction to live streaming!

Daily Mail song

Love this, and I’m surprised it has less than 500,000 plays on YouTube!

John Lewis – the best TV ad for ages?

Wow.

I was waiting for the mighty reds to kick off against Atletico Madrid tonight, full of trepidation and chest pain (another story) and this came onto my Sony Bravia:

If you agree with me that video enables you to create emotion, personality and to tell a story, then this advert should be held up to all as the perfect specimen. I actually had goosebumps … from a TV ad!!!!

Beautifully shot, wonderfully scripted, and the only down side I can find is that it could never work online … it’s way too long for a pre-roll.

That said, if I had to watch that advert on TV another 100 times, I doubt I would get bored of it.

Beautiful videography. All that said, the strap line doesn’t seem to fit with the story.

Video drives huge dwell time online (case study)

The average time that a user spends on a single page on the internet is 43 seconds, according to ComScore. That of course lumps all of the impressions that last only a few seconds in together with the impressions that last for several minutes, and comes up with an internet average. The trouble is, there are billions and billions of page impressions that do only last a few seconds, which I would argue are virtually worthless to a brand – I call these the journey impressions … the ones that a user uses to get to the content that they are actually looking for.

The real sweet spot then for a brand, in my opinion, is to buy as few of these ‘journey’ impressions as possible and look for the ‘destination’ impressions, where users spend a far greater amount of time. Telegraph.co.uk is a site that invests significantly in engaging content to make our pages more ‘sticky’ and that is borne out by ComScore, who say that the average time spent on a single page on Telegraph.co.uk is 66 seconds – 23 seconds longer than the internet average.

What’s more interesting still, is that if you look at all pages that have video on them, in each of our channels, and work out an average time spent per page on those pages then it is at least 120 seconds per page and up to 150 seconds per page, depending on the channel. If you take just the top 80% of videos in each channel to calculate average dwell time per page, dwell time rockets to nearer 250 seconds per page!

It makes sense when you think about it. Video is the most engaging format available to both journalists and brands alike, and if you incorporate professional, interesting and relevant video content into your online proposition, you’re going to drive longer dwell times. Our short form content enables us to double the dwell time per page from other pages on our site, and triple the internet average. It would seem to follow though that sites such as Sky and Channel 4, that have longer form content, have even longer dwell times.

We’ve seen many, many campaigns where it is not only the video creative that is driving a higher percentage of clicks, but also the standard display that is placed around our video content that out-performs the same creative that is appearing on our site but on non-video pages.

So the great news for marketers is that not only is video the most persuasive medium open to you, but the presence of video slows the user down for long enough to engage with your brand.

Eddie Izzard’s political broadcast for Labour

Nice video that takes the dull edge off of party political broadcasts, without taking away the serious points.

Reckitt Benckiser to invest £4m in online video advertising

Marketing Director, Phil Thomas, looks to move obver £4m into online video advertising according to NMA.

Zenith Optimedia are the media agency that handle their account. That would make them the leading online video advertiser by a way I would think?

Link to full story: http://www.nma.co.uk/3013036.article?cmpid=NMAE01&cmptype=newsletter

sad news …i-Level have been placed into administration

After losing an account the size of COI, I guess it was always a worry but it’s a real shame as I have always found them to be a very knowledgeable agency, with talented staff.

http://www.nma.co.uk/news/i-level-placed-into-administration/3013100.article#commentsubmitted

It’s so funny, how we don’t click anymore…

It’s not actually funny at all, but it was the first title that came into my head when I thought about the 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 the video campaign, as this is a video advertising blog, 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.

What’s interesting is that video is a clear winner when measuring 1-5 exposures, but when you look at 6-9 exposures the percentage uplift dropped for video to 2.9% and increased for display to 2.4%

Looking at 10+ exposures the uplifts were 4.3% for video and 3.8% for display.

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 our packages at the Telegraph that offer a mixture of video and display creative are along the right track to deliver immediate uplift, as well as slow burn uplift.

Great news!

Rory Sutherland’s TED speach

Fabulous speech from Rory Sutherland; Life Lessons from an Ad Man.

Conservative party take over YouTube for the day

Today is the big one. It’s being hailed as the closest election since 1974, and the Convservative have attempted to reach the countries youth today by taking over the home page of YouTube.

Another great speech from TED.com

Simon Sinek talking about leaders v those that lead and the difference between trying to sell what you do rather than why you do it.

If you had doubts about video and mobile; follow Google!

Google are a huge media player in anybody’s book, and they don’t get an awful lot wrong. Their brand name has become a worldwide adjective within 12 years which is an amazing feat! You Google now, not search, just like for decades people have Hoovered, not vacuumed.

If any marketers out there wanted to be convinced that video advertising (and mobile) are the bright future of us all, then just look at how Google have changed their business from a hugely successful fixed internet search company to what they are today.

A few years ago they bought YouTube, which is the biggest video site on the planet. This year they created their first video advert, which was beautiful, and it ran on TV and YouTube.

Google have recognised the growing importance that the video will play in the evolution of the web, and they invested to be a part of that.

Video combines the persuasive powers of sight, sound and motion. It is the medium that most closely resembles the way that people experience everyday life, and so after a carefully planned shoot and a cleverly executed edit, it becomes the most persuasive medium that brands can employ.

Five years ago, this power was the mostly harnessed only by TV and cinema advertising, but the explosion of video online has changed all of that.

Anyway, back to Google and their strategy. YouTube is now optimised for mobile, and they have announced this year that everything they do from now on is with mobile in mind first. Eric Schmidt, their CEO, famously said “We can make more money in mobile than desktop eventually. The reason is because the mobile computer is more targeted. Think about it. You carry your phone everywhere; it knows all about you. We can do a very, very targeted ad. Over time, we will make more money from mobile advertising”

Over time, we will make more money from mobile advertising.

That’s a massive shout, and a clarion call for anybody who was thinking that mobile isn’t important yet. Mobile is happening right now, and it’s getting bigger by the day.

40% of iPhone users already access the internet on their mobile more than the fixed internet, and as smart phone penetration continues to rise and as the network speeds increase, the mobile internet is certain to explode further still.

Google are so confident of this that they have heavily invested in mobile, with the Android operating system. Video and mobile are vital to any marketer, and Google believe that video ON mobile will also be huge in the not to distant future.

Video and mobile are here today, and they are big. Tomorrow they will be bigger, so I really believe that their importance needs to be fully researched, understood and implemented more fully by every brand that has designs on growth.

Another fantastic piece of video work from Google

Carlsberg ‘Team Talk’ TV ad (Video)

Not sure if I like it or not … like the bit about joining the immortals as we look up the steps towards a lion and Bobby Moore. It just doesn;t feel as clever as a lot of the previous Carlsberg advertising for some reason. The “If Carlsberg did team talks” at the end feels rushed, almost an after-thought.

Maybe it will grow on me.

We’re all creatures of habit … one more reason why newspaper audiences are slowly declining

Repetition of certain tasks, sooner or later turns into a habit.

For example, I buy my morning coffee from the same few providers based on the same set of criteria. If the first one I arrive at doesn’t have more than three people in the queue, I’ll buy it from there. If it does have a longer queue, I’ll move along to number two in the list. This happens without any conscious thought, and it is a part of my daily routine.

Before that purchase every day, I stand at the exact same place on the same station every day. I get off the train in the same place, and take the same journey through Clapham Junction to platform 12 where once again I take up a familiar position. Going back further still, I get out of bed, iron a shirt, go to the bathroom (always cleaning teeth first, and showering second) and then get dressed. It’s a habit. formed over time.

Advertising is often best designed to break habits that people currently have with competitor brands, while forming new ones with their own brand. So when people are talking about the decline in newspaper readership, and the rise and rise of readers online, surely the publishers themselves have to realise that they unwittingly played their part?

Back in the dot com boom of 2000 or thereabouts, I worked in media sales for a newspaper. We were crammed full of advertising that was designed to take readers from our newspaper, directly online to a plethora of different sites. There were pages and pages of advertising taken from new websites, all leading people from the offline world into a shiny new (ish) cyberspace. The revenue uplift in the short term was significant.

At the same time, our own editorial team were driving people online to read more, get more, and engage more. Over time, newspapers were showing people ‘another way’ to consume news … it was unwittingly helping readers break thier habits of reading a printed newspaper, that were formed over many years, by showing them a new way and slowly but surely people changed their habits.

The habit of reading a daily newspaper changed, over time, and they started reading the free online version.

Newspapers, in their short-term revenue-chasing funk, allowed an entirely new medium to arrive en-mass and take a huge proportion of space in their publications … all of which were designed to drive people away from the lucrative offline world, and into the online space. The most consistent, most repeated message throughout many newspapers every single day was online, online, online. Go online was the message from advertisers; go online also the vibe from editorial. Funnily enough, people started to go online.

The online world were collectively, and unwittingly acting like a parasite by attaching itself to press titles with such a force in the weight of advertising column inches, and sucking the readers out to cyberspace one by one. Advertising is often design to break habits, and the dot com boom did it in a big way. I seem to remember seeing stats at the time that proved that newspapers were the most effective medium at driving online audiences. Newspapers were justly proud of these stats, and used them to drive even more .com advertisers into their newspapers.

The online revolution would always have arrived. Newspapers certainly helped it along though, by giving online access to huge audiences.

Nissan Bowling ad (video)

Love this new ad from Nissan. Starts off like the Sony Bravia advert with the coloured balls, and then wallop!

Urban Proof.

The Times launch new website that look like print (ish)

Looks like they are trying to make their site look like the newspaper …

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/

Nike World Cup ad over 7m hits in 8 days

Nike do it again, or should I say Just Do It again. (see what I did there?)

Of all the World Cup ads I’ve seen to date this is the best by far, and it has alread amassed over 7m plays on YouTube since 17 May. Wow.

In other news, ITV redressed the Nike/Adidas ‘pissed off’ balance by missing the final 6 seconds of this epic Nike advertisement. The broadcaster famously managed to cut away from an FA Cup match in extra time between Liverpool and Everton, as Adidas athlete Dan Gosling scored the winner; the only goal of the game.

Now, Nike have been subjected to the same ‘technical difficulties’ )

The iPhone 4 is video-tastic baby!

Imagine you’re at a party. Your iPhone 4 shoots 720 HD video, and you are shooting everything baby. I mean, everything. Then, in the taxi on the way home you edit out the bits that will cause the most embarrassment to the party’s guests (saving those clips for potential future bribe material) and then the finished video is uploaded onto Facebook before your head hits the pillow.

Sites like Facebook and YouTube had better make sure their servers have space. Lot’s of space. This handset is going to turn serial photographers into videographers very quickly.

The iPhone 4 also offers consumers what looked like very good quality video calling, which may or may not take off. Video calling has been available for a while, and hasn’t taken off, but if the networks can speed up sufficiently and handsets can offer a good user experience then who knows where this could take us?

Heineken – Men with Talent ad (video)

I like this …

Mark Challinor to join TMG

From Mediaweek.co.uk:

Telegraph Media Group appoints first director of mobile

Telegraph Media Group (TMG) has appointed former Associated executive Mark Challinor as its first director of mobile.

Mark Challinor: joins TMG as director of mobile

From July, Challinor will work across the company and be responsible for delivering a revenue stream for the Telegraph’s mobile offering.

He will focus on reader and advertiser interactions, database opportunities, content distribution and new revenue-generating opportunities.

The mass adoption of smart phones such as the iPhone and BlackBerry is fuelling new opportunities surrounding mobile phones.

In the UK alone, mobile advertising spend is expected to experience near 40% compound growth this year and increase from $111m in 2009 to $524m in 2014, according to the latest PwC forecast.

Challinor will report to Steve McLaughlin, executive director of Consumer Revenues at TMG.

McLaughlin said: “He brings more than 20 years’ newspaper experience to the role, including two years as European president of the Independent Newspaper Marketing Association, between 2004 and 2006.”

McLaughlin called the experienced press marketer “a great asset” and stressed: “TMG’s mobile offering goes from strength to strength. Our World Cup app, for example, has had over 300,000 downloads.”

Prior to starting his own consultancy business in 2006, Challinor was group promotional marketing manager at Associated.

During the 1990s, he also held a number of commercial roles at Trinity Mirror. He has also worked as a consultant with The Times of India, Sydney Morning Herald and the American Marketing Association.

http://mediaweek.co.uk/news/1010920/Telegraph-Media-Group-appoints-first-director-mobile/

IAB Video Event speaker videos now online

In April, the IAB held an online video event at Microsoft in London.

The speakers including Bruce Daisley from YouTube, Ed Couchman from Channel 4, Rob Black, Chair of the IAB Video Council and Eyewonder, Camilla Day at PHD, Nicky Clarke from Sky, and me from the Telegraph.

You can now see all of the keynote speakers, including my effort, at:

http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/internetmarketingeventsvideoevent.mxs

My IAB Engage for Mobile thought piece

This is a thought piece that I wrote for the recent IAB Engage for Mobile event.

—

Wake up and smell the coffee.

To demonstrate how I believe mobile advertising can really benefit marketers, I have used the Starbucks brand as an example. This open pitch is to any coffee company to be honest, but partly for clarity’s sake and mostly because their name reminds me of the central character in one of my favourite childhood TV programmes, I am going to choose Starbucks.

So why use mobile advertising for Starbucks?

Firstly, because the enormous morning commute that descends upon London every week day is the holy grail as far as Starbucks are concerned; and mobile will allow Starbucks to reach these people in a cost effective, targeted manner at the exact time that they are about to make a coffee purchase. No other medium is able to reach a huge number of engaged coffee drinkers as close to the purchasing decision as mobile can. Outdoor may have more people walk past it, but I would argue that consumers are paying far more attention to their mobile screen while they are accessing the mobile internet than they are on outdoor advertising while walking their daily route. That said, I have a great case study for a deal that combined mobile and outdoor, but that’s another story.

On Telegraph Mobile we see a massive spike in traffic between the hours of 6am and 9am, and then as that mobile spike falls away after 9am, it is replaced with a new spike on the fixed internet site, Telegraph.co.uk. So it would seem that people are surfing the mobile internet on their way to the office, and then switching to the fixed internet. For Starbucks, the fixed internet would be like shutting the door after the horse has bolted, so mobile really comes into its own.

For me, my coffee loyalty is only dictated by what I did or experienced recently. For a brand such as Starbucks, if you jolt me from my automated purchase decision each morning there is every chance that you could become my new habit, and my coffee habit is currently costing me about £15 a week!

Offer based advertising to the right people (commuters) at the right time (in the morning rush-hour) in the right place (London, because of scale of audience and the concentration of Starbucks outlets) with the right message (Break your daily routine, and visit Starbucks today and we’ll give you x, y or z)

So if you take the possibilities that this highly targeted, and relevant message can offer you as a marketer today, and then multiply it by the huge audience that I believe the mobile internet will have in a few years time, it’s not hard to understand the potential.

In fact, at some point within my lifetime, I fully expect mobile to be the biggest medium in terms of audience. This journey has already started, and I believe it will be driven by faster networks, a higher penetration of smart phones and more and more content being optimised for mobile consumption.

It already plays a central role in consumer’s lives, and I am pretty sure it is the only advertising medium that a consumer takes to bed with them, before asking it to wake them in the morning! It is totally personal to the user, and is often personalised with private photographs, videos, ring tones, games, audio, social media apps, email, calendar etc

Once the market gets to a place where network speeds are super-fast, and handsets are all smart phones, then we will see huge numbers of people watching films and TV on their mobile. This already happens on the high end handsets, but eventually I can see a carriage full of commuters all watching long-form video content on the way to work.

The TV market is currently adapting to a world full fragmented audiences and time-shifted viewing, and I believe that mobile will change the traditional viewing habit further still. When super-fast networks combine with fantastic handsets, and the content is every bit as good as can be accessed via the fixed-internet, then you can be sure that the explosion of mobile internet access will not be far behind.

Orange to trial HD voice calls

New standard for voice calls could be rolled-out nationally after Orange’s High Definition trial

The days of poor quality phone calls could be coming to an end
High definition phone calls are being trialled by mobile operator Orange in a prelude to a possible national roll-out later this year. The technology more than doubles the frequency range available for voice calls, although Orange says that there will be no impact on the mobile network’s performance.

The new way of encoding speech, which follows that trialled by the network Three earlier this year in Maidenhead, Berkshire, is designed to isolate voice sounds from background noise. It requires users to purchase a new handset, and Orange said it will be offered free to existing customers. Sony Ericsson and Nokia have already started installing the new technology in some of their handsets.

Andrew Warner, the company’s head of voice and messaging products, said “The aim is to make it seem as though you are talking to someone in the same room – you will be able to make a call from a football match or concert and actually have a normal conversation. We think this will become the norm for calls and feedback from everyone who has trialled it is that it is very good.”

The new technology, however, does not address the problems associated with mobile phone reception, and will require transmitters’ software to be upgraded. That means it could be some time before the UK as a whole is HD-equipped. The trial is going on now across a range ofOrange’s customers.

New standard for voice calls could be rolled-out nationally after Orange’s High Definition trial

The days of poor quality phone calls could be coming to an end
High definition phone calls are being trialled by mobile operator Orange in a prelude to a possible national roll-out later this year. The technology more than doubles the frequency range available for voice calls, although Orange says that there will be no impact on the mobile network’s performance.

The new way of encoding speech, which follows that trialled by the network Three earlier this year in Maidenhead, Berkshire, is designed to isolate voice sounds from background noise. It requires users to purchase a new handset, and Orange said it will be offered free to existing customers. Sony Ericsson and Nokia have already started installing the new technology in some of their handsets.

Andrew Warner, the company’s head of voice and messaging products, said “The aim is to make it seem as though you are talking to someone in the same room – you will be able to make a call from a football match or concert and actually have a normal conversation. We think this will become the norm for calls and feedback from everyone who has trialled it is that it is very good.”

The new technology, however, does not address the problems associated with mobile phone reception, and will require transmitters’ software to be upgraded. That means it could be some time before the UK as a whole is HD-equipped. The trial is going on now across a range of Orange’s customers.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7843170/Orange-trials-HD-phone-calls.html

Adobe launch Flash 10.1 for mobile

On pretty much all operating systems apart from, you guessed it,  Apple OS4.

http://url4.eu/4r53x

Branded apps v sponsored apps; which should you choose?

As a brand, the first questions that I believe you should ask before getting involved in the exciting world of app development are as follows. You need to be really hard on yourself, and really try to take off your rose-tinted brand spectacles before answering these questions as well …

1. Why would anybody download this app in the first place?

2. Once downloaded, why would they use it regularly?

With hype, competitions, or good promotions I believe that you can get people to download an app if it sounds interesting, useful or fun. I think in the main that brands are quite good at this first step, but it is when you need those consumers that downloaded the app to continue to interact that it becomes more difficult. So many apps are downloaded and hardly ever used again because once you’ve seen the content there is no real reason to go back.

The Telegraph News app for instance answers those two questions as follows. Why would people download this app in the first place? Answer, because it offers quality Telegraph content with a superior user-interface, and it’s free.

Once downloaded, why would anybody use it regularly? Answer, because Telegraph.co.uk has something updated on their site every two minutes. The Telegraph app is constantly updated with the very latest news, sport, business, technology, fashion etc. There is always a real reason for consumers to come back, which is why we are growing our base of active unique users by about 20,000 people a month. It is consistently useful and interesting.

If you feel as a brand that you can produce a great app, with some cool content in it, you will probably do a good job at getting over the first hurdle of getting it downloaded. It that app isn’t updated, or consistently useful like the Google app or the National Rail app, you are likely to find that at best it will sit unused on people’s phones or at worst will be deleted.

That is why sponsorship of an existing app, with an existing audience, may well be the best way to go. It takes the risk out of the project. You can buy a high level of exposure, which gets in front of a proven audience, and it is a fair bit cheaper than creating a new app from scratch.

If you have any views, thoughts or case studies please join the conversation by leaving a comment below.

My thoughts about the new iPhone 4

Just had a little play with the iPhone 4, and I must say it looks really good.

The sleek, rounded lines of the iPhone 3GS are replaced with a sturdier, more solid feeling unit and along with the toughened glass, it serves to make it a far more resilient phone. The 3GS is very likely to smash if dropped.

The screen size is the same as the 3GS, but because the resolution is so much crisper the icons actually look smaller even though they are identical in size. I was chatting to the Telegraph’s technology guru, Claudine Beaumont, and she showed be that you can actually use Telegraph.co.uk rather than the mobile version of the site, because the screen resolution is such that you can make out smaller text more easily than on the iPhone 3GS.

You can read Claudine Beaumont’s full review of the iPhone 4 here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7849655/Apple-iPhone-4-Full-review.html

Claudine also tells me that with relatively heavy use, she can get around 16 hours of battery life from the iPhone 4 which is a much needed improvement. Other cool additions are the band that runs all the way around the phone acts as an antenna, so the signal strength should be improved. It also has a 5 mega pixel camera, and offers you the power to shoot HD 720p video – you can also edit that video on the handset using iMovie.

In summary, the main features of the iPhone 4 as I see them are:

> Stronger design

> Longer battery life

> Superior screen resolution

> 5 mega pixel camera

> 720p HD video & on phone editing with iMovie

> Multi-tasking

> Video calling with ‘Face Time’

This is how Steve Jobs announced it’s arrival:

iPhone 4 reception issues if you hold it in your hand

Yesterday saw the launch of the iPhone 4 in the UK, and already many disgruntled early adopters are finding problems.

Several videos on YouTube claim that when you hold the iPhone 4 in your hands, it loses reception. It’s thought that this might be a problem with the two antenna system in the phone

In the above video, you see a phone with four bars (full service) laying flat on a table. When the user picks the phone up very gently, keeping it pointing in the same direction, it slowly loses it’s signal before eventually displaying the dreaded ‘no service’ note.

Call me old-fashioned, but a mobile phone absolutely has to be held for me. It will be interesting to see how this one develops.

Bill Gash appointed chair of the IAB Video Council

Bill Gash was last week appointed chair of the IAB Video Council, and replaces the current chair, Rob Black, with immediate effect.

I’d like to personally thank Rob for all his dedication and effort over the past two years, and wish Bill all the best in the role. I am sure Bill will bring tenacity, knowledge and enthusiasm to this key role.

Press release form IAB:

The IAB’s video council has elected Ooyala’s regional sales director, Bill Gash as chair of the council for the next 12 months. Chosen due to his extensive online video experience as well as his drive and enthusiasm to push the council forward, Gash will lead the monthly meetings, manage future council initiatives and work with the council to promote best practice amongst the industry.

The core objective on the council’s agenda is to educate and excite advertisers, agencies and publishers on the role of online video advertising. In the last 12 months the council have completed various important initiatives such as the VAST 2.0 (Video Ad Serving Template) standard in the UK. At the beginning of the year the council partnered with Sky on effectiveness research and hosted its first conference as well as participating in a number of influential industry events.

Gash has put forward his plan for the next 12 months, with a view to create further cross council collaborations, promote best practice as well as working to drive better ROI for the industry. He also plans to bring VPAID (Digital Video Player Ad-Interface Definition) to the UK and to continue to release educational resources in the form of guidelines, events and publications. The council is hosting a buyer v seller video debate on 28^th July as well as releasing a video buyer’s guide later this year to educate the industry further.

The video council is one of the IAB’s working groups consisting of broadcasters, publishers, technology providers and media and creative agencies.  An IAB working group for video has existed for almost five years, but it became a permanent council in 2008 led by outgoing chair Robert Black of EyeWonder.

Gash is currently regional sales director for video technology and analytics, Ooyala. Prior to this he worked as a consultant for video and server technology provider Videoplaza. His experience with online video stretches back to 2004 when he led Entriq’s first forays into the UK.

Bill Gash, regional sales director, Ooyala said: ‘As chair of a council I’m serving what must be the most exciting sector of our industry. As access to video across more devices escalates and usage continues to ramp up, the IAB’s video council will be doing even more to better support marketers looking to invest in this thrilling medium. The next 12 months are critical for the industry, and our main priority remains helping advertisers and agencies understand that video should be at the top of their digital agenda.

Jack Wallington, head of industry programmes, IAB said: ““Despite the buzz in the industry about the potential of online video, in order for the discipline to grow we need to work hard as an industry to develop with the technologies, understand our audiences and ensure brands get optimum return on investment.  The launch of UKOM’s video product in the coming months will be a significant step in the life cycle of online video, but the IAB Council is also charged with further educating marketers and promoting the very best practice to keep this industry robust.  We’re looking forward to working with Bill to remain relentless in our quest to help advertisers get the most out of video marketing, to make the UK the leading market for online video creativity and set the standard the world over.”

The Smartphone revolution continues

Sony Ericsson have posted a £10.1m profit in Q2 this year v a loss of c. £178m in the same quarter last year!

“I want us to have the biggest share of Android phone sales in the world … ” said Sony Ericsson CEO, Bert Nordberg. He apparently attributed this marked turnaround in profits down to strong Android phone sales.

With Google saying that there are 160,000 new Android devices sold every day, have iPhone got a real fight on their hands? I think so!

It’s time for media choice to rule advertising creative?

For as long as I have been in media (a long time) it has been so that clients will tend to brief the creative agency, who will create something wonderful and then pass it to the media agency who’s job it is to fit those creative assets into the best media spaces possible.

In the world where media is so rich in choice, and audiences are more fragmented than ever before, surely it is time for the media agency to dictate to the creative agency which creative formats are required, based on how they need to reach the audience that the client wants to target?

I had a situation just the other day where I was talking to an agency that only had one creative format to work with, and it meant that a cracking targeting opportunity that we could have offered was turned down. I believe the idea was the right solution for the client, but the media agency simply didn’t have the tools to follow through.

I may be letting common sense run away with me here, but surely the most important thing to the client is to target the right audience, with the right message, at the right time? If that is the case it makes perfect sense to me that the media agency should present the client with a plan that reaches the right people at the right time, and then the client asks the creative agency to come up with a big idea that works across the necessary platforms.

Anybody agree with me?

Rory Sutherland TED speech (video) – excellent!

I love this TED speech from Rory Sutherland.

Diamond Shreddies, hillarious!

King of Shaves launch a sexy ‘viral’ (video)

As a red blooded male this King of Shaves video is very easy on the eye, but I fail to see any part of the advert which promoted a selling point.

If it was shot purely to raise awareness – and if it does indeed go viral – then it will have done its job. Other than that, it doesn’t really show or sell me anything.

It reminds me very much of the cinema advert that Kylie starred in a few years ago for Agent Provocateur lingerie, but all the flesh and thrashing about from Kylie led to an invitation for the gentlemen to stand, and when they couldn’t manage it we assumed that the red hot lingerie had achieved the desired effect.

I don’t see any of that in this video. For old times sake, I have embedded Kylie below.

IAB Summer of Video thoughts …

Congratulations to Tim Hussain from Sky and Oliver Newton from Starcom, who both put forward very convincing arguments at yesterday’s IAB Summer of Video event.

There was a very interesting exchange around whether the best online TV ads were re-purposed TV ads or not. I thought Oli argued very well for a more interactive, bespoke ad unit and then Tim came back with the financial imperatives of using an advert that was already made, as opposed to spending more money on creative and therefore less on media. For the mass market, I agree that a short pre-roll – which is a cut-down of the longer TV advert works, as long as the publishers don’t run too many before the content. It enables a uniformity of message across multiple platforms, and as Tim very eloquently pointed out at yesterday’s buyer v seller debate, it means that clients aren’t having to spend too much of our media money on creative! )

However, as I have said countless times before on this blog I think the strongest video offering in the digital space is branded content. It takes the brand from a position where they are advertising around other people’s content, to actually being the content. All eyes are focused on the brand!

Branded content allows the user to start watching immediately (no pre-roll) and assuming the content was done well, it keeps the user engaged for longer than any pre-roll will ever do and Mediacom recently carried out some research that proved that brand recall was improved in direct correlation to the length of time the consumer was watching a video / exposed to the brand.

I have been involved in many many branded content deals that have worked very well but Intercontinental Hotels & Resorts always stands out for me though.

The hotel group were advertising because they wanted to raise awareness of their concierge service and achieve cut through in a competitive market. They also believed that staying in an Intercontinental Hotel would enhance your travel experience.

At TMG we responded to the brief by shooting four video city guides. The Telegraph.co.uk audience love to travel, and so the ‘insider guide’ videos to London, Paris, Cyprus and Madrid were likely to be well received.

Each video started with the presenter  arriving at the hotel, and checking in. She then met with the concierge who told her about some interesting things she could do while in Paris which were beyond the obvious, and this is what made the video useful and interesting to the viewer.

She then went and visited the places the concierge recommended, only making the occasion reference to the concierge and IHG.

Market Evolution carried out some pre-campaign research, and then post-campaign research to see how the video content had worked.

There was a 120% uplift in awareness of the Intercontinental Hotels concierge service after seeing the campaign. There was a 200% uplift in the thought that ICH would enrich a viewers travel experience and a an 80% uplift in those who agreed that ICH offered a superior service.

Making really interesting, useful or even humorous video is in my eyes the best way to get an in-depth connection with the consumer, but I think for reach and from an economics point of view, a 10 second pre-roll is the best way for now.

Any thoughts on this? Please feel free to leave a comment.

Fantastic ad campaign by Tippex on YouTube

I absolutely love this campaign!

It’s the second super-interactive campaign that I have seen on YouTube in as many months.

http://www.youtube.com/tippexperience

Make sure you watch and interact, it is well worth it.

Nigel & Victoria – comedy from Phillips

I really think there is a big future in brands creating entertaining video content online, and this is a great example of how Phillips have managed to create something that captures the consumers attention for three and a half minutes at a time, while reviewing their products.

Fosters are planning to remake some classic British comedy shows as well, and I really hope that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

In the past it has felt like brands are too scared of aligning themselves with comedy, but I don’t believe they should be, especially when they are in full control of producing the comedy. Comedy makes people feel good, makes them laugh (hopefully) and that has got to be a good space for a brand and let’s face it, the majority of video links you are sent are sent because they are funny. By producing comedy, you are helping your customers spread the word for you!

I will definitely be speaking to brands about this sort of project when I arrive at Web TV! I thought Nigel & Victoria was very watchable and funny in places, and overal it entertained me while I found out about the Phillips lap top cushion and iPhone battery thingymajig!

Yeo Valley TV advert

Often I find that songs on adverts are an irritating bunch. From Go Compare to Sheilas Wheels, but the new advert from Yeo Valley is actually a pretty good effort.

It’s not likely to make the charts, but bearing in mind that a brand commissioned this to sell product, I think it is pretty good. I reckon it has half a chance of going viral on the interweb, and there will almost certainly be mash-ups to follow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOHAUvbuV4o

Google TV promo video

BUPA using customised TV creative for VoD

I have always found the idea of measuring a pre-roll campaign’s success on the click through rate a curious one.

While I totally accept that it is difficult to measure them in any other way, and therefore reverting to the standard measurement that standard display uses makes sense from that point of view, but it is essentially counter-intuitive to expect a consumer to click to play a video and then click on a pre-roll before they have watched said video.

The other massive barrier to the likelihood of a click, was that most pre-roll creative is essentially TV creative with no call to action.

Interesting then to see BUPA advertising on Horse & Country with and end frame that calls the user to “click here” and not only in a text command, but with the ad voiceover as well.

At least BUPA are trying to solicit a click, even though I still believe the pre-roll to be a branding medium.

http://www.horseandcountry.tv/episode/aigas-part-1-episode-1-fixed

Video “The reinvention of the spoken word”

Chris Anderson, Curator at TED, speaks eloquently about video.

He talks about how since the dawn of time, humans have used the spoken work to tell stories, and that video enables people and brands to now tell a story, and then broadcast that story to millions.

To be fair, Chris say’s it way better than I could ever hope to so watch the video!

Funny video: Brands could be laughing all the way to the bank

I would like to hear your comments on this post, so please do take the time to let me know your thoughts.

The sharing power of social media is never used more than when it is used to share funny content. Funny or weird, but if you think of the last ten links that you were sent from friends, I would be willing to bet that a high proportion of them were sent because the sender thought they were funny?

The trick is of course, to make your content funny. I mean really funny. Phillips recently invested in a comedy series of videos called Nigel & Victoria. It wasn’t laugh out loud funny, but it was good and maybe a brand buoyed by the success of this project might be braver in the next project, and next time maybe the boundaries will be pushed further in the pursuit of ‘laugh out loud’ video.

The cost of creating video has never been lower. If a brand put the effort into finding the next comedy format or talent, they could launch millions of views and maybe even the career of stars of the future. The cost of creating the video, which in turn would give them a platform to carry their advertising, would surely be lower than the media cost if it was done well?

I realise of course that the road between planning funny video and actually creating funny video is a winding one,  but surely it is still a road worth trying for the right brands? I am no psychologist, but I know the feel good factor that funny video can create. Advertising around that feel-good factor has to be valuable, does it not?

As I said, I would love to hear your comments on this idea so please leave a comment!

 

A brief guide to video advertising

Video is the most powerful advertising medium, bar none, because it is the medium that most closely resembles real life. It combines sight, sound and motion and can help brands create personality, emotion or excitement. If a picture paints a thousand words, then a video paints a million.

Before Channel 4 launched in 1982, advertisers could only use the power of video advertising on one TV channel which was ITV or in the cinema. Today, there are literally hundreds of TV channels but even they are dwarfed by the plethora of choice that the internet offers. A lot has changed in 19 years!

The internet of course enables broadcast companies to deliver their TV shows via a different platform, and catch-up TV is growing more popular but the majority of video being viewed on the internet is short-form (3-5 minute clips) rather than long-form.

YouTube is obviously the largest video site, and the BBC iPlayer is also huge but there is also a huge amount of viewership of professionally produced video on almost every major publisher site from newspaper sites, to football clubs, fashion portals to parenting advice.

Video content is everywhere online, and you can be sure that wherever there are engaged eyeballs, the advertising pound won’t be far behind.

In 2009, the video advertising market was worth around 30m.

The IAB and PwC have recently released figures that show H1 2010 is already up to over 20m, and with the expected uplift in spend for Q4, some are predicting that the video market could have doubled to be as much as £60 by December 2010.

Most advertising, whether it be newspaper ads, online display advertising, outdoor advertising or even TV advertising works by pacing advertising around the content that is commanding the users eyeballs.

A video pre-roll sits in front of the content, and plays where the users main focus is.

Also, many advertising medium are shared experiences, and advertising occurs while the user is also focussing on something else. Watching video online is not usually done while doing something else, so the user’s attention is 100% focussed on the screen.

The industry standard way to measure the success of video advertising has yet to be born, but it is clear that judging success on the click through rate is the wrong way.

99% of video ads are TV ads, and they don’t have a call to action. If they don’t ask a user to click, then how can they be measured on a click through rate? Also, I believe it is counter-intuitive to expect a consumer to click on a video because they are interested in watching it, and then click on a pre-roll to take them away from that content before they have even watched the content.

Video viewership and advertising is predicted to continue its stellar growth into 2011 and beyond. As more publishers make more professional content and more advertisers increase their investment in online video advertising, the future looks bright.

Video content is already available on mobile devices, but I believe that as the network speeds increase, and the UI becomes as good over the mobile network as it is today over a wireless network, then viewership and advertising will start to explode.

New video advertising newspaper

I have created a daily, digital newspaper that basically scours Twitter for the hash tag ( #videoadvertising ) and then collates all of that news, at midday, in one easy place.

In order for this to be a useful resource, I would ask that everybody that Tweets anything about video advertising adds the tag #videoadvertising to the Tweet. That should then be enough for Paper li to pick up your link, and to re-publish is into the Video Advertising Newspaper each day at 12pm.

The newspaper link is http://paper.li/MikeTV/1287748929

if you have an interest in online video advertising, I would urge you to save the link to your bookmarks now and also to follow me on Twitter if you are not already doing so – www.twitter.com/miketv

I hope that in a few days the paper will be populated with interesting articles from many different sources.

Royal Opera House; fantastic use of video!

This is such an unexpected and clever way to use video.

The Royal Opera House have commissioned a web series, shot in the style of Jerry Springer called Danny Knows Best.

The guests on the show have their usual sorry tales to tell, but when you are lured by the chance to watch the uncensored version it takes you to the Royal Opera House site, and explains that the theme tune from Danny Knows Best is actually La donna è mobile from Rigoletto and that the stories on the chat show spoof are actually the stories from Opera.

What a wonderful way to make the opera feel more relevant to a wider audience.

http://www.dannyknowsbest.com/

Fabulous cinema stunt from Kelly Brook and Carlsberg

 

A  really clever way to promote 3DTV and Carlsberg in the cinema …

Love this!

Fosters video content with Alan Partridge (Ah ha!)

Alan Partridge is back thanks to a clever piece of video advertising by Foster’s.

The twelve part series of  Mid Morning Matters will be available for people to watch on Fostersfunny.co.uk or YouTube, oh and this very blog

I love the way that brands are starting to align themselves with bespoke online only video; it makes a lot of sense to me. Create some funny content, make it easy to find online and online consumers will spread the content through email and social media links, and the brands message clearly reaches a larger audience as a result.

Phillips recently commissioned the Nigel & Victoria series; the Royal Opera House produced Danny Knows Best and now Foster’s are getting involved with Alan Partridge.

Short film shot on a Nokia N8 phone, amazing!

I have just watched a short film which was directed by Thomas Hilland, and I can scarcely believe that it was shot on the new Nokia N8 mobile phone.

I’m amazed, have a look … be sure to set the player to HD though!

John Lewis Christmas advert

Another fine video advert from John Lewis, and although this Christmas advert is beautiful (below) I still marginally prefer their previous advert

Episode two of Alan Partridge funny with Foster’s

Foster’s funny.

Episode two of the Morning’s Matters branded video.

Mobile video research

Interesting, but not surprising results.

Mobile video is a huge opportunity for brands to connect with consumers, but the network speeds and reliability have to improve considerably before it can be properly utilised.

Until networks can offer this, I think app publishers should look at ways to offer the user the chance to download the video they want to the phones memory, while they have wireless coverage, or overnight when the network is less busy. That way the play back experience will be excellent, as will the advertising opportunity.

http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/content/mobile-video-quality-under-fire

Maani Safa on the ‘apps v mobile web’ debate

Maani Safa is the Product Director for Somo – Europe’s leading mobile advertising agency.

The mobile web vs Apps discussion has been heating up more and more over the past months – usually with polar arguments supporting each.

There is no doubt that the rise of “apps” was the major force behind smart phone usage becoming as high as it is today with Apple being the spearhead behind the craze with the iTunes app store. The idea of the “app” made it very simple for the mass market to recognise the ease of using a mobile device to achieve the exact same tasks on the go that users had been doing for years on the desktop.

Apps have fundamentally changed user interaction and user journeys online too – as it stands when user x wants to find a Chinese restaurant in the local area they are more inclined to dip into an app, whereas on the web, its nearly always through Google. So what is the answer to the app vs mobile web outcome? There isn’t one really. Both have a place.

As time passes, and the general mobile market leans further towards “smartphone functionality” as the norm the user base will begin to realise that the mobile web, html5 and faster browsers can provide more or less an exact experience as an app, except that the mobile web is multi platform – meaning whether you are on a Nokia N8, an iphone 4, a Blackberry Bold or Samsung Galaxy S, you are simply a click away from the chosen experience. No app store required.

On top of that – the likes of Google, both across the mobile web and Mobile OS’s such as Android are making searches both easier (Google goggles, Voice activation etc) and more useful. Google mobile search for restaurants is fantastic and beats the majority of app experiences.

Great examples of brands using mobile sites are Net-A-Porter.com, ASOS, Autotrader and M&S. M&S in fact made their single biggest web transaction across mobile – a £3000.00 sofa.

So does all this mean that apps will die a slow death? Not at all – for game apps and the like an app is a definite requirement, as the experience simply cannot be replicated on the web (for now). On top of that, the apps store marketing power is a force that is  hard to compete with – here at Somo we have clients that ask us make them an app and ensure it reaches the top 10 download charts. Why? It can ensure downloads of around 100k – 300k a day.

As time passes we will see more and more brands have a presence on the mobile web – it will become a simple hygiene factor for them, which is fantastic for consumers. Apps will always have their place but expect to see more and more mobile sites built first and then simply wrapped in an app shell to also place it on the mobile app stores.

Web TV Enterprise appoints LiveRail as ad serving partner

Web TV Enterprise appoints LiveRail as ad serving partner as demand for online video grows

Web TV Enterprise, the UK’s largest premium advertising video network, has appointed LiveRail as its new ad serving partner. This will enable Web TV Enterprise to offer its advertisers advanced targeting across its network and a range of new video ad formats.

“This solution will enable us to enhance our current offering with greater targeting capability across multiple publishers, audiences and against premium content,” said Jamie Estrin, managing director of Web TV Enterprise. “The partnership with LiveRail will also allow us to become VAST and VPAID compatible, enabling publishers to host new video ad formats.”

VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) and VPAID (Video Player-Ad Interface Definition) are a set of technical standards governed by the IAB to allow a cohesive online advertising industry. “The demand for video is growing at an exponential rate,” said Mark Trefgarne, CEO of LiveRail. “We’re confident that the partnership of the UK’s largest video network with the industry’s leading video ad technology will provide an unbeatable opportunity for both video publishers and advertisers.”

Alan Partridge & Fosters. Mid Morning Matters, Episode 3

Alan Partridge & Fosters. Mid Morning Matters, Episode 4

Alan Partridge & Fosters. Mid Morning Matters, Episode 5

Alan Partridge & Fosters. Mid Morning Matters, Episode 6

More funny branded content in 2011 please!

I have dabbled in branded content for a few years now, but it seems to me that 2010 was the biggest year that branded content has seen.

Of all the branded content that’s out there I have particularly enjoyed the video content that makes us laugh, and I really hope that we see more if it in 2011. For me, if you can weave your brand into funny content then you have struck gold, because the viewers will share it and generate more users that cost you nothing!

The campaigns that stand out for me are the excellent campaigns that Foster’s ran with Alan Partridge, the Nigel & Victoria mini web series created by Phillips and the Tippex campaign on YouTube with the hunter and the bear.

They all tapped into our funny bone, and created views as a result, and a decent number of views in the case of the Foster’s & Tippex campaigns.  Last time I checked, each episode of the Alan Partridge series had 150,000 plays on YouTube alone, and the Tippex campaign had over 13.5m views!

So my Christmas wish for branded content is that more brands are bold enough to invest in content that makes us laugh.

May I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!

Facebook drives nearly 10% of all video referrals

According to a Q3 report by Brightcove and Tube Mogul Facebook is now the second-largest referer of video views with 9.6% of all video referrals measured coming from the social media giant. Google remains the largest.

The data measured came from an anonymous, cross-section sample of Brightcove customers representing media industry verticals.

Here are some other interesting snap-shots to come out of their report:

Wednesday is the peak day for video views when looking at all videos. The weekend, while lower in total number of plays, had a greater level of engagement per view. The weekend delivers less views, but those watching are doing so for longer.

Newspapers saw significant growth in the number of titles uploaded (51% growth) and surpassed broadcasters in total minutes for the first time this quarter with 313 million minutes streamed, compared to 290 million for broadcasters.

Brands experience higher rates of engagement when referrals come from Twitter, and Newspapers experienced a higher level of engagement when the referral came from Google.

You can download the report in full by clicking on the link above.

More funny branded content!

After my last post about funny branded content, I was pulled up for missing this little beauty.

Rightly so as it turns out, because Sony Ericsson have managed to produce the TV music show that broadcasters would love to make. I think comments from the presenter that allude to the possibility of inadvertently wanking off a killer whale will keep this off of our TV for the foreseeable future though! )

Matt Edmondson, the presenter, is fresh and funny and the whole thing works really well. He’s a cross between Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais … good work Sony Ericsson!

If I have missed any other classic funnies from 2010, please do drop me a line and I’d be happy to include them.

T-Mobile Flash Mob video at Heathrow airport

Another great T-Mobile Flash Mob video, and I absolutely loved the reaction of the bloke when the bald-headed Indian chap jumps in front of him and starts singing “Oh my God, I can’t believe it, I’ve never been this far away from home” by the Kaiser Chiefs … brilliant!

Nearly 6m video views on YouTube already. which must be worth in excess of £150k in terms of media spend?

 

Jack Black stars in great Orange video advert

I took my daughter to see Gulliver’s Travels at the cinema today, and apart from being an excellent film that I would highly recommend to anybody, something really stood out for me on a professional level.

Before the main feature, Jack Black (the star of the film) appeared in a spoof Gulliver’s Travels trailer that turned into an advert for Orange.

I thought this was a great It was a great use of video on the silver screen, and although I am sure Orange have used this creative many times, and not just before Gulliver’s Travels, it really worked on this day.

My daughter said “Daddy has it started?” and she wasn’t the only one wondering if the film had skipped the titles and ploughed straight into the action!

The difference in impact between this Gulliver creative and every other advert on-screen was immense.

New rules for product placement; cars, tech and FMCG to benefit?

It seems to me that the motoring industry, along with FMCG’s and the Technology sector are perfectly placed to take advantage of the new Ofcom rules that allow products into films (inc. dramas and documentaries), soap-operas and sports programmes.

Why? Because they seem to be the categories of advertiser that fit into the following:

1.       Can be easily integrated into a wide range of programmes without harming editorial integrity

2.       They are the brands that already invest heavily in sponsorship in order to get TV exposure & positive brand connotation

3.       Most importantly, they are not excluded by the Ofcom rules

The Ofcom rules on who can place products in programming are pretty strict, and they make sense in the main, as they restrict alcohol, tobacco, food & drink high in fat or salt, medicines and baby milk. Baby milk? Anyway …

That means that brands such as Coca-Cola, Redbull, Burger King, Johnnie Walker, and Martini who currently invest heavily in F1 because of the TV exposure that garners couldn’t place products into shows. Some advertising professionals are surely going to question this logic though, as it  would allow Redbull, for example, to brand itself on a sports car, but be banned from allowing that driver to actually drink it.

Look at Football. Brands who seek to get maximum TV exposure and a positive brand connotation from their involvement in football include McDonalds, Carlsberg, and Mars; all banned from using product placement under Ofcom’s rules.

Cars are an exciting prospect in my eyes. There are already some good examples of cars being placed into shows, through advertiser-funded programming on TV and online. Toyota created Car Pool, a TV show on Dave that sees Robert Llewellyn interview different comedians in the Toyota Prius each week.

The 1960′s show, The Saint heavily incorporated the Jaguar XJS; The Sweeney, Starsky & Hutch; Dukes of Hazzard, The A Team and The Professionals all had a motor vehicle at their core, whether they were placed their by the brands or not. I think I’ll save Batman, Street Hawk and Airwolf for another post

In the future I can see Stephen Fry’s guide to the British Isles, which sees the entertaining, quintessentially English comedian tearing up hill and down dale in a Land Rover or a Jack Bauer type in the New Audi Quattro while answering his Sony Ericsson Xperia a hundred times an episode.

I can see a loaf of Hovis Granary bread on the breakfast table of every resident in Emerdale or the cool dudes of Hollyoaks spraying Lynx deodorant all-over like there’s no tomorrow.

While I understand why alcohol brands are banned, I must admit I am still slightly disappointed. Eastenders, Coronation Street and Emerdale are all set around a local pub. It would add to the story no end, in my opinion, if the patrons of the Queen Vic, Rovers Return and Woolpack were allowed to ask for something other than just a pint. It seems that the nation can sit down every night to watch their favourite soap stars drink, but as long as it is a non-specific drink.

You can see the Ofcom press release about the new rules here: http://media.ofcom.org.uk/2010/12/20/rules-for-product-placement/

JWT’s 100 things to watch in 2011

Great branded content from National Geographic

I love this piece of branded content made by National Geographic.

I works by drawing you in and getting you really interested in the story surrounding the world’s population explosion, and then hits you with the message that National Geographic Magazine will be covering it in more detail.

VYou – new video chat website (in Beta)

http://vyou.com

VYou.com is an interesting new site which allows users to sign up for free and leave video chat messages for each other. The site is still in beta, but I like the concept of taking internet chat and turning it from text to video.

It looks like there are a mixture of consumer and business users, so I have registered as MikeTV and will be road-testing it in the next few weeks.

It has the potential to grow into a significant number of video streams though, and then the advertisers are sure to follow.

Online video advertising market sees revenues triple in 2010

Press release from Web TV:

Online video advertising experienced substantial growth last year, seeing revenues more than triple, according to Web TV Enterprise.

The UK’s largest premium video ad network has reported revenue growth of 244% for 2010 against 2009. The company has also announced record year-on-year growth in Q4 2010, with sales up 162% compared to the same period in 2009.

During 2010, Web TV Enterprise ran more than 400 campaigns on its network of premium video channels for 154 different advertisers. Of these, 118 ran online video campaigns for the first time.

Entertainment, telecoms and FMCG companies spent the most on VOD advertising in 2010, Web TV Enterprise found.

“2010 was a landmark year, not just for us but for the whole industry,” said Jamie Estrin, founder and Managing Director of Web TV Enterprise. “The campaigns running on our network now cover the full spectrum of TV advertising categories, from automotive to leisure, proving that online video is now a major media channel in the UK.”
In March, Web TV Enterprise is due to publish its fourth bi-annual report which reflects the views of the UK’s online video media buyers. Its third report, published in September last year found that growth in online video advertising spend was being driven by delivering incremental reach to advertisers’ TV campaigns.

“For the first half of 2010 alone, online video advertising spend grew rapidly to hit £21million in the UK (IAB / PwC AdSpend Study H1 2010),” said Jack Wallington, Head of Industry Programmes at the IAB. “Within the IAB Video Council – a committee of the UK’s leading senior online video experts – there are unparalleled levels of excitement as companies across the industry are reporting explosive investment in online video as advertisers are now seeing online’s incredible brand building abilities first hand.”

Online video delivers Cadbury £2 in sales for every £1 spent

According to an article in Brand Republic (link below) Cadbury achieved £2 in short-term chocolate sales for every £1 spent on media.

http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1048861/online-video-key-roi-cadburys-campaign/

The results were achieved by placing the Chocolate Charmer advert (below) online. This compared favourably to TV, which delivered a larger audience but only 60p in sales for every £1 spent.

On top of that, online video advertising delivered an additional reach of 19% and reached a higher proportion of younger viewers, when compared to television.

Is mobile video being stunted by data caps?

I remember when the mobile internet first launched, and I was on a Vodafone contract. The pricing wasn’t the clearest, and after using a painfully slow connection for a month was horrified to learn that I had racked up a huge bill! I stopped using the mobile internet for a while after that, and it took a fair period of abstinence before clearer, more affordable pricing tempted me back online.

That seems like an age ago now, but are we running the risk of having a similar situation now with mobile video?

As more people stream video across 3G, the networks are increasingly finding it hard to cope. I read somewhere that one person streaming one 30 second video on 3G was the equivalent of every single person in Newcastle sending a text message at the same time.

The reaction to this from the networks has been not to increase capacity, but to restrict consumers on how much data they are allowed before incurring additional charges. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that if you watch a lot of video, there could be a nasty surprise in your next bill. I have no idea if increasing capacity is even an option to be fair, but the net result of these data caps is surely going to be consumers will be more careful about what they watch, and probably chose not to watch snack video content?

What do you think? Is this a serious barrier for the mobile video business?

VW Academy video ad – brilliant!

This ad first aired during the Super Bowl, and is already has over 320,000 plays on YouTube.

A highly entertaining, and engaging way to get across quite dry product facts!

Love it, big tick from me.

Cameron Church on the whole Google H.264 thing

Google announced that Chrome would be dropping support for H.264 recently, and Cameron Church of Brightcove responds to the question “How will this affect the onlline video market” in this blog post.

http://www.streamfoundations.com/index.php/2011/02/09/googles-webm-may-be-all-that-but-youre-probably-not-going-to-even-notice/

‘P’ marks the product placement spot

Ofcom have announced that programmes containing product placement must contain a ‘P’ as they start, and immediately after ad-breaks.

I guess this is the TV equivalent of the ‘advertisement feature’

Full story here: http://tinyurl.com/6du4ej2

Can mobile networks become broadcasters?

I absolutely believe that one day in the next 20 years, mobile video will be far bigger than online video.

Once the user experience allows consumers to stream video with no lag, and a perfect experience every time, the morning commute or other periods of downtime will suddenly be filled with rich, entertaining video content.

The question I found myself asking recently though is who will make that content? The obvious answer is the production companies that are already making it. The obvious business model would be the networks acting as a vehicle, or dumb-pipe, and merely transporting other people’s content to their users.

However, when mobile video is accessible to the vast majority of consumers, would it not make more sense for mobile networks to create their own unique, fantastic content that can only be accessed on their network?

O2 have worked tirelessly to be the mobile network of choice to music fans, and have had significant success with that. Orange is the mobile network for film fans with Orange Wednesday’s a huge media hit. So what if in 20 years’ time these networks were offering a full programming schedule available only on their network?

Using modern day properties for examples sake, imagine if The Inbetweeners were only available to watch if you signed up with Orange? This would allow networks to differentiate in very real ways, and charge a premium for the pleasure of being a part of that brave new Orange world (other networks are available). The programme trailers could be available to all, on all networks and devices, but full episodes would only be available to watch on their parent mobile network.

What do you think, possible?

Social Eyes allows video chat within Facebook

Video chat is nothing new. The Real Player, Google Talk, Chat Roulette, Face Time on the iPhone 4 and even the very first 3 mobile phones allowed video chat. None of these services have exactly set the world on fire, so at first glance it is easy to see why the naysayers are declaring that Social Eyes will not amount too much.

Social Eyes is a new company, founded by Rob Glaser, the founder of Real Networks, and it allows a very simple integration with your Facebook profile. There is no software download, and signing up literally takes 20 seconds. Simply go to socialeyes.com and press ‘connect with Facebook’
As with all video chat services, Social Eyes requires that friends are on the same platform at the same time in order for the opportunity to chat to present itself. That is where this service will have the biggest advantage for me, because millions of people spend hours a week on Facebook, and so the chance of friends being online at the same time is considerable. You only have to look at how many opportunities there are to text chat with friends online in Facebook to realise that the opportunity is considerable.

The biggest problem with video chat, is that you couldn’t really use it at work. Talking to your PC is probably frowned upon in the workplace, but evening chat at home over a wireless network could well take off. It’s a bit like merging Skype into the huge dwell time platform that is Facebook.

I think it has a really good chance of being the first main stream chat service. All Social Eyes need to do now is work out how to monetise it! If they could build scale, maybe a 10 second pre-roll before each chat session might work. Or maybe in stream banners similar to YouTube.

Cisco say in 20 years time you will be able to smell, feel and interact with your TV

Scott Puopolo, Vice President and Global Head of Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group has set out his thoughts on how TV will evolve during his keynote speech at the Over-the-Top TV Conference 2011 in San Jose, California.

I found myself baulking at the claims that within 20 years we will be able to smell the cooking taking place in the cooking shows we watch, or feel the breeze in our face when watching a show set on a beach. I think it will take ten years from internet connected TV’s to be fully adopted and used, so this sorcery that Mr Puopolo speaks off sounds fanciful at best. Who am I to argue with Cisco though, it could happen I suppose although the programming production process would be infinitely more complicated if you had to match smells and feelings with sight, sound and motion.

Here is Scott Puopolo being interviewed:

I can totally see the gesstural controls, video calling and interaction taking off more quickly than smellyvsion and breeze-TV, but whatever unfolds it is surely an exciting time for the TV industry!

Imagine the advertising potential? Wake up and smell the coffee, quite literally! Imagine a travel advert for Saint Lucia if you could actually feel the warmth of the sun and the sea breeze while seeing dreamy images? For decades fragrance houses have pumped millions of pounds into TV advertising, when the one sense that really counts for a fragrance (smell) is missing … imagine those fragrance houses being able to get their signature smell out to millions, alongside the branding?

The technology to make this happen is way beyond my understanding, but I’ll take Scott’s word for it because it sounds like the most creative advertising medium that you could possibly imagine!

Five years of video advertising (US)

Found this nice, easy to read infographic on viralblog.com, and although it reports on the US market it is still interesting I think.

U.S. mobile usage by activity

Found this on ComScore’s Data Mine.

Collective acquires premium online video ad network Web TV Enterprise

Integration expected to speed shift of broadcast ad revenue to online video.

Collective, a full service provider of media and technology solutions for display and video advertising, announced today that it has acquired premium online video advertising network, Web TV Enterprise. The deal, which follows only six months after the Company’s expansion into the UK and just weeks after acquiring video advertising platform Oggifinogi, furthers Collective’s position as a leader in delivering audiences to brand advertisers utilising unified in-banner and in-stream video ad formats.

Web TV Enterprise is the UK’s largest premium online video ad network, representing many of the UK’s leading web publishers and content owners. A pioneer of the VOD (video on-demand) advertising space since 2006, Web TV presents advertisers with the widest range of premium video channels on the web, reaching more than 25 million UK viewers a month.

“Collective is committed to accelerating the shift of broadcast advertising spend online,” said Joe Apprendi, CEO, Collective. “Unlike most video networks, Web TV’s revenues come largely from broadcast media budgets versus smaller digital plans. Our acquisition of Web TV will allow us to tap video’s incredible potential and further strengthen our rapidly expanding capabilities.”

In its Online Video Advertising Market Report based on a survey of UK media buyers, Web TV Enterprise revealed that more than seventy percent expected online video advertising to increase by twenty five percent over the next six months. The research also suggested digital buyers are responding to improvements in audience measurement techniques, which has long been an obstacle for many, as noted by eMarketer which reported 31 percent of UK advertisers said online video ads need better measurement.

Collective also makes available Internet Gross Rating Point (iGRP) reporting for all Collective video, rich media and display campaigns, making the integration a natural extension of Collective’s product suite as the company continues to align its business with meeting brand advertising objectives.
“The promise of online video advertising lies in its ability to allow brand advertisers to engage with their audiences within the most appropriate content environments, where the most impact and opportunity exist,” said Jamie Estrin, Managing Director, Web TV Enterprise. “Collective’s success in combining data, targeting and analytics with the most engaging advertising format available makes this a natural fit for us. Our combined efforts will drive the advancement of online video advertising.”

The deal closed at an undisclosed amount.

About Collective

Founded in 2005, Collective is a full service provider of media and technology solutions for display and video advertising. We help brand advertisers and leading publishers monetize trusted audience data and brand safe ad inventory. Collective’s industry expertise provides a strategic advantage to its clients by leveraging proprietary audience modeling, insights and ad effectiveness metrics. Our flagship products, Collective Display and Collective Video®, are powered by AMP®, our market-tested data and media management platform. Collective is headquartered in New York with offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco and London. Collective’s investors include Accel Partners®, Greycroft Partners and iNovia Capital. For more information, please visit www.collective.com.

About Web TV Enterprise

Web TV Enterprise (www.webtventerprise.com) is the UK’s largest premium online video ad network, representing many of the UK’s leading web publishers and content owners. As a pioneer of the VOD (video on-demand) advertising space since 2006, the company presents advertisers with the widest range of high quality premium video channels on the web, where it places audio-visual advertising. Web TV Enterprise exclusively represents premium content from partners including Sony Music, iVillage, The Independent, E! Online and IPC Media. Over 250 leading advertising brands have run pre-roll campaigns on Web TV Enterprise’s premium video channels including Sony Playstation, COI, Vodafone, L’Oreal, Renault and Unilever.
Founded in 2006 by Jamie Estrin, Web TV Enterprise’s premium video ad network reaches over twenty five million online viewers.

Video advertising on mobile up 492% year on year!

The IAB and PwC have released a report on mobile advertising in 2010, and it looks as if pre and post roll advertising is the fasted growing ad-format of all, albeit from a low base.

Mobile video advertising still has many barriers, most notably inconsistent user experienced when streamed over a 3G connection; a lack of measurement and therefore accountability and many publishers are still struggling with the technical aspects of serving mobile pre-roll advertising.

I think that mobile video has the potential to be bigger than fixed-internet video before too long, and it is encouraging to see the signs of that happening in this IAB/ PwC 2010 report.

It would be interesting to see how much Apple’s iPad and other tablet devices have driven this growth in pre-roll advertising.

Snapsot from the report:

Expenditure on Mobile advertising formats. This category is broken down into:

• Banners and text links were up 62% year-on-year to £23.7 million (£14.6m in 2009).
• Tenancies were up 18% year-on-year to £1.7m (£1.4m in 2009) and a market share of 2% (3.8% in 2009).
• Pre- and Post-roll advertising was up 492% year-on-year to £1.1 million, (£0.2m in 2009) and a market share of 1.3% (0.5% in 2009).
• Other formats – including display advertising within SMS / MMS – £1.6 million, up from £1.2 million in 2009, a growth of 32% year-on-year.

The growth of mobile stats [video]

Some interesting fact and figures on the growth of mobile from Sybase, a SAP company.

Bruce Daisley talk at IAB Engage (video)

Great talk from Bruce Daisley of YouTube at the IAB Engage conference.