If you are looking for a great example of online video I recommend you check out the Fiskars Cinema Series. This series of three documentary style videos tells the story about a 360 year-old artisan enclave and “company town” called Fiskars Village.
These videos are telling a story, it is obvious that these are promotional videos, but they exude passion and craft and do not feel like commercials. These videos remind me a lot of the TV version of “This American Life” and some of Hillman Curtis’ artist series videos.
These videos are presented on a flash heavy site with very little text. I would recommend that along with all this great video they include some text. This would improve their organic search results and give people who liked the videos, more information about the village.
f you want to reach a large audience with your online videos, it is always a good idea to post your video to several video sharing sites.
Posting you video to youTube is a no brainer, but with over 300 other video sharing sites to choose from, where do you begin? I recommend posting your videos regularly to 5-10 different sites, and before you decide on which sites best suit your brand of video you may want to start posting on 20-30 sites and narrow them down to the top 10 after a couple months of testing.
If you are serious about online video, and plan on producing a lot of video and building an audience. You should also factor in your ability to monetize your videos on each site.
One video sharing site I recommend you consider is…
The National Parks Conservation Association recently launched a campaign to elect a bear for president, in hopes of getting the presidential candidates to address national park issues while on the campaign trail.
The NPCA has relied heavily on viral videos, and the internet to promote the campaign.
Y&R Chicago created several pro-bono videos for the campaign. The [...]
In the February 2008 issue of Inc. Magazine there is a short article about how gDiapers is using online videos to help promote their eco-friendly diapers.
As a new dad I was very interested in the product, and as an internet marketer I was interested in the marketing side of this story. I had to investigate [...]
Burger King pulled a stunt on it’s customers by telling them that the Whopper was discontinued and no longer on the menu.
Crispin Porter + Bogusky filmed the whole thing and turned the stunt into a TV ad and a 7 minute long viral video documentary.
What I find most fascinating, is that when customers are confronted [...]
mirates has created what is sure to be the longest commercial of all time, to promote their non stop flight from Dubai to Sao Paulo.
The flight is 14 hours and 40 minutes long, and so is the commercial. They hired Fernando Ferreira, aka “Non Stop Fernando” to talk for the entire duration of the flight about Brazil, Sao Paulo and of course the benefits of flying Emirates.
The video clip below shows of a few moments from Fernando’s 14 hour performance…
This week Google/youTube announced it is expanding its partner program that allows for creators of original videos to share in a portion of the ad revenue that these videos generate.
youTube ran a pilot program earlier this year, and based on the success of that trial anyone in the United States or Canada can now apply to become a partner.
Anyone can apply, but only those who upload videos on a regular basis, already have a significant audience, and comply with the youTube terms of service will be accepted.
Since the writers went on strike early last month they have been using online video to effectively tell their side of the story.
It is interesting to see the variety of styles and techniques they have incorporated to get their message across.
Here are a few of the more popular videos that have gone viral.
Why We [...]
Here is an example of a well crafted and well funded online marketing campaign. That ties together a campaign website, online video, and the most expensive commercial that Guinness has ever produced.
The treasure hunt begins at the Guinness contest website. There you will be challenged to unlock 11 dominoes. Each domino represents a scene from the new Guinness ad.
To unlock the dominoes, you must look for clues hidden in the video clips and visit additional contest websites to find the hidden codes. Once you unlock all 11 dominoes and put the ad together you win a golden domino.
One of the good things about internet TV and internet video in general, is that you don’t have to spend all your money in one place. Unlike broadcast TV you are not forced to create a show that appeals to everybody, that more often than not ends up appealing to nobody.
With internet TV You can create smaller shows, with smaller budgets, aimed at smaller audiences and still have the potential to succeed. Internet producers and broadcasters are still going to have to rely on advertising to fund their show, but they will need far less of those dollars to make a go at it.
The deadline for the LG Life Is Good video contest is this Saturday Nov, 10th.
With a grand prize worth over $18,000 and over $30,000 in total prizes LG has provided enough incentive to get people’s attention. LG has also worked hard to generate consumer interest by making sure the contest has been getting a lot of press, and encouraging both viewership and submissions.
To date there has been over 800,000 video views, over 800 subscribers to the LG YouTube channel, and nearly 750 video submissions.
18 year old freshman and apple fan Nick Haley created a home made iPod Touch commercial and uploaded it to youTube. He pieced it together from clips he found at apple.com and timed his edited to the fast paced and catchy song “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” by CSS.
Imagine his surprise when Apple contacted him, and told him they liked his video and wanted to create a TV commercial based on it. Nick was then flown to LA where he got to work with long time Apple agency TBWA/Chiat/Day on a broadcast quality version of his spot.
The people over at Tubemogul wrote a great report on why you should include video marketing into your internet marketing mix, and they follow if up with some best practice tips on how to get your video in front of your target audience.
Tubemogul provides a free service that allows you to track videos across several video sharing sites. I have been using and testing their services (as well as their competitors) over the last several months. Considering we are still in the early stages of video tracking and analytics, I have been quite impressed with their services so far. With this in mind, we should all be interested in what the people at TubeMogul have to say when it comes to internet video marketing.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is using video to raise money for the Wikipedia Foundation and to help foster the growth of Wikipedia in the languages of developing countries around the world.
This video benefited from some excellent footage from the documentary film “Truth in Numbers”.
I was very impressed with quality of the video, and predict that this video will be a very effective fund raising tool.
n theory a MySpace web series starring eight young and attractive women just out of college probably sounded like a good idea to Ford when they decided to lend their name and marketing dollars to “Roomates”.
The problem is, “Roommates”, looks really, really bad. I can’t say I was expecting much of a story, but throw in bad writing, bad acting, bad production value, and most annoyingly bad audio and it’s hard to see how Ford is going to benefit from this.
I’m sure the series will be filled with shots of the 2008 Ford Focus as the girls take trips to the beach and travel to shopping malls, but I’m sure whatever audience this show has will be watching the girls not their cars.
The sad truth is that TV shows exist mainly as a vehicle to sell advertising, but I wish more people would realize that quality content benefits both the audience and the advertiser.
When it comes to internet marketing it seems that holding a youTube video contest has become as acceptable as setting up a web page and buying Google Adwords.
Now that Panasonic, Heinz, Doritos, Chevy, Coke, Mentos, HP, CBS, Subaru, and even the State Bar of Texas have held youTube video contests. It appears to be an easy sell for marketers to include a youTube video contest as part of their marketing mix.
5 reasons why youTube video contests are so popular:
1) They are relatively cheap and easy to set up. Create a low budget video announcing the contest, create a youTube channel, and if you want create a simple contest web page.
2) You can promote your contest as much or as little as you like. Offering a good prize will usually be enough to generate word of mouth promotion and encourage participation.
3) Having a youTube video contest can make your company/product/brand appear modern and relevant…
Adsense Video Units are the newest addition to Google’s Adsense lineup. Video Units are now available to web site publishers in the US, along with Adsense text and display ads, Adsense referal ads, Adsense search, and Adsense mobile ads.
The Adsense Video Unit is an ad supported video player that you can embed on you website or blog. Just like Adsense text and display ads, Google will choose what ads to display based on the content of your web page.
For those of you who haven’t seen youTube’s overlay ads in action you can experience one about twenty seconds into this Dandelion Weird-Out music video.
There was no embed link with this video, so I didn’t get a chance to see if the overlay ads work when the videos are embedded in web pages or blogs. I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t.
These overlay ads are pretty rare at the moment, and they seem to disappear soon after they appear, so check it out while you have a chance. I posted two images below, one of the overlay ad for the movie Halloween, and one showing the picture in picture movie trailer that plays if you click on the overlay.
This week’s Weekender is devoted to online video.
Online video optimization tips
Jody Nimetz of Ask Enquiro gives us 14 video optimization best practices and tips, while websiteoptimization.com offers up some web video optimization tips that are more tutorial style.
Online video is a tough business
The Silicon Alley Insider delivers their detailed analysis of the poor state of [...]
And the $57,000 goes to “Heinz the Kissable Ketchup” created by Andrew Dodson who runs a one man production shop out of Wheelersburg, Ohio.
His winning user generated commercial for the Heinz Top This TV Challenge aired during Sunday night’s Emmy Awards.
The four runner up videos each received $5700 and their commercials all aired on the Today Show Sept. 17th.
Heinz plans to run a second campaign in august.
Hungry for more? Due to the impressive number and awesome creativity of the commercials you all submitted, we are excited to announce the Heinz Top This TV Challenge Take Two-coming this October. Stay tuned for details.
Here is 5 part video I found on youTube this weekend called “Behind the scenes: Hollywood Goes Hypercommercial”. It is a critical look at how product placement is affecting movie making.
The video was created by the Media Education Foundation in 2000, so it may feel a little dated, but it is as relevant today as it was 7 years ago.
Product placement has become more prevalent in film and TV since then, not less. And online video is no different. Both professional and user generated content on sites like youTube and Revver are already being used by marketers to display their products.
Sometimes the product placement is transparent and out in the open like when companies post their commercials online, or run contests. But quite often marketers are looking for stealthier ways of integrating their products with popular content.
There are already several companies including Brandframe, WePlace, and InShot that are publicly offering their product placement services to help marketers get their product seen on user generated video sites on a pay per view basis.
Dan Meth created this short animated video feature the “Internet People” who have now become part of pop culture thanks to viral nature of internet video.
The video has become a viral video success of it’s own, with over a million views on youTube so far.
If there are any clips you don’t recognize, or if there are a few you want to revisit, Buzzfeed has created a comprehensive list of all the viral videos and memes mentioned in the video.
Hyudai has just launched a new ad campaign, and instead of featuring its cars it has opted for an honest and somewhat sarcastic approach to marketing itself.
The “Think about it” campaign is challenging people to think about what really makes a good car and to also reflect on how cars are being marketed to them.
The campaign by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners will include online, print, out of home, and TV ads, as well as the web page www.thinkaboutit.com.
Here is the final version of the partial user generated - partial Google staff created Gmail video.
The video is far from polished, and isn’t trying to deliver some finely crafted corporate message. It’s simple, fun, and after being online for only 2 days has 1.4 million views and growing.
This is a great example of what can happen if you invite your audience to participate.
After months of testing youTube has finally rolled out its inVideo ads to the public. 15 seconds into a video, an overlay ad will appear over the bottom 20% of the video. This overlay will be 80% transparent and will animate for up to 10 seconds before disappearing on its own. You will have the option of closing the overlay ad immediately if you want. These overlay ads will contain links that can trigger a video ad. If you choose to watch the video ad, the video you are currently watching will pause, and then the “player-in-player” video ad will begin playing, and disappear once it is finished. Google estimates that 75% of people will watch the full player in player ad.
There has been a lot of buzz over the last couple days about Seth McFarlane (creator of Family Guy), and Raven Symone, (star of the Disney’s That’s So Raven) deciding to use Google Adsense to distribute their original video content. Seth McFarlane is planning on creating 50 animated shorts and Raven Symone is producing a series of short “how-to” videos. The videos will appear in a video box on a targeted webpage that the viewer will have to click to play. Each video will be accompanied by banner advertising and either a pre-roll or post roll video ad. There has not yet been any mention of product placement, or specific brands tied to the project.
With it’s latest Gmail promo video, Google shows us once again, that simple ideas are viral ideas. The catalyst for this collaborative video campaign is “help us imagine how an email message travels around the world”.
Google set the ball rolling with a short somewhat comical clip of google employees passing around an oversized Gmail M-velope. They invite people around the world to download and print the M-velope and create their own 10 second clip to ad to the video. Google will select it’s favorites to complete the video, and the video will then play on the Gmail homepage, via youTube of course.
Heavy.com has created the Husky Network to market it’s own brand of ad supported video network. It consists of surrounding or wrapping a video player with a large static ad.
Publishers would have a choice of embedding the ad supported video into their web pages, or alternatively having the ad and video open in a pop up or an overlay. Anyone familiar with watching videos on the Heavy.com will already be familiar with the format.
I highly recommend anyone interested in online video read a recent Adam Curry intererview by Jack Myers, over at the Mediapost TV Board. Adam Curry, ex MTV VJ, current host of Podfinder and partner in the social audio/video network www.podshow.com compared the recent online video explosion to the early days of MTV, and argues that the future of marketable online video lies in episodic content.
YouTube, with millions of single-click unlinked video fragments, is not the future of broadband entertainment. ITunes, with a closed business model focused exclusively on selling iPods, is also not the future… The future is “serialized episodic content that bridges the gap between TV networks and YouTube.
While giving a speech at the Seoul Digital Forum, Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, was asked by a member of the audience “What is Web 3.0″? Watch this quick clip for the answer.
He starts by making a jab at the term Web 2.0, but then responds with a very insightful answer, that probably has more to do with Google’s than Web 3.0, if you can differentiate the two.
Here’s how it works, an advertiser has a video ad she wants you to see, the magazine publisher has a magazine he wants you to subscribe to, and you want that magazine. This is where AdPerk comes in.
They’ve created a web page where people can watch video ads in return for free or discounted magazine subscriptions. You can earn a free subscription to Popular Mechanics or 50% off Dwell Magazine. It looks like Ode and Alternative Magazine are on board and will be available soon.
