Manhattan Marketing Maven

Valuing & Validating Video Online

If video online is any indicator; on the web, seeing is believing. The number of videos viewed on YouTube -- 10.3 billion -- in September 2009 exceeded the number of core Google searches by a full billion. That's billion with a "b". 

Then consider the scale of use. More than 168 million US internet surfers watched nearly 26 billion videos online in September -- an average of 154 videos per viewer. Where did they find the time? That's roughly 84 percent of the total US internet audience (comScore says 81 percent) watching an average of 9.8 hours of video during the month where the average length was 3.8 minutes. Imagine how many of others tasks, demands, attractions and people vie for 10 active hours a month of your time! 

The number of people watching video online is up year-over-year by 46 percent. And the use of video on mobile devices is up 70 percent to 15 million Americans watching 3 hours and 15 minutes of mobile video each according to The Nielsen Company. And all this is going on while TV usage hits an all time high of 141 hours per month. We are more addicted to the tube than ever before but now the tube is following us around, available 24/7 and luring us with more memes every day.

The implications of this data suggest that every marketer better grab a video camera and get cracking. Consider these realities.

Video is the expectation. People expect to see it and hear it. They use YouTube heavily for search and younger people default to YouTube as their first point of web entry. 

Video is ubiquitous. Facebook, MySpace, Hulu and hundreds or thousands of sites feature all kinds of video. Production is cheap as is distribution. Anyone can shoot, produce or edit and grab 15 minutes of fame and many achieve different levels of virility.

Video validates. If you aren't producing video you aren't serious, real or as big as you claim to be. Video is becoming table stakes for online marketers. Presence trumps production values. Marketers are re-purposing all kinds of video assets in service to a growing appetite for online viewing. 

Video varies. Production quality ranges from childish to expert. Angles, animation, narration and new forms of story telling are emerging all the time. Reality can be dissected or distorted in service to abstract points of view or commercial messaging. 

OLX.com Aims for the Global Classified Listings Crown

French born Princetonian Fabrice Grinda built hiscareer as a serial entrepreneur by taking online business concepts developed in the US to global audiences. Now as Co-CEO of OLX.com he aspires to offer the best free global listings site on the web; "a Craigslist 2.0 for the world with functionalityy as good or better than listings on vertical subject sites."

With online marketing experience in southern and eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin Americaand $23 million in venture capital from the likes of General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund and DN Capital, OLX.com is operating in 39 languages and countless dialects providing strong competition for newspapers all over the world.  

The global recession, eBay's consistent missteps with sellers and Craiglist's move to charge for high value listing categories all give Fabrice reason to believe he can build a consistent growth business on the back of this universal transactional utility. By asking for just an e-mail address, providing cross-site AJAX search tools and enhanced tagging, a fast WAP application that circumvents limited infrastructure in many countries and empowers zillions of cell phone users and by keeping everything free to both buyers and sellers, he expects to take share from the US leaders even though OLX is hardly known in the US. Simultaneously he is expanding the reach of his classified sites to under-served and under-penetrated geographies. His strategy of PPC-driven growth combined with seven acquisitions in places like Spain, Denmark, China, Argentina, Italy and Russia, position OLX to exploit emerging markets and take on established western European classified leaders.

The business model is hedged by providing white label listings applications to as many as 20 social networks around the globe. OLX is behind classified listings on Friendster.com and Sonico.com;the Facebook of Latin America. Using these tactics and revenue streams the site expects to break even by early 2010.

From the search-and-find perspective humans are "shockinglysimilar globally when it comes to using classified sites," Fabrice says.  And while there are local differences among categories and different kinds of merchandise or services are more active in different areas, the utility model offers scale at predicable operating costs and margins. Bad times accelerate the number of listings and the number of searches in selected categories; especially jobs and real estate. But the biggest challenge or complication is digital security to ward off endless attempts at spam and scams. On a global basis OLX deletes 66 percent of the 2 million listing attempts made each week and uses a wide array of security tools and tactics to protect users and escape hackers. 

The bottom line?

To be a successful entrepreneur you don't have to invent or re-invent the wheel. Sometimes you just have to expose it to people who haven't seen it yet or can't get or make one themselves. 

Getting Started Using Mobile Marketing

Prudent forward-looking professionally paranoid marketers should get started and get smarter about mobile media and marketing now. During the ascent phase (especialloy during the recession) prices are low, content and merchant partners are flexible and open to experimentation. The trick is to get an oar in the water before anybody gets a lock on a killer app, rolls out a game-changing technology or corners critical markesegments.

Here are 5 tips to get started in framing your own mobile marketing program.

Focus on Core Apps. Lead with your long suit. Decide which of your core products or services are most useful while customers are on the go and start there. Don’t try everything at once. Try one thing. Start with the service most in-demand by customers or prospects, the items that is most closely identified with your brand identity or your unique selling proposition.

Start Small. The first step puts you squarely in test-and-learn mode. Ask customers to do one thing. Ask them to choose, vote, get a coupon, set an alert, or take an exclusive offer. The idea is to validate the channel and test your ability to influence incremental changes in behavior. You want to get them to do one thing, easily and quickly so that they like it it, appreciate the effort and add to their warm and fuzzy feelings about your brand.

Market Across Platforms. Prepare for a range of phones and systems. Also prepare to have responses to mobile creative on the web, in e-mail or even by phone. Mobile apps are critical for a few but the real value-add for customers or prospects is rounding out the brand experience. Use a mobile test to get customers to respond to an e-mail or to an ad, to view and vote or to offer opinions about something they see or hear in another media channel. The idea is to associate your brand with your customers’ lifestyles in a way that they can easily interact with you.

Make an Time-Sensitive Offer. In return for taking a mobile action within a fixed time frame customers should get a reward. Rewards can take the form of contest entries, discounts, and exclusive access to people, places or things or things of value like freebies or coupons. Mobile media is a direct response platform. Many customers come to it with expectations set by DR marketers.

Ask About It. Do a post-action customer satisfaction survey using e-mail and mobile media to gauge customer reactions and gather customer input and feedback. Mobile marketing is evolving and who better to help you plan step number two than the folks who responded to your initial foray?    

 

Re-Imagining My Morning Newspaper

I just read a blog at NYTImes.com and it struck me that I must be the last Luddite who blindly clings to the print version because I can read it on the subway or in the can. 

This belated revelation is ironic not only because I know a bunch of guys at the Times but because I[ve always fantasized about having a personal newsroom that could monitor and report on the stuff that I either desperately care about or casually stumble upon 24/7. And yet its been happening for a while with a richness that approaches my fantasy and I've ignored it even though I get several e-mail alerts each day from the Times and have signed up for mobile election night alerts..

It finally dawned on me that the stories in the paper are the tip of the iceberg and that audio, video, still images, impressions, reactions and corrections to almost everything I read is a click away. Plus there are options for sharing, interacting, reacting and enriching the experience. If only I had the time to invest in paying attention to all this stuff!

Maybe I've missed this because I hate staring into that cathode ray tube. Maybe I'm too old or too blind to read the paper online. Or maybe I missed it because I'm trapped in a 19th century print paradigm fed by myopia and the nostalgia of having been a paperboy. Or maybe I missed it because the Times hasn't really opened my eyes to this digital world because its marketers are trapped in a print cirrculation paradigm and haven't reached me with either direct or digital marketing.

Now that I'm learning to use social networks and helping clients get their arms around the digital world, I guess I have to re-imagine the daily newspaper and see it as a hub of information and interaction rather than just the great gray lady that arrives on my doorstep every morning.

2 Personal Productivity Tools: Desperately Needed

In a self-service 24/7 digital world I need some serious help to keep my data in synch and to get all my fabulous gizmos to work with me rather than against me.

There are two tools that I desperately need. They may or may not exist. If they exist and you know about them I implore you to call, contact or cue me about how to get them. If they don't exist I beg you to invent them, mash them up or get somebody in India to create them fast. I hereby renounce all claims and future royalties.

Universal Address-book. The idea is to update things once in a single place and then quickly and easily share the data across platforms. I want a tool that will allow me to data enter and store my personal database of addresses and contacts on the web and download it with a click to every computer, phone, PDA and other intelligent device I have. I've tried to concentrate all my updates and changes in Outlook and though Plaxo claims to have a tool like this, I can't download it and can't seem to use it.

Global Cellphone Dialing Software. I want a software program that will know when to dial the extra zero and when to dial the access codes necessary to use all the stored numbers in my phones. Unfortunately the numbers I enter are keyed to the national system or to my providers' protocols. But when I travel, there's always an added access code or you have to dial 08 in-country versus 8 from abroad. I want a patch that will suss out this stuff digitally and automatically understand what I've got stored and do whatever is needed to make the connection, save me time and reduce my anxiety. 

If I could get, find or discover these tools, I'd have a lot more time to contact, connect or converse with all those people at all those numbers I've been madly collecting, storing and updating.     

Media Never Dies

TV killed the radio star. Cable knocked off TV. The Internet killed cable. Thus said the pundits. But real people add to and adjust their media use. Media never dies.

Now according to Knowledge Networks SRIs couch potatoes are being eclipsed by "Streamies"  --- video addicts chained to their computers who are much heavier online netizens than the average American. These people are fascinated by the growing quantity and quality of video choices. As evidenced by the heavy male skew -- 2/3rds more young adult men, twice as many older adult men-- the number and variety of moving porn images available online keep them coming back.

Teens are the biggest "Streamies." Forty-three percent of boys 12-17 and 40% of girls watched streaming video at least once during the past week. These teenagers spend 28% more time online than the average teen but their online viewing is not diminishing their TV/cable addiction.

For young adults (18-34) 36% of men and 16% of women are madly streaming video and spending 41% more time doing it than their online counterparts. And for real adults (35-64) 21% of men and 11% of women are investing time in online video, a whopping 67% increase over the non-streaming members of their age cohort.

A healthy amount of this viewing takes place during daytime, a testament to either the growing appeal of business content or the appeal of taking care of business on the boss's time, bandwidth and keyboard.

Is Howard the Only One?

I’m a Howard Stern fan. I’m a regular listener. I defected to Sirius for Howard. And over the years I have bought a ton of adds on his radio shows. But I can’t believe that “The King of All Media” is the only radio act that can attract young men to the dial.

The quick failure of David Lee Roth and his replacement by Stern wannabees Anthony and Opie suggests that either there is a colossal lack of talent in radio, a colossal lack of imagination among radio programmers or both. And while I love porn stars, fart jokes and putting dorks in humiliating situations as much as the next guy, it’s hard to believe that this is the sum total of programming that appeals to my demographic.

Is it possible a fast thinking and fast talking disc jockey in some third-rate market has been overlooked? Is it possible that there is no other distinctive voice or no unusual perspective on current events that could be brought forward? Are radio programmers as lame as the Democrats unable to find, construct or nurture talent?

New Versus Old Media Manipulation

Two closely placed stories in the Media & Marketing section of the Wall Street Journal point out the significant differences between old fashioned interrupt media and online opt-in media.

The February 15th advertising column celebrates a media scheduling innovation in which American Express ran three separate 30-second spots back to back during “60 Minutes” on CBS, “Lost” on ABC and “Law & Order on NBC.” In so doing they grabbed 90 consecutive seconds of attention from whoever was watching that commercial pod.

Radical huh?

Making Newsletters Work Harder

Every business seems to have a newsletter. Few have any news. And fewer still contribute to business growth. Most aren’t opened or read..

Why?

Most firms exert too little effort and have too little valuable content. Too much of the writing, design and strategy is done by rote. And while a monthly or quarterly e-mail “ping” might momentarily spark brand recognition or awareness it rarely provokes inquiries or engagement.

The premise behind creating a newsletter is still valid. A well crafted newsletter can establish a brand’s positioning; educate customers and convey thought leadership. It can also prompt and qualify leads, if and only if, best practices are applied.

Here’s the list of newsletter best practices:

Have recipients determine frequency, medium and content preference.

Track readership and serve content based on reader preference.

Customize where possible. Abandon a one size fits all approach.

Offer incentives for pass-along. Solicit ideas and input.

Accentuate your point of view, key executives or products

Aggressively seek interaction. Make it clickable and easy to respond.

Be personable. Write in real rather than corporate nonspeak – blog style

Address industry r competitive issues head on.

Make it fun.

Include a call to action. Give readers something to do in response. Think of your newsletter as an element in an on-going converesation

DRTV Gets Its Due

Direct Response TV advertising (DRTV) seems to be the fastest growing segment in TV Land. Sales are up 25 percent during the first half of 2005 to $1.2 billion, according to TNS Media Intelligence, a growth rate double that of cable TV. Sellers are reporting 100 percent renewal rates from DRTV advertisers like J&J, Pfizer, Orbitz and L’Oreal. Packaged goods and financial services advertisers who long disdained DRTV are now embracing it.

My...how things have changed.

Not too long ago DRTV was the late night and weekend province of the Ab Roller, Hooked on Phonics and Ron Popeil. It was, if you believed the white shoe ad guys, a sleazy neighborhood frequented by brands on the deathwatch, jobbers with leftover inventory and small time entrepreneurs running boiler room operations in search of quick and dirty wins.

Fast forward to a time of tight budgets, fragmented viewing, integrated marketing and creative executions that can simultaneously promote the brand and carry a call to action. Presto! The ugly duckling becomes a swan.

DRTV can be branded and responsive. DRTV is carefully tracked to yield a clear ROI. And DRTV at 40 percent of the cost of upfront or scatter inventory is still bought creatively to finesse network issues and zero-in on target audiences. DRTV reinforces brand awareness. DRTV drives phone calls. DRTV drives web traffic. DRTV provokes search engine queries.

DRTV has always done these things. This is nothing new to those of us who have toiled “below the line.” We can all enjoy a brief “I-told-you-so” moment, bask in the recognition for a previous undervalued media channel and savor a back-handed compliment for all those savvy media people who have mastered the nuances of DRTV.