Marketer's Lab

Web Video for the Little Guy

Psssssssst, hey you. Yeah you, Mr./Ms. marketer. Don’t tell the big-budget agencies and marketers about this, but now there’s a new way to do high-quality web video marketing easily and on the cheap. Mum’s the word.

OK, I’ll let you in on it… As part of a larger Upshot Institute effort to dive into how marketers can utilize web video, I spoke recently to Kevin Yahl from ClickstreamTV, “an online media management and delivery system that provides a one-click, user-friendly viewing experience.” More simply put, they provide a hosted application that allows marketers to easily tap into the power of web video marketing.

ClickStreamTV is focused on the small-medium (SMB) market, as Kevin shared with me, they like to say they are “a professional version of YouTube, turnkey, affordable and high-quality.” If you’ve done much exploration of the web video space from a marketing perspective, you’ve probably encountered a jumble of confusing video vernacular, a maze of formats/encoding options, bandwidth and quality issues, and lots of questions and crazy claims about the impact of web video. ClickStreamTV appears to be a company who has figured out how to cut through all the mind-numbing complexity and allow marketers to spend time thinking about the content rather than stressing out about the technology.

Their flagship offering “The ClickStreamTV Interface Package” will set you back $995 for the initial set up and then $99 a month for up to 20GB of transfer. The ClickStreamTV web site does a very nice job of providing details on what they do, but the Reader’s Digest version goes like this; upload your video (any file type) to the ClickStreamTV application, it converts your video to the most popular formats (Flash, Windows Media, etc.), you can then integrate any video you have uploaded into a custom branded player, once your player is all loaded up the way you like, you can use their email tool (included in the Interface Package) to upload any email list you want to send to and then fire off a message promoting your video.

There are some nice examples of what they do on the ClickStreamTV site, judge the quality for yourself, but I found it to be very good across the board. Kevin shared that the founders of ClickStream all come from broadcasting backgrounds so they understand a thing or two about video quality and have brought that expertise to the web.

If you're thinking about web video at all ClickStreamTV has a great offering and delivers a high-quality product that doesn’t require an engineering degree to use.   

Marketers Rejoice

I have a number of lame excuses for being so painfully long since my last post, the most legitimate would be finding time within the significant work I’ve been doing on the launch of a new venture – Upshot Institute. Upshot Institute is focused on helping marketers make sense of all the myriad marketing tools and technologies out there. Basically increasing awareness of all the many types of solutions and then assisting in understand how best to apply different technologies or tools to common marketing challenges.

In the process of pulling things together I’ve been overwhelmed by the incredible number of enabling technologies we as marketers now have at our disposal. Yes, it’s true that the marketing game has become more challenging (enter marketing cliché of choice here; “doing more with less” “ROI, ROI, ROI”, “market transparency”, media fragmentation, etc.). The silver lining in all this is that intelligent use of the types of technologies we will be covering at Upshot Institute, and I will be featuring in this blog, can be a great counter-balance to those challenges.

 

Monitor your competitors in real-time. Understand not just where people are going on your web site but why? Use web video, and not just some talking head thing, but real, high-quality video to bring your marketing messages to life. Quantify the impact of your social media efforts and understand the taxonomies which create that impact. The list goes on and on, but my point is there’s a whole world of amazing tools we now have to work with. So while there’s certainly a raft of complexity and issues to address in this evolving market landscape, it’s incredibly exciting to have new and rapidly evolving tools to level the playing field a bit.

 

Get fired up about all this technology! Never has there been such an opportunity and so many resources to work with. Embrace your inner geek, realize that marketing now requires us all to become familiar with these new tools and develop the expertise to effectively apply them.