SmartMarket Media Blog

According to a new survey by PermissionTV and reported on eMarketer, Marketers will increase their use of online video in 2009 (read their full article here). Here are some of the interesting statistics and trends they are predicting from this survey:

In the online survey of 400 senior marketing executives, nearly 2/3 identified online video as a primary focus of their 2009 digital marketing campaigns and budgets.  More than half are planning the launch of an online video campaign by the second quarter of 2009.

Brand awareness was listed by 71% of survey respondents as the biggest value of online video, followed by lead generation (47%), customer retention (44%), and customer conversion (41%).

Interesting to me was that e-mail was missing from the ad tactics respondents were asked about. Matt Kaplan, vice president at PermissionTV, told eMarketer that survey participants were not asked specifically about their e-mail budget plans. Although I believe e-mail marketing is a standard tactic for nearly all digital marketing campaigns and is especially effective when deploying an online video campaign. Who better to deploy an online video to and ask to forward it on to friends that a permission based e-mail list of contacts you already have a relationship with? The reason it was omitted was because spending on e-mail is far lower than for many other formats.This does make sense as E-Mail Service Provider (ESP) services are relatively inexpensive in the grand scheme of an online marketing campaign.

It will be interesting to see how 2009 pans out according to these predictions. It’s refreshing to see that brand awareness was the top reason for doing an online video marketing campaign as that is one of the strengths of online video. Those who put down lead generation, customer retention, and customer conversion will hopefully have some sort of statistics aggregation tracking in place as well as some sort of call-to-action either built into the video or somewhere around the video as this is critical to the success of any online video campaign.

How many views make a viral video a success?

How much of a typical online video is actually watched?

This is a question that was recently asked by Feed Company in a survey of 40 executives at top U.S. creative ad agencies and media buying firms. Almost 28% considered it a success if a viral video got more than 1 million views followed closely by about 22% each evenly saying it was successful if it was viewed 100,000, 250,000, or 500,000 times. A meager 2.8% each considered it successful if it was viewed 25,000 or 50,000 each. I’m telling you that of all these numbers the 2.8% were the closest to being correct. It’s not about the cumulative total of those views, it’s about getting that video in front of the right eyeballs.

This was a quote I pulled from the Feed Company’s Viral Video Marketing Survey “The Agency Perspective” The last part about the quality of engagement and conversation — that’s the real key to the success of a viral campaign.

Here’s an example that we utilized for ourselves using word of mouth or viral marketing as a self-promotional piece in a B2B environment with measurable results. Last September I was named by the Worcester Business Journal to their 40 Under Forty list. So to celebrate this we created a funny movie poking fun at myself. We set very clear goals to:

1. Increase our brand recognition within the Central Massachusetts region served by Worcester Business Journal.
2. To open a discussion which would hopefully lead to a working relationship with Worcester Business Journal.

First, we sent it to our contact at Worcester Business Journal to get their “blessing” before sending it out to our e-newsletter subscribers. The Business Journal’s editor-in-chief called us within 15 minutes to say that it had already been forwarded around their entire office and they wanted to show it at the awards banquet the next night with over 500 attendees. At the event the owner of the Business Journal (and several other regional business newspapers) came up to me and asked if they could send it out on their e-newsletter to their list of over 5,000 subscribers.

Within about two weeks after the event our e-newsletter subscriber list doubled and from that event we have created videos for two of the event attendees, we produced videos for all three business journals owned by the parent company of Worcester Business Journal and have all three business journals set up to resell our online marketing video product. As with any word of mouth marketing campaign, it needs to grab people’s attention and be easily passed on.

Based upon our website views of this video and the video views on sharing sites such as YouTube, we had a little over 12,000 total views. That’s it. But we were able to target our demographic specifically to decision makers in businesses in a select region. So all the right people were viewing the video that we wanted to engage with it.

So what’s the moral to this story? You can have 50 million views of a video but if it ultimately doesn’t lead to the desired brand interaction you were looking for how effective was it really? Be more targeted in your distribution and don’t worry about cumulative views if it is engaging the right people.

How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?

5 Questions Interview: Mike Langford of Tweetworks

With Hanukkah and Winter Solstice already starting at sundown last night, the holidays are upon us. Christmas and Kwanzaa are just a few days away.

So with that in mind I wanted to share a video of holiday cheer we just created for Waste Management as their holiday greeting. It has a very loose & funny “message” to it but it is more about enjoying the children running around giggling, your family, loved ones and the time you spend together. Cherish these moments together as they are fleeting. Today your little ones are excited to tear open their presents, tomorrow they will be headed off to college. Not trying to be a downer here, just trying to put those burned sugar cookies into perspective. This holiday season take a moment to take a deep breath and enjoy life while it happens.

So no matter what holidays you celebrate, I wish you all a very happy and safe holiday season and a fun and prosperous 2009!