Digital 180, Compete’s online “TV” series, spoke with Marta Kagan, who leads Espresso’s growing Boston office.   As the outspoken voice behind The Secret Diary of a Bonafide Marketing Genius, Marta writes and speaks frequently about branding and advertising in the digital channel.  Her viral hit What the F**k is Social Media? has been translated into seven languages.

Continue reading “Digital 180 Speaks with Espresso’s Managing Director Marta Kagan” »

I’ve never paid for cable. It’s not that I don’t enjoy TV. I do enjoy it, perhaps a little too much, which is why I’ve always thought it better to steer clear of cable and satellite services. For a while I led a happy existence – reading books, frolicking in the sunshine, and maintaining a marginal degree of intelligence. Then Hulu came along with its “evil plot to destroy the world” and things changed. Hulu offers free TV shows and movies from a multitude of networks and studios with crisp pictures and minimal advertising. These days I spend much more time watching online video than I should.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who enjoys Hulu’s free services. Hulu may be becoming more of a brand online than ABC, NBC and Fox, the big broadcast networks that own shares of it.

As shown in the chart below, traffic to hulu.com overtook all three networks for the first time in June. The networks’ traffic declined during the summer rerun season, but Hulu seems relatively unaffected.

So how has Hulu managed to draw people away from the networks that produce the content and supposedly hold the loyalty of consumers? To find out, I took a look at compete.com’s Search Analytics reports.

The chart below shows the percent of overall search traffic driven by term categories:

• The network name category includes any term that has the name of the network in it (i.e. “nbc tv” or “hulu video”)
• The show name category is any search term that refers to the name of a show (i.e. “family guy episodes”)
• The free content category refers to any search term that contains the word ‘free’ (i.e “watch free tv”)

The data point to one big reason for Hulu’s success: branding.

• Hulu has been more successful in developing its brand with online video. Over half (56%) of Hulu’s search traffic in June was driven by branded searches for Hulu’s name, whereas only 17% of Fox’s traffic and 14% of NBC’s search traffic were driven by searches for the networks’ names.
• The networks have been more successful in attracting viewers searching for specific shows with 43% and 34% of NBC and Fox’s search traffic, respectively, coming from terms relating to show names.
• Hulu is attracting searches for free content while the networks are not. This suggests that Hulu has been more successful at marketing itself as a site for free TV, while the networks may be struggling to convey that they are also offering free access to their shows.

For the major networks, this means that it makes more sense to advertise specific shows than the network brand itself. For Hulu, the biggest takeaway is that is has successfully created a brand as a site for aggregated, free online content.

There have been rumors floating around that Hulu may start charging for content bundles. Some have argued that peer-to-peer file sharing still poses significant competition in the online content space and that too many outlets for free content already exist.

This my be true, but with Hulu’s successful branding, it may be able to make the transition to paid content simply by offering some added value and convenience – maybe portable content that the user could put on multiple devices to rival iTunes’ DRM. For now the question remains: will people who don’t pay for cable be willing to pay for online content?

Visible Measures is an authority on measuring the consumption and distribution of online videos and Matt Cutler, the Visible Measures VP of Marketing and Analytics, recently spoke with Digital 180. While everyone is already familiar with online video, its function in branding campaigns is still evolving. Matt shares his ideas on how social video differs from viral, what trends he sees emerging in the near future, and what company is getting it right with online video right now.

Check out the Digital 180 channel and continue to check back with the Compete Blog for more insights from industry leaders.

Michael Rucker of YouTube recently joined us at the TNS Media Digital CMO Summit and shared some of his views on online video in the Digital 180 interview series. Michael discuss how the differences between broadcast and online video change how marketers should approach each and other trends he sees in online video. Check back next week for more insights from the Digital 180 series.

With Google’s announcement last week that it would begin showing sponsored results for video searches on YouTube, a lot of advertisers and producers have begun to consider a new opportunity to tap into the web’s largest pool of online videos and viewers.

YouTube has long been acknowledged as the far-and-away frontrunner in online video, with close to 63 million US-based visitors in October 2008, according to Compete. Less well-known has been YouTube’s status as a top-ranking search engine.

Last month, YouTube served nearly 770 million search queries, making it the third largest search engine, according to Compete’s October Search Market Share.

The graph above shows the twelve month trend for video search queries on YouTube. Some key points:

• Queries at YouTube have grown 35% since October 2007
• The average unique visitor to YouTube conducted 12 searches in October 2008 (770M queries/63M UV)
• By comparison, video search specialists Blinkx.com and Truveo.com each had less than 2 million unique visitors last month

With that kind of query volume, there is clearly an opportunity for advertisers to tap into the search intent of millions of YouTube searchers. Advertisers can target their videos to searchers who are expressly interested in their brand, product or category.

For instance, a YouTube search for “James Bond” returned sponsored results for the new “Quantum of Solace” game from Activision. It also returned a sponsored video for a rival game from Electronic Arts, showing the need for advertisers to play defensively.

Until now, YouTube advertisers have chosen from a variety of banner, rich media and in-video advertising formats, priced on a CPM-basis. Now they may benefit from the pay-per-click system where, like Google AdWords, keyword prices will be set by auction and advertisers will only pay when a sponsored video gets clicked.

There’s also the opportunity for advertisers to target segments on YouTube that aren’t specifically searching for an advertiser’s offering. To continue with the Bond example, a potential ticket buyer may also be searching for the Aston Martin DBS, the official Bond car, or Alicia Keyes, who performed the movie’s theme song.

So what exactly are YouTube’s visitors looking for? Compete’s monthly compilation of the top searches made on YouTube provides unparalleled access into consumer search patterns on the site and offers advertisers a tool for aligning their messaging with user intent. From the list below of the Top 40 YouTube search terms in October, it’s clear that music videos are highly searched for on the site.

Are 40 terms not enough for you? Please contact us if you’re interested in acquiring a much broader list of thousands of the top monthly YouTube search terms.

Growth at Google’s YouTube slowed dramatically in August, coming in essentially flat after months of consecutive gains of 3 – 5%. Despite the slowdown, Google still overwhelming led the field with 55.4% share of video viewing visits.

As the gap between YouTube and everybody else continued to widen, two players debuted in the top ranks in August, thanks to major news events. The Democratic National Convention gave a big boost to CNN.com, part of the Time Warner Network, which altogether took a 4.0% share of video viewing visits.

Meanwhile the Olympic Summer Games drove major traffic to NBCOlympics.com, part of the NBC-Universal Peacock, which shot up to 3rd place with 3.9% of visits. That marked the first time TWN and NBCU have been in the Top 5.

The newcomers, both complements to larger TV networks, displaced Fox Interactive Media (parent to MySpace) and Microsoft. FIM and Microsoft have consistently lost share over the past 12 months, but usually their loss has been YouTube’s gain.

Meanwhile, some familiar faces are climbing steadily up the mid-ranks. Facebook’s video application claimed 11th place in August with 1.5% share of visits in August, up from 17th place in January.

And Hulu took 14th place in August, with 1.2% of viewing visits. The NBCU-Fox joint venture debuted in the Top 20 in January, making it the fastest rising competitor to date.