Winning With Video

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My name is David. I’m from a company called LightWeightMedia. We produce, develop and deliver video content for the web and we have just started working with cScape and the Customer Engagement Unit.

I’m going to talk to you about winning with video because this is something we’re engaged in. I have chosen to focus on the UK newspaper industry for two reasons. Firstly, because I think these guys are already in a recessional environment in the sense that their circulation has been falling for a long time, as we all know, and we’re in an advertising recession, which started in television and has moved into mainstream media now.

So they’re suffering from that a lot and for those two reasons they have to be pioneering online – they have no choice. So this is the challenge that newspapers face really. Their users’ habits (they used to be referred to as ‘readers’) are changing quickly. They can get their news in many different ways. We have seen the broadband stats already, in terms of how many people in the UK have access to broadband. Lots of people are expecting rich content on their mobile phones now, with the advent of things like the iPhone and the Nokia N95. These handsets are out there already and selling shed loads of units so people are expecting to have information disseminated to those different mediums.

So, you know I’ve got my iPhone, my TomTom and there’s wireless all over the City of London now – the Square Mile is completely wireless. I want to be able to access news in these ways. Also, not just our own habits, but the ways of disseminating news are changing as well. The media is obviously incredibly fragmented now. You can deliver news through RSS feeds, through Widgets, through blogs. They need to make sense of this landscape and make it their own very quickly.

But also, and cynically I dare say, most importantly to most of them, their advertisers are now expecting to receive cast-iron figures about return on investment if they are to invest in advertising on their websites. So while advertising online is growing massively, there’s no reason why advertisers have to go to news websites, because potentially they are not breaking the news. So there’s a lot of thinking for them to do there, and I think the answer is video! But I would say that, wouldn’t I? I’m going to try not to sell to hard! They’ve put a lot of resources into developing their websites and video has increasingly become a part of that.

I wanted to talk about the UK quality newspaper market for two reasons. Partly because I think the demographic of their readers would be more predisposed to be early adopters, potentially interested in technology and in the media landscape. They’re more likely to take on pioneering things that they’re trying on the web first. And also because they have lower circulation figures than the tabloids so they have to pioneer and try things out.

And they have. Except The Independent, they all have launched their own video channels recently, channelling out loads of content, which is quite interesting. So why have they looked at video? Well, lots of reasons. They need to keep up with user demand. In the US in November 2007, 75% of users were accessing video. This is a huge amount. In the UK, over 10% of all internet usage is video, so the users absolutely expect it.

You need to engage your users, you need to extend their dwell time. My favourite acronym at the moment is WLFING – What Did I Log On For? Apparently, two thirds of us, by the time we log off, can’t really remember why we logged on and chances are we’ve zipped around all over the place. The only way to deal with that is to engage your users and increase the dwell time on your site.

Video is a fantastic way of reinforcing the brand. This is something that is a little bit more obvious, but you can sometimes miss it. Television and cinema advertising is the most punchy advertising medium in terms of getting your message across because you can put a name, a face, a tone to your brand. A lot of people haven’t been able to afford to do TV campaigns, apart from for very big above the line things. Online video gives you the opportunity to give you all the things that are great about television but you do it on the web at a relatively affordable price so reinforcing the brand, doing what video does best, should not be overlooked.

You need to keep your advertisers spending so they are absolutely feeling these are some cast-iron reasons why they have to deliver video.

So I decided to talk about two of our UK quality newspaper websites, which I’m going to deem ‘the Techie vs. the Tory’ in a fight to death – maybe a bit over the top! These are quite useful to look at, I think, because The Guardian has been way out in front in terms of unique users monthly for quite a long time now so in a sense they raised the game quite a long time ago and everyone else needs to catch up.

The Telegraph are certainly doing their best to catch up and they launched, with huge fanfare, their new website last year. Since then, they’ve seen a 100% rise in unique users. That is phenomenal when you think about the kinds of things they need to deliver.

So I’m going to talk about each of them and look at what we can take away from them because I think that they do have quite different propositions, but the lessons are the same. They’re trying to engage their users, they’re trying to demonstrate to their advertisers that they’re engaging their users.

This is The Telegraph website. Nice and big. A major part of their website is Telegraph TV. It’s absolutely emblazoned there and it’s a television channel of sorts. We have the advertising pre-roll and the news happening now. They are, after all, a news website. Further down, there’s a schedule. This looks a bit like the SKY menu, but here a lot of the shows are regular, like a weekly fashion show and daily business updates. After the ad pre-roll comes the Telegraph pre-roll, which is punchy, trustworthy, corporate, exciting, but quite conservative because that’s what they think their users need and I think they’ve hit the nail on the head. And then they show the newsroom – what people haven’t seen before, getting them behind the scenes. They place their talent front and centre.

This is something called The Culture Minute. Again, there is an advertising pre-roll. Maybe I’ll poll you afterwards to see what the brand recall really is on the advertising and we can see if we can prove or disprove it! You can see there are lots of options here. They produce The Culture Minute on a regular basis. There’s an incredible amount of content that Telegraph are generating themselves.

So here we have The Telegraph’s Arts Editor and, again, we’re placing our talent front and centre and saying we’ve got something to tell you about culture. So they’re very much placing themselves at the heart of the proposition.

Just to sum up, it’s very much a TV channel in style. It’s quite a linear process – they’re offering, as a broadcaster, to deliver their content to you, the user. They’re placing their talent front and centre. Most of it is their own content as well and it’s quite expensive and a lot of thought has to go into developing own content and that’s why TV channels are specialists. They’re doing a hell of a lot of that – it’s a massive undertaking. And the results are there to see. They currently have – and this is a fast-growing stat as well so this is probably out of date as it’s from last month – 795,000 unique users of Telegraph TV. As a result, perhaps, of the re-launch, in which video has been placed front and centre, site traffic is up 17%. So it has had a halo effect.

OK, The Guardian. I’ll try and not be biased here but I’ll put my cards on the table and say we do some work with The Guardian. So, I don’t see any big pull here to ‘Guardian TV’, as on the Telegraph site. Well, it isn’t there because they’ve really pushed it right in. This is the latest multimedia and here you’ve got music, blogs and video.

So I’m a Spurs fan – long suffering as well so I’d be interested in this part and, hang on a minute, there is a video home. So I sort of stumbled across this but then when I click on it I realise that here we have, buried in the site (or integrated, positive people might say), The Guardian video page. Very different feel – less corporate, more funky. There’s more latest news and videos down the side.

An interesting thing here is that we haven’t heard at all from a Guardian personality or seen The Guardian newsroom. All we’ve seen is an expert - in this case, Hogarth – talking about his favourite illustrator, Quentin Blake. So they’ve taken what they know is interesting content without putting a Guardian spin on it. They’ve said here is something you might find interesting, and I think that’s what they’re doing that’s slightly different.

So, again, here we’ve got a list of the different options, but it’s not divided into TV programs but by subject: news, sport, politics, travel. I’m a media fan as well, so here we have the new Flake advert with Joss Stone. This isn’t at all Guardian content, this is just an advert that’s running on television at the moment. As someone who is very interested and engaged with the media, I have to say I am interested in seeing TV adverts here. They’re launching TV ads here before they actually go live.

They’re not saying to me ‘this is The Guardian’s take on the media’, they’re saying ‘come in to The Guardian world and we will guide you through the content’. They’re doing what YouTube does best, offering you the content within a content structure you understand.

They do look similar, but they are quite different in the sense that The Guardian video proposition is a portal, if you will, it’s not a television channel. There’s something a lot more interactive and integrated about it and the talent is in the editorial role, for them to say ‘we know what you want to see, and we’re going to offer it to you’.

They have also, interestingly, started to roll this out site-side. In the recruitment section, they’re letting users – the recruiters – generate their own content, creating job ads using video. So they can show a day in the life of the role they’re recruiting for. For all of their supplements offline, they’re producing accompanying videos.

They’ve had a tremendous amount of success. Their site traffic is a little larger, so they have a few more views, but one million views was the last count I had from them a couple of months ago. Again, it’s had a halo effect across the site – not just from the videos because we have got a US election that everyone seems obsessed with and all sorts of things so there are other reasons to go to newspaper sites. But it’s certainly helping newspapers to hold their website traffic firm and when you can do that, you can think about how you’re going to engage your users further. They are using video, in a sense, as a voucher – it’s pulling people in. It’s something bright and shiny to pull them in. And once you’re there, you are truly engaged. The interactive video is probably more engaging than The Telegraph approach of ‘we’re going to be a television station’, but that’s just my personal opinion.

They are utilising what they have available already in quite an interesting way. They’re saying we understand we’re not a TV generator, we’re a newspaper. We have brand values that we stand for – that’s why you buy our newspaper – we’re going to translate those across to the website and deliver them in a new way, but just using that as a channel rather than trying completely to re-write the rule book, which is great. That’s innovation.

And they’ve proven the power of targeted, pre-roll advertising. The Guardian did some research recently and they got a 69% brand recall rate on the ads, so not just people recalling that they’d watched an ad before, but they actually recalled the brand which it was associated with. Everything points towards the fact that the recall rate is pretty high and video ads separately have a click-through rate of about 5% vs 1% on banner ads, skyscrapers and that sort of thing. So it’s an incredibly powerful medium to be working in.

So what does this mean for us? We can embrace an interactive approach, in the sense that traditional video is all about broadcaster/user, but internet video has got to be about broadcaster/user/user. The user can talk back to the broadcaster and to the user as well, and we can still have that traditional relationship of broadcaster to user. But it has to be a more interactive approach that’s adopted and I’m not sure we’ve got that right yet.

We have seen that video absolutely works for advertising and it works for the users because when you boil this down and when they get it right, what you’ve got is the best of TV, which was the medium of the twentieth century, with the best of the internet, which is of course the medium of the twenty-first century. If you combine those two and if people can actually access them because they’ve got broadband, then you’ve got a really strong proposition.

And for us, video absolutely works because, like anything else online, we can demonstrate exactly what’s going on with click-through play rates. And I think the metrics for online video are still being developed. I don’t think there is an absolutely clear understanding of what represents success or failure yet because it’s still early days. But you can certainly prove how many people have watched and how much they’ve watched.

In conclusion¸ you can put anything on the web on video and people will watch it, but you need to do it right. And at this point, I’ll introduce Simon, our camera man just to show how we’re doing it right! This presentation will be on the web shortly after this because we felt there was an opportunity to pass on what’s happening here and if you wanted to watch or listen back, it will be available. So we’re trying these things out ourselves.

Thanks for listening!