The Plan
A two-minute video called “Bee-Boy dance crew drops dead” was introduced in July. It features a dance crew in bee outfits, doing a “bee dance” to an instrumental hip-hop track, complete with DJ, also in a black and yellow bee outfit. It was disseminated to bloggers who tended to embrace social causes and youth efforts and was introduced in chat sites as well. After all of the dancers disappear, the viewer is directed to the helpthehoneybees.com site. The Feed Company, Los Angeles, handled the viral video aspect of the campaign.

The Results
The video generated more than 2 million views in two weeks and drew over 3,500 comments on YouTube. More than 150 blogs featured the video and it was part of over 11,000 Web forum discussion sessions. The video maintains a 4 1/2 star rating on YouTube.

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Brandweek [link]

Such passionate emotional connections can lead to sky-high ROI. American Express demonstrated this when it witnessed a 45% increase in credit card applications during its Statue of Liberty restoration campaign.

But brands must be careful to select an appropriate cause. If the issue doesn’t fit what they’re selling, they could be accused of using trendy charities to make a profit.

Cases don’t have to be high-profile to be sound marketing strategies. In lieu of following well-trod routes, such as breast cancer, AIDS or genocide, ice cream company Häagen Dazs took up the case of the disappearing honey bees.

Honey bees began dying mysteriously about two years ago. The reason for this hasn’t yet been discovered, but scientists’ failure to correct the situation may yield potentially catastrophic repercussions on the human food supply. Since 30 of its 73 flavors use ingredients that depend on bees for pollination (e.g., almonds, blueberries, peaches), it was considered a highly relevant issue to Häagen Dazs.

With help from Omnicom’s Goodby, Silverstein, & Partners, the firm launched a multi-platform campaign that included TV ads, print ads that flower when planted, a microsite, and philanthropic sponsorships.

But its viral video, Bee-Boy Dance Crew, generated the biggest impact. Inspired by a dance that bees do to divulge the location of nectar to hive members, a breakdancing crew, dressed like giant bees, competes on a dance floor. Targeted to youth thirsty for honey, hip-hop and a cause to support, the complex footwork of the Bee-Boys — a pun that plays on “b-boys,” a street term for breakdancers — sparked the interest of kids that follow breakdancing culture.

At the end of the video, only one bee-boy is left standing. He looks around, wonders, “Where my bees at?” and fades dramatically into darkness.

Los Angeles-based Feed Company spearheaded the initiative to put the Bee-Boys in front of digitally connected youth across social networks, video sites and blogs, acknowledging their participation — and hopefully their desire to pass it on — was key to the video’s viral success.

“Young people online are sharing content and issues that are important to their lives,” said Josh Warner, president and founder of Feed Company. “Using video to engage that audience on the web, where they hang out, is a great strategy for brands that are willing to take risks.”

The pay-off was significant for Häagen Dazs, which isn’t known for its youth appeal or digital-savvy. In two weeks ending Aug. 1, the video garnered two million views and 3,500 comments. It also earned a four-and-a-half star rating out of five on YouTube, was covered across 150 sites and blogs, and was mentioned in 11,000 forum discussions.

Coverage in the Huffington Post, on Treehugger, and CNN, which picked up the story and spread it nationwide, contributed to significant microsite traffic.

Visits to Häagen Dazs’ “save the bees” site spiked, reflecting heightened interest in the bee issue, and solidifying consumers’ connection between brand and cause. While bees haven’t yet been saved, intensified consumer interest in Häagen Dazs ice cream — of which every pint sports the pro-bee message — suggests perhaps people have begun to care.

MarketingVOX [link]

For its “Häagen-Dazs Loves Honey Bees” campaign, the ice cream maker’s agency of record Omnicom Group’s Goodby, Silverstein & Partners created a video showing costumed bees performing a unique bee dance set to hip-hop music, only to then slowly disappear from view.

Then, Los Angeles-based marketing shop Feed Company was brought in to formulate and execute the “seeding” strategy for the video online. “Seeding,” which is Feed Company’s specialty, is a less hackneyed term for “viral marketing,” but essentially means the same thing.

The Honey Bee cause campaign incorporated a number of media, from traditional television ads and “Plant this page, Save a bee” flower-seed print ads to a microsite and philanthropic sponsorships. Feed Company was tasked with introducing the video to a large online youth-based community that actively shares video content and champions social causes on top social networks, video sites and blogs.

“Youth online have a lot of socio-political energy and word-of-mouth impact,” said Christine Chen, associate media director for San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. “So we really needed to get the video to key social locations on the Web where it couldn’t be overlooked. Feed Company understood this and delivered the expected reach and engagement.”

In two weeks, “Bee-Boy Dance Crew” was viewed over 2 million times online. In addition, it received more than 3,500 comments on YouTube and was “buzzed about” on more than 130 sites and blogs and over 11,000 forum discussion sessions. The video continues to receive a four-and-a-half star rating on YouTube.

According to Josh Warner, president and founder of Feed Company, Feed Company typically charged between $60,000 and $75,000 for a campaign of this scale. “Häagen-Dazs definitely got their money’s worth,” Warner said.

Founded in early 2007, Feed Company quickly established a name for itself when it helped Ray-Ban spread a video of a guy catching sunglasses on his face to the tune of over 13 million views.

To achieve such impressive numbers, Feed Company employs word of mouth, social media and public relations to build up online views for brands and their videos. The company optimizes viral videos for search engines, and buzzes about the videos with influential bloggers, editors, and social networking sites. Other clients include Microsoft Zune, Intel, Disney, and Deutsch/LA.

“How do you take your product into different online environments? Do you do user-generated content or something more professional? How do your other marketing efforts intersect with these efforts? What brand themes are you bringing to this new audience? Do you reveal who you are, and if so, how? These are just some of the questions a marketer has to answer when considering seeding video online,” Warner said.

MediaPost [link]

The claim: California’s state bird, the quail, is brown and ugly and should be replaced by a parrot. No, that’s not another bizarre California ballot measure. It’s part of an advertising campaign by Parrot, one of the many companies trying to get consumers to buy their hands-free devices in advance of Tuesday’s ban on driving while talking on a cellphone without using a headset.

Rather than showcase their devices in TV and print ads, many companies have decided instead to go the nontraditional route. They have created viral videos, dreamed up a scheme in which a ticket for driving with a cellphone could be used as a coupon for a hands-free device and created a whole campaign to replace the state bird with a parrot, complete with a petition and a letter to the governor.

Nontraditional advertising “can bring effectiveness and reach that traditional advertising cannot,” said Scott Leonard, president of A.D.D. Marketing, a Los Angeles-based ad agency. “It can get people to stop in their tracks and focus on something in a real deep and meaningful way.”

It’s also cheap, Leonard said. That could be important because many companies won’t allocate much money to advertise in only California and Washington, the two states that have bans on driving while talking on a cellphone going into effect Tuesday.

Aside from the site at www.parrotnotquail.com, which extols the virtues of both parrot the bird and Parrot the Paris-based company, there also are billboards and a radio campaign in which a host named Positive Parrot talks about road rage. The company has also created two viral videos in which a bratty teen drives his instructors mad by talking on his cellphone during a driving lesson.

If you’ve found some fake bird poop on your car recently, along with a reminder about the cellphone ban, that’s Parrot too.

“We didn’t really have the money to run TV ads, so we tried to find interesting ways to get people to engage with the brand,” said Laura Eastman, director of client services at Ground Zero, the Los Angeles ad agency behind the state bird campaign.

The videos have increased traffic on Parrot.com 25%, said Bryan Westbrook, a spokesman for Feed Co., which created the videos.

Another video, created by Cardo Systems Inc., a maker of hands-free devices, has been viewed more than 4 million times since it was posted last month, and versions in French and Japanese have received a lot of hits. In the videos, a few friends put kernels of popcorn on a table with cellphones. They call the cellphones, which makes the popcorn pop.

A link to Cardo’s website appears during the video (no, you can’t really pop popcorn with phones, Cardo says — the videos are “fictitious and optical illusions”).

“We wanted to get in front of millions of global consumers,” spokeswoman Kathryn Rhodes said. “We needed more brand awareness.”

Plantronics Inc., another maker of hands-free devices, has created an educational site about the law and a radio campaign on KGO-AM (810) in the Bay Area. It also has partnered with Best Buy so that consumers who purchase a certain type of headset get the Geek Squad to set it up free, spokesman Dan Race said.

Of course, if you’re trying to advertise to people who gab on the phone while driving, you could argue that a billboard is the best way to go. That’s where Aliph Inc., which makes a hands-free device called Jawbone, will begin to advertise Tuesday.

But its campaign isn’t traditional either.

Aliph’s billboards will feature pictures of people in prison mug shots, with the slogan “Crime Pays: Bring Your Hands Free Ticket to Jawbone.com.” Those who get fined for driving with a cellphone can submit their ticket information for $20 off the price of Jawbone.

The strategy? Perhaps Aliph is going after a different demographic from the civic-minded person who might vote for a parrot as California’s state bird — criminals who can’t vote.

LA Times [link]

Speaking both as a blogger as well as someone who does blogger outreach for marketing campaigns, I feel like I am qualified to say what works and what doesn’t. Below are some key points to making your blogger pitch effective and that you get the best result and coverage for your product or client.

• Address a blogger by name when it is provided. If the blogger’s name is not available, then address them by their blog’s name. While this takes longer and can be tedious with the copy and pasting necessary, it can go a long way in showing that you care enough to personalize the outreach.

• Keep it short. Almost all bloggers write in their spare time, meaning that they don’t want to read through something long, especially if they receive many pitches.

That said, some of the best pitches I have received are from Feed Company, the people behind the YouTube viral-marketing. While their content is only tangentially related to the subjects about which I write, I always appreciate their personalized pitches and would definitely post their content if I found it relevant to my readers. Below is a recent pitch.

“Hi SavoirVivreNY,

Check out the follow-up to YouTube video
sensation “Guys backflip into jeans” which shows Rocky the orangutan as he
chills in the streets of Hollywood sporting classic denim.
With a laid-back tone and catchy beat, “Super chill monkey does Hollywood”
follows Rocky as he rides the bus, goes to an audition, and chows down at his
favorite taco stand. Damn it feels good to be a primate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBFhvrAOFqY

Please let me know if you decide to post it!

Thanks,”

Well would you look at that, I posted their link after all!

Editor Drew Fiedler’s blog [link]

Video seeding on the web is a relatively new marketing phenomenon brand advertisers have discovered. It’s an innovative way to get brand videos viewed by users on video sites, blogs and social networks. Video seeding relies on a combination of digital PR, on-site and word-of-mouth marketing to get videos viewed on YouTube and other video sites where the fight for attention is fierce.

Since it’s still in its infancy, there are many questions and misconceptions about what video seeding is and how to use it. Let me clear those up.

Isn’t a great video enough to get the word out?

No, a great video is just the beginning.

We see videos from great creatives and agencies on YouTube and other sites that don’t get the views and engagement they deserve. Why? There’s an audience for the content, but the people in that audience just are not aware of it.

For example, there’s an agency in Seattle that created these great brand videos for Widmer Beer. The agency did everything right with the creative, and the content was fun and social. People in the video were doing what beer drinkers would be doing if they had thought of it. The videos should have received more views, but there wasn’t enough marketing support.

People think that viral video just happens. Other video campaigns like Dove, Ray-Ban and Quicksilver were all really successful because they had a lot of planning and marketing behind them.

Can I repurpose the video I have used in other campaigns?

Too often marketers treat video seeding as another medium into which they can shoehorn existing content. But advertisers need to think like an entertainment company and develop different creative altogether. This content needs to compel and engage audiences because viewers on YouTube make a choice to watch your video. So, your creative needs to stand out and compete with LisaNova, or Chocolate Rain, or whatever is popular that day.

Ray-Ban and its ad agency were very effective last year with a campaign we seeded called “Never Hide.” They created six videos that were linked creatively, but stood out on their own as individual pieces of entertainment. This enabled audiences to become engaged with the content and share it with their friends. The most popular video of the six, “Guy Catches Glasses with Face,” received more than 13 million views on multiple sites and still gets several thousand views a day a year later.

Why can’t I just rely on pre- and post-roll video advertising?

I’m not one to rip on pre- and post-roll video advertising. Different ad platforms work for different reasons on any one campaign. But brands are coming to video seeding companies with a type of creative that doesn’t fit into a 15-second ad format. There’s more of a story to tell, or a different message that can’t be conveyed in a shorter ad format.

The one thing I tell clients is that they need to stop thinking of video seeding as an isolated marketing activity; instead it should be integrated with other elements of a marketing campaign. One type of marketing effort shouldn’t be carrying all of the weight; integration is key. We find that traditional PR outreach and other media exposure contributes a lot to the effort by driving search and views on the videos we seed, which can be very helpful if timed right.

Why consider video seeding?

Advertisers have a responsibility to make their digital content available in as many places as possible to be consumed by their audience. Social networks are the best places for users to consume video-based media. In this environment, it’s easy to watch, comment, share, tag and republish video on other outlets, so you have this incredible extrapolation effect that’s not possible with print, TV or radio. When was the last time you ripped an ad out of a magazine and sent it to a friend? With a click of a mouse, you can send a video on YouTube to your friend and comment on it. That’s a very powerful opportunity brands can take advantage of.

How does video seeding affect branding?

The branding in videos we seed is usually very subtle. We recommend that our clients brand their creative at the end of the video with a URL, bug, campaign tagline — or not at all. We also recommend subtle branding within the video itself, but subtle doesn’t have to be unmemorable. In a video we seeded called “The Masks” for Microsoft Zune, more than one million views were generated on YouTube and the only branding was at the very end of the video with a URL to microsite zune-arts.net. Of the 3,000+ comments received on the video, many mentioned Zune.

With a successful seeding campaign, users make the connection to the brand. However, how you brand your content should be guided by why you think users are in these social environments in the first place. They’re not there to watch TV commercials. They’re there to get away from the mainstream and watch what they want to watch on their own terms. If you accept this, you can start to develop and brand worthy creative for these environments.

How does it affect messaging?

What happens oftentimes with clients is that the message they have in mind for their creative and the one we end up with is very different. Feed seeded a controversial GM TV spot for Deutsch Advertising that promoted GM’s 100,000-mile warranty. It featured a sympathetic robot that has a bad dream and imagines getting fired from his job at the GM plant. We fell in love with this robot. We created a blog for the robot, created a user account for the robot on YouTube and even helped him do his own podcast — ultimately zeroing in on the creative that resonated most with users in the environments they socialized in. Often three or four different messages can be used for different audiences, which enables you to cast a bigger net and reach more people with your video.

Josh Warner is president of Feed, which has seeded many successful web brand videos including Ray-Ban (”Catch”), GM (”Robot”) and Microsoft Zune (”The Masks”).

iMediaConnection [link]

If you’ve never heard of White Gold, that’s probably because he doesn’t really exist. But he does star in the new multiplatform advertising campaign from the California Milk Processor Board (the “Got Milk?” people). Think Tenacious D shilling for Big Dairy. It’s an obvious bid to hit the ad-cynical teenage demographic where they’re most vulnerable: the funny bone. And the campaign is genuinely hilarious. But will that be enough? U.S. consumption of milk slumped 14 percent between 1981 and 2006, according to the Department of Agriculture. In California, which is getting the brunt of the campaign, the price of whole milk has climbed 44 percent since 2003. A gallon of milk costs even more than a gallon of unleaded, with a nationwide average price of $3.87. Sen. Barack Obama reminded voters from the stump in Pennsylvania at the end of March that “you’ve never paid more for a dozen eggs, a gallon of milk.”

As executive director of the California Milk Processor Board, Steve James is all too familiar with those numbers. But he points out that despite the increase in cost, consumption did not slip over the past 12 months. “Our only mission is to increase the consumption of fluid milk,” he says. “You don’t find too many marketing people saying ‘Woo-hoo! It remained flat!’ But staying flat in a market where the price increase was 52 percent [over last year] is incredible.”

Enter White Gold. The mock rock god has been given the full Spinal Tap treatment courtesy of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners of San Francisco: a MySpace page went up last month, along with an elaborate White Gold Web site good for killing an hour if it doesn’t crash your computer. Two full-length videos of White Gold’s surprisingly excellent music (and ridiculously silly lyrics) have dribbled onto YouTube in the past month and will soon be available on iTunes. Last week short segments of the videos began appearing on California television along with “Behind the Music”-style documentary footage of the mythical guitar hero espousing the mighty virtues of milk (he once replaced a broken string midconcert with a lock of his protein-strengthened tresses).

If this all sounds a bit risky, the CMPB is not ditching its iconic “Got Milk?” campaign (the rights to which it leases to other dairy boards) anytime soon. But James sees the decidedly weird campaign—starring a teethtacular glam-rock wizard in a white tiger loincloth—as an opportunity to reach out to kids just as they’re reaching out for sodas. “They tend to go outside the family and lose the mother gatekeeper making them drink milk with every meal,” James tells NEWSWEEK. “That’s a demographic that we really felt was important to relate to. This struck us this as the perfect way and the perfect tone: it’s ‘Zoolander’; it’s ‘Spinal Tap’—it really resonated for us.” (Average board member age: 55-60. “We’re a bunch of middle-aged dairy guys,” says James. “One guy said, ‘I don’t get it, and that’s probably a good thing’.”)

Along the sliding scale of what constitutes a viral hit, James and the creative team at Goodby et al. might take solace from a few Web stats: the, uh, milktastical video for “One Gallon Axe” has netted 380,000 views in three weeks; “Tame the White Tiger,” replete with cowbell, a milky jungle waterfall and lasers, has been watched more than 5,000 times in 10 days. White Gold counts Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl as a top MySpace friend, for what that’s worth. And the reason the music is so spot-on is the songs are co-written by members of the cult Detroit band Electric Six. Will all this translate into dairy sales? It’s funny now, but it may not have the timeless, malleable appeal of the milk-mustache campaign (possibly a moot point: the man has a wicked handlebar all his own). At least for the moment, White Gold is milk magical.

Newsweek [link]

The Zune Arts program consisted primarily of a website, zune-arts.net, featuring short films and music from up-and-coming artists, all of which focused on the theme of sharing and friendship — one of the player’s key attributes. But since then the website has morphed into an online haven for emerging artists and musicians. While still part of the Zune family of marketing initiatives and still touting the “sharing” themes, Zune Arts now has its own goals and audience and has become established in the indie arts community.

By late 2007, Microsoft and its “curator” agency, 72andSunny, realized there was a much bigger audience it could introduce itself to: Zune Arts’ hip and emerging art and artists not only could generate good will with a larger group of influencers, but also lend a cool edge to Zune and boost the music player’s sales, which to date have not exactly skyrocketed.

Viral made sense
Because Zune Arts already had an arsenal of artist-created just-for-online videos, a push in the viral video direction made sense. The site already had the videos and music free and readily available for downloading and forwarding. So Microsoft and 72andSunny turned to Feed, a specialty media company that seeds video. Feed creates marketing campaigns that get videos in front of online influencers and relevant consumers with the goal of generating postings, pass-alongs and recommendations to create a selected critical mass — and maybe even go viral.

In November, Feed began working a Zune Arts video called “Masks,” created by New York animators PandaPanther with music by The Black Angels, from Austin, Texas. The Feed team began a two-month strategy of going online to niche indie film and music sites, lifestyle publications and more general video sites while targeting art and music communities or individuals within YouTube, MySpace and Heavy.

Feed created a branded environment on YouTube, sent e-mails to bloggers, posted on forums and called contacts and acquaintances. Within a month “Masks” tallied 200,000 views on YouTube; good for a niche animation project, but the animators wanted more. So they went back to everyone they had originally contacted and asked them to help get “Masks” to YouTube’s home page by petitioning their favorite film or animation editor.

YouTube Success
One week later they got an e-mail from the YouTube film and video editor saying she was considering “Masks” for a feature. Another week later, the video was on the home page of YouTube — where it stayed for six days — and has now had more than 1.2 million views.

Did all that maneuvering and all those views ultimately sell more Zune music players? Maybe, maybe not. But that’s not necessarily the point here, said Feed President Josh Warner.

“This is very much a brand-awareness medium. … We complement a more traditional marketing campaign,” he said. “I can’t say we’ve moved the sales needle, but I would say we’ve helped build strong brands.”

Video seeding is a fairly new marketing concept. But the idea seems to make sense. After all, most marketers would agree that just throwing up a video on YouTube is probably not going to get it widely seen.

A way to discover
“The value of this service is that they help ensure people who like to discover things, discover your content where they want to,” said Glenn Cole, co-founder and creative director of 72andSunny. “To me, the mental image of what they do is that they’re like the guys who put the Easter Eggs out in the yard when they’re seven years old, and they do it really well. They could just put it out on the tree stump in the middle of the yard — and some clients want a giant egg out in the yard that no one can possibly miss — but I think [for other clients] the hiding makes their content feel more special when you finally find it.”

And although viral video is oft-tossed about as branded-entertainment gold, analysts and agencies also agree that “going viral” should not be the goal in creating or disseminating online videos.

“That’s the problem — it’s a one-hit wonder,” said Forrester Research senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang. “If you instead have an ongoing process and really become relevant in your target market, you’ll hit 80% of your target vs. a one-hit wonder that hits a large percentage of people but not your target.” The problem is that marketers can’t get past the allure of those big hits.

Engagement another draw
“Viral video is not only cool and [has] potentially lower distribution costs, but the other draw is engagement. The audience is passing the word along and your message now comes with their halo. It’s a very sexy proposition on several fronts. But the question is, can you build processes that are predictable and cost efficient to do it? I think we’re very early in that process,” said Jupiter Research analyst David Card. Feed’s Mr. Warner said he can. And although he said his company has had one truly viral video — meaning it received wide mainstream viewing — in his company’s one-and-a-half-years in business, that doesn’t mean branded videos are a waste of marketing dollars. “It’s very rare that marketers have a viral video. But what they do have is great video that needs to — and can — find a great audience of engaged consumers,” Mr. Warner said.

AdAge [link - login required]

The free program, known as YouTube Insight, has already gotten a lot of reaction from marketers, many of whom use the highly trafficked site to post commercials, movie trailers and other content.

“A lot is happening with social networking sites,” said Kristi Vandenbosch, president of Tequila\US. “As YouTube starts to provide this data, it makes it easier for online marketers to justify using this site for advertising.”

In the past, YouTube has publically reported the raw number of views captured by a given video along with a list of the clip’s top traffic sources. The new program, which can only be accessed by users who upload videos, breaks down viewership by day and shows the states or countries where most viewers are.

On the company blog, YouTube executives said the tool would help uploaders improve the popularity of video on the site and inform future content decision. More data tracking is already available for paid advertisers, such as those using InVideo ads, said a YouTube spokesman.

The move may be an attempt by Google to woo more advertisers to the highly trafficked site that it paid $1.76 billion for in 2006.

“The trouble with YouTube, as with many social and emerging programs, is the lack of true measurability. So, the release of YouTube Insights is definitely a step in the right direction,” said Nicholas Ward, strategist, search technology for Range Online Media. “YouTube Insights is bringing us a step closer to the kind of optimization that marketers expect from the video format.”

Until now, many marketers have relied on third party tracking companies like Vidmetrix and TubeMogul to track video views over time on different sites including YouTube.

“Without a doubt, we’re really excited about it,” said Josh Warner, president of Feed, a Los Angeles-based company that seeds branded videos on blogs, video sites and social networks. The brands Feed Company works with, which include Ray-Ban and GM, are looking for as much accountability and metrics that can be provided, he said.

YouTube’s edge over other social networking and video sites may be the volume of its traffic. According to ComScore, last month YouTube had 63 million unique visitors in the US. This was an increase of 86% versus February last year. According to Hitwise, for the week ending March 22, YouTube was the 10th most visited Web site in the US, receiving .77% of all Internet visits. In addition, last week, 80.49% of YouTube visits were from returning visitors.

“YouTube is where the audience is going and has gone to view and share and discuss video content,” Warner said. “We’ve never not included YouTube in our seeding plans.”

Some marketers see the move as an additional push to legitimizing online ad spend on social and user generated sites.

“In the short term, it is a very useful tool for uploaders and agencies who are looking to test,” said Waikit Lau, co-founder and CEO of ScanScout. “In the long term, Google could really be changing how the television consumption and advertising model works.”

However, not all reviews from marketers have been positive ones. Margie Chiu, VP of strategy at the NY office of Avenue A/Razorfish, said her initial impressions of the new capability were disappointing. “The functionality is quite limited. Nonetheless, it’s a step in the right direction,” she said. “In my mind, and for most marketers, knowing how many video views you got in Arizona is probably not very actionable.”

Chiu had some suggestions for improvement, “In our ideal state, we would have the ability to place our own tags on the videos as we think about our clients’ needs,” she said. Clients want to know how many people these videos drove to their sites, who these people are and if they’re qualified visitors, she said. Ultimately, it is about whether or not that person bought the product, she added.

The future evolutions of this type of analytics will be much more interesting, Ward speculated. “For example, how do I shift content, titles, or other aspects of a video to better reach my consumer target and create a meaningful communication?” he asked.

New features are still to come, according to a YouTube spokesman. In the coming weeks, YouTube will release a “basic discovery” feature that will allow uploaders to evaluate how viewers find their videos, he said. So people will be able to see if a video was found by searching on YouTube or Google — or if the content was discovered by browsing under “related video options” on YouTube or if the person received a link to the video by e-mail or from a Web site.

YouTube is open to listening to its users and will update Insight in the future based on their feedback, the spokesman said. Insight itself was a tool that users had been asking for, he said.

“It will be interesting to see the evolution of new features for this product… hopefully, with additional information from YouTube — like how users are finding video content — marketers will be able to identify the ‘secret sauce’ that makes video content more likely to ‘go viral’ on the Web,” said Susan Davidson, director of strategy and analytics at AtmosphereBBDO.

DMNews [link]

The Problem
Taking on the iPod may seem like a fool’s errand, but Microsoft has faith that its Zune digital music player is every bit as hip. But how to go about communicating that?

The First Step
Microsoft sought to exploit the Zune’s social networking buzz with an eight-week campaign based on a video that first ran on an arts Web site for Zune users, Zune-Arts.net, called Masks, that was a takeoff on the movie 300. The piece was created by New York animation duo Jonathan Garin and Naomi Nishimura with oversight by Zune Arts curator, 72andSunny, Los Angeles/Amsterdam.

Distribution 
From mid-November through January, Feed, Los Angeles, launched a three-phase campaign to get the video out. First, Feed hit Gen Y social networks, blogs and forums, and formulated messages to address each individual location. 

Next, Feed sent Masks to video share sites and then put out a word-of-mouth campaign in the animation community on YouTube requesting influencers to ask their YouTube editors to include Masks on the site’s Film & Animation home page. The third phase saw a broadened reach highlighting the animation’s “Make love, not war” theme to a more general audience. The move garnered the video 200,000 views across seven to 10 sites in the sixth week after launch. Masks was subsequently selected as a featured You-Tube home page video during the first week of January.

The Results 
In the eight weeks, Masks had more than 850,000 video views and 110 links to the video, including You Tube and My Space. On its placement on YouTube alone, 561 users subscribed to the Zune Arts channel, 6,500 users marked Masks as a favorite and the video received more than 4,000 positive reviews.

BrandWeek [link]