Influx Insights Tag Feed: video

making money on laggards- vhs

Influx Insights — 2008-12-22T11:56:39Z

There's a great story in the LA Times about a company which bucked the trends. When everyone was moving to DVD, they brought VHS tapes and still found buyers.

"The last major Hollywood movie to be released on VHS was "A History of Violence" in 2006. By that point major retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart were already well on their way to evicting all the VHS tapes from their shelves so the valuable real estate could go to the sleeker and smaller DVDs and, in more recent seasons, the latest upstart, Blu-ray discs. Kugler ended up buying back as much VHS inventory as he could from retailers, distributors and studios; he then sold more than 4 million VHS videotapes over the last two years.

Those tapes went to bargain-basement chains such as Dollar Tree, Dollar General and Family Dollar, and Kugler's network of mom-and-pop clients and regional outlets, such as the Gabriel Bros. Stores in West Virginia or the Five Below chain in Pennsylvania."

Proof is ever we needed it, that trends take some time to die and that it takes a long time for technology to fully saturate.

While we all crave the new, remember there are many that can't access it.

Posted by Ed Cotton

brand as media company- nike

Influx Insights — 2008-08-10T20:22:58Z

Red Bull maybe one of the first brands to recognize the potential of become a media company. Instead of sponsoring events, it now creates and produces its own. This gives it a huge degree of control and the ability to associate itself with the extreme events that best suit the brand.

Nike is starting to move in that direction with a slightly different take. It's using the Olympics as an opportunity to showcase its innovation and technology and to communicate this to the world, it's using the internet and dozens of video interviews with athletes and designers.

Here are some Nike personnel talking about a new sailing shoe for the Olympics.

It's a reminder that all brands have the opportunity to tell much big stories because the media bandwidth available to do so is that much bigger and costs nothing. Although, these videos currently follow a pretty straight formula, it's like that we will see a lot more creativity being introduced into this area in the future.

It's same to assume that in the near future, these brand stories will have as much creative importance as advertising does today. Whether advertising agencies will step up to take on this role, remains to be seen. If they don't PR companies and in-house creative departments will take this over.

Posted by Ed Cotton

a new way to think about product placement

Influx Insights — 2007-09-26T18:36:41Z

Given the growth of online video, it's surprising that no one has really thought of the opportunity with product placement.

However, it looks like BrandFame is one company looking to exploit the space by matching producers with brands.

Posted by Ed Cotton

google streetlevel is just scratching the surface

Influx Insights — 2007-05-31T11:28:28Z

Frank Taylor of Google Earth blog captured some amazing footage of new Google camera technology that was shown at yesterday's Where 2.0 conference. Just think of the advertising possibilities!

how to encourage participation

Influx Insights — 2007-04-26T11:29:00Z

Bill Tancer of Hitwise recently presented some interesting stats on participation levels on Web 2.0 sites, his research found that only .16% of all YouTube visits were to upload video and only 0.2% of Flickr visits were to upload photographs.

As we are in the “Participation Age” there seems to be a need to expand the number of participants. It’s questionable if brands are doing enough and by brands, we mean these Web 2 brands and creative brands in general; video cameras, computer brands, digital camera brands, printer brands, etc….

Obviously, the 1% rule is being played out, but think of the market potential if that 1% could be increased to 2%.

Brands in this space need to think about how they can encourage participation, this is part incentive and partly education. The education part is important and can obviously there need to be different streams for different segments; from the non-user, to the user who isn’t interested in sharing.

Clearly all brands that want to move into the Web 2 space and create community and conversation need to listen up, this stuff doesn’t just magically happen, it needs encouragement and education.

One interesting example is the Daily Telegraph newspaper in the UK, yesterday it launched a blogging service for its readers. For many, this could sound foolish, given the abundance of free blogging platforms, but this is smart as it’s going to attract their readers who trust DT more than the small blogging brands. In addition, in a challenging time for newspapers, there is a lot to gain by doing this and is reaching out and providing education and utility for a new group of participants.

Participation is the tangible offshoot of engagement, which has become the fashionable thing to try and measure these days.

It’s clear, if brands want thriving communities and strong brand relationships, they need do more than pay lip service to the notion of participation.

Is participation a new metric for engagement?

viral video success- the landlord

Influx Insights — 2007-04-25T10:47:38Z

Will Ferrell's Landlord film has been an incredible success, generating over 15 milion views in a short period of time. Interestingly, the film isn't available on You Tube and can't be embeded in other sites. The only way to view it is on Ferrell's new site Funnyordie.com.

Forbes Magazine has an interview with the Funnyordie.com's founders.

Here are a couple of highlights.

I'm sure there's something to the instantaneous piece of it too. This stuff doesn't have to sit in development for years.

Absolutely. You just go do it. Grab a video camera and do it. You don't even write a script; you just get the beats for it and do two takes, three takes at the most. And because of that, some of them aren't going to be great, and some are. But the whole spirit of it is, Who cares, let's just do stuff and have fun with it.

Do you see a trend emerging? Will other celebrities start to make their way online too?

Yeah. And I hope they do it in this way, kind of messing around and loose. I think if celebrities start entering it with a team of professionals, agents and executives, and the Internet short becomes really thought out, I think instantly people will smell that out. So I think the spirit of it has to be sort of screwing around, to be real and not overly premeditated. If you want to see that, you go to big movies or television--and that's a great thing, but the Internet has a looser form to it.

It's surprising few celebrities have gone down this path, but we can obviously expect hundreds of films to be hitting the pipes in the next few months, to compete directly with user-created content. Celebrities clearly have the name recognition advantage and a fan base, but can they be as creative as everyday folk and can they generate more than one hit?

Again, it's another example of doing more stuff, for less money and experimenting to see what sticks.

adding layers to videos

Influx Insights — 2007-06-14T14:14:53Z

Mojiti is a new site that provides all kinds of possibilities for consumers to play with existing content and maybe even for brands to annotate and add to their communication materials.It's user-created pop-up video and shows the oppoortunities that exist to add layers and depth by adding additional content elements.

brand ecosystems on youtube-the "real" ps3 channel

Influx Insights — 2007-06-14T14:12:56Z

YouTube is a billion channel universe, but explore it by brand and you quickly notice that this ecosystem has different component parts.

Influx went through a hypothetical exercise; we tried imagining a “channel” for Sony’s PS3.

Exploring some of the 44k videos on the site and trying to organize them into themes, it breaks down into something like this:

1.   Instructional Information

Set-up videos have become alternative instructional manuals. Here’s how to set up and use your PSP with your PS3.

View count: 20k

Here’s a video on how to use the console’s web browser.

View count: 122k

2.   Hacking the System

How to run more on your PS3.

View count: 118k

3.   Brand destruction as entertainment and edutainment

Some people destroy the unit just for the hell of it.

View count: 3.5 million, this film with the most views of any PS3 film

Others, open it up, so you can learn what’s inside

4.   Community Conversation

Here’s a group of YouTubers debating why and why not PS3 is better than other consoles.

5.   Brand meets culture-news

Dozens of video showing launch chaos from around the world.

6.   Game and feature trailers

Here’s one for Sony’s new Second Life type environment for PS3 users.

7.   Advertising

Somewhere in all this, lies the advertising.

Obviously, all this might not be ideal content for an officially sanctioned PS3 channel from Sony, but there are clearly more areas they can play in.

-   Creating video-based instruction manuals

-   Highlighting new features

-   Game trailers and previews

-   Videos that explain the technology behind the system

In essence, brands could be doing more with YouTube by producing and distributing content, other than just advertising; material that could have broader reach and usage in this new ecosystem.