So what have I been upto over the past few months? Well, in October 2009 I took an ENG camera course at CameraCollege.nl, a Dutch accredited training institute. In order to be able to create some decent images, you have to know what goes on inside a video camera. Although I initially felt a little resentment towards the technical stuff they teach you (”Do I really have to know this? Yeah, you do!”), I’m glad I took the course. With this solid foundation and experience in working with professional ENG cameras, at least you know why your shots turned out the way they did. And besides, they also focus on all aspects surrounding the technicalities. Basically, you are sent out for a couple of hours to return with usable material. For anyone based in the Netherlands or Flanders (Belgium), I highly recommend this institute. If you live anywhere else, find something comparable.

Following my course, I decided to do research in order to buy my own camera set. Initially, I had my eyes set on the EX-3 from Sony. Being equipped with a 1/2 inch sensor, and inspired by the amazing work DoP Philip Bloom has done, I wanted to extend  with a Letus 35mm adapter, in order to be able to put some fast 35mm primes in front of them. That combination would have set me back €11k easily — and that’s even without any 35mm glass! Still a minor investment in comparison to the professional grade ENG cameras, but real Euros nonetheless…

Inspired by a few Canon 5D movies, I eventually decided to go DLSR all the way. The result of my research led to an article I wrote for ReelSEO entitled “How to Guide for Shooting HD Video with a DSLR Camera”. In December I went out to London with my wife (thanks for your patience with me, Daphne). While she did some christmas shopping, I spent most of my time capturing the Christmas atmosphere in the city and its wonderful inhabitants. Below you’ll find the result.

Right now, I am talking to various clients and prospects. Aside from giving them sound advice on using YouTube professionally, I will be creating some nice content as well in 2010 and beyond.

Life is short, do what you love.

The article provides an in-depth analysis of why brands should consider posting video to video sharing sites as opposed to *exclusively* hosting video themselves (or using a proprietary video platform). Based on 19 criteria, accompanied with my somewhat biased explanation, readers can create a balanced scoring card. By giving plusses (and perhaps some minuses) on either side of the table (hosting versus posting) readers can decide what best meets their needs.

The idea behind the article came to fruition after reading other posts on the topic of video marketing strategy. I noticed a tendency among video platform proponents to dismiss video sharing sites as “UGC-communities” and point brand owners to fears for advertising, image association, poor branding, loss of clip control, aggregate statistics, et cetera. Although some of these arguments do have some validity to them, many of these acclaimed negative features are in fact either outdated, exaggerated or simply untrue. Why video platform buffs employ such tactics in their sales-pitches is something that wonders me still. Now, at least, as a brand owner, you can make up your own mind.

Judging from the response, hosted versus posted video really is a key question to marketers. Thanks to Bit.ly (gotta love those open social statistics!), you can see that more than 500 have taken the time to click the link through Twitter, Twitter Apps or other social networks.

The ReTweets made it clear that the topic struck a cord with those involved in video marketing.

I am curious to learn how you feel about it. That’s why I created the following poll:

What started with a pilot with a dedicated channel for the Whitehouse in June 2009 now forms an integral part of SlideShare’s offering for brands. According to CEO Rashmi Sinha from SlideShare: “We have been thinking about channels for a while, and spent almost 6 months building it.”

Today it’s here – alive and kicking. SlideShare branded channels now form an integral part of their offering to advertisers (see slide 18/20). SlideShare co-operated with Federated Media, Universal McCann and Microsoft to build the branded channel dubbed the Microsoft Office Parent Toolbox: “work, play and everything in between” the channel’s tag-line reads. It features presentations and documents centered around home and family usage of Microsoft Office products. The channel can be reached externally with a brand-name friendly URL-structure. Simply add the name to SlideShare’s URL: http://www.slideshare.net/MicrosoftOffice. Please note the use of capitalization in the brand name – this makes it easier for users to recognize branded content from Microsoft Office in SlideShare’s (and Google’s) search results.

However, the branded channel is more than an environment within an external medium for showing off branded content. SlideShare deliberately chose to stay true to its original course. SlideShare branded channels are seamlessly integrated with the community’s core features: allow users to upload and share presentations with one another.

Through integration with a branded channel on a social network, brand owners can benefit from the community as oppossed to building traffic to their own website from scratch.

With the use of branded channels, SlideShare advises its advertisers to also work with channel curators and bloggers. The Parent Toolbox channel is moderated by Asha Dornfest (Parent Hacks), an authority in the parenting space. Dornfest, however, shares blogging responsibilities of the channel with some of the Web’s most talented parenting bloggers: Danny Evans, Ree Drummond and Maggie Mason, among others. They are swapping tips and documents that make family and home life easier and actively engage in conversations with users. Users based in the USA, in turn, are motivated to contribute content as well – everytime they upload, they enroll in a sweepstake in which Microsoft gives out 50 Microsoft Office licenses.

The vibrant community of SlideShare offers brand owners the opportunity to benefit from the virality aspects, as opposed to building traffic from scratch. Aside from integrating blog content on the channel, SlideShare also allows for inclusion of video content on the channel – both real life stories of users and product tips and tricks from Microsoft. For example, see this video of the Cheese Guy that uses Office to keep track of his scientific approach to producing cheese: “I especially like Roquefort [...] which is like smelling old soccer shoes. Cheese is molding bacteria, with controlled delay.” Love it or hate it, this is fun content to watch. What surprised me, however, is that Microsoft decided to host their videos on SlideShare, instead of YouTube and then embedding it within the branded channel on SlideShare. Single-source video really helps in terms of video SEO.

Expect more advertisers to follow Microsoft’s lead: “This offering is open to other advertisers, this is just the first one,” said Rashmi Sinha. SlideShare, however, declined to give specific details on the investment involved, other than that it involved a media buy requirement, comparable to what Google uses for YouTube. “Right now, we are negotiating one at a time,” SlideShare’s CEO said. “We are talking to more advertisers and expect to see more channel announcements in the future.”

InterbrandFirst, let’s look at the financial institutions:

Rank
2009	2008	Brand		% change
22	15		American Express	-32
32	27		HSBC	-20
36	19		Citi Bank	-49
37	37		JP Morgan	-11
38	38		Goldman Sachs	-10
53	55		Axa	-7
57	42		Morgan Stanley	-26
72	41		UBS	-50
81	82		Allianz	-5
94	100		Visa	-5

Financial Services: integrity as brand differentiator

Never before has the value of brands eroded as fast as it did in 2008-2009. “As a group, financial services brands have lost a third of their value in a matter of months”, writes Interbrand. As can be concluded from the above ranking, UBS (-31 positions), Citi Bank (-17) and Morgan Stanley (-15) suffered the most in Interbrand’s Top 100.

Brands are all about trust, which is was the factor shaken the most as a result of the financial crisis. So what are brands in the financial sector to do to regain consumer trust? “Future financial leaders will still provide the same types of service, but deliver them in a more consistent and thoughtful manner – and always with integrity. This, in the new world, will be the real differentiator”, concludes Interbrand.

Automotive in decline

Along with the financial institutions, the automotive sector is confronted with changing consumer perception – and, ultimately consumer demand. New demand for cars can be summed up as: smaller, greener and more efficient. The days of the gasoline-gulping V8s and V10s are gone, never to return. As the world approaches peak oil, the need for alternative energy sources will continue to grow. Automotive brands have to respond to that new reality – or suffer the consequences. One of those clear victims is Harley Davidson, which saw its brand value plunge by 43%. As a not-so-environmental-friendly brand that relies heavily on its strong heritage, it’s not easy to re-invent. Brands who have established a more innovative image over the years, suffer the least: Hyundai (-5%), Honda (-7%) and Toyota (-8%). Also in ts report, Interbrand included an interesting picture of the demise of the Ford brand since 2000, which indicates that Ford saw its brand value decline from $35 billion to $7 billion.

Media warning: here comes Google

In record time, Google has risen to the top of the Interbrand chart. In 2009, Google now commands a number 7 position, with a brand value increase of 25%. “The common theme is low price and high functionality with added transparency,” Interbrand writes. These should be dire lessons for media companies. Content still is king, but the source of information is rapidly shifting from being centralised (the media) to being decentralised (with the help of all the technology and services Google provides).

Interbrand states: “The media sector landscape is being redefined by non-traditional players, and is facing pressure from all sides. Technology companies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook are entering the conten creation and delivery arenas and giving users the power to dictate their means of media formation and consumption, threatening to render the old media brands obsolete.”

Source: Interbrand site & magazine

Schmidt painted a long term picture between 10 and 15 years to an audience at the Royal Television Society in Cambridge: “We’re going to go all out on all of them to ensure that if you have great content, as people in your society do, then you can decide if you want it to be advertising supported or if you want people to pay a subscription”, Schmidt said. He also claimed that Google has already generated between $5 and $6 billion through its AdSense model. Schmidt: “Our goal is to make large amounts of money for our content partners.”

Unlike Bebo and MySpace who have started to commission their own content, Schmidt said Google will not go into content: “We are a technology company.”

See full report at Broadband TV News

The beta version of Adobe Story is now available in Adobe Labs. This end-to-end workflow solution allows those involved in a video production process to work alone and/or collaboratively on scripts. Since metadata is now accurately recorded in the crucial pre-production phase, one can imagine what value it has for all the other phases – up until publication to multiple screens. Instead of trying to describe audio or video through speech-to-text or video recognition tools, which nonetheless remains valuable for archive material, Adobe recognizes the importance of metadata.

One can easily imagine what effects this will have in terms of Video SEO and Video Monetization. Since all metadata is available, publishing video will become easier. This certainly streamline VSEO efforts, although some SEO-friendly copywriting skills will still be required. Interactivity is another one: by having the dialogue available, you can make the content more easily searchable or make that paid-for product placed cereal box or Gucci dress instantly clickable.

There is one catch, however: much like the name of the product implies, it works for stories: that is, scripted content. Non-scripted content (news, interviews) still depends on either manual transcription or automated speech-to-text software.

In the article, Richard discusses why Google should enable advertisers to start building traffic from their own content on YouTube back to their own site. Currently, this is not possible. With an estimated 3-15% of views currently being monetized on YouTube, Google could easily increase this value by allowing advertisers to buy ads against their own content on YouTube.

Right now, selected videos on user channels have autoplay, while videos on brand and partner channels feature click-to-play.

How long this glitch will be live is unknown.

Update: 11:45 PM – The bug is now fixed by YouTube. All things back to normal.

According to the NewMediaAge article, commercial broadcaster ITV lost an estimated £1.3m in ad revenues because no ad deal was in place for the popular Britain’s Got Talent content. Susan Boyle’s performance generated more than 85 million video views on YouTube (more than 70 million on this video alone, for which embedding has been disabled!?).

In the regular partnership agreement, Google is responsible for ad sales and media owners get a share of the revenues (typically 50-60%). Since these media owners know their content best, they are ideally positioned to sell such positions. One can imagine that referring clients to Google for buying such inventory is not preferred.

Many media owners use YouTube to either syndicate their content (in full or in part) or use it as a video platform to host and subsequently embed content from YouTube on their own site. With syndication, YouTube may simply enlarge ad inventory: “We sell out of our video-on-demand space so this would be additional space to sell,” an ITV source was quoted on NewMediaAge. With embedded content, having control over who advertises around the content increases overall value of advertising packages, which then includes in-video or pre-roll. Moreover, it extends reach as videos are both featured on YouTube and embedded on the media site.

The missing link

For somewhat different reasons, advertisers that own and operate a brand channel on YouTube, want control over their videos as well. Driving traffic towards selected sites is what is missing in the brand channel proposition today. In my recent post with 7 tips for better business on YouTube, the number two suggested improvement is the use of YouTube as a conversion tool.

Most advertisers I talk to ask how much traffic YouTube will generate back towards their own site. Unfortunately, the only way to do this today is to include a back-link in the video description. Google requires brand channel owners to invest in media spend to drive traffic towards the brand channel and its content – on YouTube. Advertisers can use the available inventory on partner channels and other sites within the Google content network to purchase display, in-video and – in some markets – pre-roll. But once you have the attention of your audience on your own brand channel videos, you cannot instantly drive traffic back to the brand site from the video itself. Exclusive use of in-video advertising on your own content would be a desired feature. Advertisers should be enabled to use part of their required media investment to purchase such positions at Google’s ratecard prices (instead of AdWords, since there is no one to bid against).

Other than perhaps some technical and administrative hurdles, I cannot imagine why Google would not offer such features to brand channel owners. It clearly adds value to the brand channel proposition, while it also helps Google to more effectively monetize YouTube.

Agree or disagree? Please comment.