Larry Kless' Weblog: engagement

Showing posts with label engagement. Show all posts

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Streaming Media West Red 2009 Carpet Interview - Tom Wilde, RAMP on Monetizing Discovery and Engagement Through "Content Optimization"

In this 2009 Streaming Media West 2009 Red Carpet interview Peter Cervieri sits down with Tom Wilde, CEO of RAMP, the company formerly known as EveryZing, and the industry’s leading "Content Optimization" platform for media publishers. Tom also spoke at the Online Video Platform Summit on the SEO Panel - Optimizing Video Search and Discoverability, and is a recognized leader in the field of Internet search and online advertising. His newly rebranded company made the announcement at Streaming Media West with a new name, new and improved tools for video search and discovery, and new focus. The new Software as a Service (SaaS) platform platform is divided into four core solutions: RAMP:workflow, RAMP:discovery, RAMP:engagement, and RAMP:monetize, and is designed to help media publishers expand video search and discovery and ramp up engagement monetization of all types of web content though, "content optimization."

RAMP has an interesting history in that it's portfolio of technologies spun out of a company called BBN Technologies, one of the world’s foremost research organizations with more than $100M government funded research, in speech-to-text and natural language processing technologies and search for the Department of Defense. The technology was developed primarily for monitoring phone calls and broadcast television mediums. When the company was acquired by venture capitalists they decided to spin out some of the technology which was over 30 years of R&D and included 20 patents that his company acquired. Some of the problems that the government was trying to solve was speaker, topic and format independent technology, which has very similar requirements to that of big media companies.

RAMP began as PodZinger, a podcast search engine, and started trying to figure out how to create rich metadata from audio files to make audio podcasts more discoverable. PodZinger used speech-to-text technology to create a text index of the audio, which enabled users to find content anywhere within podcasts and jump directly to the point of their keyword. They moved to a B2B media merchandising platform solution soon after rebranding as EveryZing, and opened up their platform to include all forms of online multimedia content. Tom identified the challenge of video discoverability as one of the key emerging problems of the web, and that rich media content misses out on monetization opportunities when it can't be discovered through search engines.

RAMP Content Optimization and RAMP Platform Solutions suite is more of big media company play with startup fees roughly in the low tens of thousands, with monthly fees usually between $5,000 and $15,000. Licensing costs can be paid either on a monthly or annual cycle, based on the amount of content that is processed. Many media companies use RAMP's speech-to-text algorithms to auto-generate transcripts and tags for third-party content. Customers in specific market verticals include news, sports, local, infotainment, print publishing and web.

On Vator News, Tom said that the re-branding was,

"largely driven by the completion of our solution to a business-to-business SaaS provider to media companies. Everyzing was an older consumer destination name and we didn't feel it was reflective of what we do now and what we're doing going forward. RAMP has a nice set of meanings; ramp up your traffic, ramp up your sales, it's easier to remember."

According to Tom, 2010 will bring more focus on social media, mobile and managed services and he noted that the pervasiveness of video across all verticals will continue to grow.

In his Red Carpet interview he said,

"In the end, virtually every company of significant size out there has to begin to think like a media company. They have to produce media because that's how the marketing conversation will happen through video and through social. So I think all of this converges in the future, where there won't be any major company that isn't behaving like a media company."

See Mark Robertson's post on ReelSEO for more on RAMP's Content Optimzation Platform. Also see Andy Plesser's interview with Tom on Beet.TV where he talk about how companies like CNBC, Thomson Reuters, FOX have implemented the service and OVPs like thePlatform, Brightcove, and YuMe have partnered with hosted solutions.

About RAMP
RAMP is an advanced Content Optimization SaaS platform providing publishers’ workflow, discovery and engagement solutions to drive monetization of online content to users’ search and browsing behavior. RAMP offers publishers an open, flexible and modular capability to optimize large amounts of content, including text, audio, video and images, within dynamic publishing environments. As a result, publishers’ content becomes positioned for discovery and precise targeting, both on search engines and within publishers’ own websites. Users rely on such precision to discover and engage with content, thereby increasing the commercial viability of content for publishers while curtailing publishing costs.
Leading publishers using RAMP include – FOXNews, NBC, DowJones, Meredith, and others. For more information visit: www.RAMP.com, or contact us at info@RAMP.com.

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Sunday, December 6, 2009

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.

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