Why YouTube Isn’t Enough

The YouTube rumor mill has been working double-time over the past few months. This week, the WVMC welcomes back guest blogger Renée Mitson of Flimp Media Inc., who tells us why using Google’s video appendage might not be the best Web video marketing solution.

People do not go on YouTube to find a business. People go on YouTube to watch a funny video, learn about a new dance or catch the last fifteen minutes of a television show they forgot to Tivo. Despite high hopes, the video sharing site has not created the business boom originally anticipated. This is because of the ageism, so to speak, of videos shared on the site.

YouTube is a sink-or-swim market. In order to make it to a homepage such as “Most Viewed” or “Favorite” the video only has about fifteen days to generate buzz. It is much more rare for an older video to suddenly fall into popularity and retrieve a runaway number of views. The video poster has a better shot of reposting the video over and over again in hopes that it will catch on at a later date.

But this does not answer the question as to why YouTube is difficult for business marketers in particular. Well, consider the demographic. Videos are 1.5 times more likely to be viewed by a viewer between the ages of 12-17 with a 60/40 male slant. It is silly to expect a large amount of leads to surface through such a portal. Secondly, you only have fifteen days to impress these youngsters, and for what? The hope that they may tell their parents? I’m not seeing it.

Which brings me to – DUH DAH DAH – the Flimp solution. With Flimp landing pages you have complete control of your demographic. The client chooses the initial viewers, who can then send it to their friends and colleagues, likely in a similar demographic, through viral messaging. The video enters through the demographic the client wishes it to, rather than a roundabout route. Best of all, there is no age factor – your video can be sent this week, next week, next year if you like and the recipient receives it in exactly the same way.

Furthermore, with the ability to track who is watching these Flimps, any company can create a more efficient business plan by fine-tuning their content to reach a certain demographic. After all, the best business strategy always leaves room to become more effective.

You Cannot Do Better Than Video

Just in case you thought you could skate by without doing the whole “video thing,” try this one on for size: Doubleclick and Google just released a report which details the performance of rich media advertising versus all other forms of advertising. The results are staggering. Ads which use video more than double the purchase intent rates of rich media without video, almost triple .gif and .jpg rates, and more than quadruple simple flash ad rates.

You’re not using video, you say? Well what if I told you that video dramatically increases brand awareness, online ad awareness, and brand favorability more than any of these ad formats? These aren’t slight increases — they are gigantic increases. We’re talking crazy numbers, like brand favorability increases of 1,533.33% over simple flash. (You read that right: more than one thousand five hundred percent.)

Still not convinced that video kicks more derriere than any other ad format? Then you need to read the entire report. You can check it out here. And if you’re not convinced, after reading the whole thing, that using video is the single most effective way to construct an online advertisement, well… you may need to have your head examined.