The Salesperson That Never Sleeps

Following great success, our virtual sales tool, RTC Virtue, is now available in Europe as well as North America.

Using our interactive video technology, RTC Virtue can create completely personalised sales experiences for online customers. To implement the virtual sales tool, RTC captures a client’s existing sales experience and efficiently integrates it into their platform. Indeed, by reflecting “best practice” sales techniques captured from the client’s traditional sales process, RTC Virtue’s conversion rate can exceed human sales conversions.

In the US, premier marketing intelligence supplier Equipment Data Associates (EDA) turned to RTC’s revolutionary video technology to create a personalised online virtual sales tool for each of their direct mail prospects. When a prospective client visits a personal URL (PURL) supplied through EDA’s direct mail campaign, RTC’s platform is able to create a personalised video that incorporates the visitor’s name, current date, location, and product features which will most benefit that particular visitor.

“David Kane (EDA’s virtual salesperson) is our best ever sales hire!” said David Schwartz, EDA Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “He’s ultra reliable and works 24/7, 365 days a year – and gives a perfect personalised presentation every time. The RTC service has more than doubled response rates compare with traditional Webex presentations.”

“I’m delighted that we’ve now launched the virtual sales tool in Europe as well as North America”, said Tom Quinn, the recently appointed new CEO of RTC. “RTC has a clear focus on Response Marketing which delivers measurable results – this is reflected in our work for some of the worlds most prestigious brands including Manchester United, Sony Ericsson and Nationwide. Time after time we’ve delivered massive ROI for our clients – our work for Nationwide increased their sales by 50% and the campaign paid for itself within six weeks.”

You can see the EDA ‘David Kane’ implementation of RTC Virtue in action here. Note that he is totally unaffected by sleep deprivation despite having been selling continuously for many months!

The full press release for RTC Virtue can be read here.

Tags: Innovation, Interaction, Online, Personalization, Sales, Technology
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Sing with Lips

As part of the launch campaign in November 2009 for the ‘Lips Number One Hits’ game on the XBox 360 , we produced a karaoke video service for the product web-site using video from video production company The Rumpus Room, and created by media publisher Global.

The ‘Mix your own Music Video’ service allows you to create a music video featuring Lily Allen’s 2009 Number One hit, ‘The Fear’ using karaoke performances by members of the public. These were recorded over two months at roadshows around the UK by The Rumpus Room. Real Time Content took the video and split it into individual lines of the song, then allow you to choose the gender of the singers and the quality of their singing. People who have taken part in the recordings get a special code that allows them to feature themselves in the video.

You can try out the ‘Mix your own Music Video‘ service here. ( http://www.singwithlips.co.uk/mix/ )

You can remix the video to get a different version, but you are extremely unlikely to see the same video twice – when the recordings are complete then there will be about 10 to the power 144 different possibilities, which is approximately:

…a billion billion (…12 more billions…) billion billion versions of the video,

and it is a BIG number: more than the number of atoms in the Universe!

Each of these videos is individually created by Real Time Content’s software in less than 2 seconds, of course.

Tags: Content, Karaoke, Lily Allen, Music Video, Online, Production, Technology, Video, Website, XBox 360
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RTC win award for Innovation

Real Time Content is pleased to have received an award for ‘New Media Innovation’ in the 2009 Global Telecoms Business innovation awards.

The submission was from Real Time Content and BT Group plc. It included demos of our Nationwide Home Insurance and Manchester United Video Messaging projects as practical realizations of the innovative research carried out over many years within BT, and which is now commercially available as part of the technology offering from RTC.

The Nationwide Home Insurance campaign is notable because it resulted in a click-through rate increase of 240% and a sales increase of 50%, proving that personalized video really can make a difference to the advertiser’s bottom line. The Manchester United Video Messaging service allows fans of Machester United to create their own highlights videos and send them to other people.

Presented by Global Telecoms Business magazine, the GTB Innovation Awards are designed to honor innovative projects involving telecoms operators and service providers around the world, in association with their vendors and suppliers. The 2009 Awards were presented on Tuesday, June 16, at a black-tie dinner at the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel, London. You can see a list of all the winners here.

Tags: Awards, Innovation, Technology
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Keeping their attention

Attention means everything in advertising. How do you keep someone’s eyes on your video ad when there are a million different distractions online? It’s probably fair to say that advertisers are familiar with this and that it’s what driven and advanced a lot of ad creative to be bigger and better than before. But at what point do you say that the ad has captured the attention of an audience member and proven “successful?”

The problem lies in the measurement of attention. The online ad space is getting more complicated with new ad formats and the lack of standards, as we’ve discussed before, and measurement hasn’t been able to keep up.

Last week, VideoEgg, the video ad network, launched a new system for optimizing ad placement based on interactions, called AttentionRank. Built on measuring engagement and time spent, AttentionRank works to charge advertisers only if the viewer rolls over a rich media ad and watches for a certain length of time. It’s been clear for quite some time that click-through rates are not an accurate measurement of rich media ads, but measuring an ad’s level of attention is an entirely new way to think of it.

Commanding attention is not in the hands of the the ad networks, though, it’s in the hands of the creative. Audiences generally like video and find it more engaging and “attention grabbing” than static or even animated banner ads, but creative teams still have to do everything they can to keep the attention of the viewer. It starts with good creative, good content and a way to target the message – like through personalization – to really capture and maintain the attention of the end viewer.

Tags: Engagement, Measurement, Video, VideoEgg
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Quest for the Standard

Earlier this year, a joint venture, called The Pool, was led by Publicis companies Starcom MediaVest Group and VivaKi, and including Hulu, Microsoft and Yahoo, to test and establish standards for new advertising models among the ad elite.

The Pool wants to narrow the current vast selection for video to one golden standard, which they will present in February 2010. Last week, two executives, Curt Hecht, president of VivaKi Nerve Center, and Tracey Scheppach, video innovation director at Starcom USA, presented the audience at IAB’s Digital Video conference the timeline for their testing. They’ve reduced their initial like of 30 possible online video ad units to two, which they will be testing (against the pre-roll format) until October of this year.

While they didn’t go into much more detail, it’s certainly an interesting prospect – one online video format that achieves the most engagement from consumers while achieving what’s most appealing to media buyers. Could such a thing exist?

IAB has taken their own group of advisors, calling The Re-Imagining Interactive Advertising Task Force (what a name!), which includes more than 20 publishers and agencies like CBS Interactive, Digitas, Google, Razorfish and Universal McCann. For the first time, this group will help to recommend changes to IAB’s annual review of ad standards. This is part of the IAB’s ongoing push to create better guidelines for advertisers. It seems that lack of standardization in online advertising is everyone’s problem, but these efforts are a big incentive to brands who are hesitant to invest in the space.

Meanwhile, media companies are doing their best to get creative about selling video ads. NBC has started pitching variations of their usual ad units, offering a “push back” roll-over unit under the video window and longer single pre-roll ads.

Whatever the end results from these two groups are, there’s sure to be a dramatic shift for content owners. Perhaps content owners can save money by repurposing the “old standard,” pre-roll ads, into refreshed and retargeted personalized video? It’s worth testing the waters.

Tags: Creative, IAB, Publicis, Standards
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