I've been trying to keep this blog from devolving into a series of links to news articles and other blog posts. without additional commentary. However, I felt this Mediapost article was too good to pass up. It features a study by Feed Company ("Viral Video Marketing Survey: The Agency Perspective") and provides useful views on measuring success.
IAG Research is the company that produces the lists of most well-liked TV ads, which is featured on AdAge.
The company gathers its data by creating questions around broadcast TV content and advertising during that time slot. Those questions are provided to the public not by way of survey invitations but a contest that provides points for correctly answering questions. With that kind of approach, there are definitely ways to cheat or game the system, which IAG needs to constantly prove it effectively accounts for. It certainly appears to have provided a satisfactory resolution such that Nielsen (my previous company) deemed it appropriate to acquire the firm.
In addition, IAG had sufficient weight that it was becoming a second currency used in some broadcast contract negotiations.
The acquisition makes perfect sense at a time where TV content and advertising is now easily consumed online. The most intriguing possibility lies in the idea of assessing effectiveness of sequential messaging for a single advertiser in a single program. For example, if Hulu can prove that sequential (and exclusive) messaging that builds and tells a story is 3x more impactful than the same 30-second spot repeated, then online video has a nicely quantifiable high-value proposition. Online video CPMs no longer need to be driven by supply-demand. Also, the exact same ad spot can be evaluated in both the TV viewing environment and the online viewing environment to compare branding effect and relative cost effectiveness between them.
The introduction of YouTube Insight gives content creators some nice options for tracking distribution of video assets around the Internet. In addition, this arms viral video marketers with data tracking to show evidence of impact.
Before YouTube Insight, there was also TubeMogul and VidMetrix (part of Visible Measures). These services appear to crawl for publicly available information on video views each day in order to track video view counts. Hence, they are able to provide video views and comments on a daily basis.
When videos are transcoded through their services, TubeMogul and VidMetrix would be able to attain more detailed information and provide geographic and demographic detail. (However, in this video, TubeMogul states that demography is inferred from IP address, so data quality is highly questionable.) In order to entice content owners to upload through them, the sites offer a single upload service in order to distribute across multiple sites, including YouTube, MySpace, Y! Video, Google Video, Metacafe, Revver, and Veoh, among others.
Two other companies in the video analytics space are Streametrics.tv and divinityMetrics. I will have to spend more time reviewing their services before posting.
