This video from ACT Conferencing, a global provider of integrated conferencing solutions, describes the distinct differences between webcasting and web conferencing. It's presented by Clair Pearson, Global Product Manager of Events & Multimedia, who discusses the variety of virtual solutions and common terms used to describe web conferencing, online meetings, webinars, virtual events, streaming and webcasts.

You know who claims to know content marketing these days? Everybody who likes money, that’s who.

What if there was a way to separate the veteran communicator from the Johnny Come Lately?

So that in the midst of this content marketing gold rush, clients and hiring managers can begin identify the pros who know how to think about marketing, conceive strategic content, create the right media, craft compelling messages that actually resonate with key audiences.

You know, the pros who have been doing content marketing all along—as opposed to the person for whom “content” is just a lucrative new vocabulary word.

Today, when consumers shop online, they expect the personalized attention of an in-store experience. They want brands to provide engaging experiences during purchases, and at every stage of the customer journey. As a result, innovative marketers are turning to online video as an engagement tool.

Below are five considerations for ensuring your brand's success with online video.

Search engines favor video, and now structure their results to reward sites that use it. Consequently, online marketers are investing more in order to promote their videos. One investment that goes a long way toward attracting higher quality visitors is making on-site videos accessibility at scale, e.g., for every product in your catalog. This ensures reach for long-tail keywords, which are known to drive the highest quality traffic and best conversion rates. 

Pre-roll ads bring your prospects back. The average consumer will interact with your brand several times before conversion. An effective way to bring site abandoners back and recoup otherwise lost investment in traffic is with retargeted ads designed to re-engage abandoners based on their previous behavior on your website.
Online brands can now take retargeted advertising a step further by presenting abandoners with video pre-roll ads that are personalized based on shopping history, present relevant products and current deals most appropriate to visitors’ browsing behavior. Retargeted pre-roll ads (see Office Depot example below) outperform traditional retargeted banner ads with higher conversion rates and often with above-average order value, leading to a significant return on ad spend.


On-site video increases conversion rates. When videos are properly produced, they captivate users. The availability of video also enhances credibility and the overall impression of the website even among users who do not view them. What's more, videos generated in real time enhance the potential of on-site videos even further. As content, such as price, seasonal deals and last-minute offers constantly change, product videos are created on the fly to overcome what was a major challenge for manual video production. The result is not only a richer and more engaging shopping experience, but also higher conversion rates. 
Online video can be an effective customer service tool. A company’s ability to retain customers strongly depends on the way it services them from the point of first contact and throughout the customer’s lifetime with the brand. Online video is another tool brands can use to deliver the best possible service experience. 
Use video to onboard new customers with in-depth product demonstrations, provide order and provisioning status (see Dell example below), or deliver complex bills, statements and invoices with an easily digestible explanation of usage and fees. Companies that have done this have customers who make more informed repeat purchases and less calls to the contact center, resulting in fewer product returns, decreased merchandising and support costs, greater trust and credibility, and generally higher customer satisfaction. 


Online video makes for more impactful nurturing campaigns. The effectiveness of best customer nurturing practices, including email campaigns, newsletters, loyalty programs and customer portals, is often enhanced with personalization features to engage the customer with offerings that resonate based on his profile, shopping history and browsing trail. 

Implementing personalized videos based on individual shopping history can significantly enhance efforts to nurture, upsell and retain existing customers. The open rate for video newsletters, for example, is two to three times higher than for text. Personalized video newsletters can include a greeting with the recipient’s name, as well as display promotional offerings based on browsing history, geography or preference segmentation.
At right is an example of an email nurturing campaign from Shopbop.com to a customer who recently purchased a pair of denim jeans.

These five applications of online video bridge the gap between live and virtual experiences for the consumer and offers the most streamlined way to present information in all of their touch points with your brand.

Do you have other considerations for successful engagement with online video? Please share your experiences below - I’d love to hear from you. 

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A brief history of the last 50 years in corporate video: Corporate training films begat weird corporate promo videos begat dreadful corporate streaming videos begat public embarrassment through paltry page views. 

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A recent article on digiday.com reviewed some of the myths in the ad-tech space and discussed why they are indeed myths. While reading this, I thought about the applicability of this to the online video advertising space. Let’s analyze each myth separately.

Myth 1: There’s not enough quality inventory for advertisers.

When we talk about online video advertising, I look only at in-stream video ads. And while there is certainly less inventory in video compared to display, video inventory is growing at an amazing pace. Comscore reports that last month Americans viewed 9.5 billion video ads. So basically, in one year, we more than doubled the number of video ad views - incredibly 2.5X compared to April 2011.

In terms of quality of the inventory, I believe it is extremely powerful to get the attention of a viewer for 15 or 30 seconds in a pre-roll ahead of the content the viewer is looking to watch. We've seen high engagement rates - without comparison to display ads, which sometimes even appear below the fold. So, at the end of the day, a video ad view is much more powerful than a banner ad impression.

Myth 2: Publishers should worry about programmatic buying.

In my humble opinion, publishers should worry if buying is done in the traditional way. Programmatic buying is the only way to maximize the full potential of your inventory.  It's true that today because of the scarcity of good premium content, high-end inventory is easily sold, but with time, advertisers will want to make smarter buys and be willing to pay higher prices for the "right" opportunities. 

Myth 3. Ad Tech is too complicated.

I believe that the video ad environment is still less complicated than its elder display counterpart. I also believe there will be some consolidation in the next few years. Advertisers would like to manage their advertising budget in a transparent way and be able to transfer funds between channels to areas where they see higher returns per every dollar spent. Today, the market is very fragmented (search, display, social, video, email), but with time, technology platforms will be built to provide a true holistic view on ad spending and returns. Companies, like Google, Adobe/Omniture and others, are already heading in that direction, and video is going to be an integral part of that.

 Myth 4. Programmatic buying introduces a new set of undifferentiated middlemen. 

In general, I would like to see fewer players along the value chain and each taking a piece of the action. Fewer hands involved in the process will increase market efficiencies. As they say, "cut out the middlemen."  While many ad-tech companies bring value to the chain, especially in the formative stages of the online video advertising space, it can be hard to distinguish one video exchange from another. Again, ideally, with time as the space matures, there will be fewer middlemen. 

The online video advertising world is a few steps behind the display banner space. Whether it is 2 years or 5 years behind, it is clear that video is catching up quickly and we here at SundaySky are certainly excited to help shape the future of it.

But later the internet appeared and we betrayed our best friend –TV, leaving it alone with elderly and found a new one – Internet, which enabled us to use websites that showed us everything online. We could watch anything we wanted at any time. Gradually the social media developed and the most popular online platform YouTube was launched in 2005. Since then arguments are held- which one is better TV or YouTube. Of course the majority of users are young and they will assuredly say that YouTube is better and will give their reasons. 

The time factor plays a predominating role in this argument. YouTube is available at any time you want to watch. If you are away it is available everywhere you want to watch, just find the wireless connection and finally it is available on your cell phone. NO restrictions are put there and anyone cat enter here and watch videos according to their interest. Everything is sorted out here. Any member of your family can watch a video and get the information he requires from YouTube. 

You want to entertain your children and don’t know how- here it comes to help-find all the cartoons of the world and let them watch it successively. Want to listen to your favorite singer’s latest song and watch the music video, here again Youtube comes to help. Have just got an interesting video and want to share it with your friends-post it on Youtube, the more views you get the more famous you are. Want to know anything about your favorite product- here the ads will be found. 

And what do you think you lose doing it? Nothing, you don’t even need to pay money, just sign up here and add and watch as many videos as you can. So with these simple explanations I assure you that YouTube is better, faster and more qualified than TV. 

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The do-it-yourself automotive trend is growing every day, and especially in a down economy, people want to save money by installing performance parts themselves so they can save hundreds of dollars on labor. There is no better way for a manufacture of performance parts to connect with their potential customers than to create videos such as the one below that give you a background and step by step installation guide so you feel comfortable doing the job yourself. For example, in the video below, Mishimoto, a brand popular for radiators and cooling parts, demonstrates how to install their parts into a Subaru Impreza WRX.

  

It also helps that the video has a professional race car driver, Matt Waldin, to give credibility to the brand and entice customers to continue watching the video. The video goes step-by-step in explaining not only the benefits of the part, but what tools you need to do the job so you can be sure you have everything necessary to get the job done. 

Some customers like to make their own product videos, and they gain a following and recognition on automotive forums of their knowledge and experimentation of the products. Lots of times, especially with newer cars, people like to hold off on buying parts until someone in the community buys it first and then reviews it for quality, ease of installation and performance gains. 

Some how-to's can get very technical, and some customers even do mechanical comparisons on a dynamometer to determine effectiveness of parts, such as a comparison of the difference between a short ram intake and a cold air intake. Information such as this isn't so straight forward, so there needs to be testing done that can only be given credibility with a video posted online, or dyno sheets that show power gains. As customers get more savvy, online videos are going to be playing a bigger part in the automotive performance market.

Companies want to prove that business video delivers a measurable financial impact to justify the investment.

In the current online business environment, all companies need to invest in solutions that have a clear and measurable ROI and payback period. Sure, vendors of business video solutions tout the impact of video on targeted business metrics, such as conversion rate, churn rate, engagement rate, call rate, and customer satisfaction as drivers of ROI. But, do they prove that business video is actually delivering these results? If vendors only compare the metrics of video viewers to non-viewers, without controlling for volume of video views and the effects of self-selection bias, the actual ROI results will be inaccurate.

True SmartVideo solutions are designed to address these concerns. Every program starts with defined goals that are measurable. The initial phase of the program includes a persistent control group that separates visitors into a test group (has access to video) and control group (no access to video). Performance of the video group vs. the control group is measured for each metric. This addresses the volume of video views on the total performance and also controls for self-selection bias. The aim is to measure transactional impact (short term) and lifetime impact (longer term) on key metrics.

I’ll use an example to illustrate these points.

A common statement is that “video-viewers convert at 3x the rate of non-viewers”. If non-viewers convert at 2%, this means that video viewers convert at 6%. Without using a control group to address video view rate and self-selection bias, the ROI projections would not be accurate or realistic. Consider the below visual.

This illustration demonstrates the impact of self-selection bias on the test visitors who don’t view video (slightly lower conversion rate) and also reflects the impact of scale of visitors who choose to view the video. Although video viewers convert at 3X non-viewers, the actual lift in conversion is 5% when comparing total video group vs. control group (2.1% conversion rate for the video group vs. 2.0% for the control group).

To effectively measure impact of business video, it is critical to define the success criteria and metrics before kicking off the program. Then, establish a control group to measure the overall effect of video on the target metrics, instead of measuring only actions of video viewers vs. non-viewers. 

Is your business video program delivering measurable financial impact? If not, consider adopting a SmartVideo approach.

Online Video Publishing [dot] com welcomes SundaySky as a new blog content partner.