EyeView's Blog

Who Watches TV Anymore?

I was reading this article at the Online Video Insider this week and found myself almost completely at odds with the ideas being expressed. I wasn’t looking for trouble, I just couldn’t agree with author Michael Kokernak’s idea that the future of advertising for video will be some kind of cross-platform convergence between your TV set and your Internet connection.

I realize that I don’t represent the mainstream. I got rid of my cable subscription and television years ago, but I still think that in 2009 and beyond when people think about TV and the Internet converging, they think about it happening on their computer, not on their TV. I just had a really good think about it and I can’t remember the last time I watched an ad on TV. It doesn’t matter to me how clickable and interactive you make TV ads, I’m just not there to watch them. 

Consumers are moving online and the advertisers that want to chase after them are doing the same. TV as an advertising medium is almost entirely obsolete apart from one or two cultural touchstones like the Super Bowl or American Idol.

But even if the audience wasn’t in the process of a mass migration, the advertisers would be. The web offers advertisers a level of accountability that has never been available to them before. Every dollar spent on advertising can be minutely tracked to measure its effectiveness. Even more excitingly, the internet is a medium with a glut of publishers. That means a surfeit of unfilled inventory available at competitive prices. It has never been a better time to be an advertiser and that has nothing to do with TV and everything to do with the ability of the internet to serve relevant ads with built in ROI.

Kokernak claims that the link between “the television platform and the Internet is the marriage of the century”. I think he needs to be more specific about which century he means.

Brightcove Highlights the Challenge Ahead

I have been keenly following the recent developments at Brightcove, one the world’s leading syndicators of video content. Despite cutting back on staff towards the end of 2008, Brightcove has bounced back with the release of Brightcove Express a new iteration of their service aimed at small and medium businesses and priced accordingly.

Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Brightcove, has always been an evangelist for online video. When he launched the company over five years ago he stated his belief that video would become as commonplace on the web as text.

Discussing the launch of Brightcove Express, Allaire said, “In the last 12 to 18 months, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in the number of company sites that are adding video. These are not media companies, but corporations and organizations of all kinds: consumer goods companies, universities, government agencies. Nonmedia companies are our fastest-growing segment.”

Our experience at EyeView is very similar. We are seeing increasing numbers of commercial sites beginning to harness the power of video for their businesses. Everyone wants video but many are coming to the medium without a clear vision of how their investment will be recouped. Even as video become ubiquitous there is still much uncertainty about the business model behind it. Video must be accountable or it will never succeed.

Brightcove have attempted to go around the issue by lowering the price to make it affordable for everyone, but syndication costs are just one part of the budget for video. Bobby Tulsiani, a senior analyst at Forrester, addressed this problem head-on.

The biggest challenge for Brightcove and its competitors, Tulsiani says, “is whether these company websites will be able to monetize their video content. The continued growth of the market will be determined by whether these companies can justify the cost of creating and serving videos on their sites.’’

It all comes down to establishing clear links between the implementation of video and an increase in engagement, loyalty and, of course, revenue.

Video demands ROI and the companies beginning to embrace the medium will too. The ability to deliver proven revenue gains and authentic analytics packaged with a video that is engaging, persuasive and on-message will be the key that unlocks the full potential of video for online businesses.

Decline in Digital Ads Offers Opportunity for Online Video

Online newspapers, once thought to be the only viable future for news media are no longer providing the comfort they once did. As offline ad revenues decline and cover price wars continue to cause major worries for print newspapers, publishers turned to their online siblings to help pick up the slack and for a while it was working. At first, many of the advertising dollars that left offline media just migrated online. It was the same media buyers talking to the same ad-sales personnel just about a different medium. In other words there was no advertising crisis, just a movement away from a tired medium towards a fresh and exciting one.

But, like the wrapping for today’s fish and chips, that is all yesterday’s news. In the UK the continuing depression in the property market combined with ongoing uncertainties in the job market has hit ad sales right where it hurts – in the classifieds. For too long now, newspaper publishers have depended on a booming property market and a healthy turnover of staff in key areas to ensure that they meet their targets. This report shows the problems facing the UK’s largest newspaper group, Trinity Mirror.

While the forecasts for the next few quarters are no brighter, I like to think that this downturn represents an opportunity for publishers rather than their end. No can say for sure whether the property market will return to its former heights, but publishers can use this time to regroup and think about what they really have to offer online. One of their key investments should be in video. No other online medium has the same power to persuade and encourage users to act.

I believe that as online publishers emerge from the current funk they will embrace video as the best solution for their advertisers knowing that it is the medium most likely to convert and provide value to those advertisers. At the same time, advertisers are turning to video as the most effective way of delivering a branded message with a precision-targeted call to action to each and every viewer.

Online video is the right solution for advertisers and publishers alike as they try to make sense of the current turmoil. The implementation of online video ads with measurable ROI will establish new models of publisher integrity which will rebuild confidence across all advertising sectors.

When the dust settles, people will be watching video and increasing numbers of them will be clicking on the embedded link.

Another Video Conversion Success Story

Anyone with a school-aged child has wrestled with the problem of tutoring. Whether your son needs help with his trigonometry homework or your daughter needs to stop falling behind with her reading comprehension you will discover that finding a tutor can be as difficult as it is expensive. Whether you have to travel to the tutor’s residence or find a mutually agreeable time in your own home, you can expect to pay anywhere from $30-75 per hour of one-on-one tutoring.

It was only a matter of time until someone came up with a better solution. TutorVista operates out of Bangalore, India with a team of highly qualified professional tutors available round the clock to work with your children improving their academic skills. As long as you have a broadband connection, you can get unlimited tutoring for under $100 per month.

The guys at TutorVista approached us with a problem. They had a landing page that was specifically designed to funnel traffic through their sign-up process. The landing page was already reasonably successful by most standards but they wanted to try and increase conversion for that page to make sure they were getting the most out of their traffic.

A conversion solution was prepared which included a battery of tests to be performed on the landing page to measure optimization around a video which we created specifically for the page. The first test embedded the video on the page for half the visitors and tested it against the existing page and the existing conversion rate. On top of that, we made the embedded video autoplay for first-time visitors, reasoning that the information in the video was useful enough to overcome the issues that sometimes arise from autoplay.

Arun Kumar, Manager at TutorVista, continues the story: “We implemented EyeView’s solution on one of our landing pages that already had a pretty impressive conversion rate. The very first test they ran boosted conversion by over 80 percent. EyeView really works.”

We will be running more tests over the coming months, with the aim of further optimizing conversion for this page, but there is nothing sweeter than hitting the first pitch right out of the park.

Congratulations to TutorVista on having such a great product and congratulations to the EyeView team for taking a gamble and watching it pay off handsomely.

If you want to watch the video, I’m adding it here, but the real magic for TutorVista is happening right on their landing page: