If you are not publishing videos in social networks online, you are missing an opportunity to extend the impact of your brand online.

The situation with video is comparable to the beginning of the Web. Then, only the big brands were quick to embrace the new medium and have a representation on it – mostly a simple Website that re-enforced the existence of the company and its brands online and provided information for the online community. Web presence matured over time as the medium became mainstream, and it spread out to smaller organisations and brands.

Now, 15 years later, we are at the beginning of another era: video has become a medium online. For many, YouTube has become their default entry into the Web and they spend most of their time online on YouTube. For the majority, YouTube is the dominant search engine and the second largest search engine after Google overall.

What do people find when they search for your brand on YouTube? Go and try it out – you may be surprised what your community is posting about you! Would a YouTube user find your message amongst all the other chitter-chatter? What impact will that have on your brand?

Some of the larger brands understand. There are some very good YouTube brand channels online. For example, check out the Nike Football channel. With 8,326 subscribers, it is the number one most subscribed sponsor channel of all time. It hosts 207 videos of diverse football highlights involving Nike. Or look at a new channel like the MINI channel which already has 41 videos after only having been created on the 1st January 2009.

In Australia, other than the political parties and bloggers, not many YouTube channels have been set up. Probably the best are Cricket Australia, XXXX, and Tooheys. Comparing just the two beer brands, it is easy to notice that Tooheys uses the channel just for re-publishing TVCs, while XXXX uses it to create brand engagement – a difference that is also reflected in the number of videos, subscribers, channel views, and friends.

Why are they spending money on social video?

Video has huge advantages over other content. Videos are able to provide a direct and rememberable explanation of what a brand stands for – much more so than text or pictures. Video is therefore twice as effective for conversion actions than text only. An Australian study showed that 57% of online users have watched online videos before making a purchase decision.

But not only does video help in the actual act of selling. Video also has an advantage when it comes to exposure to eyeballs on the Web. In Google universal search, video is 50 times more likely than other Web content to turn up on the first search result page. Yes, you read correctly: 50 times more likely – just think about all the SEO that you’d have to do with other content to have such an effect. On top of that, users are more likely to click on the video thumbnails on the Google result page than on any other results – the thumbnails are strong in directing eyeballs.

Now that we’ve seen the upsides of video, you will ask yourself what the kind of content may be that you should publish about your brand. What would be the purpose of publishing video to social networks? Video is a communication channel like any other. You can use it for any brand strategy that you may be preparing. You might consider creating videos to launch a new brand, to diversify an existing brand, to educate about products, or to start a conversation with your customers.

Here are some examples of what companies have used their YouTube channels for:

• Nikon Australia use theirs to provide tutorials and product demonstrations
• Qantas provides facts about the company and their TVCs
• Doritos Australia use it to run an ad competition
• AXE provide funny content
• Sun Microsystems publishes a vlog that includes interviews of executives

My recommendation is not just to upload the videos to YouTube, but also to pick some other social networks that focus more on your actual target audience, e.g. Dailymotion for a European focus or Break.com for a young males focus. Also make sure to consider your release strategy and video SEO to reach a maximum number of eyeballs for your content. And finally: don’t forget to measure your success over and over again – with metrics tools like Vquence’s VQmetrics service you can learn which content and strategy works for your audience and which doesn’t. It is such attention to numbers that Natalie Tran who publishes Australia’s most subscribed YouTube channel reckons has helped her make it such a success.

One of the biggest fears in our industry is that online video will replace TV, and the consequences this will have on advertising and broad audience reach. According to recent research reports, the notion that online video is pushing TV out of the market is at least partially mistaken – instead, both, TV and online video viewership are continuing to increase.

With time-shifted TV increasing over-proportionally, and therefore people increasingly skipping ad breaks, new and more effective forms of advertising on TV are increasingly necessary – such as sponsorships, overlay ads, or clickable product placements. However, the traditional ad breaks will not fully go away – they just need to be used more effectively.

The important finding in the reports is that 31 percent of Internet activity occurs when consumers are also watching TV. Almost every third person uses the Internet while watching TV! Surely, this is an opportunity that advertisers must not miss!

The Superbowl ads show the way: this year, almost 70% of the ads had a URL embedded and planned for interaction with their customers after running the ad. The role of TV ads is changing: they are now a start to online user engagement. Advertisers have to be aware that consumers have their universal look-up tool at hand as they are watching TV and are keen to type in a URL and follow it to explore new products, play an online game, or interact in some other way with the brand that is advertising on TV.

Even now, TV ads are still a very good means to reach a large and diverse audience and seed consumer interaction. The minimum of user interaction that a TV spot should provide is that a copy of itself can be found online and shared with others through a link. Having your TV spot uploaded online is a great means to seed a viral ad to an audience that is used to sharing through their social networks.

You just need to check out view counts on some of the top Superbowl ads of this season to see that their online impact can be enormous:

• “Free Doritos” has more than 2M views
• “Careerbuilder.com” also has more then 2M views
• “Pepsi Refresh Anthem” has more than 1.6M views
• “Cars.com Lifetime of Confidence” also has more than 1.6M views

A good Australian example is this Toohey’s ad, which was uploaded by a random user and achieved more than 500K views. Toohey’s would have gotten a lot of information about their audience and possibilities to re-connect to that audience had they published it themselves.

So, the next time you roll out a TV ad, also roll it out online and don’t wait until one of your customers does this job for you out of sheer frustration that it is not otherwise available.

Set up a channel on YouTube, through which you publish it. That gives your ads a common home and an authorised place to live. It also allows you to check out YouTube Insight metrics to analyse the composition of your audience.

Since YouTube is regarded by most as the default online video search engine, it should be your first call to upload it there. Another site to consider is MySpace.TV – if you have a MySpace page for your brand or campaign, you should also have your video ad at MySpace.TV. There are plenty of other sites that may be relevant depending on the audience you are targeting.

When you upload the video, also make sure to fill in the metadata with lots of information – this is your means of performing Search Engine Optimisation within YouTube and makes your video turn up in the “related videos” box of other videos more often.

Also consider making your TV ads more interesting for an online audience. Some recommendations for making interesting video ads for online were recently published by Daniel Flamberg at iMedia: make them short, funny, and use animation. And don’t forget to include a URL in your TV ad so you can direct your customers to the right place of engagement.

Some Video ad collectors on YouTube:

• http://www.youtube.com/user/tvadfad
• http://www.youtube.com/theinspirationroom
• http://www.youtube.com/user/ideenverteiler
• http://www.youtube.com/user/timyang
• http://www.youtube.com/australianads
• http://www.youtube.com/tvadsfromaus

There are some interesting observations:

The Pepsi ad, while tops on views, comments, and number of ratings, actually didn’t rate as highly as the the others. My guess is that it has more informative than entertainment value and thus does not excite people as much to make a high rating.

The Bud Light ad received lots of views, but didn’t really engage people to make comments or ratings. People probably just agreed that cutting back on beer is not a good idea.

The SoBe 3D Lizards ad raised interest and comments, but wasn’t really rated either even though there were lots of special effects and the cool idea of a 3D ad.

The Bridgestone Astronauts ad was rated the highest, but it didn’t receive anywhere near the same number of new views as the others.

A similar effect is visible for the Hulu ad, which came second in rank, but has even less views than the Astronauts.

Now, other sites have also published rankings for the Superbowl ads, so let’s compare our outcome with that of others:

The methodologies between these rankings are very different. The USA Today is an online survey, the Nielseon IAG one is a panel, Tweetbowl measured the number of tweets on a particular ad, and Vquence the number of views on YouTube of the ads. However, there are some similarities.

Clearly, there are some common winners:

• Doritos – Crystal Ball
• Careerbuilder.com
• Doritos – Power of Crunch
• Pepsi – Refresh Anthem (now at 1.5M views at YouTube!)
  
• Pedigree
• Bud Light – Meeting
• Bridgestone – Potato Head

Some other are only on one top 10 list:

• Cars.com
• Budweiser – Clydesdale Generations
• NFL (isn’t even on most lists of ads shown)
• Etrade – Singing Baby
• Pepsi Max – I’m Good
• Hulu
• GoDaddy – Shower
• GI Joe
• Star Trek (though I am uncertain this one is the actual ad)
  
• GE – Scarecrow
• HR Block – Death and Taxes
• Miller – 1 Second

 Feel free to make up your own personal favorite. I really quite like the last one – a one second ad by Miller of a guy screaming “High Life”.

UPDATE (4th Feb): According to Nielsen, the 2009 Superbowl draw a record 98.7M viewers which gives it record a CPM of $30.39.

According to Suite101, advertising at superbowl is a strategic marketing endeavor for the big companies that is worthwhile. E-Trade for example reported a 32% increase in newly opened and funded brokerage accounts in the week following the debut of the first two talking baby spots last year, and had more than 5 million total online ad viewings and 5 million searches for its ads following the 2008 game. This year, they built again on the talking baby idea, releasing the a superbowl ad and a related ad, but also building social activity around these through a Facebook page, a twitter channel, and their YouTube channel.

In fact, according to the Online Marketer Blog, most of the advertisers decided this year to support their superbowl ad with online social activity – mostly through micro-sites or an additional set of Web pages on their usual Web location, but also some Facebook pages and Twitter channels. All of the ads this year were published to YouTube, some with fully targeted brand channels. Only few ventured into full social advertising activities: “Out of the 54 commercials shown during the actual game, 17 had no online engagement at all – not even a URL. Almost one third = 31.48% – planned for no interactionwith their customers after the game.” Here is their analysis for the first and the second half of the game.

It is amazing to see so little online engagement from the advertisers when they already have to spend such a large amount of money on these ads. With more social activities and customer interaction, the effect of the ads could be extended much longer and the huge spend becomes a lot more worthwhile.

At Vquence we started monitoring the ads as published on YouTube and will report on their successes. You can get a good overview of the ads on the YouTube Adblitz channel. Also, here is the panel-based ranking by USA today. We will see if the actual views on YouTube can result in a similar ranking.

Finally, here are some interesting observations about the content of the ads that were aired this year.

As a technical first, the ads from Dreamworks for Monsters vs Alien and from PepsiCo for SoBe lifewater were in 3D. This may be the beginning of a new set of 3D movies for our theatres.

An interesting new advertiser to the field was Ed McMahon’s Cash4Gold. This is not a typical advertiser at the Superbowl and the quality of the ad does not compare to your typical special-effects-rich, entertaining superbowl ad. However, it is a mirror of the current financial situation.

Overall, the ads were not as light and fun as in previous years, but had a dominantly violent character. Also, ads with explicit sexual references had been pulled, in particular the ones from PETA on Veggie Sex and Ashley Madison on Married Affairs.

Finally, a large number of the ads were trailers for upcoming movies by Sony Pictures, Disney/Pixar, Universal Pictures, DreamWorks, and Paramount as well as several ads for new NBC shows and a rather funny ad for Hulu, the online video site.

A beautiful ad, kept very much in the tradition of a peaceful Christmas, was released by Stella Artois yesterday. I am not sure if we will see the ad on TV here in Australia, but since there are no lyrics, the ad is inherently internationalised.

The ad is fundamentally a TV ad, but Stella have created a beautiful microsite to accompany the video and share it online. The site is not very interactive or enables the building of a community, but it has a “send email” option.

This combined TV/microsite approach is in fact the typical way of publishing video advertising at the moment. It is a cautious way of venturing online, without taking the plunge to fully exploit its potential.

We believe this video is on the verge of going viral – and could go viral on a much larger scale if Stella ventured into the social Web space just a little further. It is a beautiful ad that people just like to point each other at.

There are currently 6 copies of it on YouTube, none of which was uploaded by Stella. The ad already enjoys more than 2,000 views just one day after the upload. There is one copy on Dailymotion. There is no copy yet on MySpace.tv or on any of the other social video networks.

Stella have an impressive Facebook account with 58,951 subscribed fans. The video is not uploaded there, which is a shame considering the huge potential. Also, a MySpace account is not set up for Stella Artois – another missed opportunity since the many fans are flocking to other fans’ “Stella Artois” sites.

6 fans twittered about the ad at this point in time – this is certainly just a start. All viral advertising blogs that we follow have written about the ad and given it very good comments and ratings.

We will continue to watch the performance of the ad in the social space and provide statistics on this blog.

UPDATE (7/1/09): Christmas is over, and so is the time for Christmas ads. Here is how the ad performed on YouTube.

Achieving only about 10,000 views certainly doesn’t make this ad viral. But it had a good increase in views in the first two weeks (uploads were all made on the 3rd December), after which the curve tapers off. With a bit of social networking effort, a lot more could have been achieved.