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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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!
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):
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.
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.
Niky
loves the Ogilby pitch and decides to sign. Why pay for regular content when
someone is offering measurable content?
The design
team at Ogilby open their Adobe applications, create some killer content and
click the “Insert Analytics” button in the toolbar.
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.
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 started it. Not content with being the
inspiration for a million tedious PowerPoint slides with his
concept/article/bookThe 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?
I like to think of EyeView as a private conversion laboratory.
Come visit us in the renovated dungeons under EyeView Towers and see the hordes
of conversion science geeks in their white coats scurrying about. Once we have
persuaded people to let us experiment with video on their website, we tinker
and we tweak until we deliver the results we promise – optimized conversion.
Our latest customer (or victim) was eToro. Forex is a
notoriously difficult sell to new users as it often seems forbiddingly complex.
eToro has revolutionized the world of forex by developing a platform that
relies on user-friendly graphics to deliver complicated data in
easy-to-understand formats.
Given the complexity of the subject matter, it’s not surprising
that eToro turned to video as a great tool for getting across a lot of
information. In addition to a really cool video, we were able to provide a measurable impact on their business.
Below you can see two screen shots. The page on the left
represents eToro’s landing page as it was. The page on the right represents the
same URL with the video embedded.
We set up the test as follows. For all new visitors to the
site, 50 per cent would be the control group receiving the old page with the existing banner while the
other 50 per cent would get the page with the video. We even took it one stage
further and made the video play automatically for first time visitors in the “page
with video” test group.
Click
on the image below to follow the link to eToro's site and see which
group you are assigned to. Let us know in the comments.
The results were nothing short of spectacular. Comparing
like with like, we saw that the page with the video playing automatically generate
33 per cent more conversions than the existing page. For a company like eToro
where each converted user has a defined lifetime value this meant a significant
upturn in revenue for that landing page.
eToro are delighted with the conversion increase their video
has brought and I made sure that the boys back at EyeView’s lab were allowed an
extra 30 minutes of daylight as a reward for their efforts.
The phrase to eat one’s own dog food may have originated with Microsoft, but it has entered the popular lexicon because it rings true to so many people. If you want others to believe in your product, you must be an enthusiastic consumer yourself – even if your product is dog food.
Here at EyeView we recently undertook a critical re-examination of the video on our homepage. We stopped being a provider for a few minutes and instead became our own customer. We already had a video in place that was working. The conversion goal for the page was to have visitors submit their details in on our Contact Us page in order to generate new leads for the business.
We looked at a number of different elements that we felt should be tightened up to see if they would have an impact on our conversion and then we tested them.
First of all we looked at the messaging in the video. We went through our internal messaging policy and made sure that the script of the new video was fully aligned.
Part of the conversion funnel was to drive traffic to the Contact Us page. We were concerned that not enough people were visiting the Contact Us page after watching the video. We decided to make the call to action much more explicit in the video based on the principle of “See it. Hear it. Click it.” We moved the call to action button inside the player and made it clickable. We also had the narrator clearly invite visitors to push the button to drive home its importance. We made sure that this button matched the existing call to action button outside the player to avoid confusion.
To make sure we made the biggest impact on new visitors we set the video to play automatically. But this only happens the first time you visit. If you are a returning visitor the video player waits to be prompted before relaunching the video.
To see the new video in its natural habitat, visit EyeView's homepage here.
In summary, we proposed a number of changes and then we went out and tested those changes, measuring their impact against the old video. The improvement was felt immediately. These carefully considered tweaks boosted our conversion rate by over 46%. A resounding success, by any standard, but it doesn’t make us complacent.
We are already planning the next round of tests including an off-player call to action button that is synched up with the video to draw attention to it at exactly the right time.
As long as we continue suggesting changes, we will continue testing them. We’re hungry for conversion success and we’re fortunate that we make the most delicious kind of dog food.
