In Digital Podcast 38, we interview David Becker, Chief Marketing Officer at ExpoTV.com. ExpoTV is all about consumer generated video product reviews both on line and on TV. ExpoTV covers just about any product you can imagine with about 250,000 reviews.

If you are interested in producing a social media marketing campaign that uses user generated content this podcast is for you. David discusses the concerns advertisers have about marketing around user generated content and some of the steps marketers can take to mitigate the risks. He provides case studies from other companies that show how they have managed to produce successful social marketing campaigns. David has suggestions about how to connect with super fans and turn them into allies that will make social marketing work for you.

 

 Digital Podcast 38 [48:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (524)

David Becker is ExpoTV’s Chief Marketing Officer. Prior to Expo, David served as president and COO for Beliefnet.com, a spirituality and self-help web site. David also founded Backslap Entertainment, a user-generated content production and syndication company backed by Fremantle, producers of American Idol. David was also President and COO of Uproar.com.

Technorati Tags: social media marketing, user generated content, super fans, advertising, David Becker, ExpoTV

As part of our Super Fan series, we interviewed Dean Carignan. Dean is Director, Advertising Business Strategy for Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division. In this role, he develops long-range strategic plans for investments in streaming video advertising, mobile marketing, and game-based advertising. Dean also spent several years with Microsoft’s adCenter group, where he drove product strategy for Paid Search, Display Ads, and Contextual Advertising.

Dean was able to provide us with some excellent perspective on these new advertising opportunities. He is part of a group that looks at opportunities to advertise via the Xbox, Media Center, Zune and mobile platforms. We go into depth on in game advertising and how important this new segment will be. He walked us through case studies of Domino’s Pizza and P&G that describe how a well designed campaign can add to the realism of the game experience and yield results for the advertiser.

This is a must listen podcast for advertisers who are struggling to break through on television and are looking for new ways to market their products using these rapidly growing platforms.

 

 Digital Podcast 37 [49:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (407)

Technorati Tags: Dean Carignan, Microsoft, in game advertising, gaming, social media, super fans

Chris MacDonald, Libsyn’s EVP of Business Development and Operations, told me all about the Association for Downloadable Media.

Chris is the newly elected Chairman of the Association. Chris explained that the Association for Downloadable Media is focused on providing standards for advertising and audience measurement for episodic and downloadable media. If you are producing downloadable media the association is working on making it easier for advertisers and publishers to buy and publish ads on this type of content. If you want to get involved you can join the association. Individual memberships are $150 and corporate memberships are $1,000 for now.

 

 Digital Podcast 21 [16:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (978)

In today’s announcement, The Association for Downloadable Media (ADM) announced the election results for the 20 inaugural office seat positions including the Executive Board (Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary, Treasurer); eleven (11) Advisory Board seats, Chairs for: Advertising Standards Committee, Education & Outreach Committee, Measurement Committee, Membership Committee and the Terminology Standardization Committee.

Elected individuals for the 4 Executive Committees (Chairman, Vice Chairman, Secretary and Treasurer), 11 Advisory Board seats and 5 Committee Chair positions are:

• Chair
  • Chris MacDonald, Chris MacDonald, Libsyn PRO Enterprise Platform and Indiefeed
• Vice Chair
  • Susan Bratton, Personal Life Media
• Secretary
  • Matthew Snodgrass, Porter Novelli
• Treasurer
  • Duncan Perry, Podcast.com, Treedia.com
• Committee Chair: Advertising Standards
  • Brian McMahon, National Podcasting System
• Committee Chair: Education & Outreach
  • Rob Walch, Wizzard Media
• Committee Chair: Measurement
  • Angelo Mandato, Raw Voice
• Committee Chair: Membership Committee
  • Bryan Moffett, NPR Digital Media
• Committee Chair: Terminology Standardization
  • David Rowley, Kiptronic, Inc.
• Advisory Board
  • CC Chapman, The Advance Guard
  • Jonathan Cobb, Kiptronic Inc.
  • John Furrier, Podtech
  • Rob Greenlee, Microsoft Zune
  • John Havens, BlogTalkRadio
  • Risto Koski, Nokia
  • Jim Louderback, Revision3
  • Mark McCrery, Podtrac
  • Elisabeth McLaury Lewin, PodcastingNews.com
  • Kent Nichols, AskANinja.com
  • Tim Street, French Maid TV

Technorati Tags: Association for Downloadable Media, ADM, advertising, new media

In a world where competition for attention is growing faster than ever and consumers get to skip the ads if they want, will advertisements as content save the day for advertisers? It’s not clear yet, but there is a growing body of evidence that it can and is being done by advertisers, both big and small.

The Wall Street Journal provided five case studies today of advertising as content, and all done by small companies.

1. Blendtec’s Will It Blend

Blendtec is in the blender business. One day the marketing guy sees the enginneering guy test blenders with chunks of wood. The net result is one of the most successful Ads as Content campaigns, Will It Blend.

The video series is so popular they are now selling it as a DVD for $9.93.

Straight from the success of YouTube.com, Will It Blend has been known as an internet marketing sensation, viewed by more than 30 million people. Now for the first time ever, you can take home the glory, passion and power of Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson with his blending antics on the first 50 Will It Blend videos, including Will It Blend facts and behind the scenes footage.

Not only has it been successful as content they say sales of blenders have shot up 500%.

Here’s the video of one of my favorites Will It Blend: the iPhone edition.

2. MJ Safety Solutions Bullet Resistant Backpack

MJ Safety Solutions MyChildsPack is a bullet resistant back pack. The video is serious with lots of explosions and guns firing. YouTube reports that the video has been viewed just under 25,000 times at the time I write this. The company reports that it has sold over 1,000 of these backpacks at $175 each.

3. All Natural Maine Root’s Free Range Root Beer

In this video campaign, All Natural Main Root is marketing the fight against corporate root beer and of course their alternative: Free Range Root Beer. Sales have gone up from $500,000 to $3,000,000 year over year. Maine Root paid $20,000 for the campaign. Not a bad return from some viral videos.

FreeRangeRootBeer.com is dedicated to stopping corporate root beer “by any means necessary.” Non-violence is our modus operandi. We spread our message mostly through non-violent protests, but also use root beer “breakouts” to free root beer from their bondage in their inhumane storage facilities. We’re on a path of peace, love and organic root-based beverages.

Here’s the SugerCane Shuffle from the SugerCane Gang - fans of Maine Root.

4. Make Magazine’s Weekend Projects

Make Magazine takes a different approach. They not into comedy or even trying to sell you something. They provide How To videos that focus on things you can do over the weekend. Think of what Popular Mechanics or Popular Electronics could have been if they got the web. The other benefit for Make is that the videos have sponsors so they get to advertise their website and re-advertise someone else’s product at the same time. Is that like re-gifting?

5. Moe’s Southwest Grill

Moe’s Southwest Grill decided to get the customers to do the work. They held a contest for a “Burrito in Every Hand” campaign. The winner gets 2,860 vouchers good at Moe’s. They got 40 videos and over 200,000 visitors to the website set up for the campaign. They say sales have gone up, but no details and they expanded their email mailing list by over 200,000.

And here’s a link to the Notorious M.O.E. and Nacho Daddy video, the winner of MOE’s contest.( sorry,I could not get the player to publish -)

So there you have it. Some great, well maybe not great, content that deliver the goods as advertisements. There’s some good lessons for content producers in here and for advertisers as well. It’s time to think differently.

It’s too bad the Wall Street Journal doesn’t understand what it writes about as I would have provided a link to the WSJ story, but it’s behind a walled garden. And I would have provided a link to to the Wall Street Journal video on makes a video go viral, but it had too many ads to make it bearable.

The journal should also get the news that viral is not only about getting a great funny, useful or how to video, its about working the system to get to the top of the most viewed video list. Here’s a link to TechCrunch’s Secrets to Viral Videos. Too bad there’s so much gaming and shady practices involved.

If you know of more case studies, let me know.

Technorati Tags: viral video, online video, advertising, ads as content

Google has now integrated Youtube video into Adsense. This is straight from the Google blog Inside AdSense:

AdSense isn’t just for ads anymore; it’s also a place to get video content for your site — and earn extra revenue at the same time.

We’re excited about the launch of video units — a new way to enrich your site with quality, relevant video content in an embedded, customizable player. Simply embed a snippet of code and have relevant YouTube partner content streamed to your site. You can choose categories of video to target to your site, select content from individual YouTube partners, or have video automatically targeted to your site content. Companion and text overlay ads are relevant and non-intrusive. To further blend the YouTube player into your site, you can also customize the color scheme and layout as well as choose from three different player sizes.

Here’s the video:

The blog post says “Video Units” should be visible on the Adsense Setup page, but it’s not showing up there for me so they may be still in the process of rolling it out.

UPDATE: Here’s the what the Video Unit looks like. They also have a smaller and bigger one.

Technorati Tags: adsense, google, youtube, video units, video ads