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

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.

• Linear Video Ad With or Without Companion Ad
• Linear Video Interactive Ad
• Non-linear Overlay Ad
• Non-linear Non-Overlay Ad

The document is interesting since it summarises the state of art in video in-stream metrics – metrics that we are also preparing to graph in the Vquence metrics mix. While it specifically addresses ads, the metrics are really about measuring a user’s interaction with a linearly playing video.

The following default metrics for in-stream video ads have been defined and are prescribed as the basis of every reporting:

• video impression (or view)
• companion ad impression (or view)
• video click-through
• completed video play at normal playback speed
• time spent viewing at normal speed in sec
• percent of un-duplicated video viewed at normal speed

The following additional events may be reported:

• audio mute / un-mute
• video window collape / expand
• video pause /resume
• video rewind

Further, for non-linear ads that run in parallel to the video, the following metrics are defined:

• ad impression
• click-through on ad
• accept invitation to view additional ad aread
• minimise ad
• close ad
• overlay view duration

It seems to me that we are really only at the beginning of understanding what we need to measure around video and video advertising. It is good to see that the IAB have summarised the current state of the art. These metrics provide first standards towards calculating a CPM-type value for a video advertising campaign. Yet, it also states taht the value of watching a video ad is not just defined by the number of impressions, but also by a complex set of duration and event measures. I expect we will see a new kind of standard measure emerge over time for estimating the value of a video ad from these metrics – a measure that includes impression, event and duration measures.

The graph shows the development of the cumulative view count of the videos that were published by the main political parties in Australia over the last 2.5 months before the election in 2007.

At first you will notice that Labor started far above everyone else. Unfortunately we didn’t start recording view counts that early, but we assume it is due to the Kevin07 website that was launched on 7th August.

In the graph, you will notice a first increase on the coalition’s view count on the 2nd September – that’s when Howard published the video for the APEC meeting 2-9 Sept 2007.

Then there’s another bend on the 14th September, when Google launched it’s federal election site and we saw first videos of the Nationals going up on YouTube.

The dip in the curve of the Nationals a little after that is due to a software bug withe some of YouTube’s data.

Then on the 14th October the Federal Election was actually announced and you can see the massive increase in view count from there on for all parties, ending with a huge advantage of Labor over everybody else.

Interestingly enough, this also mirrors the actual outcome of the election.