Vquence - Video Technology and Metrics Experts » marketing

Australian Video Company Vquence signs Exclusive Sales and Marketing Agreement

silvia — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:45:40 +0000

Vquence to provide SignUp Media with quantitative data on social video use, audience reach and user engagement

Vquence, an Australian start-up in online video technology, and SignUp Media Limited, a media measurement and analytics company, today announced an exclusive strategic sales and marketing agreement covering North America and the United Kingdom.

Vquence was founded by veteran entrepreneur Chris Gilbey, former CEO of Lake Technology, Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, former Multimedia Science Leader at the CSIRO ICT Centre, and John Ferlito, serial entrepreneur with several network service providers.

SignUp Media will offer Vquence’s VQmetrics service as an integral part of their suite of measurement tools to effectively measure and track viral video campaigns using Vquence’s database of 50 million videos. SignUp Media will have access to metrics on videos on YouTube, MySpace.TV, Dailymotion, Vimeo and other social media sites providing online quantitative metrics for brand and reputation monitoring.

“Internet video has become a critical component of the overall media landscape,VQmetrics will help our clients better monetize their content and show them how viral video may be contributing to successful campaigns with consumers” said Paul Mewett, COO and founder of SignUp Media.

Dr. Silvia Pfeiffer, Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder and Director of Vquence, is very excited about the new sales opportunities. “SignUp Media have very experienced and extremely well connected sales and marketing executives which will open up markets to us that we would otherwise not reach. Our respective visions of the future of the measurement market match and we can foresee huge opportunities beyond video together.”

Terry Foster, CEO of SignUp Media said, “We are excited to announce this strategic partnership with Vquence. Dr. Silvia Pfeiffer’s vision and thought leadership in social video metrics are second to none”. Foster sees tremendous growth and demand in this space over the next 3-5 years and believes this partnership is a key element in the next phase of SignUp Media’s growth.

About SignUp Media Limited

SignUp Media provides tools and content that allows companies to use information to make better and more informed decisions. SignUp Media’s monitoring tools and products combine research intelligence, quality content, text-mining methods and visualization capability into powerful solutions that give you the ability to track and document the effectiveness of your communications activities. www.signupmedia.com

About Vquence PTY

Vquence’s mission is to measure every aspect of the consumption of socially published video online. We provide enterprises, marketers and consumers with detailed statistical data to satisfy information needs relating to social and online video. Vquence captures quantitative measurements of video use, and further provides audience reach and behavior information. www.vquence.com.au

Dark viral videos and Witchery

silvia — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:50:03 +0000

Wikipedia defines viral marketing as “marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological or computer viruses.”

Some recent marketing campaigns have taken their “viral” aspect to its extreme and are not even mentioning a product or brand name, but are instead running a dark campaign. The only aim this can have is to encourage the curiousity of the audience that finds something oddly unreal about the video and starts investigating who could be behind it. Such an approach usually engages younger audiences who dislike overt marketing and gets people talking – ultimately also talking about the brand.

Let me explain what I mean by “dark viral marketing” with three recent examples, one of which is Australian.

1. Taylor Momsen escapes paparazzi

A overly energetic Taylor Momsen runs away from the photographers – something that was immediately assumed by bloggers (e.g. here, here or here) to be an ad. Turns out, it is an ad for Nike. It achieved more than 580,000 views, hundreds of comments, and created quite a buzz around the blogosphere.

2. Leaked assassination footage from Russia

This one is a challenge to uncover – it took one blogger’s intensive detective work to find out that this is really a dark viral ad – in fact, the video is part of the storyboard – for the new first-person shooter game Singularity. Feedcompany bascially admitted in their blog that they helped DDB roll this out. I guess this was a great test to challenge the prospective purchaser of Singularity. With more than 600,000 views within only 2 weeks and more than 2,000 (!) comments, this has certainly hit a nerve.

3. Are you my man in the jacket?

In this Australian video, a girl asks to be put back in contact with a guy she met in a cafe who left his jacket behind. The video was exposed as a dark viral ad for Witchery‘s new menswear line and run by Naked Communications.

For an Australia-only campaign, the video received an amazing number of views – more than 190,000 within the first month and more than 1,000 comments! It made it into main-stream media and got lots of other attention (here and here).

Interestingly, a follow-up video where Heidi “comes clean” also shows all signs of a viral video with more than 40,000 views after only three weeks. Below is the graph as recorded by Vquence, which shows how viral the first view days of this second video were.

This agrees with an analysis published by Hitwise which states that the Witchery website increased its market share within the Apparel and Accessories industry by 120% and ranked the second most popular downstream to receive traffic from YouTube in the same industry. Survey company edentify also reported huge successes for the Witchery brand recognition and perception. In contrast, social media monitoring service Streamwall reports only little viral effect and a dominantly (by 23%) negative social discussion.

It seems while the industry was outraged about this dishonest ad and authored much of the negative publications around it, consumers were amused and entertained for a while, but mostly indifferent about it. The publicity certainly helped increase the brand knowledge.

The more fundamental question about these kind of ads is: should you produce a video ad and not mention what it is actually trying to sell? It seems not disclosig the brand can stir more interest from the public and more airtime by main-stream media. On the other hand you take the risk that the audience does not follow up and discover the brand at all. I think we’re going to see many more of these videos.

The largest problem with such ads is that they are not per se creating customer engagement, but just customer entertainment. It will be difficult to include them into a strategy that keeps people engaged with the brand. It will work well to enter a young market with a bang.

Controversial Campaigns

silvia — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:28:24 +0000

As we keep monitoring viral video and social marketing campaigns, we come across interesting phenomena. Today I’d like to point out three controversial viral video marketing campaigns and their effects:

Motrin – In November, McNeil Consumer Healthcare published a video ad for their pain killers, which addressed mums carrying their babies in slings.

The ad actually insulted many of these mums and an online controversy broke out with a #motrinmums group being created on twitter, many blogs posted to counter the implied consequences of wearing your baby, and eventually McNeil pulling the video from their site and from YouTube, and writing a letter of apology to some of the enraged mums. The ad had a much larger influence than expected, since the “scandal” reached main stream media. Effectively, most people wondered why the mums were so enraged and while the targetted audience was not fully reached, the ad reached a much larger audience than expected.
ASI Sport Talent – In early December, the Australian Sport Institute published a video ad to drive sport talent hunt for the London Olympics.

In the ad, a British hoodie taunts Australians about their failure to win as many medals as the British team at the Beijing Games: “Let’s rip the Brits to bits in London 2012.”. The campaign stirred up London when almost all of page three of The Sunday Times was devoted to it. The Australian Sport Institute got more publicity out of maintstream media because of it’s controversy than it could have hoped for. Whether that will translate into higher numbers of athletes joining for the Olympics is still questionable.
FLAAF “Axes against evil” – In mid December, a Belgian campaing topped the charts in controversy with their army of supposed terrorists that warn the Dutch people for the dangers of their traditional New Years Eve fireworks.

But the Belgians showing their good humour are giving it very positive comments and feature it on several leading Dutch news and entertainment shows.

What each of these videos show is that a controversial campaign can have an impact far beyond your direct target audience. It may get picked up by the traditional press and thus reach people that would otherwise not hear about it. This can be both a blessing and a curse. If it involves permanent brand damage, it may not be such a good idea. OTOH it is obvious that controversy will create a larger audience and reach more people so taken with caution, a controversial video ad can achieve far more than an ad produced without making sure to distinguish yourself.

How to have success with social video

silvia — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:19:08 +0000

Daniel Flamberg recently posted an article through iMedia which summarises the experience gained from a social video marketing campaign.

Their target audience were 25-35 year-old mostly mail IT guys in SMEs, which indeed hang out on social video sites. They published a sequence 3 videos, which were a mix of live action video showing work situations and animation using World of Warcraft characters to stylize emotional reactions to office situations.

Here’s what they learnt:

A. Shorter clips get more views

B. Animation ghets more play than live action

C. Search engines drive a decent amount of traffic to video sites

D. They doubled their traffic by actively commenting on blogs and posting opinions in communities and including a link to their video

E. They think more links and more connections will yield more traffic.

F. The burden of creating interest is entirely on the publisher. Unlike TV or cable channels where no matter what you do somebody will watch your stuff, there is no baseline audience online.

This is important information for when you are planning a video marketing campaign online. In contrast to traditional marketing channels, there is indeed much work necessary after you have published the video, since social media is about getting a communication going with your viewers rather than simply throwing an ad at them. If you take the time to get into the conversation, you will get a lot out of it for your marketing campaign, but also for your product.

Head over to iMedia to read the full article.