Influx Insights Tag Feed: youtube

cultural smarts from samsung

Influx Insights — 2008-08-21T17:33:54Z

You can't create something culturally relevant without an understanding of contemporary culture and its manifestations.

The "Unboxing Video" category has been with us for years and its format is widely recognized and understood by tech geeks.

It's a sub-genre of new media that's ready, primed and waiting for someone to do something creative with.

Nice work!!

Via Random Culture

Posted by Ed Cotton

building the youtube brand-part2

Influx Insights — 2007-12-23T01:41:51Z

A few days back, I wrote about the rise of YouTube as a serious media entity; often ridiculed for hamster videos and teenage rants, the channel is now moving into the big leagues; playing a significant role in the US 2008 Election debates and its recent announcement to partner with the World Economic Forum for its Davos event in January 08.

In the post, I speculated, somewhat in jest, that the brand would soon be launching a channel for the Queen of England.

Clearly, we all now inhabiting a world where fiction is fast becoming fact, today, t he BBC announced the launch of YouTube's Royal Channel.

Posted by Ed Cotton

the evolution of homer

Influx Insights — 2007-12-18T06:34:38Z

Posted by Ed Cotton

building the youtube brand

Influx Insights — 2007-12-18T05:36:11Z

YouTube has often been ridiculed as a media outlet, with analysts pointing to hamster videos and ranting teens

However, YouTube has a different target in its sights, it's clearly trying to build credibility as a media and is inserting its brand into all kind of interesting places from the 2008 US Election to its latest move to partner the World Economic Forum in Davos.

This is all about brand action; offering up the brand to the World Economic Forum to let consumers into a previously closed affair and in the process getting YouTube a seat at the top table of world leaders

It's all surprisingly simple and easy- no ad campaign, no PR, just a page on the internet.

Although YouTube may lack the seriousness of established media outlets it's community, scale and connection to the people makes it a media which offers access like no other and for a old-fashioned institution like the World Economic Forum, it gets a contemporary shot in the arm.

Who will YouTube partner with next?

The Queen of England?
The White House?

Suggestions in the comments section please.

Posted by Ed Cotton

ad agencies and viral video- do we know what we are up against?

Influx Insights — 2007-11-23T20:58:50Z

A post appeared on Techcrunch recently the created something of a frenzy around the ethics of viral videos and their marketing.

For any of you who believe ethics are involved, forget it. It appears people are doing whatever they can to game the system to their advantage, employing tactics that would have client and agency lawyers ready to jump from the 20th floor.

Here's are some of the highlights from the post.

The Film

1. Make it short: 15-30 seconds

2. Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others.

3. Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia

4. Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”
Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!

5. Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video.

Seeding

1. Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.

2. Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.

For all I know, agencies might be doing this, but if they aren't, someone else will be. The world has gotten tougher, alot tougher. Not only is this challenging on moral grounds, if you are prepared to put that aside, there's an incredible amount of work needed to make viral success happen.

Thanks to Podcasting News.

Posted by Ed Cotton

google reverse engineers youtube

Influx Insights — 2007-10-09T15:03:03Z

For months, analysts have been speculating about how the mighty Google is going to make money from YouTube and all kinds of suggestions and schemes about new ad units and formats have been raised. In the fashion of a true innovator, Google has made a lateral move by offering video content as part of its Adsense network.

Now publishers can create video ad units using YouTube content.

It's a fascinating strategic move and it will be interesting to see how it takes off.

Here's a video explanation from the Google team.

Posted by Ed Cotton

influx interview- shari leventhal- firebrand

Influx Insights — 2007-10-04T04:59:05Z

As online video explodes and fragments, new entrants are emerging to lead new niches. One interesting example is Firebrand, who've decided to focus on advertising as their lead form of content. I emailed Shari Leventhal, the company's Chief Marketing Officer to learn more, ahead of the site's launch on October 22nd.

1. Why is now the time for Firebrand?

Firebrand enters the media landscape at a time when the commercial interruption is coming to an end. Firebrand believes that by taking commercials out of its second-class position as an interruption and creating a destination where consumers can choose to watch and are guaranteed to find the best in creative advertising, that users will seek it out. The research supports this demand indicating that over 33% of our target market is already downloading TV ads from the Internet and that 68% would watch Firebrand on TV, opt in on the web or do both.

2. Don't most people hate ads, why would they want a channel dedicated to them?

To the contrary, our research shows that 81% of our target demo feel that some ads are more entertaining than TV programs, while 74% said they would like to watch some commercials even though they have seen them before. Additionally, Firebrand offers the full depth of brand experience where users can Watch, Win, Shop and Share.

3. Who do you see as the audience?

Our primary audience is the highly desirable “Gen Y/Millennials,” a wired and media-savvy generation, loosely defined as ages 12-34.

4. How will the ads be selected?

Firebrand has developed a panel of in-house programmers who curate and program the “coolest” TV commercials the way MTV used to program music videos, creating the first multi-platform network to go “live” simultaneously on TV, web & mobile…You can’t pay us to air a bad commercial.

5. Will people be able to buy the products advertised?

Whenever a user is interested in a product featured on Firebrand, they will have a one click option and can go directly into that brand’s online environment where they can make their purchase.

6. Will other advertisers be allowed to advertise on your site?

Firebrand will program and curate video advertising as content so users can opt in and choose to watch and interact. There will not be any interruptive ads like banners or pop ups anywhere on the site.

7. What happens if their ads suck?

You won’t see it on Firebrand. Firebrand has a commitment to its users to program only the best in creative advertising. This means an advertiser can’t pay Firebrand to air a bad spot.

8. Give us some examples of your favorite ads of the moment that you would like to have up on your site?

JC Penny – It’s Magic
Sony Bravia, “Balls”
Bud Light, “Swear Jar”
Nike, “Free Style Basketball”
Coke, “Happiness Factory”
Skittles, “Touch”
Ikea, “Lamp”

9. Is your idea to show the ads alone or will there be any opportunities to showcase behind the scenes material?

Firebrand features “Commercial Jockeys” or CJs that contextualize commercials as art and entertainment and guide viewers through the spots, contests and promotions. Moving forward, credits to directors, and “best director” cuts will be just some of what Firebrand offers.

Posted by Ed Cotton

a new way to think about product placement

Influx Insights — 2007-09-26T22:36:41Z

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

couldn't brands be more topical?

Influx Insights — 2007-08-26T14:07:21Z

Relevance is an important component of brand success; consumers need to know that the brand gets and understands them and their needs. What happens if relevance is changing at a faster pace than brands imagine? Most big brands keep track on trends and it’s widely understood that trends move at a relatively slow pace, so using the trends yardstick, brands usually feel they have time to respond.

What if they are looking at the wrong yardstick?

What if the new yardstick is conversation?

Interestingly, that’s where blog measurement tools come in. Again, most of the big brands are tracking these. However, the tend to be being used mainly by the PR and quality control departments, so they can respond to problems and crises, as and when they occur. It’s a glass half full approach. They are being used to fix problems.

Suppose they were used to find opportunities. Opportunities that allowed brands to positively enter the conversation and obtain that all-important relevance. Agencies tend to think about production schedules that stretch into weeks and months because their focus is on traditional media and even with the web, the turn around time for a decent website, is several months.

Agencies have become slaves to production and lengthy production schedules, partly because of the financial upside.

Surely, new opportunists are going to emerge that find help brands to seize the relevance. They will use shorter and lower cost production alternatives; highly topical low-cost films posted to You Tube and other video sharing sites and rich web media that’s placed precisely in the right context at precisely the right time.

Posted by Ed Cotton

online video is mass media for the young

Influx Insights — 2007-07-26T13:51:38Z

Pew’s latest report on online video consumption is an interesting read. It shows that although viewing is starting to mainstream (57% of all internet users have watched video online), it’s still got some ways to go to become a major challenger to traditional media (only 19% watch online video every day).

However, it’s clear that some of the impact needs to be explored by demographics. The younger 18-29 year old age group is simply a lot more engaged with over 70% having ever watched and 31% doing it every day.

There is so much video content online and people are watching a wide range of types of material, but news and comedy stand out, with comedy being the most popular for young adults. Ads rate surprisingly high in the list, just below sports and politics.

In terms of behavior with online video, it’s the young leading the way again, they are simply way more active with 67% of 18-29 year olds sending links compared to 45% of 50-64 year olds and 23% of 18-29 year olds rating video compared to just 4% of 50-64 year olds.

The Pew report indicates that online video is clearly here to stay and amongst young adults has established itself firmly as a mass media on the menu of media they actively consume and participate in.

Quite simply, every advertiser with an 18-29 demo should be using online video. How they creatively breakthrough is another challenge.

It remains to be seen if initiatives like the recent YouTube political debates can take online video behaviors to a broader demographic base.

Posted by Ed Cotton

too much video content

Influx Insights — 2007-07-11T14:37:08Z

When a top VC says there is too much video content (See WSJ-Kara Swisher's interview with Roelof Botha of Sequoia- below), there's certainly a problem out there. It seems to be getting worse, which is making it so much harder for virals to break through and ads to be seen. This is clearly the motivation behind the Publicis/Droga initiative to build a "YouTube" for ads. The battle for attention, really sucks.

Posted by Ed Cotton

dove's evolution is the last of its kind

Influx Insights — 2007-06-24T20:59:46Z

At this year's Cannes Lions, jury wanted to show the world of advertising has changed, so they and gave the Grand Prix to Dove’s Evolution spot.

The effort was rewarded for two reasons:

1.   It shows that there’s life beyond the 30sec television spot.

2.   It demonstrates the importance and power of corporate social responsibility. It’s not just a statement, it’s an action; Dove isn’t just commenting on the state of women and beauty, it’s actively trying to do something about it.

The problem is that the media world has changed so dramatically in the last 6 months that it might be impossible for a brand to replicate the success of Dove. The ad was truly viral; it was even seeded by the writer directly on YouTube and took off from there.

So what’s changed?

1.   Everyone’s doing it- YouTube is a changed environment with hundreds of advertisers and entertainment companies all competing for attention alongside user generated content.

2.   Viral media has become a commercialized industry where you have to pay the big bucks to get success. There are commercial seeding companies who you pay to get the word out and YouTube has now become a fully-fledged media company. You can now buy viral success by running your ad on the front page of the site, but it will cost you $60-$80,000 a day to do.

Dove was a pioneer in this space and was rightly awarded for its efforts, but brands looking to replicate the success of Unilever’s brand are going to find it tough. Unilever loved the case because it turned a $50,000 investment into tens of millions of dollars of media coverage.

That’s the potency of the story and the bit that every client likes and salivates over. The problem is that it’s not going to be easy to achieve any more because of a radical shift in the economics.

If your brand is brave and gutsy enough to get behind a powerful and challenging socio-cultural idea, execute with creative brilliance and support it with a smart CSR program, you will get people to pay attention, but it's unlikley you will be able to do it for $50k.

Posted by Ed Cotton

henry jenkins- 9 reasons why youtube is culturally significant

Influx Insights — 2007-05-28T17:58:51Z

Henry Jenkins of MIT has a smart post today that identifies 9 reasons why YouTube is a powerful cultural entity. People have questioned the purchase of YouTube by Google and others are rapdily trying to develop their own versions.

Jenkins outlines the reasons that makes YT such a powerful force and therefore one that is going to be hard to compete against.The post goes into lots of detail that supports the 9 reasons, but here they are in "diet-like" format with some interpretation added by Influx. An essential guide for anyone involved in shaping culture, who has ever wondered what the fuss is all about.

1. YouTube is a Melting Pot. A destination where commercial, amateur, government, non-profit, educational and activist content co-exists.

2. You Tube is a meeting point for Community Collaboration.

3. You Tube as Tool for Amateur Curation. Amateurs scour mass media and identify salient elements for rebroadcast.

4. You Tube and the Network Effect. YouTube's value multiplies the more its content gets used by people and integrated into their own content.

5. You Tube as the Citizens News Network. Citizen journalists are capturing their own content and breaking stories on YT.

6. You Tube as an Avenue for Civic Engagment. Political issues and ideas are debated, covered and explored on YT- offering a new opportunity for discourse.

7. You Tube Changes the Cultural Economy. The meeting of commerical and amateur is seen best on YT. It offers us a "lens" into the future of cultural production.

8. You Tube Raises the Importance of Social Networking. YT shows the value and importance of social networking as a skill and the importance of broadening participation.

9. You Tube Shows the Lack of Diversity in Participatory Culture.

ad hijacking

Influx Insights — 2007-05-24T13:44:33Z

What happens when talent hijacks your spot and turns into something else entirely and then throws it up on YouTube?

This fake Nissan spot is one example.

Via Life Moves Pretty Fast

we're all lads who love berries and cream

Influx Insights — 2007-06-14T18:13:23Z

Starburst recently posted a 30 second spot to promote its new berries and cream flavor. Their strategy: Be as weird as possible. And it worked.

It has over 2 million views on YouTube. Not to mention the hundreds of remixes, and blog mentions, and the thousands of comments (most of which include "lol"), this spot has become the most popular kid on the block. And its even catching on with the young lingo. MySpace bloggers are signing off with “Berries and Cream.” We’ve also seen this phrase used in place of the word “random” in sentences.

One of many questions we have is how this one slipped through the corporate colander. Imagine proposing this idea to the CMO of Starburst: An Amish-ish, elf-man, who looks like something straight out of a Monty Python skit, dances in a bus station and sings about how he loves berries and cream. It was a product of 3am creative desperation and too many berries and cream that hit the right chord with YouTube viewers.

We just hope that Starburst doesn’t turn around and try to ride the wave that they created. A joke isn’t funny anymore when someone has to explain it. They might have started doing that here:

Starburst isn’t the only one who gained popularity by being weird. Napoleon Dynamite was brillant. And many others have tried:

Most of these bizarre :30s sink - what made this one float? What makes this “lad” more popular than the singing rabbit? It could be the ridiculous try-this-at-home dance. It could be that it plays the genders equally; boys are having a hay-day making fun of this guy and girls are at home singing and dancing? It could also be the normal guys in an everyday setting juxtaposed to this bizarre and random meeting. The combination of these ingredients have either brought advertising creativity to a new level or they have reduced it to inanity.

Regardless, congratulations to Starburst for taking a successful risk. One YouTube viewer said it best: “WTF? But I love it."

Berries and cream,
influx

how to encourage participation

Influx Insights — 2007-04-26T15:29:00Z

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?

brand ecosystems on youtube-the "real" ps3 channel

Influx Insights — 2007-06-14T18:12:56Z

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.