Online Video Platform Summit: Measuring Success

For businesses, all roads lead to monetization, and there's no other tool more important than video analytics to capture how your video content is consumed on the web. While definitions vary on what is considered a "view" or an "impression" and no real standards currently exist, everyone recognizes the need for real-time data to measure and maximize the ROI of their online efforts. In this session from the Online Video Platform Summit, the CEOs of four leading analytics and video technology companies, Tubemogul, DigitalSmiths, Visible Measures and Accordent, discuss how video metrics help video publishers better understand audience behavior and the performance and reach of a viral video, social marketing campaign, online video ad, corporate training video or other content, and how it drives productivity and revenue.

Measuring Success

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 3:00 PM PST

Description: Without solid, performance-based metrics, there's no way to measure the success and ROI of your video content. The ability to measure video traffic beyond "views"-including audience dropoff, what sites and search terms are referring viewers, and audience geography-offers content publishers deeper insight into both the viewing habits of their audience and the extent of their video's reach. Panelists in this Online Video Platform Summit session will demonstrate video metrics in action and talk about what to measure, how to measure it, and how to turn those measurements into actionable business intelligence.

Moderator: Jan Ozer, Principal, Doceo Publishing

Mike Newman, CEO, Accordent Technologies

Brian Shin, Founder & CEO, Visible Measures

Ben Weinberger, CEO, Digitalsmiths

Brett Wilson, Co-Founder and CEO, TubeMogul

In regards to the future of video analytics, Brian Shin noted a tremendous shift in the analytics space in general. He said,

"I think that the integration of analytics into everything that we do, the concept of web analytics will go away and I think you'll have just a unified analytic platform that's just tracking events."

Mike Newman noted that for his enterprise customers it's about business intelligence. There are always "bean counters" and finance managers that want to see objective data, metrics, tracking and discipline.

"Interestingly, the evolution we have seen is from starting with, "We want to create content" to "How are going to define success and how are we going to measure success?" and without those things in place we're not even going to start."

Ben Weinberger outlined the five things that you need to know about your target viewer to effectively monetize video. He maintained that you don't need to know who they are since that information is too specific and overwhelming. He expanded on these key points:

"What you do need to know is (1) what group they belong to, the basic demographic information (2) what is the viewing behavior of that group (3) when they are viewing, what is the appetite for consuming advertising (4) what platform are they on, since you're going to optimize the viewing experience for them (5) if you have all that information, what bucket are you putting them in, in the traditional ad sense. So that they're effectively being targeted with the right kind of ads."

Brett Wilson noted that,"the hardest part of online video is getting your video watched," and that approximately 50% of all the videos on YouTube have under 500 views and there's only .33% that have over 1 million views. He cited a Tubemogul research study that looked at how much a typical online video is watched, which found that most viewers click away from the video after the first minute.

"I think one thing we'd all agree on is that a metric we would all like to see become more standard is viewed minutes. So right along side a view you'd see how long they actually watched."

A few key take-aways from the panel were, that not all video campaigns are the same so figure out the specific ROI each of your campaigns, focus on reach rather than views and don't assume you've isolated the key metric. Key data can come from somewhere you weren't even trying to measure.

Related @ovpsummit Tweets:

OVP Summit analytics panel session, "Measuring Success" with @visiblemeasures @DsmithsBen @tubemogul @Accordent_Tech#ovps093:12 PM Nov 18th, 2009 from web

Related

• See my related post for detailed bios of each panelist - Online Video Platform Summit Analytics Panel - Measuring Success
• Also, see these Red Carpet interviews with Brett Wilson, Brian Shin and Ben Weinberger

NewTeeVee Live Workshop Panel Session: Real Time Analytics that Drive Personalization and Monetization

Last month at NewTeeVee Live 2009, I moderated a workshop panel discussion titled, Real Time Analytics That Drive Personalization and Monetization. On the panel were , Jeff Jordan from Omniture, Matt Cutler from Visible Measures, Edmond Lau from Ooyala and Michael Shimbo from Live Daily. The goal of the session was to educate the audience on how analytics of all types can help drive greater brand exposure as well as increased revenue. As content owners and marketers move beyond the basics of getting video published on the Web, online video is becoming increasingly performance based.

Title: Real Time Analytics that Drive Personalization and Monetization
Description: As content owners and marketers move beyond the basics of getting video published on the Web, online video is becoming increasingly performance based. The discussion will focus on how content creators, brands, and creative agencies can effectively use this data to drive successful video campaigns.

Date: Thursday, November 12, 2009
Moderator: Larry Kless
Panelist: Edmond Lau (Ooyala), Matt Cutler (Visible Measures), Jeff Jordan (Omniture), and Michael Shimbo (Ticketmaster)

Why are analytics important?
The panel started off answering that question. Jeff Jordan said that, "at the end of the day, it's about differentiation," and user engagement metrics are core to knowing your audience. Matt Cutler said that "we're all in this together," and that effective metrics help tie into business results and can create brand lift. Edmond Lau noted that analytics help create a tight feedback loop that is data driven and that online video has that opportunity to monetize online video ads. Michael Shimbo said that analytics provide a wealth of information about what Ticketmaster customers are consuming, and that the more you know about your audience the better the revenue stream.

What are we measuring?
Jeff said that there's no magic bullet on what to measure but it's a combination of things that we are trying to monetize. Matt noted that many customers are really interested in reach and engagement. Edmond pointed out that the key metrics differ based on the use scenarios. Media companies care about impressions and click through rates and how best to insert ads. For brand markerters, video engagement is more meaningful and engagement reports help you see what parts of the video people watch, what part they seek or skip over. Michael said that there is no shortage of analytics and asked when is it too much since it could be overwhelming and hard to decipher. But knowing how to assemble the data, leverage it and have a qualifed user to interact with the data helps drive business decisions.

Many customers don't like the answer, "it depends on what your business is," when they really don't know what they want and just want a specific list of variables to measure. Jeff offered the advise, "start where the money is and work backwards." Jeff also had another Tweetable quote in regards to measuring social media metrics, "If you don't have social video then you don't have a video strategy."

The discussion moved into answering questions about behavorial targeting and personalization, analytics for the three-screen strategy, media buyer sophistication, how to choose an analytics provider (Omniture, Visible Measures, Ooyala) and the importance social media metrics.

Edmond posted on the video on the Ooyala blog and had this to day about the session,

"We discussed how analytics would shape the online video industry in 2010 and beyond, and how actionable analytics that closed the feedback loop between video publishers and their online audiences would be the major trend. Online marketers looking to build their brand would continue to improve their ability to understand engagement and demographic data about their users. A more complete understanding of their users would then empower them to fine-tune their video experiences and brand advertising to reach larger audiences and generate more conversions. Media publishers seeking to monetize their content through ads would benefit through the development of user profiles and preferences built from their past behavior, the behaviors of similar users in their demographic, and their current behavior on the webpage. These profiles could be used to power data-driven decisions for ads targeting or video recommendations."

Special thanks to Ooyala for inviting me to moderate this session and big thanks to Shalini Gupta for all her work at organizing it.

I also interviewed Jeff Jordan following the session about social media metrics and video marketing and will post the video sometime soon.

See the related Guest Post from Tim Hawthorne on my other blog: Online Video Publisging [dot] com: Made to Measure - How to use Online Analytics Tools to Measure the Effectiveness of your Online Video

Streaming Media West 2009 Red Carpet Interview - Brian Shin, Visible Measures on True Reach and Video Engagement

In this Streaming Media West 2009 Red Carpet interview Peter Cervieri talks with Brian Shin, Founder and CEO of Visible Measures, a media measurement firm that provides independent third party measurement solutions for Internet video publishers and advertisers. Visible Measures specializes in measuring the consumption and viral distribution of Internet video. According to Brian, their patented technology platform integrates within existing video players to measure audience video engagement through a combination of how users interact with Internet content; the amount of interaction they have; and the viewing time independent of where that video content is, either on your sites, partners or blogger sites. Every interaction with the video content from each play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, share, embed and true reach is exposed for analysis. This helps online video publishers know if they're growing their audiences and helps video advertisers understand whether or not their brand messages are actually being delivered to their target audiences.

Brian also spoke at the Online Video Platform Summit on the Analytics Panel - Measuring Success and discussed the importance of true reach and video engagement.

In a recent post on ScribeMedia.Org, Peter Cervieri summarized some of Ben's key points on video monetization through advertising, audience engagement and reach.

Peter says,

"Reach is a metric that makes sense to advertisers.

In this respect, Visible Measures tries to give brands a sense of what they call True Reach™. For example, when a movie studio is building up to a movie launch, there are multiple types of video that connect the brand to consumers that affect reach, frequency and impact.

• paid media (buying an ad on a site such as Yahoo, ESPN, NBC, CNN.com)
• owned media (promotional video content uploaded by a brand or its agency to drive traffic and audiences to some destination controlled by the brand)
• earned media (social video and viral video - consumers embedding, emailing or remixing a brand video, or creating their own videos inspired by the brand)
• benchmark against relevant competitors"

Continue reading Peter's post on ScribeMedia.Org.

As part of a service to the industry, Visible Measures publishes a series of weekly and monthly Top 10 charts on the viral success and reach of the most watched video ads, film trailers, webisodes and viral videos. The Top 10 Viral Video Ads Chart, is updated Thursday mornings and published with Advertising Age reveals the Web's top-performing brand-driven ad campaigns. The Top 10 Film Trailers, updated Friday mornings and published with Variety showcases the Web's best-performing movie trailers. The Top 10 Webisode Series of the Month is updated at the beginning of each month and published with Mashable, highlights the Web's most-watched episodic video series. The 100 Million Club is the Web's only list of the most-watched viral videos of all time.

Just this past week Visible Measures announced that it has collaborated with BETC Euro RSCG to measure the Evian Roller Babies advertisement and compare it against the top-performing ads in online video. Visible Measures was able to accurately measure the total online viewership for Roller Babies and confirm that it has become the most-viewed online video advertisement in history. The video generated a True Reach of over 45 million views across more than 1,200 unique video placements and over 30 video destination sites.

Visible Measures' Enabling Technologies

Visible Measures' Internet video measurement solutions are powered by three core technologies, our Video Placement Multiplier, Viral Reach Database, and Video Metrics Engine. Their Video Placement Multiplier uploads videos to more than 40 video sharing sites in a single step while providing you with control over brand placement. Their Viral Reach Database gives you complete visibility into viral video placements and audience growth by tracking more than 200 million videos across 150+ video-sharing destinations. Their Video Metrics Engine processes viewer engagement with millions of video streams everyday in real-time, recording every interaction by every viewer from every video on your network.

Related

• The Viral Video Research Blog | Visible Measures
• About Visible Measures
• Brian's blog Hungry Yet Humble - A blog about entrepreneurship from the front lines of a growing startup
• ScribeMedia.Org: The Business, Technology and Culture of Digital Media | Brian Shin - Visible Measures
• Visible Measures Partners with BETC Euro RSCG to Measure Record-Breaking Evian Roller Babies Internet Video Advertisement
• Beet.TV: Going Deep on Video Viewing Metrics: Visible Measures Tracks Audience Engagement

Online Video Platform Summit Analytics Panel - Measuring Success

Without solid, performance-based metrics, there's no way to measure the success and ROI of your video content. The ability to measure video traffic beyond "views"-including audience dropoff, what sites and search terms are referring viewers, and audience geography-offers content publishers deeper insight into both the viewing habits of their audience and the extent of their video's reach. Panelists in this Online Video Platform Summit session will demonstrate video metrics in action and talk about what to measure, how to measure it, and how to turn those measurements into actionable business intelligence.

Measuring Success
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 3:00 PM PST

Moderator

Jan Ozer
Principal
Doceo Publishing

Jan Ozer is a digital video expert and frequent contributor to Information Today, Inc.’s magazines, including Streaming Media and EventDV. Jan is the owner of Doceo Publishing, and has written more than 10 books related to the video world and is considered an expert in the field of video and compression techniques. In 1995, Jan published his first book, Video Compression for Multimedia with Academic Press, followed by Publishing Digital Video in 1997 for the same publisher. Since then, Jan has taught video production seminars in the U.S. and abroad, both on a private consulting basis and for various academic institutions, most recently the University of Wisconsin. Jan continues to write for PC Magazine, EventDV, and Streaming Media, and has published an additional eight books for Peachpit Press and PC Magazine Guide to Digital Video, published by John Wiley. Ozer's most recent instructional title is Critical Skills for Streaming Producers, published with Streaming Media, and is a mixed media tutorial, delivered in PDF format on DVD. If you're looking for more current articles from Jan Ozer, check out Streaming Learning Center.com.

Speakers

Mike Newman
CEO
Accordent Technologies

As co-founder and CEO of Accordent Technologies, Mike Newman has led the company’s growth and development from a start-up software company to an enterprise internet communications solutions provider with thousands of tier-1 enterprise, education and government clients worldwide. Mike is a frequent speaker at industry trade shows and conferences and is widely respected in the streaming industry for his expertise in webcasting technologies and business models.

Brian Shin
Founder & CEO
Visible Measures

Brian Shin is the founder and CEO of Visible Measures. Brian has co-founded several successful Internet software companies, including web-based collaboration technology vendor Creative Aspects, which was acquired by Medsite Inc. (now WebMD); and The Cambridge Intelligence Agency, a Web-based e-mail response management solution provider that was acquired by marketing services company MSGi. Brian also co-founded technology strategy consulting firm Infraweb, Inc., where he served as President, and was an early member of the team at Allaire Corp. which went public in 1999 and was subsequently acquired by Macromedia.

Brian enjoys trying new foods with his wife, occassionally updates Twitter and his blog, holds an undergraduate degree from Tufts University, and earned an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management as part of the dual-degree Harvard-MIT Biomedical Enterprise Program.

Ben Weinberger
CEO & Co-Founder
Digitalsmiths

Ben Weinberger co-founded Digitalsmiths on a single premise—the internet would revolutionize the movie, television and entertainment industry, driving a new level of innovation that would forever change consumer behavior. This pioneering approach has helped the company transform an idea into a reality and a vision into a thriving and fast-growing business. The company’s flagship product, Digitalsmiths VideoSense, the industry’s leading studio-grade, video monetization solution, has propelled Digitalsmiths to the forefront of multi-screen metadata management, media analysis and digital content publishing technologies. Ben graduated with honors from Southern Illinois University, and serves on its board of directors for the Honors Program. He also serves as a member of the Digitalsmiths’ board of directors.

Brett Wilson
Co-Founder & CEO
TubeMogul

Brett Wilson leads the strategic direction for TubeMogul. He spent the first 3 years of his career as a consultant for Accenture. Next, he founded and led YouCanSave.com, a profitable ecommerce company that obtained over $69 million in revenue and was successfully acquired. He is also married and has two beautiful children. Brett received his M.B.A. from UC Berkeley.

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hashtag #ovps09

I'm Moderating an Analytics Panel at NewTeeVee Live Tomorrow!

This is a quick break from my promotion of the Online Video Platform Summit, which is just one week away, for a media alert to say that I'll be at NewTeeVee Live tomorrow moderating a panel discussion at 12:30 PM on Analytics sponsored by Ooyala. The focus of the session is to discuss how analytics of all types can help drive greater brand exposure as well as increased revenue. The event will be held at the the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, San Francisco, CA from 8:00 AM - 8:30 PM. The conference will be discussing 'Television Reinvented' and will feature panel discussions from leaders in the field of television and communications. See the full schedule at http://events.newteevee.com/live/09/schedule/

Ooyala Workshop - Real Time Analytics that Drive Personalization and Monetization
As content owners and marketers move beyond the basics of getting video published on the Web, online video is becoming increasingly performance based. Ooyala's Analytics Engine provides real time data on viewer consumption and engagement. Today's discussion will focus on how content creators, brands, and creative agencies can effectively use this data to drive successful video campaigns.

Moderator

Larry Kless
Founder and President,
OnlineVideoPublishing.com

Larry Kless is President and Founder of Online Video Publishing [dot] com a new media resource firm for sharing strategies and best practices for online video publishers. Larry is a 20 year veteran of the enterprise video space and award-winning producer of corporate and educational videos. His background is in fine arts and he's a long-time member of Canyon Cinema, Inc. and Filmmakers' Coop. He writes a personal blog and is a contributor on ReelSEO.com and Vator.tv focusing on streaming media, online video, startups, gadgets, social media, advertising and marketing, videoconferencing and collaboration. He was named a 2009 Streaming Media All-Star by StreamingMedia.com, and is also Co-Chair of the Online Video Platform Summit which will be held in conjunction with Streaming Media West in San Jose November 18-19, 2009.

Speakers
Matt Cutler
VP, Marketing and Analytics,

Visible Measures
Matt Cutler serves as vice president of marketing & analytics at Boston-based Visible Measures, the independent third-party measurement firm for Internet video publishers, advertisers, and viral marketers. As part of his responsibilities at Visible Measures, Matt leads the company's research efforts, focusing primarily on measuring how viral videos spread across the Web and identifying best practices in optimizing audience engagement. Previously, Matt led strategic marketing at SPSS the world's leading provider of predictive analytics software and services. Matt joined SPSS as part of the acquisition of NetGenesis, a pioneering Web analytics company that he co-founded in 1994. Matt regularly publishes viral video research findings on the Visible Measures blog (http://blog.visiblemeasures.com) and via Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/mcu)


Jeff Jordan

Product Manager, Video,

Omniture
Working side-by-side with the world’s largest media companies, Jeff has pioneered Omniture’s industry-leading video measurement solution that is currently measuring billions of online videos each month. As Omniture’s video measurement evangelist and product manager, he is the visionary behind all video-related products focused on measuring and monetizing static and viral video. Before his work at Omniture, Jeff was involved in the venture capital and emerging technology space, finding and nurturing start-up companies through early-stage funding to exit.


Edmond Lau
Tech Lead of Analytics and Monetization,
Ooyala

Edmond Lau is the Technical Lead for monetization and analytics. He works on Ooyala's ad serving infrastructure and third party ad integrations, manages the log processing pipeline for analytics, and built out tools to track bandwidth and latency across different CDNs in Ooyala's video player. He has extensive experience working with data processing technologies including Hadoop, MapReduce, and Thrift. Prior to Ooyala, Edmond worked for 2 years as a software engineer at Google on Search Quality's user happiness team, where he launched the related searches feature on google.com, worked on search history, conducted live-traffic user interface experiments, and built out infrastructure for prototyping new features on google.com.

Michael Shimbo

VP of Digital Content and Strategy, Ticketmaster
General Manager, Live Daily
Michael was the co-founder and president at concert.tv. Prior to that he worked at NBC as a product marketing manger.

You can also tune into the all-day broadcast of NewTeeVee Live from 8am - 6pm PT / 11am - 9pm ET on Gigaom TV on Livestream. The stream will also be made available on to your iPhone if you can't get to a computer! Check it out at: http://iphone.livestream.com/gigaomtv