Category Archives: chaptered youtube videos

The Webinar is Dead! Long Live the Webinar!

By | chaptered youtube videos, Training, Video Marketing, youtube | No Comments

The traditional appointment webinar is a tried-and-true lead generation mechanism that any marketer needs to have in the toolbox, right? Not according to Michael Kolowich of Knowledge Vision, who’s been promoting the notion of the ‘Flipped Webinar,’ riffing off the concept of the ‘flipped classroom’ where the lectures happen online, before the students gather—and the gathering is focused on interactions between the students and instruction, and among the students.

This Q&A with Kolowich, published on The SEM Post today, outlines the concept and rationale behind the Flipped Webinar—and specifically how Vinja Video might help make it a standard practice.   Here are some excerpts of an hour-long video Q&A, recorded live—discussing and demonstrating the Flipped Webinar produced by Training Magazine Network last fall:

Breakdown of the State of the Union

By | chaptered youtube videos, video, web, youtube | No Comments

Few hour-long videos are more densely packed than the President’s annual State of the Union speech to Congress. I know how hard it is to condense several weeks of start-up company activities into a board deck—but I can’t fathom the challenge of delivering a status report for the entire country spanning an entire year, never mind the political stakes and international spotlight.

While countless days and weeks are spent honing the speech to make it flow—and to keep the live viewing audience from tuning out—breaking it down makes it easier to browse and share. Conveniently, Vinja’s chaptering function makes it easy to identify and tag key elements of the speech, while maintaining the continuity of the whole.

Here’s a 31-chapter breakdown of President Obama’s speech, presented in one of our new ‘overlay’ players (click the bullets on the right to browse, select and share the chapters—and note that the White House logo clicks to more information at www.whitehouse.gov):

Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest Leverages User-Generated Video

By | chaptered youtube videos, video, web, youtube | No Comments

The Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” contest provides an excellent example of a larger trend and strategy of big brands leveraging consumer-generated video. ULTA Beauty uses Vinja video to drive product sales from customer-generated YouTube videos. GoPro has done a brilliant job of helping consumers put their video selfies on steroids. And Red Bull is a publishing empire for user generated action sports video that also happens to sell a beverage.

But when Doritos started its Crash the Super Bowl contest nine years ago it was one of the first examples of brand-sponsored and -driven user-generated video. And Doritos was bold enough to present it on one of the world’s biggest stages. Carrying on that tradition, this year’s entries are some of the best ads seen yet and in only the second year since the brand opened up the contest to a global audience, 40 percent of the finalists come from outside of the United States.

Doritos recently unveiled the 10 consumer created advertisements that have been selected as finalists for the annual “Crash the Super Bowl” contest. PepsiCo’s popular snack brand has presented some of the most talked-about Super Bowl commercials of all time and for the ninth consecutive year the brand will turn over the global stage to two bold fans who have created homemade Doritos ads. For the second year in a row, Doritos has opened up the competition to fans around the world and this year’s finalists include a record four advertisements from outside of the United States.

The grand-prize winner will is guaranteed $1 Million, as well as an opportunity unlike any other in the history of the contest: a chance to work as a contractor for a full year onsite at Universal Pictures in Hollywood.

The 10 finalists, hailing from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, were selected from nearly 4,900 submissions representing 29 countries around the world. Two of the 10 television commercials will be selected to air during Super Bowl XLIX, the championship game of the National Football League in the United States, which is viewed annually by more than 100 million people around the world. The grand prize winner will be selected by fan votes on www.doritos.com and the other advertisement that airs will be selected by the Doritos brand.

We’ve used the Vinja Player to make the 10 Crash the Super Bowl finalist ads—along with a few other entries—easier to browse, view, share and track. Check them out for yourself:

YouTube Video Marketing Has a Moving Target and it is Measurement

By | chaptered youtube videos, Uncategorized | No Comments

During the early days of YouTube, the only measure of success was “views.” But since then marketers have increasingly challenged the value of a “view” and are now focused on creating content and distribution strategies that drive deeper levels of engagement, such as sharing, data capture, or online purchases. This makes “measurement” a moving target. So, let’s take a quick look at where we’ve been, where we are now, and where we’re headed when it comes to identifying the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your YouTube video marketing strategy.

YouTube 2007

YouTube Analytics, circa 2007

Measurement took a big step forward on Mar. 26, 2008, when YouTube Insight was released. The free tool enabled anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to their channel. For example, uploaders could see how often their videos were viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they were relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You could also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it took for a video to become popular, and what happened to video views as popularity peaked.

Meanwhile the market kept moving and marketers started demanding more robust metrics, but it didn’t appear that YouTube Insight was keeping pace. That’s why one of the chapters in the second edition of Greg Jarboe’s book, YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day, is entitled, “Trust but Verify YouTube Insight.” It was published on Nov. 1, 2011.

Less than a month later, YouTube Analytics replaced YouTube Insight. The announcement was made on Nov. 30, 2011.

YouTube Analytics offered a number of new features that YouTube Insight didn’t:

  • A new overview that displayed key information quickly, while also enabling YouTubers to easily access more detailed information.
  • More detailed statistics so that YouTubers could get a more precise understanding of their content and audiences.
  • The ability to discover which videos were driving the most views and subscriptions.
  • The ability to see how far viewers were watching through their video in a new audience retention report.

But the market has kept moving and many marketers are now demanding even more robust metrics. And some savvy marketers have started to realize that YouTube needs to do a lot more than beef up YouTube Analytics. It needs to replace its online video player to change the way video is presented and consumed.

In fact, the way viewers select and interface with our video content remains largely the same: all they can do is scan our title and description, glance at our thumbnail, check our video’s duration, and play, pause, fast-forward and rewind the linear content.

Savvy B2C marketers like ULTA Beauty, the largest beauty retailer for prestige, mass and salon products and salon services in the United States, and savvy B2B marketers like TheCUBE, the leading live interview show covering enterprise technology and innovation, realize that it’s about time for online video to stop working like VCR and start working in concert with other web media.  When it does, the medium of video, and the web itself, will never be the same again.

Vinja enables them to:

  • Tag video chapters: Easily mark, tag, and share links to the gems of content within any of their YouTube videos.
  • Share customized experiences: Meet and interact with their audience through custom video players integrated into their website and workflows.
  • Measure results: Gain and apply insights about their audience to hone their messaging and drive their business objectives.
Vinja Analytics, circa 2014

Vinja Analytics, circa 2014

Together, Vinja and its early adopters are following Galileo’s advice: “Count what is countable, measure what is measurable. What is not measurable, make measurable.” This was controversial advice 400 years ago when the prevailing view of the cosmos was geocentric (the earth is the center of the universe), not heliocentric (the sun is the center of the solar system).

The measure of web marketing success has already evolved from network-centric (page views) to user-centric (session engagement). It’s about time for the measurement of web video marketing success to evolve likewise from video views to viewer engagement—such as, what parts of a video were viewed (and shared) with what frequency, by whom, and with what measurable business results.