There’s been a lot of talk about online video product placement in the last year. There’s been little information on the benefits of online video product placement, or the outcomes of using online video product placement. I’ve always had a gut feeling that online video product placement works, but up until this year, I didn’t know how it impacted success metrics.
I’ve been loosely involved in the Video Blogging community since 2005, so it was pretty easy for me to identify an online video content creator partner for this campaign. Finding a online video content creator can be tricky, and confusing. I haven’t met many online media buyers that have a good understanding on selection criteria. They usually try to map values to the same metrics as banner buys (i.e. site traffic, time on site, frequency opportunities, etc…), but that discussion is for another post. What I want to convey in this post is how online video product placement was effective for our client, and our success metrics.
The goal of our campaign was to drive online video submissions to Youtube.com for a contest that had 3 tiers of prizes. The top prize was $5k dollars cash, and about another $700 in prizes. Beyond the prize incentive, we used two paid media tactics to drive targeted traffic to a site that had a call to action, directions, and rules to enter the contest. One tactic was a partnership with EpicFu.com to make a mention of the contest to their community, the other was more of a traditonal online media buy on another popular video website.
Below is the analytics chart showing traffic for the two tactics.
While the traditional online buy drove around 10 times the traffic, traffic wasn’t the success metric, video submissions were the goal. We had approximately 75% of sign-ups on our form that followed through with a submitted video for the contest. The most interesting statistic, approximately 50% of the submission came from the time period of the Epicfu.com product placement video. While we were on a shoe-string budget, the traditional online media buy cost 6 times the amount as the online video product placement. While awareness and traffic are nice, our goal was submitted videos. Dollar for dollar, the online video product placement drove more submissions.
Realizing Consumer Generated Content is on the rise, and is forecasted to get even more popular, targeting users that create online video is very difficult. Comparing our contest to other popular brands that had done similar contest, we saw better than anticipated numbers and quality of submission. Over half of the submission were shot in High Definition, and the quality of ideas were very impressive.
