EyeView's Blog

Conversion Conference - First Thoughts

It’s been a hectic couple of days here in San Jose. The inaugural Conversion Conference, set up by Tim Ash from SiteTuners, is generally agreed by both attendees and presenters to have been an unqualified success.

From my perspective it was gratifying to spend time with so many conversion professionals. Everywhere I went people were talking about testing methodologies and the comparative advantages of A/B and multivariate testing. It was conversion geek heaven.

The speaking tracks were broken up into four groups: Persuasion, Best Practices, Hands On and Testing. Having sampled at least one presentation of each group I found them to be relevant and useful.

The conference kicked off Tuesday morning with a keynote address from Tim Ash himself. Tim is one of the pioneers of Landing Page Optimization and he delivered an entertaining introduction breaking down the basics into easily digestible and practicable suggestions.

Straight after Tim, two presenters tag-teamed a session called The Power of Split Testing. Both Brooks Bell and Lance Loveday delivered valuable insights into the basis of this vital art. Brooks, in particular suggested the 5 Ts that must be considered when it comes to A/B testing:

• Traffic
• Technology
• Time
• Trust
• Team

Throughout this and every other session I was in, people were tweeting furiously to get the word out to their networks. By tuning in to the conference hashcode, #ConvCon, I was able to get real-time updates from the parallel track. It was a sign of the conference’s quality that there was always something interesting going in each of the two meeting rooms and seating space was almost always at a premium with listeners sometimes spilling out into the corridor.

Day two started in fine fashion with a presentation from Bryan Eisenberg delivered at breakneck speed. Bryan’s energy, undiminished by his impressive weight loss, woke everyone up and led into another day of fascinating sessions.

All in all, I feel that the conference more than justified its existence. There was a clear need for a dedicated conversion conference and I’m thrilled to note that the next one is already scheduled for October. I have the feeling that most of this week’s attendees will come back and that, once word gets out, there will be more people lining up to visit the show. 

For now we will have to rely on the presentations from this show which Tim Ash has promised to make available to everyone who attended. In addition, all the sessions were filmed. I’m not sure what Tim intends to do with all this footage, but, if you want to see it, you had better contact him yourself and request it.

Meaningless Statistics For Viral Video

I love a well presented chart or a neatly laid out table. The guys over at marketingcharts.com, for example, put out a daily newsletter that delivers one good insight per day without trying too hard.

But this report from the usually reliable Millward Brown left me utterly cold. They claim to have developed a metric for determining the viral potential of your video. Their metric includes “Buzz”, “Celebrity” and “Distinctiveness”. As far as I am aware none of these is measured in SI units. Worst of all is that loaded word “potential”. In other words, even if you accept the crazy notion that you can actually measure the celebrity-ness or the buzz-ocity of your video, you will still only arrive at a figure which shows the potential your video has to go viral. Your video may or may not fulfill its viral potential, but at least you will know how likely this was to have happened… potentially.

Based on Millward Brown’s new index and a survey of over 100 ads, a bizarre statistic was reported here and elsewhere stating that only 15% of ads go viral online. Firstly 15% seems shockingly high to me, but when you look at their definition of viral success you start to see all sorts of chicanery in action.

To back up this statistical flim flam, Millward Brown offers eight case studies analyzing, post facto, the main viral drivers behind each. It’s a classic instance of “past posting”, the delicious con tactic that was used in The Sting. Out of the eight videos analyzed, three were ads that were shown during this year’s Super Bowl. The other five were similarly big budget productions backed up with additional TV and print campaigns. The only lesson Millward Brown is teaching here is that if you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making your video and then millions of dollars buying airtime for it so that tens of millions of people tuned in to the most watched program of the year see it, there is a chance that more people will watch it again online. It’s the daftest, most insignificant piece of research since this study into whether it’s better to be hit over the head by a full or empty beer bottle.

I understand that agencies are still taking millions of dollars from foolish advertisers to make viral videos with no discernible ROI. I get that this outmoded practice will be defended by other agencies paid by the first lot of agencies to try to lend them some integrity. But this latest attempt at selling the Eiffel Tower doesn’t even try to appear credible.

I call on the researchers at Millward Brown to use their metric to identify some viral successes (and failures) before they happen. Furthermore, in order for something to qualify as an online viral success the campaign must garner more eyeballs online than in any other medium. Let’s see you work your magic with that!

New Video Marketing Quiz Lands With A Bang

We’re really excited to launch the newest Video Marketing Quiz with all new questions.

Following the success of the last quiz, we wanted to top ourselves and present some of the data generated by the tests we run in the most engaging way we could imagine.

Since the last quiz we have seen the format picked up and imitated by Omniture/Adobe, which just makes us think that we created an exciting product.

To mark this launch we are giving away hundred of dollars in Amazon vouchers to the people who take the quiz and the Tweet their results.

Every hour for the first eight hours after the launch today at 10 am ET, five lucky tweeters will be selected and sent $20 to spend any way they wish.

It doesn’t get more exciting that that!

Enjoy the quiz and get tweeting!

Viral Videos Suck... or... This Too Shall Pass

First of all I want to thank Nalts and his excellent blog for bringing this video to my attention. It’s another epic mini-movie from OK Go that showcases the band’s innovative use of short-form video to market themselves and their music.

It’s very entertaining. It’s also fairly useless.

Let’s take a look at their last huge viral success. The video for Here It Goes Again rode the first wave of YouTube’s explosion into global consciousness. You’ve seen it. Four indie nerds doing a synchronized routine on treadmills. It’s very entertaining. According to YouTube’s figures it has been viewed almost 50 million times. That’s just from OK Go’s own channel. The same video on EMI’s channel has added another 1.5 million and there are probably a few hundred thousand more views with other unauthorized duplicates.

So the band have produced a video that’s been seen around 50 million times. What did they do with that? Not very much. There seems to have been very little strategy behind the whole thing. If you watch the video on YouTube there are no live links allowing you to purchase either the video itself or anything else by the band. The video serves no purpose other than to entertain. Even if you were to ascribe every purchase of the song’s parent album Oh No to a viewing of the video, you would still end up with a dreadful conversion rate. Fifty million videos viewed has translated, to date, into less than 250,000 albums sold. That’s an embarrassing conversion rate of less than half a percent.

It makes me want to scream. If only their YouTube page was linked to iTunes. If only there was a link to purchase a video ringtone of the video for ten cents. If only the page was designed to drive 50 million viewers towards some kind of action. Any kind of action. If only 99.5 percent of those views weren’t totally wasted.

Damian Kulash, lead singer with OK Go sees it differently. He believes that the video’s huge viral success helped the band to sell out concerts on five continents and win a Grammy. I don’t doubt any of that, I just wish he’d tried the video ringtone idea as well (and cut me in for a percentage).

Which brings us back to now. This new video from OK is very entertaining. Before it even went live on YouTube, Kulash was complaining in the New York Times, no less, about his record company’s refusal to allow video embedding. Kulash was concerned that without the possibility of his video going viral, the band would be unlikely to replicate the success they have achieved. Fortunately for us, EMI caved in and we can now embed the video.

In the two days since it launched, it has been viewed almost 2.5 million times. The video page still carries no advertising or identifiable call to action. Sales of the new album are, as yet, unknown.

I think the video is very entertaining. It still makes me want to scream.

comScore's Digital Year In Review

I know this report came out a week or so ago, but it's essential reading for anyone with more than a passing interest in the interwebs.

There is so much analysis produced these days that you need a report detailing the best reports to read. With all this noise, comScore continue to produce clear and informative statistics that always seem to answer the question someone in your office just asked you.

Some of the highlights from this report are the first-ever decline in annual growth rates for ecommerce as well as the unstoppable expansion of online video.

The report also captures the birth of Bing and the rise and rise of Facebook as it became the thrid largest display ad publisher in the US after Yahoo! and Fox Interactive Media (which includes MySpace).

You can download the entire report here, but you will have to give comScore some details first. It's well worth filling in the form to get to the report.

Enjoy.

Online Video Stories Of The Week

Over at Online Video Watch, Corey Kronengold comments on Brightroll’s announcement that they have been profitable for the past 12 months. Corey is not entirely trusting but he acknowledges the positive message this sends to the industry.

At comScore, December’s video viewing figures showed a new entry in the top ten video content properties as how-to syndication platform, 5min.com, hit 30 million US uniques for the month.

Fierce Online Video’s Jim O’Neill satisfied continued demand for iPad stories with a piece on Hulu’s rush to become iPad-friendly in time for the tablet’s launch or soon thereafter. There’s no doubt this story will run and run and the implications for the future of online video have yet to be fully determined.

At ReelSEO, Mark Robertson was delighted to report on the efforts of many of the online video platforms to support SEO as part of their offering. YouTube has been the de facto search engine for video until now, so it’s great to see these platforms supporting the indexing of video across all search engines.

Finally, today, no review of online video this week would be complete without mentioning the Superbowl. In what was a fairly lackluster year, the stand out commercial for me was this one for Snickers featuring Betty White (now with added Abe Vigoda). Geriatric genius!

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. What they mean is, when someone pays attention to you and respects what you do enough to reproduce one of your original ideas or activities you should be flattered. And we usually are.

Last July, before the release of his New York Times bestseller, Trust Agents, I approached Chris Brogan with an idea for a Twitter giveaway. I proposed that we give away 50 copies of his book on the day of its launch to the first 50 people who tweeted about a brand awareness campaign we were running. The campaign centered on our Video Marketing Quiz which is a fun interactive game that tests your knowledge of video as an effective marketing tool.

We were overwhelmed with the results. As soon as Chris tweeted about the giveaway, everything went nuts with thousands of people taking the quiz and tweeting about it afterwards. It was such a simple idea, yet it worked so well for us and we were tremendously grateful to Chris for his support and proud to be part of the launch for Trust Agents.

We knew it was a successful idea when Chris ran with it and instigated the exact same promotion with his pals at LinkedIn less than a month later. I’m sure it’s not the last time we will see Twitter used in this way.

This week our Video Marketing Quiz saw another form of imitation as Omniture, the web analytics company that was recently bought by Adobe, released an interactive game that tests your knowledge of banner ads as an effective marketing tool. If you disregard the background, the awkward fonts and the clumsy interface that never quite clicks on what you want to click, it’s eerily similar to our own Video Marketing Quiz. All of which goes to prove a few things:

• If something works for someone else, you might be able to make it work for you
• If you want to know who’s listening, check who’s copying
• Great ideas belong to the world (but it’s always nice to know you had them first!)

            

          EyeView's Video Marketing Quiz                                        Omniture's Pick The Winner Quiz

Happy Holidays From EyeView

As we come to the end of an amazing year, it’s great to look back and reflect on the changes we’ve seen. The year 2009 will be remembered as a breakout year for online video as it left the confines of video sharing sites and crossed over into mainstream acceptance. In 2010 every commercial site will include a video presentation at some point in its interaction with potential customers.

The final sign of acceptance will be when video is made accountable not just as a ‘nice to have’ marketing extra, but as a fully functioning tool in the marketer's arsenal with its own ROI and the expectation of revenue generation.

EyeView is proud to be leading the charge towards accountable video with our award-winning optimization program and our fantastic roster of clients.

Thank you to everyone for making 2009 so exciting and let’s see if we can’t do it all again in 2010!

Adobe and Omniture – Visions of the Future?

Today, I'm delighted to host a guest post by the CEO of EyeView, Oren Harnevo. Don't be shy about letting him know what you think. You can also follow him on Twitter @ohnevo. Take it away, Oren:

Last week Adobe declared that it will acquire Omniture for $1.8 billion. While some might not understand this bold move by Adobe, for me it makes a lot of sense. Adobe is entering the online market and is starting to use its elbows against companies like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. I think the future for OmnAdobe or AdobNiture is bright and here’s why.

It might not be what Adobe wants from Omniture but this is my vision of the future of OmnAdobe!

I see a future in which advertisers turn to agencies no longer for content, but for effective content. What do I mean by “effective content”? Content whose impact can be assessed, measured, optimized and which can deliver ROI. Advertisers want to pay for results, not for mere content, and that is exactly what a company with a range of content-creation products wants with an analytics company – content with results.

Today, the creation of online content is all about experience and aesthetic. The flash application developer and creative designer believe they know what to create and do the best they can. But what if we had a way, to measure how good their work really is? What if we could put a price tag on one designer’s work against another’s? What if we could show that one flash application averages 40 seconds of use and another application maintains its hold on users for more than a minute? We could actually measure which designer was more successful.

This is not so much a vision of the future as a reflection of our normal working day at EyeView - effective content, constantly measured and optimized to provide real ROI.

Imagine this (names are strictly fictitious):

1. Niky, a fictitious online retailer of socks, wants a new flash application that allows its users to see and play with different sock options before purchase. They believe it will boost sales.
2. Niky finds Ogilby, an online, performance-based content creator which does more than just creating content - Ogilby also promises effective content and ties payment to success.
3. Niky loves the Ogilby pitch and decides to sign. Why pay for regular content when someone is offering measurable content?
4. The design team at Ogilby open their Adobe applications, create some killer content and click the “Insert Analytics” button in the toolbar.
5. Niky now log into their OmnAdobe (or AdobNiture) analytics platform and watch how the content performs, how it impacts their traffic, their sales and their users.
6. It turns out that Ogilby improved engagement with the website by 30%. Ogilby earns a bonus for their work.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? It may still take a while for Adobe and Omniture to reach such lofty heights. These companies are different on so many levels that it would another five posts to describe. Adobe is a Software as a Product (SaaP) company while Omniture is a Software as a Service (SaaS) company with subscription-guaranteed revenue. Omniture usually sells to the very high end of the market while Adobe sells to all segments. Omniture is mostly US while Adobe is worldwide. There will be many challenges for them to face together before they provide the end-to-end solution that bundles content and analytics into the perfect package.

When content is measurable and advertisers demand this accountability from their agencies, Adobe may be the only provider in the market to meet that demand. When that happens, people may take another look at this acquisition and reconsider its value.

Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin And Me

Chris Anderson started it. Not content with being the inspiration for a million tedious PowerPoint slides with his concept/article/book The Long Tail, Mr. Anderson has turned another of his coffee-break notions into a best-selling book.

The book is titled Free: The Future Of A Radical Price. I haven’t read it yet although it’s on order from Amazon (at the not-radical price of $not-free). Based on the wealth of information surrounding the book’s launch, Anderson seems to be making the point that you can make a lot of money in business by giving things away for free. It’s an interesting hypothesis and I’m looking forward to all 288 pages of explanation and qualification.

In the meantime, Malcolm Gladwell reviewed the book for The New Yorker and laid into Anderson and his idea. Gladwell was particularly upset over Anderson’s vision for the future of journalism, hardly surprising given Gladwell’s (and, to be fair, Anderson’s) primary source of income.

Then Seth Godin weighed in with a post titled simply “Malcolm is Wrong” and it all kicked off.

For my part the whole argument is kind of academic although I can’t help noticing that none of the people arguing whether or not ‘things’ should be free actually make ‘things’ (ideas and opinions are not 'things' and the market for them has always been volatile). The discussion of whether or not the output of serious journalistic endeavors should be free is entirely spurious. The business of newspapers has never been news. The business of newspapers is selling advertising. A competitive market that drives down the price point for subscription all the way to free in order to sell more advertising is not in the slightest bit radical (sorry, Mr. Anderson) or even unusual. It’s business.

It strikes me reading Gladwell’s petulant review that he doesn’t understand the business he's in. No wonder he’s so upset.

One of the joys of working with EyeView’s broad range of customers is that each of them comes to us with a clear understanding of their business. They know exactly what income streams are important and they build their business models to support them.

Once the hoo-hah dies down, and the debate over Free has subsided, our customers will still be looking for new ways to boost conversion and increase revenue. If that means giving stuff away for free, so be it, but that’s just one weapon in the marketer’s arsenal and hardly a revolutionary one.

Do you understand your business and do you think the idea of free is radical?