Beyond Viral

How to Attract Customers, Promote Your Brand, and Make Money with Online Video

Kevin Nalty

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470877616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

Promote your product using the most visceral form of social media-online video

Learn how to create cost-effective videos, engage your customers, compel them to measurable behaviors (awareness, intent, and purchase), and sustain your brand online. Beyond Viral gives you the tools and tricks to successfully use online video to reach your business goals.

• Author Kevin Nalty is the only career marketer who doubles as one of the most-viewed YouTube comedians
• Foreword by veteran vlogger David Meerman Scott
• First-hand case studies of leading brands include Microsoft, Starbucks, GE, MTV, Mentos, Holiday Inn, and Fox Broadcasting
• Learn from the successes of top companies and startups as well as the pitfalls and mistakes many of them are making

Online video has huge potential, mostly untapped. Put your business at the forefront of this important medium with the proven methods described by Beyond Viral.

CHAPTER 1

The Least a Marketer Needs to Know

In this chapter, you will learn:

• Why a marketer needs to know about online video.

• Pitfalls to avoid and ways to save yourself time and money.

• How to target customers in ways you may not have considered.

• How video can help you from awareness through loyalty.

Presumably, you would not be reading these words if you had not recognized that online video can help drive businesses. However, I feel compelled to point out why I think this is the most interesting thing happening in our time:

• Online video generally refers to viewing that occurs at a computer, and that remains the prevailing mode today. Over time, however, the convergence of the three screens (television, computer, and mobile devices) will further complicate the definition of online video and perhaps eventually make the term antiquated and obsolete.

• This medium is disrupting industries and traditional networks, and content producers have so far fumbled and lost relevancy in online video. While most video viewing is done via a television set, the audience has continued to fragment. In the early 1950s, more than 30 percent of households watched NBC, and today it’s around 5 percent.¹ As television audiences fragment and shift to online viewing, marketing dollars are following them.

• Today, online video is the only advertising medium with a growth rate estimated at 40 to 60 percent per year,² while such traditional areas of marketing mix as television and print are flat or declining.³ (See Figure 1.1.)

• YouTube remains the dominant player in online video, so this book gives it disproportionate attention. By the time you read this book, we’ll likely see a reduction of the approximately 37 percent share difference between the leading video property and its distant follower. ComScore, a market research company that tracks one of the largest panels of online users, reports that Google/YouTube leads with nearly 40 percent share, followed by Hulu with only 3 percent.⁴ Still, approximately 25 percent of Google search queries are conducted on YouTube, making it the number two search engine (above Yahoo!).⁵ YouTube also has more content and active viewers than any television network.

Figure 1.1 U.S. online advertising spending, 2008-2014 (billions and % change).

Source: eMarketer, October 2009.

Online video—like radio, television, and film—has created a new type of star. Individual “one-man band” amateurs are being watched more frequently than most television shows. Brands have a near-term opportunity to partner with these stars for cost-efficient ways of reaching large audiences. Many of these individuals are earning six-figure annual incomes via advertisers.

Online video is changing the way we market, and requires insights they don’t teach in business school (at least they didn’t a decade ago, but now I’m dating myself). On the one hand, we have marketers believing their unique selling proposition is as interesting as the “Numa Numa” kid.⁶

On the other hand, we have today’s attention-deficit video viewers (which I will explain in depth later) demanding hyperpaced video entertainment, and ready to skip or close a video otherwise. So the rules of creating videos are fairly simple: Keep your clip or video short, interesting, edgy, and give us a surprise that makes us want to forward it to our friends. It’s not a viral video if people don’t want to share it. The rules of marketing within online video are more complex, but you will soon be capable of distinguishing a successful program from the road kills along the viral highway.

Eight Things Marketers Should Know about Online Video

I like lists, so allow me start with an important one. There are eight things every marketer should know about online video. To fully understand these, it has taken me several years of experimenting as a marketer and video creator. You, however, will learn much more quickly. Read these closely and you will save months of frustration, reduce your costs and risks, impress your colleagues, and possibly even lose 20 pounds in two weeks.

1. They’re Watching. Your customers are watching exponentially more videos online than they were even a year ago. A marketer cannot survive without some skepticism, but trust me on this one. The early adopters of online video (technical enthusiasts, teenagers, video gamers) are giving way to a broader audience that will, eventually, closely represent the population. Americans continue to spend as much as 10 times more time in front of their televisions than surfing the Internet or watching online video. But three trends are capturing the attention of advertisers: (1) Time-shifted television viewing is increasing rapidly (with the proliferation of digital video recorders), (2) there is a significant (35 percent) rise in simultaneous use of the television and Internet, and (3) online-video viewing is increasing rapidly across all demographics.⁷

2. Your Brand Isn’t an Online-Video Entertainer. It is a rare marketer or brand that can also entertain. It is the role of a marketer to identify a target market with a need, position a product or service into the minds of its customers, and grow sales. Those tasks often are at odds with the job of an entertainer, which is to engage and delight audiences. I happen to wear both hats, and it is challenging to balance these roles. Many marketers, often with help from creative agencies, have created “branded entertainment” flops like the now-defunct Bud.tv, the first attempt by a consumer product company to launch a full-scale TV network with original long-form programming online.⁸ (See Figure 1.2.)

Budweiser makes beer, and would have been better served by introducing its products in the context of popular existing shows and audiences. Assume, even if you believe otherwise, that nobody cares about your brand but you. Find content that already attracts crowds, and develop creative ways of working with the creators and distributors. Instead of trying to launch a Broadway show about your product, slip down the street into a standing-room-only theater. You would be surprised how receptive the creators can be.

Figure 1.2 All that remains of Bud.tv.

3. It’s a Buyer’s Market. The ROI (return on investment) of reaching customers via online video is surprisingly high; like most new mediums, it is a buyer’s market. There are plenty of eyeballs with wallets, and an abundance of made-for-Web video content. Yet advertising dollars have not yet adjusted. In many ways, online video is like what search engine marketing was in 2000. Too many companies are stuck in a repetitive “ready, aim” mode, and only a few industries (entertainment, travel, and consumer packaged goods) are beginning to harness the power of online video. If you spend the next six months making the first step, you may lose opportunities, and also likely discover that the medium has changed again.

4. You’ll Need a Sherpa. A calculated investment in online video means: (1) being prudent about spending, (2) respecting the rules of social media, (3) engaging audiences in interesting ways, and (4) analyzing results carefully. Many brands awkwardly apply the interruption-advertising model from television and online marketing.

The best way to be prudent and stay within social media is to find a sherpa who has learned the trails of the mountain. Most of them, myself included, will be annoying. Just as social-media gurus are sprouting like dandelions, everyone claims to be an online-video expert. But there are individuals who have achieved success, have made mistakes along the way, and know where the land mines are hiding. The best way to know how someone will approach online video is to understand what he or she did previously. You’ll get different perspectives, depending on if someone came from marketing, advertising, creative, online, production, television, or film (or last year happened to be a guru of SecondLife.com, a once popular virtual world).

5. ROI Soup. Every list has a “measure-and-improve” step, but let’s get specific. Very few brands can truly measure the direct impact on sales of online video, and that makes it surprisingly consistent with the rest of the marketing mix. Still, it is not hard to cook up an ROI soup made of behavioral data, test-control research, and educated assumptions. Even better, the targeting and metrics—provided marketers and advertisers demand it—are getting almost as good as paid search, and certainly much better than print or television. As a product director I doubled my paid-search budgets nearly every year, despite not having a precise indicator of resulting sales. I used a solid assumption-based ROI model, and it impressed me more than television, radio, print GRPs (gross rating points), and studies on consumer awareness and attitudes. If you can’t track sales directly to online video, you can at least ensure you are not budget bleeding by doing a simple test-control or pre-post study using the proxy measures or drivers of sales (enrollment, site visit, intent, awareness).

6. An Impression Isn’t an Impression unless It Makes One. Television is still bought based on gross rating points, and online advertising is purchased by cost per impression (CPM). In another life, I must have been a direct-response junkie because that makes me very sad. Views or impressions can be horribly deceptive. They can give a brand the false pride of going viral with no sales consequence. A well-targeted video could be inadvertently scorned because it was seen only 100,000 times—but these viewers could be the target buyers. The question is not “how many views?” but whether a target saw it and changed his or her behavior. Most online marketers know that the vast majority of banner ads are not even seen (based on eye-tracker studies). Videos, by contrast, tend to engage a person actively—even if it is just for a minute or less. What we marketers really want is behavior change, and that happens when prospects give us time, attention, and engagement. But the CPM ad model tells us little about those vital signs. We want reach, but we need engagement to lift intent to purchase or generate sales. Just as a piece of junk mail can’t do the job of a good salesperson, a cheap display advertisement can’t perform like online video (and even those adjacent ads, to a lesser degree). I believe online video is the most visceral, engaging, and persuasive form of mass entertainment and marketing. This is amplified when there’s already a bond between the person in the video and her audience.

7. Please Don’t Just Advertise. Every marketer will eventually use online video to advertise. But I hope you will think beyond traditional ad buys—online video is a vehicle with potential to go much farther. It has implications on social media, public relations, communication, and education. Display advertising has merits, but a brand can often have greater impact with content sponsorships, product placement, and relationships with video creators and distributors. Even individual video stars are like mini-networks or publications of their own. They have loyal audiences, and you want your marketing to do more than interrupt the relationship between them and their audience. This industry is still young enough for you to be the online-video equivalent of a marketer who had E.T. holding Reese’s Pieces, provided Oprah with her first free audience giveaways, or placed the Coke cup in the hands of the judges on American Idol.

8. Understand the Ecosystem. Online video has turned amateurs into stars, web sites into networks, and interactive agencies into entertainers. It has also created a number of successful new entrants and far more defunct intermediaries. As the marketplace matures, it will sort itself out. Eventually, people and companies will return to their core competencies, but prepare for at least a decade of rapid-fire evolution. Right now, the least you need to know is that there are creators, distributors, destination sites, Web studios, creative agencies, individual video stars, and some specialty intermediaries that help link stars to brands (Hitviews, Place Vine, and Poptent), or help video creators upload to multiple video-sharing sites and measure results (TubeMogul.c...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 - The Least a Marketer Needs to Know
• CHAPTER 2 - Flavors of Video
• CHAPTER 3 - Viral Video Is Dead
• CHAPTER 4 - Video’s Role in the Marketing Funnel
• CHAPTER 5 - The Most Visceral Form of Social Media
• CHAPTER 6 - Inside YouTube
• CHAPTER 7 - Agencies Searching for Role
• CHAPTER 8 - Learning from Online-Video “Stars”
• CHAPTER 9 - Marketing via Webstars
• CHAPTER 10 - Paid Video Advertising
• CHAPTER 11 - Measuring ROI and Performance of Online Video
• CHAPTER 12 - Video and Search Engine Optimization
• CHAPTER 13 - How to Get Popular on YouTube
• CHAPTER 14 - Can You Make Money from Online Video?
• CHAPTER 15 - Guerrilla Video for Entrepreneurs and Cause-Related Marketing
• CHAPTER 16 - Learning from Obama Girl
• CHAPTER 17 - Insider Information Behind the Curtain
• CHAPTER 18 - The Future of Online Video
• Index
• Notes