Saturday, July 23, 2011

The Two New TVs: Branded and Social. Are You Ready?

Just when you thought it was safe to relax in front of the TV, it isn't. In fact, one of your new marketing tasks may involve putting up the content on your organization's own TV channel. That would be called a branded content channel.

Rob Davis, who heads the online video practice at adverting giant Ogilvy, says in this interview that his agency is working closely on branded content channels on YouTube.

Here are some sound bites from Rob.

"We're finding that with a lot of our clients it goes beyond 'I want to have a video and hope it goes well.' [The push] is about making use of the tools YouTube has available. We're focusing a lot of the effort around identifying the opportunities available with a brand channel. The brand channel model itself on YouTube is growing up. It's a place to curate content; it's a place where we're seeing people using the channel for direct marketing.

"Cure Bad Breath, for example, is a YouTube that's all about moving product, moving the Orabrush. We've just done a brand new channel for IBM that's about curating the best IBM content on the web on YouTube and bringing it into one place.

"When we talk about value of video content, we're looking at engagement, at views plus length of view and completion rates. At Ogilvy, we talk about PPI -- post play interaction. We help our clients identify what the next click should be in their strategy. Is it direct marketing, is it lead generation, is it awareness, is it about viewing more videos or going to a landing page and getting into the sales funnel. Different strategies require different measurements.

"Branded content is a major part of what we're doing. We're still focusing on VSEO (video search engine optimization) for a lot of the content we're creating. It's finding the right blend to get the eyeballs to the branded content. We're not leaving out the notion of blogger outreach and influencers, either. [The strategy involves] getting the content into the right hands so your audience finds the content where they are participating, rather than the old method of trying to drive them to a url.

[In branded channel TV] you want high production values. You don't want to cut corners on the content. The industry is ready for it, although the Internet audience may not be totally ready for it just yet. But I think it can happen. Technology is in place for this year -- 2011 -- to be the year."

And then there's Social TV. Even if you're not developing branded content for your own TV channel, you will probably be pulled into Social TV before long. So what is that?

If the MIT Technology Review on Social TV in 2010 is correct, it's coming on strong. In fact, social TV was named by this group as one of the 10 most important emerging technologies.

How about some real-life examples? Maybe you'll recall seeing Twitter integrated into a TV show. Or maybe you were part of Facebook reactions to the U.S. team's rise and fall at the Women's World Cup. Check out these and more at "Social TV," a blog on the subject.

LostRemote is another blog that covers the social TV scene. One story describes integrating TV into socialization via the Dexter app that allows users to set up their own text-messaging group chat surrounding Showtime's "Dexter" TV show.

And then there's Miso, a phone app designed to notify friends which TV shows you're watching. The process works much like Foursquare, as participants "check in" to report viewing.

Mashable gives us a quick run-down of how social TV is faring, according to TV Guide research. Surprise, Smallville, a program that's one of Nielsen's lowest-rated, has a huge social media following.

Content options provide audiences with additional content that is engaging, unique, and innovative, so that the experience is simultaneously available across platforms.

Wikipedia describes the burgeoning phenomenon this way: "Social TV is creating the cyber-living-room and cyber-bar to enable increased interactivity around shared programming, both live and time-shifted."

See you on the telly.

-- scrubbed by MarketingBrillo

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