The video provides the best introduction:

Basically, you can now have your typist create a transcript of your video and then directly upload that to YouTube, which will use speech recognition to time-align the transcript and turn it into captions. That’s awesome! You can even download those captions and keep them for some other purpose, such as add them to your local archive of videos.

For some select partners, YouTube is even experimenting with a fully automated captioning system, where the transcript is created using speech recognition. Since we know the quality of Google voice from searches performed through Google searches on mobile phones, let’s be skeptical of the quality of the fully automated solution. But it is certainly a great start and we can certainly expect Google to continue making improvements to their speech recognition technology.

Promoted Videos feature a thumbnail image with three lines of text, and when clicked, will bring the user to watch a video or view a channel on YouTube. They are being specially pointed out on the YouTube front page, in search results, in popular video watch pages, and even across the AdSense network.

These videos are contextually targeted to Web pages. If as a Website publisher you decide to take part in AdSense, you’ll earn from these ads on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. People wanting to use promoted videos can now do so from the comfort of their known AdWords account, since YouTube have just launched this service for Australia.

This week, WMG and YouTube struck a deal that will give WMG a large chunk of the revenue created around their videos – which was the issue when they broke the deal in December 2008. The partnership covers the full Warner catalogue and includes user-generated content containing WMG acts.

This is great news for anyone wanting to publish video on YouTube and use music by artists under contract with WMG: over are the times of heavy WMG policing and removing of audio tracks that were deemed “infringing”. This is also very relevant to ad producers since WMG music is now implicitly licensed for publication on YouTube.

The deal gives WMG special rights: it will sell advertising around its videos on YouTube itself rather than leaving it to YouTube. YouTube will get a share. To that end, WMG will be given a special high-quality video player by YouTube with advertising capabilities that are not available on the standard player. WMG can thus clutter the video with a lot more advertising. I wonder what that will mean for embedding the music videos on other sites?

Also, YouTube’s Content ID technology will allow them to claim and monetise the audio tracks of UCG content. I wonder what effect that will have on the videos – will there be an overlay with a link through to iTunes or Amazon for purchasing the records? That might be the least intrusive. Or will there be large banners of WMG advertisers around them? Not sure how that is going to pan out, but we will certainly experience it.

It is said that it will take until the end of the year for all WMG music videos to return to YouTube, which includes the time it takes YouTube to implement the premium video player and the time to upload the videos in the high quality format.

However, UCG doesn’t have to wait any longer – go and enjoy the new-found freedom to use WMG music again on YouTube!

The complete stats are listed in the YouTube blog post about the YouTube Generation.

One important outcome is that people consider brands that advertise on YouTube to be more current, innovative and dynamic. And 3 in 5 users say YouTube influences their purchase decisions.

I stumbled about it because four key areas that Vquence works in are mentioned as exciting new opportunities in his blog post about the topic:

• Digital video (esp. getting Internet video onto the TV)
• New analytics companies (in the vein of Compete.com, Visible Measures, Localytics, etc.)
• New forms of media/reporting/content creation
• Social media and marketing

I can only agree!

Well, it has turned into something special in a different way: Tim Burrowes who writes the “mUmBRELLA” blog about the Australian media and marketing industry allowed us to publish it as a Guest Post there.

Check out the article on the Susan Boyle phenomenon at Mumbrella. It is called “What Paul Potts and Susan Boyle teach us about the changing face of social media” and compares the world from 2 years ago with Paul Potts’ success on “Britain’s Got Talent” to the current Susan Boyle success and what has changed since then. There are some nice stats there.

Because of it’s beauty, let me add here the almost perfect statistics of the Susan Boyle top performing video on YouTube:

Statistics Susan Boyle video

Many thanks go to Tim and also Ian Lyons from Amnesia Razorfish who introduced me to Tim.

The report analyses global trends for how users interact with online media and make recommendations for how advertisers should should react to them.

Of course they had to point out the explosion of social video use in the past few years and recommend increased use of social media and video to advertisers.

But what really impressed me was that they actually took their own recommendations and applied them to their own marketing strategy: the report was published on a blog with a YouTube video showing Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank explaining the report.

It’s only one of two videos that they have posted to TheNielsenCompany channel, so it’s a new phenomenon. Yet, it’s what I would call “eat your own dogfood”. Nice work!

BTW: Nielsen should put some video SEO on those YouTube videos! At minimum they should add some links and improve the descriptions.

Two employees at a Domino’s in the U.S. had nothing better to do during their work time than to record a video of themselves putting all sorts of bodily fluids into the meals they prepared. They uploaded it to YouTube a few days ago and started a nightmare for themselves and for the brand that they are ridiculing. Their video is here, if you are willing to stand it.

The video obviously created an enormous brand damage and had a pretty bad effect on the fast food market in general with people proposing that such actions happened every day across a lot of the fast food chains of the world. Domino’s executive first decided to not react aggressively to the posting, but hoped the controversy would die down, but that is not how viral sensations work.

Only when many posts on Twitter asked for Domino’s reactions did they decide to work against the brand-damaging ongoing discussions: the workers were fired, charged with food tampering, the restaurant in question was closed and completely sanitised, and Domino’s start a Twitter channel to directly respond to customer’s concerns. Domino’s president Patrick Doyle even posted a message to YouTube in which he apologises and clarifies the company’s commitment to food safety.

The brand’s reputation was indeed damaged. According to research firm YouGov, who undertook an online suvey, the perception of its quality among consumers went from positive to negative within the first 3 days after the video was posted.

Accordingly, the call for tools to help deal with such situations is growing louder. Social media monitoring tools provide a means to make sure brand-damaging postings are captured early, their impact is measured exactly, and adequate reactions can be prepared. Tools like Google Alerts, and Sydney-based companies S7, Brandtology, and also Vquence provide tools to address the challenges.

The whole affair engaged people so much that there are now almost 100 copies and replies to the video available on YouTube. Some of these are copies of the original video, some of Mr Doyle’s apology – one even with captions.

Interestingly, the Domino’s Incident has stayed mostly a YouTube phenomenon. There is no copy on MySpace.TV, there are only two copies on Dailymotion, one on Break.com, one on Metacafe, one on Yahoo video, and a few more random singles on other sites. It is a big public discussion held on YouTube. The videos are reaching 500K-1M views and 5.5K comments here. But given the reactions of Domino’s, we expect the buzz to die down rather quickly before creating more brand damage.

In comparison to that, the recent “Susan Doyle” videos with the star from “Britain’s Got Talent” have spread across many more sites. There are 87 copies on Dailymotion, 23 on MySpace.TV, 7 on Break.com, 13 on Vimeo, 14 on Yahoo video, and 42 on Metacafe. The original video on the BritiansSoTalented YouTube channel reached almost 30M views and 150K comments. This video single-handedly achieved 700 video responses and many many more copies.

It is a good sign that a positive message where a person lives up to her dreams and out-performs all expectations receives a much higher spread than a brand-damaging, stupid prank.

All-excited, I went to YouTube to enjoy some shows. However, the first problem I had was that – at least here in Australia – the announced “Shows” tab was not available on the front page and there was no way to find the “Shows” or the “Movies”. Fortunately, the YouTube blog post also provided direct links, so I went there directly.

With new hope, I browsed the available shows and selected some to watch. I was, however, very disappointed. Most of the shows that I clicked on were not available in Australia. After some trial and error, I managed to watch “Astro Boy”, “Do you like Hitchcock”, and “Staffers”. I wasn’t able to access “Alf”, “The young and the restless”,”Star Treck”, “Beverley Hills 90210″, “MacGuyver”, “I dream of Jeannie”, “Dilbert” or “Bewitched”.

I would prefer if YouTube only exposed those videos that were actually available in Australia to us. What’s the point in pretending all this content is available, when it’s not? YouTube is no different in this respect to Hulu, which is virtually useless for an Australian.

On Tuesday I attended a panel on “Effects Of Transparency: Cash For Comment And The Dark Marketing Debate” by David Lee and Julian Cole. They presented a comprehensive list of dark marketing campaigns, some of which were successful and others backfired. The take-away message was that it is in general a bad idea to keep the consumer in the dark and that transparency needs to become a requirement for marketing campaigns.

It was proposed that the best way to achieve transparency is through the development of a regulation for online marketing campaigns within one of Australia’s leading digital industry bodies AIMIA, AFA, or mfa.

I’d like to respectfully disagree. I don’t think we need a police force for online marketing. The Web is quite a self-regulating environment and all the poorly executed campaigns learnt very quickly that the truth comes out no matter if they want to. Do we really need a law to forbid us to leave the house without a coat in winter, because we could catch a cold?

Who are we trying to protect? Every poorly executed dark campaign has backfired either on the brand or the agency. Has it really had such a negative effect on society that we need to bring out legislation?

Even a call for an “industry code of practice” is too much IMHO. Do we even know what we are asking for and what we are restricting? Let’s not restrict our creativity before we have even explored the new medium and its possibilities in full.

Instead, what we need is education. Education on what works and what doesn’t. After all, the medium is still new and we are all still trying it out. We will get burnt for a bit before we understand the rules under which it works.

For example, there are some very good dark viral video campaigns that are very successful and have not created any negative reactions – not from consumers, not from the mainstream press, not from politics or society. Just check out the first and second example on my blog on “dark viral videos and witchery“.

What we need are “best practices” – examples and case studies of successful campaigns that people can replicate. This will not restrict creativity, but will give those that are uncertain about how to make best use of a new medium the tools to execute successfully. It does not restrict those that are more creative and open to experiments to find out how to make the most of the new medium.