NewCommForum: Guide to Online Video with Brooks Gibbins
Brooks Gibbins of The NewsMarket had the unenviable task of capturing the interest of conference attendees after they all had a free evening in Las Vegas. As a multimedia session, it promised to do so.
Unfortunately, Brooks began with a company pitch, rather than jumping right into the topic. I simply don't understand this instinct on the part of conference presenters -- you get juice from being on stage as it is, and if you want to put up a simple promo slide after you're done speaking, fine, but we don't need the full rundown of your services and the typical "logo slide" of your clients." That's not what we're here for. So twenty-five minutes after the scheduled start of the session, we finally got to the substance. (I don't mean to be overly hard on Brooks, this is a common problem at conferences, but it really does a disservice to the attendees, the conference, and even the presenter's company.)
The talk began with the power of online video and a number of examples of how it has been done previously. He emphasized that you must be able to deliver your content 24/7 and in multiple media formats. First consumers came to online video, then traditional media followed, and advertisers are now getting engaged.
24.9B videos were streamed in 2006. News made up the largest segment of these videos. Twice as many consumers say they go online to watch news videos as say they go to look for user generated videos.
Brooks believes that user-generated video (including material produced by companies) represents "the biggest shift in a communications medium since the inception of the web."
He notes that online video demands that communicators must market and marketers must communicate.
Brooks then went into a number of examples of how companies are effectively using online video.
Three things Brooks suggests you should do this year:
- integrate video on your web site
- enable embedding of video on other sites (blogs, media, etc.)
- make raw file available for broadcast outlets
Unfortunately, the action items portion of the presentation got rushed through due to time constraints. It's unfortunate because I think there were some good suggestions included.
Ironically, while I was listening to this presentation, I noticed in my feed reader that Jeremy Pepper has a lengthy post on online video. Definitely a good companion to this session.
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