TV viewing is – besides for coverage of live events -  in slow decline. Sites like YouTube on the other hand is generating thousands of streams daily but very expensive to run.

But videos on YouTube and elsewhere online are very difficult to monetise. Users don’t like their viewing interrupted.

Enter ZunaVision, a technology based on an academic research project. In fact at an artificial intelligence lab at Stanford University by three researchers and an Assistant Professor and funded by Stanford professor David Cheriton.

Techniques to monetise online video have included pre and post roles, overlays and interstitial, but this is different – its overlays yes, but overlays in disguise. Techcrunch explains:

“an algorithm first analyzes the video, subsequently alters different aspects of embedded images or videos (such as the lighting, color and texture), and then attempts to fit the advertising into the physical space of their videos without appearing like a blatant overlay.”

ZunaVision claims on their site

We enable content owners to assign ad-spaces inside the physical space of their videos, ready for advertiser branding.

• Fully self-service, and fast
• No pre- or post-production, no screens
• Dynamic, resellable ad-spaces

The result: natural, uninterrupted viewing; unskippable impressions; and increased monetization for producers and sites.

Here’s another video of ZunaVision doing video inside video. Pretty slick.

Techcrunch is sceptical, calling it pop-ups for video. I don’t think its as annoying as pop-ups. In fact, did not spot the overlays in the first two scenes, probably because I expected something far more intrusive! Oops!

Still, all these Stanford whizkids still need to do is brainwash media buyers that reach ain’t everything.

In the Guardian one reason advanced – by Katy Howell (partner at Immediate Future) – as to why PR should get into blogging is that “only PR understand a crisis”.

According to Howell PR needs to both proactive – building a conversation with bloggers and other “taste makers”, as well as be flexible enough to be able to react to crisis.

She points to Pizzahut’s name change to Pastahut and that the blogosphere was not impressed by this – they saw it as a publicity stunt. They could have engaged bloggers by sending them menus, and including them in the conversation before they announced it Howell says.

A great idea.

Dell did much the same when they endured the Dell Hell media fire storm.

If you don’t yet know about it here is the story. A couple of years ago, media professor and commentator Jeff Jarvis blogged about his frustration with Dell’s customer support. He wrote Michael Dell, Dell’s founder an open letter on his blog.

The bottom line is that a low-price coupon may have gotten me to buy a Dell, but your product was a lemon and your customer service was appalling.

I shipped back my computer today and only — only — because I wrote an email to you, Mr. George, did I manage to get a refund. I’m typing this on an Apple Powerbook. I also have bought two more Apples for our home.

But you didn’t just lose three PC sales and me as a customer.

Today, when you lose a customer, you don’t lose just that customer, you risk losing that customer’s friends. And thanks to the internet and blogs and consumer rate-and-review services, your customers have lots and lots of friends all around the world.

I blog. And I shared the story of my Dell travails here. The topic resonated with hundreds more people. Go read the many comments here and here. Too busy? Then have an intern or an MBA do it for you.

And then have them read all the many posts of other bloggers who pointed to my posts and shared their dissatisfaction with your products, service, and brand and, in many cases, announced that they were no longer going to buy your name…

Ouch!

But Dell responded brilliantly. By sending technicians to reach out to complaining bloggers and solve their problems, they earned a positive buzz from the blogs in return.

Bloggers do post about brands spontaneously. And the correct engagement can prod them into action. (Unlike paying for posts which is in my opinion not real word of mouth.)

Technorati’s recent survey shows that bloggers do post about brands a lot.

But besides a crisis and being proactive there are much more PR agencies can do with blogs.

Lexis PR’s head of digital Chris Cook says in the same Guardian article:

“We believe PR is the natural home for the production of branded content. PR is about generating compelling stories that secure endorsement from third parties and drive conversation and engagement with brands. Good branded content should follow the same rules.”

Mmmm… Chris appears to be saying that just like advertising is becoming more content like, so is PR. Perhaps ad agencies and PR agencies are converging on the same territory? Content.

According to the Guardian this approach is demonstrated by the work of another PR firm, Onlinefire. Onlinefire is engaging football fans with an widget (a little application) – with links to personalised Football stories – for BBC Radio 5 live.

The widget has by all accounts been a success. It has been distributed to football sites and blogs such as clubfanzine.com, which has driven twice as many referrals to 5 Live as from bbc.co.uk itself.

The take home here is that PR companies can create awareness via content as well as any ad agency.

But have another look at Chris Cook’s definition of PR:

“PR is about generating compelling stories that secure endorsement from third parties and drive conversation and engagement with brands.”

This generation of compelling stories may have been correct in the past, but seems slightly at odds with current thinking on how companies can best communicate and have a conversation with their customers today.

To appreciate how best to engage customers its important not only to use blogs. It’s important for PR officers or those responsible for public relations in business to start blogging themselves.

That was the other thing that Dell did to escape from Dell Hell. Jeff Jarvis later wrote about Dell’s conversion to the conversation for BusinessWeek:

“Dell started its Direct2Dell blog, where it quickly had to deal with a burning-battery issue and where chief blogger Lionel Menchaca gave the company a frank and credible human voice. Last February, Michael Dell launched IdeaStorm.com, asking customers to tell the company what to do.
…
Dell blogger Menchaca has led the charge in convincing bloggers that “real people are here to listen,” and so he diligently responds and links to critics, and holds up his end of the conversation. “You can’t fake it,” he says. Dell’s team is stanching the flow of bad buzz.”

But as I posted previously, engaging customers directly through business blogs is very different from doing a press release.You can’t fake it. And neither can you be economical with the truth. That is something old PR will have to get used to. “Generating compelling stories” – especially ones that are not authentic – is old hat.

“That change in perception just doesn’t happen with a press release,” Menchaca says.

PS:

Apparently the Guardian got bits of their story wrong. According to Onlinefire’s blog:

The widget was developed by award winning design agency clock. We were brought in to take their awesome widget out to the masses, which we have done with aplomb, if we do say so ourselves – generating more than 1.5 million downloads since launch.

“Public relations firms are beginning to get in on the digital marketing act, seeing the business of inspiring bloggers to write about their brands as natural, if somewhat different, extension of traditional PR skills.”

The Media Guardian published another special insert on Internet Advertising yesterday and the above quote comes from an article (not yet online) about how PR is finding the ‘blogosphere’ the ‘perfect environment’.

Technorati recently published figures in their annual state of blogosphere survey claiming that this inspiring of bloggers is not too subtle -

“…one in three bloggers has been approached to be a brand advocate. Of those, more than six in ten were offered payments of some kind.”

These propositions are likely to be attractive to bloggers. Anybody that has done the maths would know its very difficult (it requires hundreds of thousands of pageviews) to make money from blogging via advertising with effective cost per thousands (eCPMs) of $2 to $10.

And there are companies now offering brands paid for ‘word of mouth’ opportunities with services like PayPerPost.

And this is not only about word of mouth. PayPerPost essentially pay bloggers to write about and importantly link to websites or products. The amount they also pay depends on a blog’s Google PageRank and traffic. In case you don’t know, blogs tend to have great PageRank.

Now, as any good journalist will instinctively know, any blogger that writes about a product for dosh and who does not declare this – if caught out – would ruin their blogs reputation as a credible source of information and probably damage the brand of the product they are reviewing at the same time.

PayPerPost publishes a code of bloggers ethics that includes a commitment to disclosure. But they do demand to read and approve a post before they pay.

Since paid for blog posts are not that different from advertorials (and is therefore not real word of mouth) the real value of using this method of promotion must lie in the transfer of PageRank from the blog to the product page more than anything else.

The take way? Brand advertising is under severe pressure, and what was referred to as advertising in the past is becoming more and more content like.

Social media will become home to many erstwhile advertisers. It is the dawn of a new and different way of engaging your customers.

The slide show (below) is UK centric and still has room for improvement. Any feedback or criticism is welcome.

According to New Media Age:

Google said it will sell ads to “top brand advertisers” to increase click-throughs and thereby revenues for the publisher.

I’m a but confused. Is brand advertising not supposed to be above trifling issues like sales?

Below the Google video that promotes the service.

But this week Techcrunch talked about the imminent launch of Brand Jury. A website that hopes to solve some of the problems video advertisers currently face with the acendency of the internet, and audience control (The Groundswell).

Brand Jury tries to bring ads to the people for rating and feedback, before they are released or broadcast to the wider public. It’s about introducing so called social media into the video advertising production process.

Brand Jury’s Bill Nones says:

“By using Brand Jury, you can have a direct impact on how the ads that you are forced to watch in the future are presented to you.

You currently have two options – suffer through the ads you already see, or take great lengths to avoid them. We are presenting a third option — tell the advertisers how they can better reach you.

Advertising is a fact of life, and you can’t avoid it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a say in how it is executed. Just don’t expect advertisers to “lighten up” on their own accord.”

Well advertising is not quite in such a secure place as Bill will let us have. A lot of people are very good at avoiding ads, and in particular interruptive TV ads.

I have some more doubts about this service, doubts that were also voiced (more clearly) by some of the commentators on the Techcrunch post.

AliB – September 26th, 2008 at 2:17 pm PDT

I don’t think an ad’s effectiveness can be measured by what the consumer thinks of the “advert” itself.

For example, Headon’s ad is the most annoying ad and least attractive ad I have ever seen, but I never forgot it. On the other end, I have seen many advert’s that I loved, but afterwards I didnt even know what the brand name was, or what they were trying to sell.

And…

Sekhar Ravinutala – September 29th, 2008 at 8:50 am PDT

…. My point/opinion is that your site is more useful qualitatively (written feedback by viewers) than quantitatively (rating stats). Qualitative feedback is definitely useful because it usually brings up points the advertiser never thought of. I’ve presented my videos to audiences and have ALWAYS found discovered stuff like aspects that aren’t clear to them (i.e., where the audience don’t “get” the ad). If I were you, I’d be pushing that part more than the rating stats. It’s like having focus group screenings. The crowd-sourcing oriented quantitative voting feedback might work in businesses like Threadless, but not so much for ads IMO.

and…

Fatknuckle – September 28th, 2008 at 7:15 pm PDT

… The only problem with your assumption (and its quite a large one) is that people aren’t going to take the time to tell the content producer that an advertisement is “good” or “bad.” They simply will vote with their pocketbooks.

Not to mention if I am a content producer why would I use this as a defining measure of efficacy? Say I post something to brandjury, everyone tells me it sucks. Thats a response of small subset of a defined target base which may or may not be who I am going after for a client so it i inconsequential to me anyway.

So in effect it becomes useless from the user standpoint (I’m subjecting myself to ads without anything in return) and from a producer standpoint ( I am getting nothing but a simple emotional response from an undefined demographic.)

Now if there is a large user base in a variety of demographics and you have managed to find a unique data binding path between users/responses and content) then its a whole different animal and could be useful. But thats a pretty big if given even the gorillas haven’t been able to do particularily well (but the goog is certainly trying)

I dig the name though.

I just received this email.

To coincide with asking radio stations to think about playing Reckoner we are breaking up the tune into pieces for you to remix. After the insane response we got from the Nude remix stems and the site that was dedicated to your remixes…

Unique visitors: 6,193,776, Page Views: 29,090,134, Hits: 58,340,512, Bandwidth: 10.666 Terabytes, Number of mixes: 2,252, Number of votes: 461,090, Number of track listens: 1,745,304

…we thought it only fair to do the same with a tune that at least is in 4/4. You can get the stems (the different instruments/elements) from here

Sample, cut, take the sounds, whatever. Play it in a club. Or your room. Then if you want you can upload your finished mixes to http://www.radioheadremix.com and be judged by everyone else. You can create a widget allowing votes from your own site, Facebook or MySpace to be sent through too. To start things off we asked James Holden and Diplo to do their versions.

Oh, and by the way, if you weren’t lucky enough to get your hands on one of our recycled plastic bottle shirts at a show this summer, you’ll be glad to hear we’ve made some more and they are available at the w.a.s.t.e. shop here

All at w.a.s.t.e x

Radiohead is surely creating a, wait for it – ‘buzz’ by asking their fans to download and remix their songs. Not only are they releasing song elements for easy remixing, they have a platform to where it can be re-uploaded, voted on and even widgets for distribution for to other sites. Talk about a 360 social media campaign ;) !!

They certainly are ‘energizing’ their ‘customers’. Energising your customers to promote your brand is after all one of the most difficult but effective social marketing technique.

Reckon they went to Forresters for some Groundswell consulting?

Nope not really. I think they just get it. Sometimes being nice, savvy, creative and sharing really pays.

One complaint though, they don’t say in their email that you have to purchase the stems for 79p. Small beef though.

The best remix I have listened to so far has to be the Sebastian Project Remix. See Widget below.

PS: Radiohead is the bestest band ever, even if you might think they’re too serious. Quite frankly there’s a lot to be serious about.

PPS: I wish Bok van Blerk and Jacob Zuma would release the stems of Umshini wam and De la Rey.

A few casual searches of well know business consultancies and business magazines websites and something becomes apparent. Companies really are clamouring for any credible information and analysis. They want to know what to make of the so-called “social media” phenomena.

Hang on.

What does businesses want from social media anyway?

Social, socialist, social club…

When I used to work at Lycos Europe circa 2001 – who had some of Europe’s largest online communities like Love@Lycos and Lycos (Jubii) Chat – the marketing department ran some focus groups with our young users.

The company was looking to rebrand and wanted to move away from being perceived as just a provider of Internet Search.

Lycos was obviously a community website, and was toying with using the word ‘community‘ as part of a strap line. We therefore wanted to know what its users think of the word ‘community’.
And word came form these focus groups that the term ‘community’ sounded just way to… communal. To our surprise community was actually a word with many negative associations.

And the words ‘community’ and ‘communal’ not only sounded like the word ‘communist’ (heaven forbid) it made people think of hairy bleeding heart hippies (unfashionable). In short it did not sit next to cool anymore.

In that context I wonder what our focus group would have said if we had put to them the word ‘social’?

Until not so very long ago social and community was not terms you’d imagine large corporate companies try and understand in respect of digital business.

Not anymore. Business is now full of socialists. Or rather people interested in social media. In the space of a few years the words ’social’ or ‘community’ seems to have been rehabilitated.

Today big companies’ interest in social media ranges from the casual dipping of toes into social seas to more ambitious missions: The hope that they might just serendipitously discover & conquer a bright new world.

To be more specific. Companies are looking at social media because:

• They have an urge to monitor ‘the conversation’ about their brand;
• They are trying to shape that conversation;
• While a few of the more ambitious companies are seeking to leverage social media to compliment their business.

So who are the socialists?

Mostly – yes even in the third case above – social media is seen as the preserve of companies’ marketing or public relations departments.

This is because to most companies social media is either a threat to a brand image, a research tool or it’s a massive – if unpredictable – low cost marketing opportunity.

And actually, if you are a marketeer, the preeminence of social media could not have come a moment to soon. Because marketing was not working.

Part 2 (When the web turned marketing on its head)