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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If Interactivity is the Way, Personalized Video is the Technology…
Earlier this month, MarketingSherpa released a report stating that marketers want more interactivity in video ads. Isn’t that what the Internet is all about?
We’ve talked about this before at Real Time Content, but the online viewing experience is completely different than the linear experience viewers have when they’re watching a linear medium like TV. Seriously, how much interaction do you have with the television while you’re lying on the couch?! On the Web, you have the full keyboard and computer screen so you’re more apt to interact with and maintain control over the content you consume.
According to MarketingSherpa’s post, 73% of video marketers said that interactivity increases the effectiveness of an ad. This is comparable to the differences in teaching tactics between telling and showing. Were you an avid listener and note taker during a lecture, or the type of person to ask questions and engage the professor in dialogue? Many people learn by doing, and with interactive advertising, you’re not just telling a viewer that a product is cool; you’re actually inviting them to learn about the brand by interacting with branded content. The interactive experience is similar to the dialogue between student and professor, in which the viewer impacts the type of content and how it is received through their engagement with the content.
It’s interesting to see how marketing is shifting and taking advantage of integrating different Web technologies to give the viewer a greater interactive experience. Another finding from the survey was that 66% of marketers agreed that developing different personalized versions of an ad, geared to the individual, increases ad effectiveness. This takes interactivity to the next level of personalization, whereby the content presented is customized for the audience member based on their profile, behavior or preferences. Since viewers can relate to personalized content, it is more appealing and increases the likelihood that they will want to interact with it. No longer is advertising a method of broadcasting product information, the Web is forcing marketers to reevaluate their tactics and develop new ways to start a conversation with their consumers by increasing advertising engagement.
Tags: Advertising, Interaction, MarketingSherpa, Research, Video
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Suddenly, Three Innovations Turn Up!
The last few weeks have seen some fascinating innovations. Google’s Wave shows one view of what email (or more widely, electronic communication) would look like if it was invented now. Wolfram Research’s Alpha shows just how powerful applied computation can be at answering questions, and gives a glimpse of a very intriguing future for knowledge-based computing. Now these things tend to come in threes, and up until now, I was waiting for the third…
So I was not entirely surprised to read Steve Smith’s excellent blog post in MediaPost’s Behavioural Insider, where he talks about something that I can only inadequately describe as an ‘opinion collator,’ from New York-based start-up company Jodange. You can try out the basic idea in three iGoogle Gadgets that track opinons on Energy, The Economic Recovery, and the S&P 500, but the really interesting bit is the ‘Top of Mind’ service, which applies linguistic analysis and collation capability to topics that you choose, rather than presets. You can think of the service as a summary of the collective online opinions, sentiments and feelings of a large number of people – the sort of thing that it would take a lot of effort to determine by reading very widely. And note those words: opinion, sentiment, feeling – these are difficult things to measure reliably.
Written opinions are interesting because they are the carefully crafted and considered result of people thinking, in contrast to the more visceral and immediate behaviors that are what people do, often without thinking too deeply. Online advertising is always looking for ways to infer opinion from behavior, and whilst there is plenty of technology to determine online behavior, opinion has, until now, been a much more intangible metric. Combining what we know about measuring the behaviors of people with metrics for opinions could be a very interesting approach, and one that I’m sure we will see in the future.
Tags: Innovation, Measurement, MediaPost, Research
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Localization: Delivering A Taste of Local
Facebook is known for being a personal hub into a user’s life. It already provides users with a personal view of the world, where only friends are admitted, and this fosters a ‘local’ camaraderie that encourages frequent visits. It’s fascinating to see Adidas tap into this same ‘localness’ by enabling users to visit the ‘Adidas Originals’ Facebook page to choose their language and location preferences in the ‘Your Area‘ tab. The default setting is USA and English, but because you can choose your localization, turning to the UK gave videos featuring David Beckham, while Japan had a video of street skateboarder Mark Gonzales. Letting people interact with branded or sponsored material in this way could be a glimpse of how the future of video online may work. Customization is really the first adage of marketing, making the user feel like an individual. Kudos to Adidas!
Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Personalization, Video
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Measuring the Blurring Lines of Online Video
In a recent article in MediaPost, Naj Kidwai, the CEO of Real Time Content, describes a novel way to get a preview of the future of online video. His suggestion is to look at current video ads, their content, their influences, their targeting, and their measurement. In a world where the boundaries between information, entertainment and advertising are increasingly difficult to define, any pointers to what happens next can provide very valuable insights. Measurement looks like it could be one of the key areas where today’s technical performance statistics for video serving might be augmented in the future by the sort of measures currently associated with the demands of advertisers.
You can read Naj’s article, ” The Blurring Lines of Online Video and What it Means for Measurement,” here. The article includes:
* Looking at ad measurement from a different viewpoint
* What can be learned from the way we measure ads
* A glimpse of some possible futures for online video
Tags: Measurement, MediaPost, Video
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