The rise of video content on the internet over the last 2-3 years is simply astounding. It seems hard to believe that what we now consider a household name – and the undisputed leader of the pack – YouTube, was founded just over 5 years ago.

With improvements in technology, download speeds and bandwidth, the online video revolution is set to continue and will play an increasingly important role for marketers as consumers engage more and more with this medium.

Here are 15 very good reasons why marketers should consider using online video:

1. Size: If YouTube were a country, it would be the world’s 3^rd largest, behind China and India, with more than 400,000,000 users. It is currently ranked 4^th in the world in site traffic, based on the combined measure of page views and users¹.
2. Content: The amount of content on YouTube is simply staggering, with an estimated 20 hours of video being uploaded every minute. Interestingly, 52% of YouTube’s users in the 18-34 year old demographic are sharing this content with friends and colleagues¹.
3. Search Power: If YouTube were a search engine it would be ranked #2 in the world (behind Google sites), even outperforming Yahoo, based on search queries¹.
4. Share: More than 80% of the online audience in each of the USA, UK and Australia watch videos online².
5. Locally very popular and engaging: In Australia there are 6.17 million monthly unique users, split 54% male and 46% female, each of whom views on average 59 pages per month and spends an average of 49 minutes per month on the site³.
6. Huge monthly viewing: In Australia there are more than 362 million page views per month on YouTube³.
7. Everybody’s doing it: The Prime Minister of Australia, Queen of England and the Pope all have branded YouTube channels.
8. A star was born in 2009: In 2009, Susan Boyle, star of ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ was the most watched YouTube video both in Australia and globally (with more than 120 million views globally).
9. Still as popular as ever: YouTube has a subscription system which delivers videos from content creators to interested people – this has become so popular that the “subscribe” button is activated 1 million times dailyª.
10. User rewards for top viral videos: Viral videos on YouTube can now be monetized with users able to make a one-off submission and profit from their success on the channel°.
11. Recently rewarded: The David After Dentist viral video, with more than 36 million views, has generated more than $30K for the up-loader°.
12. Continued innovation: YouTube broke new ground in 2009 with live streamed music events, including Alicia Keys’ World AIDS Day concert in New York and U2’s LA Rose Bowl concert, which was broadcast to more than 140 countries and, with more than 10 million streams, became the most successful live stream event in history°.
13. Online video is very popular on other leading sites: Whilst YouTube has a seemingly unassailable lead at the top of the table, both Hulu and Facebook are at least on the move. Vimeo, the destination for people to showcase their own video content, is also showing signs of growth – with global visits up nearly 44% over the last 3 months*. Facebook’s huge growth, coupled with its user base engaging more and more through sharing video content, will surely continueˆ.
14. Some impressive stats from late 2009: In late 2009 we saw Facebook unique video views rise 25% from 31.18 million in September to 41.15 million unique views in October, setting a record for the world’s largest network and mirroring the trend to online video viewingˆˆ.
15. YouTube’s growth continues: Google sites (including YouTube) jumped from 125.3 million viewers in October 2009 to 129 million in November 2009, and its share of video views rose from 37.7% to 39.4%ˆˆ.

We’ll keep a very close eye on the developments in online video throughout 2010 and will continue to report on them in our What Next newsletter. Stay tuned!

Steve Jennings is an Interactive Account Manager at BCM Brisbane

Sources:

¹ Alexa Web Info – 19/01/10, YouTube Fact Sheet, comScore December 2009;

² Nielsen IT&T report 2008-2009

³ Nielsen//Netratings Net View Sept 2009

4 The Official YouTube Australia Blog – 17/12/09

ª YouTube Biz Blog – 12/01/10

º YouTube Biz Blog – 30/12/09

ˆ Nielsen Wire October 2009

* Alexa Web Info – 19/01/10

ˆˆ comScore – 25/11/09

A mate of mine from my radio days posted this on his Facebook wall the other day and it got me thinking.

Radio is having a very tough time competing for your time since new media has come along. Facebook, Twitter, Blogging.. What advice would you give radio stations in 2010?? I’m giving a speech to Radio heads in the Maritimes* in two weeks and I’d love your thoughts. Thanks Dave

Is radio doomed? Do Gen Y, let alone Gen Z ever listen to it?

Radio has proven itself to be extremely resilient over the years.

TV couldn’t kill it. MTV couldn’t kill it. The Sony Walkman couldn’t kill it. Even Kyle & Jackie O couldn’t kill it. Can the digital revolution make the hit?

Logically, iPods, podcasts, mobile video etc make radio irrelevant. Radio can’t deliver news, weather, cricket scores quicker or more reliably than your mobile phone.

But the commercial stations claim revenue is as healthy as ever. Radio still produces big stars such as Hamish and Andy. And radio is adapting with specialised digital stations. Pink 24/7 anyone?

We seem to still be listening to our favourite radio stations even though we can easily program our own commercial free playlists on our iPods/iPhones/iThings. Are the ‘personalities’ and content that good? Do we just like to have a friendly voice in our ear? Is it good company? Does it make us feel like part of community? Yes. Yes. Yes. And yes. There are lots of good reasons radio survives and why people are fiercely loyal to their favourite station. Ever seen anyone (outside of media) wearing a TV station branded t-shirt?

Personally, I think the Pink 24/7 option will be the way radio goes. Lots of boutique stations. But in the meantime, my two cents to Dave was for radio to play to its strengths. Be local, topical and human.

What would your advice be? I’ll pass it on to the Radio heads in the Maritimes.

P.S. Radio Nigel is MY new station. Have a listen.

Jeff Smith is a writer at BCM and has either worked in, written for, or listened to radio for over 40 years.

* Apparently the Maritimes are on the remote east coast of Canada.

There is no doubt about it – Australian TV viewers love Australian content. Few would disagree that locally produced shows like Packed to the Rafters, Underbelly and Talkin’ About My Generation have provided all three Free to Air TV Networks with bumper audiences and revenue opportunities, and Australians with a lot of enjoyment.

So in what seemed like good news for viewers last week, the Federal Government, unexpectedly, surprisingly and quietly cut licence fees for the Seven, Nine and Ten Networks by 33% this year and by 50% next year – a rebate worth more than $250 million. This was done in order to “protect Australian content on commercial television” – except, the Government has not tied any conditions at all to the generous rebate.

There is no impost upon the networks to actually increase Australian content production above what is currently legislated.

The Government’s action to hand the TV Networks $250 million of taxpayer’s money is even more curious when you consider that Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) compliance figures from 1999 to 2008 show that the FTA networks have a history of always meeting  their annual Australian content licence requirement figures no matter what the economic conditions.

On the back of the news last week, the Ten Network (which traditionally broadcasts the bare minimum of Australian content to meet licensing requirements) saw its share price soar and many analysts predict that the rebate will go straight to the FTA Networks’ bottom line.

So how, at such a challenging economic time, has a group of private equity investors managed to gain such favour from the Government? Well it would appear that friends in high places may have been helpful. Head of the lobby group that brokered the deal was Mr Rudd’s old boss, Wayne Goss, who also more recently sat on the board of Igneus (the PM’s wife Therese Rein’s Company).

Don’t get me wrong – the licence fee structure has not been overhauled since 1964 and boy a lot has changed since then! It may well be time for a bit of a re-think. But let’s be fair dinkum with taxpayers’ dollars. If the rebate is to protect Australian content, make that a condition of the gift. If there is some other agenda in place – e.g. a subsidy for the enormous cost to roll out digital TV (inextricably entwined with the success of the Government’s National Broadband programme) let’s call it for what it is.

What do you think?

Jo Stone is Head of Channel Planning & Integration at BCM

There’s a new wave of websites about to be launched which will finally give people what they’ve been desperately craving. Sure, Web 2.0 archetypes like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, YouTube and Cool Hunter have had some success, but this new crop of ground-breaking sites are set to take interactivity and user satisfaction to a previously unheard-of level. Here’s a taster:

UpMyselfer
A social networking site where users are encouraged to only mention the really awesome stuff that happens in their lives and ignore the banal and the dire. A handy inbuilt autocorrect function changes phrases like ‘life sucks and ‘I’m bored’ to ‘Went skydiving in the Seychelles’ and ‘Pashed a millionaire’.

SnobTube
At last, a video file sharing site for people of quality and refinement. Only posh people get to put stuff on it. No riff-raff, and nothing from the western suburbs.

Acquaintbook.
‘Friend’ is such a fuzzy term, isn’t it? Here’s a social networking site with no grey areas. Everyone on it knows exactly where they stand. It’s the social networking site for people who want to fish around to find out if people they used to know are now more interesting, thinner, worse off financially, drug addicted, nicer or more interested in them than they used to be. Then ‘Reacquaint’ them. Then never speak to them again.

KidsHomeworkPedia
A web-based collaboratively compiled encyclopaedia with none of the complicated technical details that make it so much more time consuming for parents to do their children’s school projects.

LoseFaceBook.
A warm, welcoming alternative ‘digiverse’ for people whose Facebook friend requests have been ignored, to congregate and commiserate with each other.

bury.com
An aggregator of all the sites you’ve already been to that are complete shit. It automatically hides them so they don’t appear in your Google results.

YouSpelGoodTube
A video sharing site where dictionaries from Oxford and Merriam-Webster automatically run a spelling and grammar filter over all submitted comments so stuff from really stupid people won’t appear.

MumBlock
Just like Facebook, only it automatically blocks all the stuff you don’t want your mum to see. With the beta test version, however,  older users have expressed concerns that nothing from their children actually appears on their wall.

SoCuteIfeelSick.com
Think sites like Cheezburger  - featuring all those cute pictures of kittens and puppies, replete with saccharine captions – are cheesy? This site will really make you retch. There’s a whole section devoted entirely to pictures of kittens playing happily with baby bunnies in meadows, while puppies look on fondly.

Andrew Bartlett is a Senior Writer at BCM

There is no question that tapping into the power of communities has great potential for marketers. There have never been more opportunities to speak with those who share common interests, tastes, afflictions, friends, occupations, faiths, aspirations, hobbies, attitudes or any other element that might unite them – including brand preference. Collectively they have the ability to influence those around them as their opinion is generally respected by those in their ‘community’.

More often than not these days the communities being targeted are virtual. They might exist as a database, perhaps they’ve opted in to hear more about their topic of interest. Maybe they’re simply friends of friends. Quite often we learn more and more about them over time but in many cases it’s only rarely that we interact with them face to face.

Recently we attended a campaign launch hosted by our friends from Origin. The coal seam gas campaign is intended for the communities of south west Queensland, especially those areas where Origin’s operations are most active such as Miles, Chinchilla and Roma. The campaign materials feature real people who volunteered their time to appear. Local farmers are shown along with the Origin liaison officers they work with as well as an assortment of regular townspeople who are supportive of the benefits Origin’s activities bring to their community.

These people formed the invitee list for the launch. Around 130 real people gathered at a venue in Miles to view the commercials and enjoy the status that comes with being seen as the stars of the show on the big screen. The Origin folks did a great job of rightly making them feel special and galvanizing them as a supportive community.

It was really interesting to see this community come together from all walks of life. From mechanics to motel operators, graziers to junior football mums. Once the commercials started playing real emotions were on show from this community. As people saw images of their family on screen many clapped and cheered. Some even cried with delight. It was an eye opener to see how they responded and interacted with each other given many of them were strangers at the start of the evening.

We can’t always be as fortunate as we were at the launch to actually see and hear the people in the communities we look to develop and nurture as marketers. But it’s truly worth remembering that each community comprises real people with real emotions. I realise this might sound incredibly obvious but every name on the database is someone who is immensely proud of their loved ones. Whether the campaign is considered to be socially based or not.

The strong ties of family might just be an ingredient worth considering more often when we look to connect with communities, no matter what form they take.

Alan Kewley is an Account Director at BCM Brisbane

For decades, not much changed in advertising land. We didn’t realise it at the time, but things were pretty straight forward and we all knew our place.

Allocating budgets was easy – the rule of thumb that we all subscribed to was to spend around 80% of the budget on media (otherwise how would anyone know what we had to say) and around 20% on production.

Reach and frequency was the benchmark and if we were really lucky we would get to spend the production budget on one really slick TVC. Marketers controlled their brand’s perception and mass media was in its heyday.

Routinely popular shows like Friends, Sunday night movies and mini-series were watched by half of the Australian population.

Newspapers were at their peak and the Australian Women’s Weekly had a circulation of around 1,000,000 (compared to roughly half that today).

Of course the power of the Internet has irrevocably changed how brands engage with consumers and how advertising agencies operate.  Creative, media and strategy people now need to work together closely to identify the best idea about a brand that can be brought to life both online and offline.

One brand that has had enormous success harnessing the endless opportunities for engagement is Nike. The incredible success of Nike is an inspiration as it moves more and more of its budget into interactive, content and events.

Nike UK Marketing Director Simon Pestridge said recently:

“We don’t do advertising any more. We just do cool stuff. We need to become part of people’s lives and digital allows us to do that.”

Pestridge now allocates 80% of Nike’s budget to production and 20% to media. Producing TVCs is only a part of his production budget.

Events, interactive digital platforms and lots and lots of content from virals and webisodes to TV programs have driven deeper connections with Nike’s youth target.

The reality is that online, often the medium is the message. The interactive asset is both the engagement vehicle and the distribution platform.

Content like Nike’s Ronaldinho ‘Touch of Gold’ viral video has almost 30 million views. Platforms like YouTube are free – the challenge is to make the content shareable!

Now not every brand is Nike and this production to media ratio is rather extreme. However a recent study by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) brought this shift to life by comparing where advertisers will likely split a total budget in the traditional model compared to those required in the interactive space. The production ratio shifts from 27% to 48% in this modelling.

One last consideration when thinking about production is this – technology greatly affects production costs in the interactive world. At the leading edge of innovation the costs are high, while trailing behind it makes the production much more affordable and much faster.

It is almost impossible to ballpark production costs when breaking new ground – but providing the interactive idea is consumer centric and adds value via engagement, entertainment or utility, the consumer will do their part to share it. Many to many – that’s what we aim for!

So what’s the point? Old dogs need to learn new tricks. The 80/20 media to production split is redundant.

If you followed that rule in the interactive space – your asset will be pretty lonely, with cooler, more engaging, more sharable content luring your best prospects away.

Jo Stone is Head of Channel Planning & Integration at BCM

As the 2009 NRL season nears its climax, it is a time for all interested in the sport to reflect on the rollercoaster ride that was.

Let’s face facts – this season has produced one headline grabbing faux pas after another, both on and off the field. From club CEOs and coaches, to past and present players and fans – nobody has been spared the glare of the media spotlight. This has been well documented and is even a topic in a work colleague’s blog here on Two Cents just a few weeks ago. Most alarmingly we’ve even seen the next generation of aspiring junior rugby league stars involved in some very unpleasant conduct. Let’s hope this is not a sign of things to come.

So with just 3 games remaining in the 2009 season let’s cast some positivity on this battered sport. Match attendances are setting new records and the quality of the on-field action is of a higher standard than many can ever remember. Emerging new stars of the game, such as Jarryd Hayne, are delighting crowds, and will ensure continued interest for years to come. Tonight serves up one of the most highly anticipated preliminary finals clashes between two western Sydney heavyweights and arch-rivals – the Bulldogs and the Eels. As an avid Bulldogs fan, I cannot wait!

I realise it’s the job of the media to report on all that happens on and off the field, and that they have to sell newspapers and drive unique browsers to their sports pages online. Moreover, the changing media landscape and proliferation of social media channels allows for rapid dissemination of news – sometimes even from sports professionals themselves, often against the wishes of their clubs or sporting bodies. However, rugby league has been in the crosshairs all year, and in spite of all that has been thrown at it, the sport has survived. The resolve of all those involved in the game to deal with all the on and off field incidents has only made it stronger.

Rebeckah Kinkade is BCM Sydney’s Media Coordinator

Practically everyone these days has some kind of music player such as the iPod or its many lesser known competitors.  However, what you might not be aware of yet is a similar type of technology that does the same thing for the printed word.

The eReader from Sony and the Kindle from Amazon allow you to download, save and then annotate over 1,500 books, magazines or newspapers from a library of hundreds of thousands to these ultra-thin, ultra-light wireless devices.

This is great news for book lovers everywhere. I live in a small unit and as an avid reader I’m running out of shelving space!

Unfortunately it’s not all good news. Online retailing giant Amazon recently got into trouble after remotely deleting a particular book from all of its users’ hardware.  They are now the subject of a class action brought about by a student who was using the text for college coursework and had lost all of his annotated notes.  “How is this possible?”, I hear you ask.

Well, what most people don’t realise is that technology such as these book readers and iPods are permanently linked to their service providers and are known as tethered services.

iTunes links back the servers at Apple pretty much every time you turn it on and Amazon’s service terms and conditions actually state that the company have “the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Service at any time, and Amazon will not be liable to you should it exercise such right.”

In other words the books that you buy via their download service do not actually belong to you and are completely controlled by Amazon at all times.

Amazon has stated that the only reason that this book was removed is due to the fact that it was illegally uploaded to their service in the first place and was deleted for copyright infringements, and while I personally do not care if some student has lost his homework, have we stopped to consider what this means for issues such as censorship and book banning?

Books have always been banned for various reasons and they are removed from libraries and people’s homes – and very often the bans on those same books are lifted by more enlightened governments and administrations.  The difference with this technology is that it makes it all possible with the click of a mouse, and it is both complete and irreversible.

Amazon have since promised to never remove books in this way again, however the problems lies in the fact that we now all know they can do it.  And really, promises by large corporations are not often worth the ePaper they are viewed on.

What is to stop a court or government exerting pressure on Amazon and others to remove books in the future? And what does this mean for consumers who have been so eager to adopt the purchase of intangible, digital-only products?

Is the technology we so readily embrace opening us up to an Orwellian future of censorship and infringement of civil liberties?

And what an incredible irony that the deleted book is George Orwell’s 1984.

Lucy Tonkin is an Account Manager at BCM Sydney

Tuesday saw Kyle and Jackie O return to their breakfast slot on 2DayFM. The show no doubt received one of its highest ratings ever as people tuned in to hear what they had to say about that stunt gone wrong.

How did it rate? We’ll never know. Unfortunately radio ratings don’t allow us to measure shows on an individual day by day basis in the same way TV does, it averages ratings over a survey period.

That got me thinking about some of the other figures I’d like to see from the media, like sectional readership in newspapers. The papers have this information, yet they won’t release it to the public… and I can only think of one reason for withholding that data – the numbers don’t paint a good picture for individual sections and releasing them would reduce the likelihood of selling space at the rates they currently charge.

Recently there’s been debate regarding publishers providing newspaper and magazine circulation figures on a per issue basis. Once again the information is there but publishers won’t release it.

What will it take for us to gain access to such data?

Perhaps if all advertising agencies grouped together and commissioned their own research on things like individual section readership and day by day radio listenership, it would then create a benchmark for agencies to plan against.  If the media didn’t agree with these findings they might be forced to finally release their own data which they’ve been so secretively guarding.

This may not be the answer given the cost such research would command, but just taking what could be compared to a United Nations stand and hoping for the media to come clean won’t achieve much either. If the figures were to their advantage they would have already released them.

Is there anything we can do to increase transparency in the advertising space we purchase?

Martin Durek is a Planner/Buyer at BCM Sydney

Would you pay to access mainstream news content online? There has been an enormous amount of discussion about this topic in the wake of the announcement by Rupert Murdoch last week that News Corp will start charging for consumers to access its news sites globally. Bear in mind that the announcement was made on the same day that News Corp posted a $US3.4 billion loss for the year to June 2009, so the man was obviously hurting!

Overwhelmingly, the response from consumers on blogs and forums, including those on News sites, has been to ridicule the whole notion. Typical was one comment from Alan Gilbey who said -

“Now let’s see. Delete bookmark. Navigate to different news site. Create new bookmark. Rupert who??”

Murdoch’s argument is that “Quality journalism is not cheap,” and that “An industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting.” A fair enough point of view when you consider it from his perspective.  In fact, the digital revolution is in the process of transforming journalism and fundamentally changing old business models.

Major aggregators of news content, such as Google have been largely held to account by publishers for jeopardising the future of quality journalism by providing free access to news content to sell advertising.

The major point that the 78 year old billionaire media mogul is missing is that the Internet is not merely just another platform to deliver news, it is in fact an instrument of transformation where the consumer is in charge.  We get to decide what we access online and how we share it with others, and if we don’t see value in what you are offering, we’ll simply engage with someone else who suits us better.

For most of my adult life I’ve been a fan of Rupert Murdoch, but the heyday of publisher controlled media is well and truly over. It must be hard for a 78 year old to accept, but the horse has bolted and there is no return to the “good old days”. Newspapers are most at threat, but all mass media is undergoing a technology enabled, consumer lead transformation.

There’s no way I’d pay for general news online, what do you think?

Jo Stone is Head of Channel Planning & Integration at BCM