Video

E-commerce marketers who use video as a way to enhance their online presence and educate consumers about their products are often quick to tout its benefits. They aren't the only ones. According to Adobe , the software company responsible for such rich media tools as Flash and Scene7, incorporating video into one's digital marketing materials can result...

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In this week's Adhocracy column, Old brands and new bands: A love story, Simon Houpt looks at the ever evolving partnership between brand and band marketing. Which side is really rocking the benefits?


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Check out Simon Houpt's latest 30-Second Spots and read about this week's moment in advertising Ad agency John St. rides a Pink Pony to plaudits.


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For the second year in a row, The Globe and Mail's in-depth multimedia work has received a prestigious Emmy Award.

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BY DIANNE NICE
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Krafty product integration
In a case of art imitating life, or something like that, the fictional town of Mercy from CBC's Little Mosque on the Prairie is joining hundreds of real towns vying to be named Kraft Hockeyville. On Monday's episode, Amaar and Reverend Thorne will create a video submission for the contest, which will award to the winning town $100,000 in arena upgrades, an NHL preseason game and a visit from CBC's Hockey Night in Canada. A Kraft spokesman said the point of integrating the contest into the show is to emphasize that all towns are eligible. The publicity for Kraft probably doesn't hurt, either.


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Mad Men meets the Shopping Channel
If you haven't found the perfect gift for someone on your list, the folks at Vancouver's Wasserman + Partners might have just what you need. The ad agency has unveiled a unique line of holiday-themed gifts, including the Santa Beard Mop for cranberry sauce spills; holiday-scented air fresheners in turkey, eggnog or Yule log scents; and seasonal avian-flu masks to halt the spread of germs. Our favourite is the Scotch tape dispenser, which dispenses both Scotch and tape simultaneously. You can wrap gifts while you rap to the Wasserman Holiday Shopping Channel's RemiXmas CD.



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Marketing magazine's doing a terrific job of covering the Canadian Marketing Association's second annual Marketing Week.

The trade mag reports that during viral video expert Kevin Nalty's keynote address, he "illustrated the cost-effectiveness of YouTube for marketers by referring to a recent effort for the TV recording system Tivo. The campaign generated one million views. Of those one million views, how many of those views needed to turn into sales for the campaign to break even, he asked the audience. The answer: 0.0035%.

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We may not like to admit it, but media strategists, buyers, creative developers, and digital marketers of every ilk make mistakes. We've already looked at some of the more common offenses, including failing to follow through with blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages, and assuming that consumers are as excited about sitting through our repurposed 3-minute commercial spots as we are. Sadly, these aren't the only wrongdoings our target consumers are subject to in the online media space.



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In an article that ran Tuesday, Adweek reported that Toronto-based-company Cookie Jar Entertainment has just launched Jaroo, a site with 50 TV shows aimed directly at kids.

"Like Hulu, the Web site features TV shows that can be watched for free. Each 22-minute episode contains up to 90 seconds of commercials that cannot be skipped," the trade mag writes.

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As a certified language fuddy duddy, I'm irked whenever I hear a newly launched online video described as "viral."

To my mind, a video (or a microsite or a widget or whatever) isn't viral until it spreads. Its creators may hope it goes viral but, to a certain extent, that's out of their hands.



After it's released into the digital ecosphere, a marketing effort might infect consumers' enthusiasm so much that they tell five friends about it, who in turn tell five friends, and so on. If it does, those responsible for the effort have a bona fide viral hit on their hands. If it doesn't, then carefully their thought-out program is just that: a carefully thought-out program.

Eric Swayne is someone who gets it. In opinion piece that showed up Tuesday on AdAge.com, Swayne argues that the best viral marketing isn't viral marketing at all--it's meme marketing.

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As any experienced media strategist knows, the business of online advertising is not without its flaws. We've struggled with e-mail marketing, working for years to renew consumer trust after spending the previous years overloading them with messages they couldn't easily control. We increased our ad sizes to get Internet users' attention, decreased them when our audience was dissatisfied, and again pumped them up in order to be able to deliver more engaging ads. This is still, at its core, an experimental business, and as is always the case in such matters, it requires a certain degree of trial and error.

As such, our beloved medium has facilitated countless mistakes. These have come in virtually every shape and form, from social media gaffes to mobile marketing missteps.

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Ad Age reports that YouTube has begun placing ads on its most-popular videos.

This isn't just good news for amateur video-makers, who stand to profit from their efforts, or at least defray production costs. Advertisers can benefit too. The new system, which launched yesterday, will in some cases, "allow advertisers to jump on relevant videos as they go viral, rather than just choosing from videos produced by existing YouTube partners."



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