While Belgium and Germany won the highest quantity of awards (49) at the European creative advertising awards Eurobest at the weekend (France 35, UK 32), France certainly had the quality, BETC Euro RSCG, Paris winning the TV Grand Prix with this masterful reworking of a comedy standard – “The Closet”
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YouTube has launched a traditional press campaign, to promote the 4000 full length TV programmes, including episodes of Doctor Who, now available on YouTube.
The slogan “YouTube’s got TV” will appear on tube trains (naturally), on the side of buses and in newspaper advertisements from today. Later this month in a PR stunt, YouTube is taking over a shop front in London’s Carnaby Street where shoppers will be able to chose TV programmes to watch on huge screens.
“This campaign aims to tell our users that the full-length TV content has now arrived,” said Anna Bateson, the YouTube director of marketing, reported in The Guardian
The number of TV shows available on YouTube has increased significantly following a deal with Channel 4 last month where the two companies share revenue from advertising run around the programmes.
Other programmes available include Peep Show, Derren Brown’s Events, Gordon Ramsay’s F Word and clips from The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing.
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The Webby Awards top ten most influential internet moments of the decade, released yesterday has 2006 as the year the online video revolution started “flooding cyberspace with an array of professional and not-so-professional videos” and a quick spin around You Tube this morning confirms that there’s still either TV production quality footage or amateur goofing around, with not much in between.
At the professional end, Stella Artois has dropped back four decades, to 1963 with an eight part, faux retro online TV show to push its green credentials – Le Recyclage de Luxe Show, created by Mother and marketed through Facebook and Twitter. As we’re now watching an average of 10.8 hours of online video a month, according to Comscore and good content is now sprayed around freely on social networks, the days of a predominantly You’ve-been-framed-Tube may be drawing to an end.
I was going to do something on Google’s new Chrome OS spelling the end of Microsoft but Jedward is obviously more important, especially on a Friday and Wand, the agency that brought us the mattress dominoes viral could be on to another winner with this one for their responsible rubbish clearance client Any Junk.
There’s a quote on ad agency Anomaly’s site from the head of Proctor & Gamble R&D which says “My biggest competitor today is an individual with an idea.”
I don’t suppose he means that my idea for a washing detergent, even if it’s a really good idea, would be an immediate threat to P&G’s Ariel sales worldwide. If however I had a really popular video about it on You Tube and some sort of distribution deal, then I start to get his point.
Evian’s roller babies viral has just perambulated into the Guinness Book of Records with 45 million views, making it the daddy viral to date but even one for a mattress warehouse in Warrington has clocked up over 700,000 views with their decidedly low tech mattress dominoes world record attempt. More »
Brands like Mastercard and Geek Squad are creating their own news content published direct to consumers via channels like YouTube, rather than pitching stories to traditional media, Advertising Age reports today.
The US advertising monitor cites the declining number of media outlets combined with the growth of quick fire customer engagement through online communities as drivers of a new approach to PR.
Mastercard, for example has deliberately pursued a low tech video route, interviewing it’s executives on camcorders, editing on laptops and uploading to YouTube. Mastercard’s PR agent, Andrew Foote at Cohn and Wolfe says:
“They’re realizing they can comment on issues and get the points of view of their experts out there and on the record. Once the videos are up, the company will often tweet the links and follow up with reporters letting them know MasterCard commented on the topic.” More »
Online video is the top marketing priority in 2010, ahead of email and search, according to a new survey from US based TurnHere.
The top reasons for video include: branding (60%), exposure on sites like YouTube (54.7%), and viral content (48%).
Professionally produced content was overwhelmingly favored over user generated, 83.5% of respondents already using online video in their marketing efforts in one form or another.
90.7% of respondents are likely or highly likely to use online video in their marketing efforts in the next 12 months, the survey found.
Apple has certainly been busy with video, with the latest in its PC vs Mac films ‘Broken Promises’ released yesterday, taking aim at Microsoft’s launch of Windows 7 which was brought forward 24 hours because of the postal strike. I bet their PR agency appreciated that. More »
..at least. Research in May from Forrester suggests video content boosts email click-through 2-3 times and that’s an average – the best videos are off the scale.
It’s not really a surprise, what with online video traffic increasing 178% year on year (Econsultancy) and our tolerance for promotional video – 70% of Europeans don’t mind video ads (according to Tremor Media) – the only surprise is that more companies aren’t doing it.
As with email marketing, one of the main hurdles is not cost but time. Creating good video content is not expensive but it certainly does take time. It needs outsourcing to a video maker, as does email marketing, suggests Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx in this video.
The new Conservative party campaigning website, launched on Friday looked like a dud when I first arrived on its blue blog page (the one my Google search landed on). Its main purpose seems to be to tutor Tory campaigners via a You Tube video on how to conduct a telemarketing campaign from home.
So here you have the odd scencario of one of the newest and most popular marketing channels – video, being used to organise undoubtedly the least popular and most old school marketing channels - cold calling.
This only added to my growing suspicion that political parties think online marketing is a type of intranet for posting information and instructions to the party machine rather than an engagement tool for reaching voters. More »
I must confess myself in awe of the PR campaign that saw the UK’s Ben Southall installed as winner of Tourism Queensland’s ‘Best job in the World’ competition. The agency Hill Balfour Synergy had a very small budget yet managed to create enormous worldwide coverage.
The real cleverness of it, beyond the initial concept seems to lie in the second stage where candidates were asked to submit a promotional video to a voting site and carry out their own publicity. The leading competitors in each country were given some PR advice over the phone it seems and encouraged to ring up radio and tv stations to campaign for votes.
