The march of multi-media is unstoppable. We are all consuming more and more video content, when it suits us, (on demand), across more and more devices. We're also creating more and more of it too, and being long gone the days of films languishing in drawers undeveloped, what are we doing with all this video content? Sharing it. Uploading it to Facebook, to Dailymotion, to Flickr, to YouTube as the dominant hub of all things video.
YouTube announced today that they've now reached a mind-boggling 35 hours of content being uploaded per minute. Apparently that works out at " 2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day".
I've doctored the chart they published with some of the other stats they've published over the last year or so, to make the rampant growth of video over short time frames clearer:
You've been able to see what's most popular now etc for a while, but YouTube have now launched a video chart so you can check out what's been most viewed / liked / subscribed to today / this week / ever.
So having had a play about.... the 3 most viewed videos on YouTube, with a staggering 390,716,462 views are someone young, someone not so young, and something cute and fluffy......
The much-lauded (in advertising circles) T-Mobile dance at Liverpool Street staggers in at a mere #29, beaten by a broad assortment of music videos plus the odd obligatory cat-doing-something-daft offering.
Fledgling video-specific search engine Clicker have just got a new round of funding. Great!
Whilst you can find videos via video search tabs in Google or Bing, or of course search directly in YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion et al, it's quite interesting to have an aggregated medium-specific search engine as a destination. Have a play, you can search from a variety of angles including "made for the web" which is interesting in itself. My TV Production buddies should take note!!
I saw this fun video content piece earlier in the week but haven't had time to share (and in fairness the first version I saw was only in Swedish) but now I've found a version with English supers.
I'm going to spoil it for you by telling you that it's brought to you by Volkswagen, but would still urge you to spare a few moments to watch it, (then watch this other release in the same series) and then think about the implications.
What could your brand do or facilitate to make people's lives more interesting / easier / fun? In turn providing that service will most probably make them feel positively towards your brand.
The film ends pointing you to a website "thefuntheory.com" which in turn urges you to sign up, teasing the notion of more fun to come.
So of course I did. Fun is good. I am also currently pondering on buying a VW. It can but help build VW in my consideration set. Points awarded for smart use of content to open a conversation between a consumer and a brand. What they do next is the interesting thing.
I'm still waiting to hear any more about my Sony Ericsson Space Hopper's adventures, which was a few weeks ago now. Not so smart after all perhaps. Were I not working in the marketing space and/or having the memory of an elephant, chances are I'd have forgotten all about that. Opportunity missed.
E-crm. It's like dating.
Securing a first date is only step one. Assuming it went well, not ringing for several weeks afterwards is not a very smart if you were vaguely interested and were keen to go out again. You'll be dismissed , written off as useless, or find that someone else jumped into the void. In marketing terms that could well be one of your competitors jumping in and building a relationship with a consumer that might have been yours. Which means the cost in time/ effort (and money in brand terms) of getting that first date nailed down is kinda wasted. Doh. Have a contact strategy. Aim for relationship.
Here's number 4.0 (or at least one variant of it currently circulating).(This one's been around for a week, and is actually based on the "shift happens" series. Well worth 4 minutes of your time.
And this one's been kicking around since July and is perhaps more true to the original Did You Know film, but still worth a watch.
My brain is fried, my politically correct sensor has been dulled and I found this quite funny. I don't speak German either so apologies to any readers that do if the effect isn't quite as good. I intend no offense at all.
This parody of it is even funnier, because it also makes a half serious point about intellectual property / copyright on the web. In this era of sharing, crowdsourcing and genorosity I'm a big believer in Creative Commons.
I must have sat in goodness knows how many meetings with PR agencies over the years where they've wheeled out ye olde,"bugger we've had no time to think about something really relevant or creative to answer your brief, how about we do a World Record attempt for xxxx" approach. Let's face it, it's August, which means silly season for the media so anything goes. At no 18 in the Video Viral chart I get sent once a week, was this world record "attempt" from Benson's Beds (a UK bed and mattress company).
Fair play to them, they've understood that video content doesn't have to cost millions to create, and ideas and creativity rule.
They've grasped that slapping your branding all over something from the outset isn't necessary nor necessarily a positive - people will watch content that's silly, fun or engaging, and if you capture imagination quickly at the beginning there's a reasonable chance they'll watch long enough to get to the "brought to you by" explanation.
It looks this was uploaded on the 26th July and has already had 415k views which isn't too shabby.
There is no doubt the media landscape has changed irrevocably over the last few years, and will continue to do so. Many of the old models are being questioned and we're all trying to get our heads around this brave new digital world that's changing so fast we're running to keep up.
So with thanks to a friend of mine in the US who sent this to me, here's a well made piece of UGC (User Generated Content) that made me smile today and made some valid points along the way.
Grab a coffee, apply your headphones and watch for 8 minutes. Long by many video standards but a story well told
And if you still need convincing that publishing is in a tricky place, and old models have to change, read this article about USA Today's plans to attempt to monetise some of their digital content.
There's yet another Tube strike in London. Travel chaos and misery for many. I frequently walk to work from my mainline station so it hasn't significantly inconvenienced me, and luckily it wasn't raining.
Watching all the people out on bikes who clearly haven't ridden one since they were 10, and the nervous people wandering around with an A to Z in their hands (turn the GPS on your phones on chaps!) made me recall this song / video which has been around for yonks but which always makes me laugh. (There's some slightly colourful language, be warned if you are of a sensitive disposition!)
Forget traditional awareness build and ad decay curves, on the web content can live forever being watched and revisited in peaks and troughs as it becomes more or less relevant, or found by different groups of people. It's reach accumulates over time in less predictable ways but that shouldn't make its contribution any less valuable. Brands just need to think about it differently
And once more I'm contributing to the blogosphere.
Yesterday 61k new blogs were created (according to Nielsen Blogpulse). That's a lot of people expressing their views on all manner of things, joining the "Generation G" revolution where giving is the new taking and sharing is the new giving. G for generosity.
Participation, a very web 2.0 behaviour.
So in the interest of sharing in a slightly more informed fashion than just making my Delicious bookmarks available for all to see, I've decided to commit fingers to keyboard and start this blog.
Working in the digital realm is an exciting place to be. The digital landscape changes so fast there's no time to get bored, and the creativity I see never ceases to amaze me. So for those that don't get to spend as much time exploring the treasures out there, may this blog be a short cut to innovative, quirky, interesting, fun, awful or just random things I've encountered on my daily meanderings around Cyburbia.
All the opinions I express are my own and don't reflect those of any of my clients or companies with which I may have worked or be working currently.
So let's start off with a link to something I spotted last week. The "literal video" movement has an interesting take on music videos, and this version of Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart video made me laugh more than anything else I saw all week.
In fact having been rather over-exposed to the song having worked with Cadbury last autumn on the Gorilla ad re-mix campaign (itself originally UGC), it made me feel a whole lot better! Imagine the power of linking that amount of laughter and goodwill to a brand? Cadburys do a great job of that, but so many brands are still totally missing the point, and just publishing ads designed for TV and hoping for the best.
Yes the good ones do get watched, forwarded, embedded and talked about, but not many brands are brave enough to depart from the tried and trusted rules of TV commercials and embrace the true potential of the digital realm.
