Guest Post: Michael Greene on How to Source Video Ad Creative

You may not know the name Michael Greene, but if you're a Forrester client or you read this blog regularly then you've certainly seen his work. As a researcher on our team, Michael produces some great research -- most notably on the topics of sponsorships and video advertising. Below, Michael shares his thoughts on one of our latest research topics, sourcing video creative:

[Posted by Michael Greene.]

Earlier this week, AdAge reported that PepsiCo is running a public contest (in conjunction with video sharing site 12seconds.tv) to source video ads for its Mountain Dew product line. Pepsi invited fans to direct, shoot, and edit 12-second videos that show off their skills and promote Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew fans will get the opportunity to vote on 6 finalists, from which Pepsi will select 3 winners who will receive funding to produce 15 second video ads.

Pepsi does a lot of smart things here, including cross-promoting the contest through Facebook and Twitter and providing a clear, concise creative brief that outlines Pepsi’s goals, video formatting specifications, and project timelines.

Pepsi intends to put the winning ads from their contest on national TV. But looking beyond traditional sources for video creative isn't just an option for TV advertisers -- in fact, it can be even more applicable for online video marketing efforts. Interactive marketers now have more options than ever for sourcing online video creative, including video contests, creative crowdsourcing, digital studios, and – of course – traditional production methods.

Each of these sources has distinct advantages and disadvantages which Nate Elliott and I detail in our recent report, Online Video Ad Creative:Digital Studios, Crowdsourcing Vendors, And Video Contests Offer Marketers New Sources Of Creative Content. But the main point is this: Rather than rely on only one source for ad creative, interactive marketers need to take a portfolio approach with creative partners -- aligning each source of creative with its respective strengths. For instance, contests are a great source of viral video because they naturally create deep engagement with fans and generate viral buzz; while creative crowdsourcing vendors can offer a low-price alternative to traditional agencies when you need a TV ad or a product demo video. And marketers should consider more than just price when choosing creative sources: they also need to think about what rights they'll have to the videos that are created, and which vendors can best integrate their videos with a marketers' other online marketing efforts.

So what do you think? Is your organization looking to new sources for online video ad creative? How do you determine which source to access?

The Video Contests Keep Coming

[Posted by Nate Elliott]

I've spent a lot of time this year researching online video contests (clients can read my report on Best Practices for User-Generated Video Contests and my Video Contest Checklist, while non-clients can get the highlights in this blog post), and I'm happy that I'm still getting questions from our clients every week about how they can run better contests themselves. So to help our clients (and the industry) keep track of what's working well in the space, I've been compiling a list of the best online video contests I've seen.

I just updated that list, and in doing so I noticed two emerging trends in online video contests:

1. Alcoholic beverage brands love the control video contests offer. More than half the contests in my 'food and beverage' category are from alcohol brands: Jim Beam, Okanagan Spring, Black Box Wines, and Little Penguin Wine. And that makes sense, because contests offer brands the opportunity to drive user-generated content, but still remain in control of that content. All they have to do is run each video past their legal team before approving it to be posted on the contest website. (Or, if they want videos to be posted automatically, they still have the ability to pull down questionable content after it's been submitted.) This type of control has made contests popular with marketers in other sensitive or regulated industries, too -- like financial services and health care.
2. B2B marketers are warming up to the power of video contests. We're still not seeing B2B contests by the thousands -- but more B2B marketers are using contests now than six months ago. Two of my favorite recent B2B contests are Google's TV For All Contest, in which they're giving away free TV ads; and TCBY's This Could Be Yours Store Givewaway, in which they're giving away a free TCBY franchise.

Go check out the complete list of my favorite online video contests -- and if you've got one you'd like to add, leave a comment on that page or below.

Would You Buy Pre-Rolls For $1 Per Thousand?

[Posted by Nate Elliott]

Ad Age ran a fascinating piece this week about how CPG giant Reckitt Benckiser shifted $20 million of their TV budget to pre-roll ads, and then relentlessly hammered publishers on price. According to Ad Age, Reckitt bought some pre-rolls for as little as $1 per thousand.

Granted, the economy is clearly taking its toll on in-stream ad prices. And big budgets always earn marketers volume discounts. But when you realize that even in this market most high-quality pre-roll inventory costs upwards of $30 per thousand, the prices Reckitt paid look incredibly low.

And that's stirred up some debate about whether Reckitt really get good value from those buys. Clearly, they weren't aiming for top-notch, name-brand sites: the buy was focused on networks rather than individual sites, and at those prices Reckitt likely to wound up with remnant inventory. As Freewheel CEO Doug Knopper said, "Reckitt is about premium brands; [this buy] won't showcase those brands -- it will schlock them up."

Marketers can always find low-cost inventory if they want to. Online, that means untargeted, non-frequency-capped remnant inventory and blind network buys; on TV, that means 3am times lots on obscure cable channels. The question isn't whether you can find this inventory, it's whether this inventory offers any real value -- especially to a brand marketer.

What do you think? Did Reckitt help or hurt their brands by advertising on non-premium pre-roll inventory? If you could find remnant pre-roll space for $1 (or $3 or $5) per thousand, would you buy it? Let us know in the comments below.

Surprising Findings From the DoubleClick Rich Media Report

[Posted by Nate Elliott]

It took me a while, but I finally got to one of the key items on my summer reading list: DoubleClick's report on The Brand Value of Rich Media and Video Ads. And I wasn't disappointed by what I found. For the first time in years, DoubleClick dug into their server logs and gave us a bit of hard data on what types of rich media are being served. They also worked with Dynamic Logic to conduct real live brand surveys (rather than tracking those overly simplistic 'engagement' metrics so many rich media vendors have become enamored of) to study the brand metrics that matter to advertisers: things like brand awareness, brand favorability, message association, and intent to purchase. And what they found was sometimes surprising:

• There's a lot of rich media being served – but most of it's not very rich. DoubleClick says that in 2008, less than 40% of the impressions it served were GIFs or JPEGs. So does that mean the other 60% were rich media? Not according to DoubleClick: it says 55% of its 2008 impressions were "simple Flash" ads. Just 6% of the impressions served in 2008 were rich enough to be labeled "rich media."
• Rich media ads that incorporate video are usually your best choice. This creative format was most effective on nearly every brand metric, including aided and unaided awareness, brand favorability, and purchase intent. The only time not to use rich media with video? Surprisingly, when you're looking to build message association an old-fashioned GIF or JPEG is by far the most effective format.
• If your Flash ads don't include video or interaction, don't bother. When you add up  performance across all the brand metrics studied, simple Flash ads provide less brand impact than any other format – even GIFs and JPEGs. It turns out all those advertisers who served simple Flash ads through DoubleClick last year could've saved themselves some time and hassle by simply producing animated GIFs.

If you've had a look at the report, let us know what you found interesting or surprising – and whether you'll change your creative strategy based on the findings.

Online Video Contests Can Help Marketers Listen To And Energize Their Customers

[Posted by Nate Elliott]

Chances are you've seen an online video contest lately. In fact, you've probably seen a lot of them: more than 20% of interactive marketers -- including category leaders like P&G, Nike, Coca-Cola and Sony -- tell Forrester they've run campaigns asking users to submit online content in the past year. I've been collecting a list of dozens of great video contests, and one contest clearinghouse site says there are 115 user-generated video contests accepting submissions right now, across a huge range of categories.

Some of these contests -- like Tourism Queensland's Cannes-Lion-winning "The Best Job in the World" contest, or Doritos' "Crash the Super Bowl" contest -- generate a lot of media coverage. But there are many hundreds more each year, promoting everything from steak sauce to psoriasis research, that don't get as much notoriety.

Why are so many marketers running online video contests? Because users love online contests almost as much as they love online video -- and because user-generated video contests can help marketers achieve a huge range of marketing objectives.

Video contests let marketers listen to their customers and learn about their needs -- like student loan provider Access Group, which asked law students to enter videos about their concerns and then used insights from those videos to create its "Student Loans, No Worries" ad campaign. Contests can help marketers energize users an drive a viral marketing effect -- like Servus Credit Union, which encouraged entrants to develop their own marketing campaigns to drum up votes, and found the three finalists generated as much publicity as the credit union's PR firm did. And they can give marketers access to cheap, original online video content -- like ski resort Sunshine Village, which used its contest to generate a video library of its mountain's trails and terrain.

Of course, not every video contest succeeds. They often take months to plan, they can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000 or more, and they usually require the coordinated efforts of several internal departments and external vendors. And if you don't get the "three Ps" right (choosing the right premise, offering the right prize, and picking the right promotional strategy) you could fall flat on your face.

I've spent the last two months studying hundreds of contests, and have just published two new reports on the topic. User-Generated Video Contests: Best Practices For Driving More Entries And Creating Viral Impact is designed to help marketers understand which users they should target with video contests, what goals they can achieve, and how to get the most value from their contests. Video Contest Checklist: How To Choose The Right Premise, Prize, And Promotion For Your Contest contains a checklist that guides marketers through every single step in the contest process -- including choosing a contest premise, selecting a prize, planning a promotional strategy, choosing a voting structure, picking a vendor, setting a schedule, establishing a budget, getting internal buy-in, and measuring the results.

Over the next few days, I'll be publishing some of the most important lessons I've learned in my research -- including the best promotional strategies I've seen, and mini-case studies on what makes contests successful -- on my personal blog.

In the meantime, if you've been thinking of running a user-generated video contest -- or if I've convinced you it's a good idea -- drop me a line (nelliott at forrester dot com). I'd be happy to work with you on making your video contest a success.

Interactive Marketing Nears $55 Billion; Advertising Overall Declines

[Posted by Shar VanBoskirk]

I'm pleased to announce that Forrester's five year forecast is now complete and live on Forrester's site.  It feels like this has been a long time in coming from my side too! Please see the full report for detailed explanations of the trends affecting overall marketing budgets and the growth of the channel in the forecast.

You may remember we previewed our forecast at Forrester's Marketing Forum at the end of April.  If you cross reference this post to the one we posted as follow up to the forum, you will notice that the "% of all advertising spend" has changed.  The absolute forecast is still the same, we just changed this calculation to make sure it was done in the same way as in years past. See below for the most recent release:

  

This research will certainly help marketers plan their channel strategies.

• Search continues to lead interactive spend followed by display. 

• And owned social media assets (like internal blogs, community sites) are really the only emerging media getting traction in today's economic climate.

But to me, the most interesting takeaway from the research is that overall advertising budgets will decline.  Yep.  With dollars moving out of traditional media toward less expensive and more efficient interactive tools, marketers will actually need less money to accomplish their current advertising goals.   But reasonable marketers won't relinquish budget because their programs are running too efficiently. Instead, marketers will allocate unused advertising dollars into investments like innovation, research, customer service, customer experiences, and marketing-specific technology and IT staff, in order to further marketing's strategic influence within their companies. 

Carl's Jr. Brings Sponsored Conversations to Video

[Posted by Nate Elliott]

My colleague Sean Corcoran stirred up a bit of controversy recently with his research on sponsored conversations -- a.k.a. paying bloggers to discuss your products. (The 20,000-foot view of that research: the practice is here to stay -- in fact it's growing -- so everyone involved must ensure there's full disclosure, and follow other best practices.) But until recently, I'd only ever heard of sponsored blogging and sponsored twittering. So I was fascinated to hear that fast food chain Carl's Jr. is running a new sponsored YouTube video campaign.

Carl's Jr. -- no stranger, of course, to pushing boundaries in online video -- recruited YouTube stars and gave them a simple mission: make a video about how you eat hamburgers, and mention the chain's new portobello mushroom burger. They won't say how many video creators they've engaged for the campaign, or how much they're paying each. But they expect the videos to generate a total of more than 10 million views.

Considering how difficult it is to launch a successful viral video campaign, this approach makes a lot of sense: the marketer is guaranteeing lots of reach, and the videos will carry a reasonable level of authenticity and trust. And they appear to be following the best practices that Sean laid out in his report -- which might just be enough to keep the critics at bay. I'll be watching to see how this campaign works out for Carl's Jr. -- and whether YouTube finds a way to take control of this practice and turn it into a viable revenue stream.

What do you think -- how do sponsored YouTube videos compare to sponsored blogging and sponsored twittering? And would you pay YouTube stars to make a video about your product?

The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google

[Posted by Nate Elliott]

If you're like most interactive marketers, you probably don't think much about search optimizing your online video content. Less than 20% of marketers tell us they insert keywords into the filenames of the videos on their site, and even fewer use more advanced tactics like writing keyword-rich captions and annotations, or creating online video libraries.

But if you're not optimizing your videos, you should start. "Blended search," the practice in which search engines display videos, images, news stories, maps, and other types of results alongside their standard search results, has become increasingly common on major search engines. And optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google.

Recently, we conducted a little experiment to learn more about how search engines respond to common queries. We created a list of 40 of the most-searched keywords -- pulled from the search engines' own lists of popular and fast-growing search terms, like Google Trends -- and ran those searches on Google in the US and the UK, as well as on MSN UK and Yahoo UK.

MSN and Yahoo (both of which we studied only in the UK) still present only standard results for most of their searches. But Google blended non-standard search results into a large majority of the keywords we studied: nearly three-quarters of the searches we ran on Google in the UK, and well over half the searches we ran on Google in the US, returned blended results. In both the US and the UK, Google was more likely to blend videos into its results than any other type of media. (Images, in case you're wondering, are only rarely blended into any of the engines' search results.)

Not only are video results increasingly common in Google's search results, but your videos stand a much better chance than your text pages of being shown on the first results page. On the keywords for which Google offers video results, we found an average of 16,000 videos vying to appear on results pages containing an average of 1.5 video results -- giving each video about an 11,000-to-1 chance of making it onto the first page of results. By comparison, there were an average of 4.7 million text pages competing for a place on results pages with an average of just 9.4 text results -- giving each text page about a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results. Now that's a lot of math, but here's what it means: on the keywords for which Google offers video results, any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index. Those are some attractive odds.

Best of all, so few interactive marketers focus on video optimization that most of the videos in Google's index aren't very well optimized -- so if you optimize your videos well, your chances of success will increase even further.

So how can you optimize your online videos? The agencies and search engines I've talked to offer a number of different tips:

• Insert keywords into your video filenames.
• Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the 'views' tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)
• Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos' titles, descriptions, and tags.
• Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
• Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.

Clients can read more about this topic, including some examples and further best practices, in our reports SEO for Blended Search (a Europe-focused report) and Video and Image Optimization (which is US-focused).

I'm also curious to hear about your experiences. Do you optimize your video content? If so, which tactics do you use -- and which have worked best for you?

Interactive Marketing Maturity Research

[Posted by Shar VanBoskirk]

I’m launching a quant study to fuel two pieces of research: 1) The first is focused on identifying the levels of maturity among interactive marketers across industries. When finished this report will define the different interactive marketing maturity levels, the characteristics of firms at each level, and also present a roadmap for growing from lower to higher levels of maturity; and 2) The Interactive Marketing Channels To Watch in 2008. This piece is an update to our annual study examining which interactive tools marketers are using, piloting or planning to pilot in 2008. We’d love your input on this study. If you or one of your colleagues is involved with interactive channels (e.g. email marketing, search marketing, display ads, social networking, blogs, widgets, mobile) we would love your input in our research. Take the survey here. We’ll send you a copy of the research when it becomes available. Thanks in advance for your contribution!

Analysis of our Superbowl Ad rating experiment using Twitter

[Posted by Jeremiah Owyang]

Josh Bernoff and I conducted an interesting experiment.  We encouraged the twitter community (social media, marketing, advertising mavens) to join in on providing real-time ratings about ads during the superbowl.  You can read how we invited the community to participate.

Twitter is a next-generation chat room with social network features, individuals can quickly publish from a computer or cell phone, and their network can quickly see, share and respond.  It's really pushes content quickly and sometimes, news breaks there before it does elsewhere. 

I asked the participants to to 'reply' to a twitter account I created (called "superbowlads") and to say the name of the commercial, and give a rating of up to 5 stars, and to include some qualitative feedback.

Our experiment was a success, we had over 2000 responses from over 70 people over a 4 hour period.  In some cases, there was a real dichotomy in responses, (some loved an ad while some hated it).

Josh completed a very thorough analysis (see ratings and rankings, and see spreadsheets to see what people said) making sense of sometimes qualitative feedback or difficult to understand opinions (a six pack of beer can do that to a fan).  He applied some weighting to it and was able to score the ads.

What's interesting is that the poll results from USA Today aren't too different than what we gathered at our twitterbowl.  Fedex, and Budwiser both scored well, and some of the poor scoring ads like Sales Genie both ended up with lower numbers.  Now that's interesting, but not surprising, that our smaller sample size of highly engaged twitterati ended up with similar trends.

Coincidently, today is Super Tuesday where many Americans will be voting, and I see that Google and Twitter are working together to create a map mashup to show real-time voices of which user is voting for who.   

Expect this trend of real-time rating through social media to continue, and by this time next year, I hope to work with a sophisticated group who can take our little experiment to the next level.