Ipermedia Blog

Research finds professional video is tops on the Web

2008-01-23T05:30:00.000-05:00

Web users prefer professional quality online videos than user generated content, according to a survey released Monday.

Burlington, Mass.-based Burst Media, a digital media buyer, found that news clips were most popular form of video on the Web among users at 44 percent. Music videos were next with 37.5 percent and comedy videos were next with 35.5 percent. User generated videos ranked near the bottom at 15.4 percent.

According to Burst's survey 72.1 percent of respondents have viewed online videos. And while online video might seem more appealing to younger Web users, 58.6 percent of respondents 65 years and older reported having watched videos online.

Burst's survey was conducted over the Internet in December among 2,600 Web users 18 years or older. (Boston Business Journal)

So don't waste your time trying to produce your own video...get it done professionally by Ipermedia!

The ever-evolving world of media delivery

2007-11-27T02:38:00.000-05:00

A recent conference in Manhattan addressed something that we already know… the media landscape is changing. The days of just producing TV, radio and print ads are gone. More and more, content is being developed specifically for new channels such as the web, iPods, YouTube, IPTV, VOD etc.

From the perspective of a video production company, at Ipermedia, more and more of the work we do is destined for the web from the get-go. We expect this trend to continue into the 2008. The challenge for marketers is to create that needle of content that is engaging enough to be pulled out of the haystack of crap that is going around.

Read more here:

http://www.startribune.com/154/story/1443574.html

Video Production, Web Design, SEO, Branding Articles @ ipermedia.com.au

2007-10-09T01:25:00.000-05:00

Well if you are anything like me you are constantly looking at/looking for great articles that can teach you something about:

- Video Production
- Web Design / Best Practices
- Search Engine Optimization / Website Marketing
- Branding
- Visual Effects / Animation

GOOD NEWS! We have a collection of the best of the best articles on these subjects and more at ipermedia.com.au So if you feel like you need some inspiration, or just feel like getting educated on these subjects (especially as they pertain to Business), check out our articles section now.

NBC's new ad Network...sweet

2007-10-09T00:44:00.000-05:00

NBC has a (relatively) new concept, just create a network of nothing but ads!

It seems that the network is creating a portal called www.didja.com that features nothing but advertisements, both classic and current. As someone who is constantly needing to come up with new creative concept for TV advertising, a site where I can view hundreds of the best ads would surely provide a great source of creative inspiration!

Getting a better return on investment from TV commercials

2007-10-08T21:35:00.000-05:00

With 20 per cent of all advertising failing or negatively affecting the brand it is supposed to be promoting, it only takes a tiny amount of time and money to make sure that a huge bundle of both is not being wasted.

The answer is quite simply to get a second opinion from someone who isn't involved in either the brand or the p[production. Now, I am not suggesting for a minute that analysts and consultants such as myself and others are more experienced, intelligent or cleverer than those people who are coming up with the concept for ads. Our skill is that we are not involved. We can see the wood for the trees and because we have not lived with a concept from day one we can pick up the flaws and we can put ourselves into the shoes of the consumer a lot more easily than those involved. A dispassionate, analytical, target-market view.

These days far too many TV commercials seem to go on air without the agency or client giving too much thought to the real impression it will have on viewers. Basically what happens, unless an agency and its unsuspecting client are careful, is that the team involved in producing the commercial get so involved with what they are doing that they don't see the wood for the trees.

Often, without knowing, they start at concept stage with a full feature which is then cut down to a one minute or even worse, a 30 second commercial. Now, everyone in the production team knows what was cut out and so the eventual commercial makes sense. But the poor viewer hasn't the foggiest notion of what is going on.

There are two other areas where agencies fall down. The first is making the mistake of producing a "once-off" commercial - unconsciously working on the basis that the ad will only be seen once. The second is wrongfully assuming that viewers will absorb every aspect of a commercial.

On the first point, it is vital that before producing an ad the creative team gets some idea from their media colleagues on the fighting frequency. Commercials are like jokes - hysterical when you hear one the first time but in most cases, no matter how good the joke, when you hear the same guy tell it the tenth time you want to smack him in the face.

It is the same with a TV commercial. Frequency is all important but it can also be an advertisement's worst enemy.

To prove this point to yourself, take the last Cannes Ad Awards Reel. Choose the four or five you like the best and watch them five or six times over the next week or so. Then decide how great they really are.

One way to test the difference between a good and bad ad is to take a sixty second commercial and count how many points of interest there are. A point of interest being something in the ad that gets your attention. If there is only one at the beginning and one at the end - then you have an ad that should definitely not be run frequently.

No matter how excited an agency creative team might feel about an ad, the consumer will never share that level of excitement. What keeps the consumer watching and not channel swapping or heading for the kitchen, are those little things - facial expressions, pieces of action, bits of dialogue - sufficient points of interest. Almost the same way as a novel has to have high and low points running through it to keep the reader interested.

Bad commercials are those that are totally predictable from the second time you watch it. Where one feels you're having to plough your way through sixty long seconds. Those are the ads that turn viewers off the product. Lasting impressions are vital for the success of a TV commercial. This is where agencies fall down most. Assuming the viewer is going to understand quite clearly what the message is.

And beware the notion that what TV advertising is all about is the "Big Idea." It isn't. What TV advertising is all about is a practical, businesslike way of getting the attention of the consumer and maintaining it - then leaving a lasting memory.

by Chris Moerdyk

More Traffic to your Blog...Here's some help

2007-09-25T01:39:00.001-05:00

If you've been looking to get more traffic to your video business website, here's something that can help you. BlogRush

Launching early this morning and the brainchild of Internet marketing whiz John Reese (the guy really is good!), BlogRush is a new free service that was developed to help us get more readers. And so far, I'm pretty impressed.

By adding the BlogRush widget to your blog, you can get instant and exponential distribution for your posts across what will develop into a large network of related blogs. "Related" is the keyword here. The BlogRush people claim that it's all about relevancy...and they'll match your blog title and content up with related blog links.

BlogRush users will earn "syndication credits" (the right to have their blog post titles shown inside a widget on another related blog) based on their own traffic -loads of the widget, not clicks ON the widget, which is terrific -as well as the traffic of other users they refer to BlogRush. You can see the widget in the right column of this page.

Hey. It's free. It looks like it'll be a good system for building relevant traffic. You can set it up in about a minute. Give it a try. Oh -at the moment, it does not work with WordPress blogs that are not self-hosted.

Complaints Choirs: Viral Video Gold

2007-08-29T21:17:00.000-05:00

The pet peeves and angst-ridden pleas of people in Helsinki have been collected then composed in this choral work around the list of complaints. Protest goes broadband. Bob Dylan for Web 2.0? Victor Meldrew 2006?

With a hefty 160,000 views it's a strangely compelling public voice of dissent, irritation and annoyance.

Imagine you're a PR company or an ad agency. A bunch of protesters come to you and ask for a campaign to promote their position. They tell you they have bugger all to spend. Can you think of a better, more cost effective and engaging way to publicise their particular beef?

Neither can I.

I think we can expect more of this; 'Reasonable Guerrilla Lobbying'.

Creativity that makes a political point with a smile. Issue-based, mindv generated PR without taking to the streets, the megaphone, whistle or bin-lid.

There's also a version from Birmingham. With a heady 230,000 views. The choir was recruited from people who had been part of a 2 week 'Complaints Workshop'.

More here...
http://www.ykon.org/kochta-kalleinen/complaintschoir.html

Ipermedia.com.au Updated

2007-08-24T21:47:00.000-05:00

Our website Ipermedia.com.au has recently seen an update. Improvements and additions to the site include:

- improved video "works" section. No more scrolling. Just choose what you'd like to see and it'll load in like 1.04 seconds. (unless you are in 1995)
- Ipermedia.com.au now accessible to people with poor eyesight! (We figured even people with poor eyesight might be interested in checking out the site...so we have increased the font size!)
- Added "articles" section. The "articles" section is just a rip off of the "blog" you say? Well....ahh....no its not.... ; )
- Added service information. Want to know exactly what we mean when we say we produce awesome video in HD (or any other format you can think of)? Well now you can. The "services" page now links to more info about each of our services.
- General update of out-of-date information.

So what better time to check out these updates than the present. Visit www.ipermedia.com.au now!

Seven Deadly Sins of Advertising Via Viral Video

2007-08-06T07:22:00.000-05:00

Here at Ipermedia one of our favourite type of projects to work on is viral videos. They are great. There really is no limit to what a "viral" video can be, you are really only limited by your own imagination (We find they are a great opportunity to show off our staff's creativity!).

Below is an article on viral video marketing that is truly gold...

Show me a marketer without “viral” on her marketing plan and I’ll show you an online video site that’s profitable. Advertising offline is getting harder with time-shifted television and declining viewership, and online advertising is getting more complex with paid-search prices rising and banner click-thru’s dropping. Given the low variable cost of viral, it’s natural that advertisers would want to experiment with it. “I want a piece of Web 2.0,” they say.
Advertisers beware. Getting people to promote your product by forwarding a viral video is not as easy as it appears. Save you and your clients some money and consider the “7 Deadly Sins of Advertising Via Viral Video.”

1. Make a white and brown cow. Seth Godin has a term called “Purple Cow,” which refers to marketing that is “remarkable” and worth paying attention to and talking about. Your viral video better be Technicolor Purple if you actually expect it to break through an increasingly crowded space. What is remarkable? Take a look at the Volkswagen “Fast” series featuring Jim Meskimen. (Jim is a comedian and impersonator, and you’ve heard him as the voice of Messing With Sasquatch” series. Would you view this content more than once, and show it to a co-worker or forward it to a friend? I would, and have.
2. Pretend you’re not advertising. Nothing quite irrates a consumer like being secretly persuaded. “Al Gore’s Penguin Army” is a classic example of a “funny video” that was exposed as having a PR agenda. Transparency is a ticket in the viral video door, friends. No ticket, no ride.

3. Spend a fortune on production. It pains me to see companies throw around huge production budgets on online video. I’ve seen it payoff only once. Here’s Smirnoff’s Ice Tea Partay (which was featured yesterday as one of YouTube’s top 3 on Good Morning America). Clearly this cost north of $300K to produce. But even if you pay that much, you might be better off giving it a “rough around the edges” look. Improv acting, sloppy camera moves and poor production can actually give your video that “consumer generated video” feel. There’s going to be a huge market for individual directors that can shoot viral videos for around $20-$50K, and it makes it much easier to get an ROI on viral video when you’re not having to recoup a big fixed-cost investment in production. When Yahoo featured on its homepage my “Lay Me Off” video (which I’ve temporarily pulled down at the request of some of the actors), I got a number of e-mails from people asking how much I’d charge for a viral video for their clients. Since I have a day job and I do videos as a hobby, I declined. But they’ll find someone who is quite happy to take a low fee for a video that’s powerful. Of course an advertising agency will probably mark up the director’s fees by 500%.
4. Tell consumers instead of engage them. Don’t think of your viral video as an adaptation of a 60-second spot. Obviously it’s got to be irreverent, weird, funny and different. But more importantly, the web has the ability to make the viral event a dialogue. Contests are a good example. There have been plenty of online video contests, but Mentos Geyser Contest is already shaping to be one of the most successful. Check out all of the consumers creating buzz around a candy that was a 7-11 relic 6 months ago. Seventy to date! Production costs for Mentos on those videos? Zero. (By the way, vote this Mentos Jet Pack one 5 stars and I’ll send you some cheese). BarterBee’s contest created buzzz for a CD and DVD exchange. The CEO wore a bee suit to promote it. Brave.

5. Do a video contest because everyone else is. This online-video “contest fad” will continue, and it will become more difficult to activate consumers to promote your product. Do a search for “video contest” on Google and you’ll see four or five different ads for contests. The David Chappelle video contest is a good example of a nice idea with some executional flaws. First, it didn’t initially promote the contest on its own website because it wanted to focus people on buying the DVD. Second, it petered out. Contest winners weren’t announced and insufficient media budget promoted the contest. To give you an idea of how abused contests are getting, there was a summer promotion for a mayonnaise manufacturer looking for videos about may recipes.

6. Set unrealstic conversion metrics. After someone watches your video, what do you think they’ll do? Will 30% come to your site? Will 10% buy your brand in two months? Give me a break. Viral video is one of the most difficult-to-measure parts of your marketing mix. Sure you can count views. But none of the online video sites are yet able to track the viewers so you can conduct your DynamicLogic unaided recall and awareness study. And very f people will take an immediate and measurable action. Sorry to sober you.

7. Throw in the towel and decide to just advertise around viral videos. Please don’t give up and decide that it’s easier to simply advertise around videos. There are certainly products and services that can do well through this, but it’s the lazy way to approach online video. The online video sites are mostly new, and there is an unlimited possibility for creative partnerships. Even YouTube (which has been slow to embrace commercial interests) has a homepage advertising feature for advertisers. As I write, it’s a trailer for Beerfest. Yesterday it was Paris Hilton. Revver has run a few contests, and has married EepyBird to Mentos in probably the best case study for viral video marketing yet. For best results, don’t think you have to decide between getting your videos seen on sites for free OR advertising on them. Do both in partnership.

Real Estate Video Tours - Do they really work?

2007-05-05T11:48:00.002-05:00

Consider the following experience shared by one of our friends from the US here at Ipermedia...

"At 11:30pm eastern time recently, I received a call from the west coast. As I was just about to go to bed, I let it go to voice mail.

The next day, I listened to the message, which was from someone in California. He was a bit confused as to who he was calling, and asked if I did Video Tours for real estate,etc. Since I am in the Boston area, California is a bit out of my range, so I was just going to ignore the call. But, I did decide to call him back and see what he wanted.

He had seen my website and samples of my real estate video tours, and and was relocating to the area and wanted to see video tours of homes in the area. I explained that I was not a REALTOR, only a provider of video tours. He kept reiterating that he wanted to watch video tours of homes before he and his wife came out since they don't have the option of traveling across the country multiple times to look at homes. I explained (again), that I was not a REALTOR. He asked me to refer him to someone who did Video Tours, and I told him that I could do that, however, they don't have video tours for every home for sale in the marketplace... just some of their listings. He insisted that he wanted someone who had video tours, so I told him that I did have one client who had done Video Tours for all of his listings for the past 12-14 months... but again... they are only for HIS listings... not all listings. He said that this was fine... and I gave him his number.

Less than an hour later, I spoke to this agent. He immediately received a call from this person. His wife is a prominent doctor in Boston, and they want to move somewhere north of Boston.... within 40 minutes to the city. Oh... price range?.... $2-2.5M.

He is most likely going to create videos for any homes this client is interested in, which will be posted on the web for the client to view. This way, when they DO come out, they will know exactly what they want to see, therefore not wasting their time. Oh, and this is the second million dollar buyer that he has received within the past 4 weeks due to Video Tours.

Another interesting (and somewhat pathetic) side note.... The agent was checking all homes in the area in the $1.5-10M range to see what was on the market that he could show him. Of the 40 or so properties currently listed, guess how many had a Virtual Tour?

NONE. Nada. Not one.

This is not Realtor.com, where you have to actually pay real money to have a virtual tour. This is the New Hampshire MLS. Even more ridiculous, the MLS allows up to 12 photos. Probably 75% of these listings had five photos or less. What are these REALTORS thinking? Are you on crack? Come on... a 2+ million dollar house... and you can't even put up the allowable 12 photographs???? Digital photographs are FREE. In case you've been on vacation for the past decade, there is no cost to develop photos any more, only the time to actually take the picture. And you can't even provide twelve lousy photos?????? If I was your seller I would fire you in a heartbeat. You're not doing your job. Sorry. To me, this is mind numbing, and just proves that the problem with many REALTORS is laziness... pure and simple.

The funniest thing is, when word gets out that an agent has a million dollar buyer (which is not that common these days), every agent with a million dollar listing in the area is on the phone begging to show their listing.

Again, I just don't get it....."

Sounds crazy, but its the same here in Australia. For some reason, Prestige Real Estate Agents seem scarcely interested in making the small investments that ensure the BIG results.

Our sister company Property Films produces engaging Video Property Tours of all lengths. For further information on Property Films Video Property Tours, please visit the website contact us.

consider...your business broadcasts to the world...

2007-04-13T15:11:00.000-05:00

Using Video on the Internet

Getting eyes (viewers) to your web site is one thing. Once they arrive keeping them is another altogether.

Video Streaming offers an excellent opportunity to keep eyes on your site. How, by creating a series of short thirty to sixty second web commercials that can be created to sell, market, train or promote your company, product or organization. By doing a series you place a different streaming video clip on different pages within your site. Once the eyes are on that page they watch your video and while watching will look at other items you have to offer.

Tips: 1) Keep the videos short and to the point. 2) Have a professional look. This video represents your business. Hire a professional to give you that look. 3) Make the video stream available for multiple video streams. i.e. dialup, DSL, Broadband, Cable. 4) Link that video to other sites of interest (chambers, associations etc).

Keep customers (and potential customers) engaged, keep clients and network partners informed. Step into the limelight. Consider...your business broadcasts to the world.

Welcome to the Ipermedia Blog!

2007-04-02T02:44:00.000-05:00

Well April seems like as good a month as any to launch the all-new excellente Ipermedia Blog. Why do we need a blog you ask? To keep in contact with all the fans/clients/search engines of course. Here we will publish the latest news (from Ipermedia and otherwise) the greatest articles (from Ipermedia staff and otherwise), and something I personally love, the bestest of the best in creative advertising and video content!

By the way, if you have found your way here you probably already know what Ipermedia is about. We are a video production company based in Brisbane Australia. We specialise in corporate, promotional, online, training, TVC and pretty much anything else you could call 'video'. For more on this check out www.ipermedia.com.au