VideoEgg

Happy Holidays from VideoEgg

Here's to a fun and peaceful holiday season. We'll be taking a break from posting over the holidays, but we'll be going strong again in the new year.

0 Comment(s) | Permalink | By blog_editor on Dec. 20 2007

Excellent Creative Execution to Promote "The Orphanage"

I was updating my Netflix queue last night, and I usually check out the top movies on RottenTomatoes.com to see movies and docs I might not have heard of (it actually works quite well by the way; I rarely rent a movie I felt was a waste of time.. except The Namesake, but I digress). It was then that I came across the creative for Warner Brother's upcoming release, "The Orphanage." I'd love to see the CTR from current ad campaigns on RottenTomatoes.com right now, because I'd bet The Orphanage campaign is outperforming everything else by a noticeable margin.

I captured some screen shots of it in action. It starts off with a static ad, and then within a few short seconds the lighthouse in the picture begins to cast its beam of light, rotating around to reveal some creepy looking ghosts/kids before going back to static for another 20 seconds or so. We all know how scary ghost kids can be! It was quick, and more importantly, it wasn't intrusive. By the time I saw it, it was over and I actually wanted it to start over again. I was on the site for about 20 minutes and while other ads took advantage of flash animation, none used up extra real estate to grab attention.

If nothing else proves the point, I clicked through, I spent time on the brand site, and I'm going to go see the movie - and I hadn't planned on it before.

Post by Eric Klotz
Director of Creative Development

0 Comment(s) | Permalink | By blog_editor on Dec. 19 2007

2007 Online Campaign Review: Mac vs. PC

While probably getting close to retirement sometime after the new year, Mac's campaign, "Mac vs. PC," continues to be creative, smart, and fresh despite using the same characters in all spots. There a few things that have continued to impress me about this campaign and make it stand out amongst others:

1) Negative ads are powerful, while funny ads are the most loved - this campaign is both.

2) Mac successfully sticks a large number of competitors (not just Mircrosoft, but Dell, Gateway, Sony, Toshiba, etc) behind one scared and pitiful character that represents them all.

3) Most importantly, each ad is tailor made for the environment it is viewed in. The web-only ad, "Don't Give Up on Vista," appeared on tech savvy sites such as Engadget and Digg, and going straight for the juggular, it was on PC Mag as well (pictured below). But the best part is the way the skyscraper and banner work together. Far too many advertisers use page takeovers as an opportunity to just shove branding in your face without being creative. The Bose advertisements below were taken from the same website as the Mac ads, and look at the difference.

The video of the Mac ad in action can be seen here. And while you're considering your computer purchase this holiday season, check out the Mac ad below:

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

Post by Eric Klotz
Director of Creative Development

0 Comment(s) | Permalink | By blog_editor on Dec. 18 2007

Should Online Video Be Shorter to Coincide with Average Viewing Times?

Peter Kafka of the Silicon Alley Insider chatted up Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove fame recently (see How to Make Web Video Work: Make It Shorter). In that conversation, Mr. Allaire points out that while online video viewers select 4 minute videos to view, they only get through 2 minutes or so. Mr. Kafka infers that means something’s amiss in online video and that content creators should “make it shorter” to “make web video work.” Now, we who make our home here on the Range realize that this go-go-get-me-a-latte-txting-my-g/f-omg-is-that-Brittany generation likes it hot and fast, but we don’t think content creators have to “make it shorter.”

They have to make it better.

Great online shows like Ask A Ninja and Wallstrip easily clock in over the magic 2 minute mark. Good. No, scratch that. Great. Great content, entertaining stories, informative narratives and engaging characters capture viewers’ attention and don’t let go. Go check out Nielsen, all the top TV shows are hour long: CSI, Grey’s, 60 Minutes (60 MINUTES hell, it’s in the name), Without a Trace etc. etc.

Viewers bail out of a video when they’re bored not because the clock strikes 2. If they’re engaged they’ll stay with it. So don’t focus on the clock, creators. Just make it better. Then they won’t be able to click away.

Post by Jeff Reine
Director of Business Development

0 Comment(s) | Permalink | By blog_editor on Dec. 14 2007

Dessert Marketing Story is a Digital Marketing Lesson

I enjoy listening to This American Life. I don’t often get to it on a Saturday afternoon (when it’s on my local public radio station), but today I happened to catch it. It was all about the people who come in and out of a diner called The Golden Apple in Chicago over a 24-hour period. But, that’s not what this post is about.

No, this post is about rotating desserts. You see, on the day the This American Life crew was in the Golden Apple the dessert case that would normally be spinning desserts around and around was broken. You know, the kind of thing that looks like this:

So, yeah, it was broken — the desserts weren’t spinning. When the desserts weren’t spinning the Golden Apple sold 50% fewer desserts. Think about that for a moment. Take stationary desserts and start them rotating slowly and double your sales.

Why do I care about desserts, rotating or otherwise?

Because this is such a great lesson in why details matter. They matter in retail environments, and they matter in software — and from now on I think I will always think of that as “The Rotating Dessert Issue”. When I used to build custom web applications for a living we were constantly faced with clients looking at the “buy vs. build” decision. One of our strongest pitches was that off-the-shelf systems may get most of it right, but it’s the details that really end up mattering. Now, of course we had a vested interest in taking that stance, and there are plenty of good arguments against building custom software in many situations, but it doesn’t change the fact that details matter.

Post by Nathan Dintenfass
Product Manager

Originally posted on Venture Geek

0 Comment(s) | Permalink | By blog_editor on Dec. 13 2007

Classmates.com Gets Detention for IPO Attempt

Classmates.com announced today that they are pulling out of their intended IPO, agreeing to pay a $4MM+ fee for filing and then backing out. Classmates.com was a social networking (1.0) success a few short years ago. Through cheap remnant advertising it blindly blasted its brand around the Internet for years, much like the dancing alien mortgage ads, and managed to build up nearly 20MM members. The ads were not targeted because as long as you met two basic requirements, you were their target audience: Interested in speaking with past schoolmates and you didn't use Friendster, MySpace, or Facebook. Now that audience is much harder to find, and the interest in buying stock in Classmates.com just isn't there.

If Classmates.com ever had a window of opportunity, they missed it. But the lesson here isn't about the timing of an IPO, it is about being a smart, agile business in today's rapidly changing digital landscape. In simplistic terms, here are a few things they should have done differently.

Mistake #1: They stayed a subscription based service in a free content market.

Mistake #2: Their branding and marketing hasn't changed much since 1995, and it shows.

Mistake #3: Not enough reason to stay on the site. This made it difficult to fix mistake
#1 and switch to an ad supported business model. See time spent graph below.

Interestingly enough, I looked through several graphs on Compete and noticed a spike in July in just about every category except time spent, which dropped significantly. This must have been due to a last minute increase in marketing of the site to manipulate stats just before the intended IPO which led to new users that just checked it out, and then left quickly. In any case, Classmates fell victim to becoming stale in an unforgiving environment. Perhaps that will explain why an analyst from Cohen and Co. had this to say about Classmates: "We expect the Classmates.com subscriber base to peak in the first half of 2008, followed by a steady decline to zero by 2012."

Post by Eric Klotz
Director of Creative Development

1 Comment(s) | Permalink | By blog_editor on Dec. 12 2007

OMMA Announces Agency of the Year 2007 Winners

Congrats to the OMMA Agency of the Year winners. Although nothing has been posted on the awards event page as of yet, Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, posted it on his blog that his agency has won an award for "Best Use of Social Media."

Here is the list of Agency of the Year winners:

Gold: MEC Interaction
Silver: Mindshare Interaction
Bronze, Best Integrated Approach: The Insight Factory
Bronze, Best Creative Executions: AKQA
Bronze, Best Use of Broadband Video: OMD Digital
Bronze, Best Use of Social Media: Deep Focus

Post by Eric Klotz
Director of Creative Development

0 Comment(s) | Permalink | By blog_editor on Dec. 11 2007

Welcome to our New Blog

Hello there. We are pleased you've found the new official VideoEgg blog; we're calling it Free Range and its main focus will be on the blurring line between the technology of Silicon Valley and the advertising world around Madison Ave.

We pioneered the ad overlay (aka, the Ticker) on online video back in September 2006. The model was widely adopted by many online video advertising companies, and it is considered by many to be the standard for online video advertising outside of pre-roll. We also acknowledge that this is just the beginning of tackling the issues that face the digital marketing industry. Questions remain about measurement, how to value engagement, ethics and accuracy of targeting, pricing models, and the list goes on.

We do not claim to have the answer to all the issues, but we spend a significant amount of time trying to understand, talk about, and best solve the issues to benefit the entire digital marketing industry. In fact, we have an internal, company-wide, email list where all of our colleagues (from biz dev to engineering to product to sales to admin to C-levels) have multiple daily conversations about the latest news in the industry. The point is, no one person or group at VideoEgg is responsible for coming up with provocative questions and innovative ideas - we all are. This is a large part of our corporate culture.

Free Range will serve as the external version of that email list. We'll have contributions from all levels of the VideoEgg team on issues that face the industry. We'll also be periodically reaching out to thought leaders in the industry to get their opinion related topics. To be clear, we'll still be making announcements on new releases, product development, and related VideoEgg news, but for the most part this will be a collection of thoughts on the industry as whole, not a posting ground for everything VideoEgg. This will always remain an open conversation, so we look forward to hearing your feedback and seeing your comments.

Eric Klotz
Director of Creative Development

0 Comment(s) | Permalink | By blog_editor on Dec. 10 2007