Marketing Feature: Online Videos: Click to play

Online videos are in vogue. With the ability to reach a thousand or even a million people within days, they present brands with a huge opportunity to create buzz, but not all of them get it right. What makes an online video click? Rezwana Manjur finds out.

Last year, leveraging on the 23rd James Bond movie Skyfall, Coca-Cola ran a “Coke Zero 007 Challenge” in London, where it challenged commuters to jump through a series of hoops to win a pair of tickets. As contestants completed the task, they were filmed and the video was placed online.

Within days of posting the campaign video online, it garnered hundreds of thousands of views worldwide. (At the time of writing the number stood at 9,943,527). Another online sensation was Old Spice’s “The man your man could smell like” campaign. The video, leveraging TV and online mediums, took the world by storm when chiselled and shirtless former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa promised women that with the Old Spice product, he is what their “man could smell like”.

The masterminds behind the ad also took to social media to answer questions from both consumers and celebrities, creating more real-time personal videos.

The campaign churned out more than one hundred entertaining video responses, some only moments after receiving questions from fans.

For online videos, great content is invaluable, but on the technical front, the length and pace of the video, its precision or rawness in post-production and its interactive features, all play a part in sustaining the attention of the audience.

But is it important for videos to have the same production value as traditional television programmes?

“There are two conflicting aspects,” says Mark Laudi, managing director of Hong Bao Media, who says the good news is audiences are used to low-budget productions because much of what they view on YouTube is produced by amateur video enthusiasts.

“As a result, they expect videos to be authentic, spontaneous, interesting, quirky and entertaining.”

On the other hand, producing programmes which meet your corporate and branding guidelines cannot be left to amateurs, Laudi adds.

“Bottom line is the need to hire those who can produce authentic content.”

Then there is the distribution aspect of online videos. While marrying online videos with social media is a push in the right direction what else is needed for an online video to become successful and help brands engage customers?

Winning recipe

While most marketers and agency experts unanimously agree there is no definitive “winning recipe” for creating viral online videos, the video has to resonate and be relevant to the target audience and “it has to create a stir”, they all say.

SodaStream did just that. The at-home water carbonation soda maker managed to get 4.2 million views in less than a week on its un-aired Super Bowl commercial, the “Game Changer”.

For the ad, SodaStream pitted classic beverage rivals Coke and Pepsi against each other, showing the delivery men from each of the brands running to a store to deliver the packages.

Just as one seems to tread slightly ahead, their bottles explode, even before reaching the store. The sleek machine then comes on screen splashing the tagline: “With SodaStream, we could have saved 500 million bottles on game day alone. If you love the bubbles, set them free.”

However, CBS, who aired the Super Bowl game, declined to run the ad because both the beverage brands were big supporters. Instead, SodaStream was made to air an ad with unidentifiable bottles of soda exploding.

The company then posted the ad online and the controversy made its way to the ears of the public piquing their interest and ultimately driving traffic to the online video.

Closer to home, online hotel booking firm AsiaRooms.com ran its “The Right Room” campaign online, featuring reviews for hotels through videos in an attempt to increase awareness of its site.

The 12-episode video series premiered on AsiaRooms.com’s YouTube channel, featuring two hosts in their travel pursuits.

The most popular “Right Room” episode successfully acquired about 30,000 views, with the AsiaRooms.com YouTube brand channel receiving more than one million views in total.

According to the brand, these campaign efforts helped AsiaRooms.com achieve its “big booking days” after the series premiered. Not only was there a surge in bookings, there was also a fan spike of 50% on its Facebook page since the campaign started.

“Content, the novelty of an idea, its entertainment value, tone and type of language, relevance to current affairs and the familiarity with the personas involved in the video were all contributing factors (to the video’s success),” says Clarence Lin, brand development lead of AsiaRooms.com.

In this particular instance, the brand created a two-way conversation with consumers by encouraging user-generated content from fans, weaving in personal stories. “This sparked interest,” Lin adds.

With the introduction of Smart TV,  audiences might even view online videosas suitable replacements for broadcast TV.

Clarence Lin, brand development lead

AsiaRooms.com

Another recent local example, which ties personal stories with the brand, was the Bacardi Singapore Cocktail Search. The campaign paired local Singaporeans with Singaporean bartenders to create a Bacardi cocktail to engage and educate the public of what went into making the drink.

The bulk of the material gathered through the campaign was packaged into a series of online videos and fired out through the social media platform in an attempt to hook the consumer and ultimately get them to vote for their favourite concoction.

According to Henrik Resurreccion, brand manager of Bacardi Singapore, what resulted was an increase of the local Facebook fan base by nearly 300%, amounting to a PR reach of 1.4 million people, all in seven weeks of seeding the video content.

“I see videos as opportunities for companies and products to experiment and to directly communicate with their consumers – there is more creative freedom as well as opportunity to tweak and adjust quickly dependent on consumer response. Again, we see the cross of the buzzword co-creation from the digital social networking space into online videos,” Resurreccion says.

For brands, therefore, it is vital to push the content out in the right direction.

Time to set a social reminder

Consumers today are increasingly defining themselves by the need to share, connect and broadcast and hence, strategic placement and accessibility of these videos become primary in engaging the audience.

“It’s about where the link to the video is placed and with online you can place it in any publication, site, section, blog or forum that is related to your content,” says Stuart Edwards, managing director of Profero APAC.

“With the abundance of content on the world wide web, the upload-and-they-will-come approach is already archaic.”

What’s even better is for brands to identify niche online communities and influencers to promote the online video for it to get noticed, while using “syndication services” to increase reach.

“According to the social video platform, and syndication services such as YTM, your video has less than .00001% chance of going viral on its own so don’t forget to enable simple sharing techniques. Distribution of online videos is often overlooked,” says Tuomas Peltoniemi, head of digital, TBWA\Group Singapore.

He also suggests brands leverage on social media listening tools that can help identify what people are saying about the brand before creating video content. This will ensure greater relevancy to the brand’s target audience.

The digital world is already seeing smarter distribution and syndication services to help brands achieve success on YouTube. These services offer added options that help target online videos and enable advanced tracking tools to plan future content.

But marketers are also beginning to go beyond YouTube to explore alternatives such as Vine from Twitter, Vimeo, Veoh and others.

However, the Google-owned video-sharing site, YouTube, still remains top-of-the-mind recall for most marketers, a reason why it announced plans to monetise its asset. “Google has sometimes struggled to sell YouTube as a substitute for TV due to less insight on its audience then its above-the-line alternative,” says Matthew Drury, head of digital for MEC interaction Singapore.

“The current barrier is that most consumers still regard YouTube as a short-form platform (although the partnership with the Olympics and other main events has helped move that perception).”

But with one or two wide appeal content partners, YouTube will be able to drive mass appeal, though it still has a long way to go before it is playing in the same space as Netflix and Hulu, according to Drury.

With all these developments in the online space and online viewership numbers increasing day by day, a natural question arises: Will marketers cut back on TV spend given the cost-effective nature of online videos?

Who knows, maybe stand-alone campaigns will be built around online videos (in the
near future).

Battling for budgets

A 2012 PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) annual Global Entertainment and Media Outlook report said globally, until 2016, TV would continue to hold the lion’s portion of the ad spending budget at a steady 36%.

As a region, TV advertising in Southeast Asia will see strong growth and taking the lead will be markets such as Indonesia at 15.1% and Thailand at 7.4%. The study, however, also says digital is on the way up, predicting that shift will occur mainly from print advertising to internet advertising, which will see a jump of more than 25%.

According to Greg Unsworth, technology, infoComm, entertainment and media industry leader for PwC, this money will not be just a “shift” from print to online, but will include “an added expense from advertisers”.

As the world sees the rise of faster and cheaper tablets, smartphones, ultrabooks and other handy devices, the online community will show no pace of slowing down, say marketers.

“With the introduction of Smart TV, audiences might even view online videos as suitable replacements for broadcast TV,” Lin says.

This then, he says, may result in viewers being more responsive to receiving important purchasing information online, while looking to brands for useful and meaningful content packaged in a user-friendly way.

While marketers agree online and TV need to work together, and that online is complementary and/or an extension of the whole marketing mix, they foresee the balance tipping in favour of online in the future.

“We are seeing the trend of a creation of social currency, housed primarily in videos, so I think we may one day see full campaigns moving more and more of the advertising and promotion budget towards online videos as a way of influencing and engaging their consumers better, who knows, maybe stand-alone campaigns will be built around online videos,” Bacardi’s Resurreccion, says.

His viewpoint is echoed by Anita Munro, Mindshare’s head of tactical planning for APAC.

“Online video is certainly going to have an impact on traditional TV spends. In some markets more than others, based on the online video opportunity,” she says.

“We are now looking at ‘total screen’ planning rather than TV planning alone – so TV budgets are increasingly being spread across TV and online video, including mobile and tablet video,” she explains, adding the impact on TV budgets varies, but “we’re looking at a 5-10% impact as a predicted forecast as this gains traction.

“However, growth in online video spends will also come from other forms of digital advertising as well, not solely TV.”

But, as with any marketing activity, success of online videos boils down to the deep understanding of consumer insight and building on that insight. Moreover, brands need to understand what their digital identity looks like and how it works within the overall brand identity, according to Edwards, of Profero.

“Simply re-purposing offline material in an online environment will not necessarily work. Content, elements, CTA and top and tails will be perceived differently depending on the context of the video placement.”