FutureM 2013 session with Pixability.
Speaker:
Bettina Hein
Founder and CEO, Pixability, Inc.
No matter how you do the math, there’s no ROI on a video with no views. You just have to make your video go ‘viral’, right? But counting on a video to go viral is not so different from planning your income from lottery scratch ticket returns. Virality on YouTube is often misunderstood and myths abound. It’s a properly engineered video that drives views, amplifies content sharing, and generates widespread community interaction. Look behind the scenes of recent video hits with Bettina Hein, CEO of Pixability, as she discusses the importance of content planning, digital strategy, metadata, seeding, humor, production, community, social, analytics and YouTube in making videos viral.
2. What is a viral video?
Wikipedia:
"A viral video is a video that becomes popular through
the process of Internet sharing, typically through video
sharing websites, social media and email.”
Why should marketers care?
FREE Awareness?
FREE Views?
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3. The Whole Hog of A Viral Video
Brain
Ribs
Tail
Heart
Underbelly
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4. Agenda
The whole hog of a viral video
• Heart: creating good content
• Ribs: social outreach and sharing
• Underbelly: robots and incentivized views
• Brain: engineering it with data
• Right Feed: paid YouTube ads
• Tail: luck
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9. Good content is often a steady view earner
• Know your targets intimately
• Example: Build Direct from Canada
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10. Steady view earners deliver better ROI
• Know your targets intimately
• Example: Build Direct from Canada
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11. The Ribs: Social Outreach and Sharing
Brain
Ribs
Tail
Heart
Underbelly
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12. Real virality is often smaller
541,296 times
shared on
Facebook
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13. The ribs: social outreach and sharing
Relevance
Passionate
Enthusiasts
Subscribers
Participation
Crosspollination
Connecting to your real target audience
Make relevant content
Lobby tastemakers and find passionate enthusiasts
Build subscribership
Encourage participation
Use cross-pollination of email, FB, Twitter, Pinterest, G+
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14. Seeding promises
“Get your video seen by the right people.”
“We generate millions of monthly opt-in views on
social networks, mobile devices and YouTube.”
“We use proprietary technology to turn target
audiences into engaged viewers and engaged
viewers into customers.”
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15. Caveat emptor: Seeding can be seedy
A supposedly “organic”
blog post generated by a
seeding campaign.
“…XYZ — the viral
video house behind
this clip. XYZ knows.
Shop at XYZ.”
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16. What are you getting when you seed?
Click-through rates for
a seeded campaign:
Views: 284,894
Click-throughs: 17
CTR: 0.006%
Compare to average
YouTube ad
CTR: 3.5%
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24. Understand the audience and competition
Look at metrics on:
•
•
•
•
•
Audience size
Most popular content
types and sub topics
Social media
reactions
Viewer sentiment
Traffic Sources
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25. Metadata: what matters and why
•
•
•
•
•
Titles
Tags
Descriptions
Target links
Annotations
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27. The Right Feed: Paid Ads
Brain
Ribs
Tail
Heart
Underbelly
Feed
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28. Paid, owned and earned media work together
Promoted
Video Ad
YouTube Ads
YouTube Channel
Social Sharing
Much more costeffective than TV and
online display ads
A video channel
that you own and
control fully
Build a community
around your video
content
Website
Driving conversions
through highly qualified
website traffic
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29. YouTube ad placements: Choose carefully
Best practices:
1. Use varying formats
(search, in-display, pre-roll)
2. No need to stick to 30second spots
3. Use time of day according to
target
4. Geographic focus if
necessary
5. Don’t always optimize for
direct website clicks
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33. Engineering results: It all works together
Organic YouTube Traffic
Pre-campaign
Campaign
Channel subscriber growth
Pre-campaign
Campaign
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34. Summary
•
•
•
•
•
Heart: Know your audience before you create
Ribs: Share the passion and seed carefully
Underbelly: Don’t do it
Brain: Track and clone yourself to success
Right Feed: YouTube ads done right are
worth it
• Tail: Be ready when luck happens
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35. Get this presentation?
Go to pixability.com/futureM2013
•
Bettina Hein, Founder and CEO
Email: hein@pixability.com
Phone: (617) 710 5772
@bettinahein
•
Rob Ciampa, EVP Marketing
Email: rob@pixability.com
Phone: (617) 774-9600
@robciampa
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36. YouTube Advertising: How It Works
1. Select:
Choose one or
several of your YouTube
videos as ads.
2. Place:
Put ads where
your target audience
already is.
3. Call to Action:
Users can click through
to your website for more
information.
Value for money: Charged per engaged video view, not per click or
impression
Extremely flexible: Various cost per view (CPV) ranges available
depending on format and targeting
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38. When should you buy incentivized views?
• Never to inflate
views
• Awareness only
– do not expect
any action
• When there is a
good match of
demographic
• Example:
promotion of
video game
launch on
gaming site
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Editor's Notes
How free are the most viral videos?I’d really like to dispell some of the myths that abound around video. We’ve collected information on billions of views at Pixability.
What are the good cuts?What’s the non-kosher stuff that’s going on?
This is NOT actually a viral videoHeineken paid for these viewsThere is more than meets the eye here: Don’t let high view count be all you look at.
This had a high budget, a great story, a Super Bowl ad to boost this.
In the real world, most marketers have to earn their audience. You can still get a ‘viral’ effect or free views if you produce content that people care about. This is a really small online building materials company from Canada that is giving Lowes and The Home Depot a run for their money.No, a simple video that caters EXACTLY to the needs of your audience is much more important. Kevin Doohan from Machinima will tell you more:Machinima may not have the largest audience, but they know their young male audience better than anyone.
Free exposure to the right audience: Slow burners are better than spiking and then crashing and burning
What is REAL social outreach and what is FAKE?
A Coca-Cola video about Overseas Foreign Workers from the Philippines. It has ‘only’ 1.3M views – but look at this: It was shared on Facebook 500k times. So when you’re evaluating how viral a video really is, look at these metrics, NOT JUST VIEWS
For example, haul channels frequently do give-aways of productsAnswer relevant questions: how to apply certain make-up, how to solve home improvement quandries
What is seeding?
What is seeding?
One of our customers sprang for a seeding campaign. Any they got lots of views: almost 300k but only 17 clicked through to their site. The average YT ad campaign gets you 3.5% click-through.Beware when someone tells you that they’ll get this done for youMany operators pay people to blog about your video and include the video in the postsIs social sharing an end in itself? Even if those shares are happening in Hungary?
Read quotesThese sites pay people that are desperate to earn a few bucks to watch you videos. Is this really the kind of audience that you want?Mention Facebook games – in game advertising might work if you are advertising snack food or a new game. Just be watchful about the demographics.
So how
How many people are watching?How are people finding your content?Who is watching?How in-depth is the content that they are watching?
Go slower here….How do I find out what the right content for my audience is? You don’t necessarily have day-long creative forest retreats to find out what works, you can look at audience data (like our Caffeine software) to find out what people are watching
So earlier I dissed certain types of paid views. Does that mean you shouldn’t pay for views? NOOO. But if you do it, do it YouTube is a unique ecosystemItallows for marketers to do precise targetingIt allows you to use your paid media spend to very deliberately increase the organic part of a brand’s video strategy.Promoted views fuel your earned media views by making these videos rank higher under ‘recommended videos’Those views drive more viewers to your channel, thereby increasing your views even more
Example: beer ad at 6 am?
Mentos
Add Mentos
Incredible and on-brand message
Does it have to be Gangnam Style to be successful?