Website Video for Product and Service Sales

August 2nd, 2010

With broadband to the home penetration scaling ever higher, and the ability to produce high quality informational videos dropping in price, it seems like a no-brainer to me that more and more companies should be adopting web video elements as integral to their online presence/web pages.  This is distinct from the use of Video Advertising (pre-roll, post-roll, etc.) - but rather, the use of 45 second to 90 second videos that are designed to tell a product/service/company story in a much more compelling way than simply text or graphics or even Flash animations/video.

We’ve known for a long time that TV advertising is compelling because of what one can accomplish with full motion video and accompanying audio; the storytelling possibilities, the emotional connection, the explanatory visuals, etc.  In short, if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a thousand pictures.

The SoundView Group just completed a product sizzle video for one of our clients who sells a market-leading “Over the Top Set Top Box” called PopBox.  It will go on the company’s website but also be distributed on other outlets.  I’ve enclosed a link to the video at the bottom of this post - it’s much more exciting than simply describing a product via a web page.  I hope to continue to see wider and wider adoption of these types of videos in the near future given how inexpensive they are to produce.

PopBox Video - created by www.soundviewgroup.com


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Brief reflections on the state of Online Video Advertising

April 16th, 2010

This week I attended the DigiDay Online Video Conference and wanted to jot down some thoughts/impressions. Note that this post is coming from the perspective of an advertiser (since that’s what my clients are) – and not a content producer.

1. TThe room where the conference was being held was mobbed – standing room only. That in itself says something. I’m not going up to @dTech next week, but I’m willing to bet it too will be packed. Online Video aside, if you judge “Internet froth” by both the amount of conferences taking place in the space and the number of attendees , then at least from my perspective we are getting into some pretty frothy times. Maybe not at the fever pitch of the late 1990s…but it’s starting to feel eerily similar.

2. OOnline Video advertising is being utilized by big name advertisers with their online agencies to shift a chunk (not a big chunk at this point…but it’s a start…) of their TV budget over to this medium. Makes sense – it’s more accountable, and everyone wants to learn if it can do something for their brand/sales. Further, they are also using it to extend the reach of their TV buy (the extended screen idea) – effectively going further into the same audience that would have watched their show on the telly.

3. FFormats and standards (and metrics for evaluation) are still being worked on by various players – while that complicates things it’s not stopping players from stepping in and getting their toes wet.

4. JJust like in other forms of online advertising, people are exploring targeting via demo, behavioral, and context/content affiliation.

5. FFor most advertisers, being in a brandsafe location matters – and since that can be risky even when someone isn’t buying UGC, companies like ScanScout are building businesses to enable customers to sleep better at night concerning where their ads might show up.

6. WWhile UGC video is the predominant video on the web, no one has yet cracked the code on advertising with it versus spend on places like Hulu. That will change – but the change hasn’t really picked up steam yet.

7. AAdap.Tv has built a GoogleTV like bidding engine for video placements on their network. Good idea – and gives users the same sense of control (over a limited inventory) that GoogleTV currently provides in the DRTV space.

8. TThere are A LOT of Online Video Ad Networks. A LOT. And it’s very hard to differentiate the offerings. And all of their marketing sounds the same. Similar to the display ad network/exchange space. So finding the places to buy is as usual best done with some great references, some hard negotiating, and a solid testing strategy.

The most certain (and obvious) thing I can say is that because a broadband connection at home has finally hit the tipping point we’re going to see more and more video at home. And that means more and more advertising being included. So we’ll see real growth in the coming months. But everything else (who brings it to you, what formats, where it plays, what gets wrapped around it in terms of interactive/e-commerce functionality, etc.) is far from being pinned down – yet.

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Social Media Is Certainly Today’s Next Big Thing

March 10th, 2010

Yesterday I attended Digiday:  Social - which was actually a great confab re: the state of Social Media today.  A lot of “platforms,” a lot of “agencies,” and a decent chunk of companies dipping their toes in the Social Media water (or lake or river or ocean depending on their manpower and appetite for the new.)  Some observations:

1.  Social Media is here - in that there are a lot of avenues out there for people to discuss things.  Reviews, blogs, comments, forums, and of course the biggies…Twitter, Facebook, Beebo, MySpace, and to some extent the Digg’s and Reddits and StumbleUpon’s of the world.  But various people depending on their time and interest interact to extremely varying degrees with each of these outlets.  My own (and your own) experience of course bears this out.

2.  Companies need to invest a lot (and probably more than they’d like) if they want to control their own social media destiny - because unfortunately despite some really good tools out there (Ripple6 for one), managing social media is a GRIND.  It takes real people posting real things, one by one, and then Listening and then Managing.   You can’t just throw up a Facebook Fan page and walk away.  Or nothing happens - or at least nothing good.  So if you want to play - you need to invest some people time, some strategy time, and some budget.  And that all costs some serious dollars with a definite return - just a return that you aren’t really sure of in terms of amount and time to payback.  Doesn’t mean that you should bury your head in the sand re: the medium, but you have to acknowledge the road is going to be fairly uncertain and be able to live with that.

3.  Lots of people want to help - Social Media agencies are where SEM agencies were about 5 years ago and the first Digital Ad agencies were about 14 years ago.  And that’s cool - if you can afford them then the help is certainly valuable and the people involved in running them really remind me of the first digital agencies I worked with back in the mid 1990s.

4.  Knowing that it’s fairly time consuming, tred slowly and carefully into Social Media.  Maybe you only bite off a Facebook page (I recommend that due to the conversational element among many versus Twitter’s broadcast approach as there’s more possibility for viral dialog), or start a blog on your company’s website.  Or you figure out how to get discussion boards working for you on your website (which drive SEO perhaps more cheaply than anything else IF you have enough UGC).  But if you’re a small or mid-sized firm don’t plan on doing everything at once - unless you’ve got a lot of $$, a killer IT department, and a lot of time to spend on it.

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Case Studies and how to effectively write them

August 7th, 2009

Case studies - what’s the best way to write them?

I’ve been getting a lot of questions concerning writing case studies lately from clients.  What’s the best way to write case studies?  Should I create templated case study forms?  Should a web case study look very much like an offline/printable case study?  What are best practices for case study writing?

My belief is that in terms of content, writing an effective case study needs to answer the following questions:  What was the problem/need?  How did your company/product address it?  What were the results?  So I do recommend forming a fairly simply template (working with a designer) around those sections.

Then be clear and concise in recounting the answers to the above questions - focusing on the takeaways that you want the reader of your case study to remember concerning the work that you did.  Remember that even though it’s something that you believe maybe of great interest to your reader, your case study should still be skimmable and contain bullet points and headers because it’s unlikely that your reader will read every word.  And I highly recommend putting in at least one quote from the client in each case study!

Finally I do believe that online case studies and offline case studies should each take advantage of their respective media.  That means that while you may use the same template for both case studies, that the content in each one might differ in some ways - for instance you might provide critical hot links in your online case study that you don’t in your offline version, or you might have different use of colors or diagrams or fonts that increase readability in your offline version that are not appropriate for the online case study.

Done correctly case studies are a powerful marketing tool - presenting your product/service in a context that often makes more of an impact than any other type of marketing collateral you might employ.

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Latest Website Development project

July 17th, 2009

The SoundView Group is pleased to present it’s latest client work - the website for Beverly Hills Surgeon Dr. Cynthia Hall. Check it out at www.drcynthiahall.com.

Website of Dr. Cynthia Hall by The SoundView Group

Website of Dr. Cynthia Hall by The SoundView Group

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Homepage “facelift” project for Jobvite.com

July 11th, 2009

I quickly wanted to highlight a web design project that The SoundView Group just completed with help from its great crew of designers and programmers.

The client in this case was Jobvite, where the client asked for a fast and innovative homepage “facelift” because a great article in the New York Times was about to be published on the company.

Below I include the before and after versions of the homepage.

Before SoundView Group "Facelift"

Before SoundView Group "Facelift"

After SoundView Group "Facelift"

After SoundView Group "Facelift"

I think the new text, modernization in terms of look and feel, and the enhanced navigation elements are quite beneficial to the site.

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Why Google TV is the best Direct Response Television (DRTV) Medium

June 11th, 2009

If you do Direct Response TV I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t at least experiment with Google TV. And if are a direct seller, and you haven’t tried Direct Response TV with Google TV as your first foray into the medium, you’re potentially missing out on a real gamechanger for your business. Why am I such a fan of Google TV? Here’s why:

• Lets you test out every major cable net for a fraction of the cost of other buys; I’ve readily bought spots at a $0.50 CPM on major networks
• Lets you test any and all times of day for your spots
• Lets you try multiple length spots (:30, :60, :90) with ease
• Lets you with a relatively high degree of accuracy know how many impressions and responses you got. That way you can easily compute % response for budgeting purposes (which is almost impossible to do initially through traditional DRTV buys). This is critical if you choose to later make a larger buy than just the Echostar platform that GoogleTV uses

In short, it’s the best test medium for DRTV out there - and it’s simple to use. For $5,000 a week you get all of this - and when we can create a solid commercial for $10-20k, it’s basically under $40,000 to find out in a month if you’re on to a medium (TV) that can radically change your business. And if it is, we scale onto other bigger platforms seamlessly because we know from our Google TV tests what networks to buy (with greatly reduced risk). I really think Google TV is an undiscovered gem - contact me to find out if it’s right for what you are contemplating.

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Twitter and me

June 11th, 2009

I don’t Twitter as much as I should considering it’s the latest IT thing. Part of it is that I don’t know which of my main three social networking sites I should constantly be updating (Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter), and part of it is that I’m not sure really that my friends are that excited to know on a minute-by-minute basis what I’m up to and my two sentence take on life. I’m really not interested in knowing that frequently about theirs either, truth be told.

But I think Twittering is becoming something akin to Golf for me - it’s something I don’t really like to do but seems to be a boon to one’s career. So I’ll consider how to weave it into my life - albeit slowly I’m sure. Until then blogging and the occasional Facebook update will have to do!

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Social Networking Online…and off

June 11th, 2009

Today I went to lunch with Neal Lenarsky, someone that a friend recommended that I chat with about The SoundView Group. We had never met before, or spoken, but I knew given the person who “set us up” that it would be a worthwhile conversation. It was - but that’s not what I’m writing about.

Before I went to the lunch, I looked on LinkedIn for the people we had “1st level” connections to in common. Because Neal’s business is the people business (he’s a sort of Jerry Maguire “Agent” for corporate executives), we knew over 15 people in common. So I printed out the list and took it with me to lunch. Neal laughed when he saw the list - said this was the first time someone actually showed up to a meeting with a list like that - and I said it was the first time I’d ever printed one out - but we both had a good time recounting how we knew each of those people and sharing experiences we had had with them.

What was interesting to me was that people always play the name game when they first encounter someone - it allows us to establish that level of commonality and comfort that speeds the offline social networking process. But my guess is that had we both not been using LinkedIn as an online social networking tool, it is very unlikely we would have come up with even one quarter of the people we knew in common - and even if we had it would have been a fairly stilted and laborious path to get there. But in this way we quickly established our common connections, and it greased the skids for a really good meeting. Yet another reason why I love LinkedIn!

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Do I need to buy an iPhone?

June 11th, 2009

My father worked for IBM for his entire career. We had the first IBM PC at home - and although I had nothing against Apple (nor did my dad) growing up and in college and after I just never became a Mac person. So it doesn’t surprise me that I ended up being a Blackberry user as an adult.

But within the mobile marketing ecosphere it seems that all the most innovative things in the space occur within the realm of the iPhone (although I personally love VLingo, Viigo, and Youmail for my BlackBerry.)

Whether it’s the App Store or the Ocarina, knowing what’s going on with the iPhone matters to me as a marketer. Never mind that the Nokia / Symbian OS dwarfs the penetration of the iPhone worldwide - I hear the “Do I need an iPhone app?” question more today from clients than any other mobile-related question.

So I’m left to wonder - do I need to buy an iPhone now to make sure I’m always in the know? And what happens if Android really starts to take off - am I going to find myself choosing from one of three phones to take with me each morning?

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