Marketer's Lab

Speed Date - Feedroom

If you're exploring web video one of the vendors likely to show up on the radar is Feedroom.  The team at Feedroom was kind enough to spend a few minutes on the phone walking me through their application and sharing a little about their business.  One of the big things the Feedroom team was pretty excited about was the launch of their new Feedroom 4.0 platform.  The new platform has been completely re-architected and utilizes the newest infrastructure technologies.  They feel this is a huge differentiator and provides their clients a host of advantages in terms of reliability, scalability and overall product capability. 

The Feedroom client base is evenly split between media companies/publishers and enterprise organizations using the Feedroom platform for internal communications.  Feedroom recently acquired Clearstory, a digital asset management solution whose technology is now used to power those elements of the Feedroom platform.  The brief overview I saw looked great, plenty of horsepower to manage a variety of digital assets. 

Amongst their roster of clients, Feedroom has a diverse lineup including everone from the Department of Defense to Sundance Institute to ESPN.  Pricing is always tough to nail down but my takeaway was that for a very small operation Feedroom might be a little pricey, but if you have a little budget to work with and plan to do a lot with video, they have a very nice solution.  They have a nice little piece on their site that gives a feel for their overall positioning. 

If A Picture's Worth A Thousand Words...

I have to admit I'm pretty enamored with web video right now.  Web video is benefiting/suffering from much of the same hype as social media/social media marketing/etc. There's a wealth of coverage about how web video works with/against TV, how publishers are monetizing it, how marketers are using it and how it fits into the overall marketing and cultural media landscape.  Riveting perspectives and ideas out there in all the aforementioned areas, but I worry with so much attention on these other areas, we might be losing sight of one of the biggest web video opportunities.  The opportunity to bring a story to life. 

I think this is what advertising icon Lee Clow had in mind when he recently said:

“The ability to use the internet in terms of great brand storytelling is still at its infancy,” he said. “The internet advertising media, cross my fingers and hope to God, with bandwidth and with some ability, is going to become more artful; it’s going to become more interesting. … But it’s going to take creative people to embrace the possibilities of what you can do on the internet in terms of advertising and storytelling and make it a little better and smarter”.

It's easy to get sucked into the gadgetry, there are a multitude of incredibly exciting tools and applications making web video more affordable and accessible.  The technologies are tactical, web video strategy should be more about stories.  Many marketers just don't use the "marketing muscles" that drive the process of creating communication strategies involving video.  Not to stereotype too much, but it seems the B2B space has the hardest time with this.  

What every marketer should be crazy excited about is the fact we now have a medium with the proven ability to communicate messages in extremely powerful ways, the tools for creating, delivering and monetizing this content are getting better everyday and consumers in every category are embracing quality web video content.  Web video is a medium for all marketers, large and small, B2B and B2C in every industry. I challenge you to think about how you and your organization are using web video, and if you're not, consider why.  You have a story to tell, think about how to bring it to life with video.

     

Google and SpotMixer Mix It Up

One of the biggest obstacles, amongst many, for marketers thinking about tapping into the benefits of web video is how to create decent video content.  The natural follow on challenge is what to do with the content once you have it.  SpotMixer and Google are working together to offer a solution that addresses these issues pretty effectively.

SpotMixer provides a decent set of templates and a wizard that allows you to very easily create a "spot".  SpotMixer customizes the wizard process and options based on the selections you make on the front end.  The screenshot below shows the options if offers.  

Once you've got your spot created, you then have a multitude of options for how you would like to distribute the content.  Distribution options include a network offering as well as CPM and CPC based options.  The screenshot below shows how you can easily select your options. 

Like any template based solution, there are tradeoffs in terms of the ability to do exactly what you want.  Most of the examples on the SpotMixer site could be considered more slideshows than video, although there are a couple that do use actual video footage.  Despite some of the limitations, the distribution options and integration with Google adwords combined with what seem to be extremely reasonable prices, make SpotMixer very interesting.

   

Vendor Speed Date - Brightcove

Chances are good if you aren't already using video on the web in some shape or form, you're probably at least thinking about it.  Web video has gone way beyond integrating a talking head of an executive or attempting to be the next big viral thing on YouTube.  I'll be doing a lot more over the next few months on web video so stay tuned, but for now wanted to do a quick "speed date" post on one of the major vendors in the space, Brightcove.  

Brightcove provides a web video platform that allows you to create video players, manage your video assets, distribute and incorporate advertising (if you desire).  Their flagship product is Brightcove 3, basically the 3.0 version of their platform.  I won't even begin to walk through all the features (there are plenty), but there are a couple elements I found especially interesting. 

Brightcove player - The Brightcove player is widely used for much of the video content out there so you've probably seen or used the player.  It's well designed, fast and provides a solid experience.  The out-of-the-box version of the player is great in my opinion, but they also offer a number of options for customizing the player if you have specific branding elements to integrate.

Playlist - They don't make a lot of noise about this on their website or in my limited interactions with Brightcove, but the playlist/matrix that can accompany their player is simple and slick.  A non-tabbed version can be seen at this Fuse.TV site.  They offer options for customization if you'd like something more advanced like National Geographic or Discovery Channel.  It's a nice way to feature your entire library of video in an easy to navigate structure.

Advertising options - The advertising element of Brightcove isn't for everyone, but if integrating advertising into your video program is important they have a number of useful features.  First, they allow simple integration of pre, mid and post-roll spots with just a couple clicks on the admin side.  There are a variety of other controls for each specific ad, most publishers would be pleased with the number of control options.  The other advertising feature I found pretty compelling was turnkey integration with Tremor Media for those taking the ad network route with their advertising. 

I mentioned a couple of Brightcove's name clients above, they also work with clients like HBO, MTV Networks and a variety of others referenced on thier clients page.  If you don't happen to be a mega-media outlet with a massive video inventory and a big budget, Brightcove still works well for small publishers.  Their basic service, which has most of the features you get with the more expensive services, starts at about $6,000 per year.  As you go up the product stack you get more options for customization, more bandwidth and a few other goodies. 

Brightcove is probably not a fit for you if you only have a small number of videos or you're just looking to add a couple small video segments to a website.  If you have, or are planning to do more than just a few token video pieces, Brightcove would likely serve you well managing and delivering your video.  If you're doing any advertising integration, Brightcove then becomes an even greater value. 

That's it for this vendor speed date, more to come on the wild west of web video... 

Taking Ourselves Too Seriously

I came across this recent 3 minute Ad Age piece and had to do a quick post on it.  It's Brian Williams, of NBC Nightly News fame, doing a little tongue-in-cheek piece about digital media.  Reminder that we need to keep our perspective on all things digital.