INTERVIEW : Brett Wilson (Tubemogul co-Founder / CEO) – video content must read

Brett Wilson is Co-Founder/CEO of Tubemogul “a video advertising and analytics platform that connects advertisers with highly targeted audiences”. I first found out about Tubemogul a couple of years ago when I worked across the pond at MySpace Video – it was then a cracking platform that anyone can use and there’s lots of new stuff too. Part free product and part paid service they are extremely useful and are really expanding and diversifying (including doing the rounds and opening offices in Europe).  I snaged 5 minutes with Brett to see what’s in it for PRO’s and communicators.




What is Tubemogul?  How do PlayTime and OneLoad differ?


TubeMogul is a video advertising and analytics company. For brand advertisers and marketers, we offer two tiers of services to get their videos watched and tracked: 1) Advertising: PlayTime is our video advertising platform where advertisers only pay when someone chooses to initiate an interaction with their video. PlayTime is 100% transparent – in addition to pre-approving sites and placements, advertisers can log-in in real-time to see statistics like impressions, views, play time and social shares for every placement during and after the campaign.  2) Syndication / Seeding: OneLoad is our free content syndication service where advertisers can easily syndicate and track their videos on top video sharing and social networking sites, from Facebook to YouTube. TubeMogul is the undisputed leader in video distribution – we have over 200,000 clients, including the largest PR firms, agencies, corporations and media companies.




How are you different to Unruly media and other competitors out there?


Unruly Media and similar services typically work with mid and long tail sites and blogs who embed a player into their blog and get paid for each view.


Here’s how TubeMogul PlayTime is different:
1. Quality inventory – we work with premium comScore 500 sites with high quality inventory (while they’re working with mid and long-tail sites)
2. Transparency and analytics – we show our clients exactly where their ads ran and how they performed on each site. Our competitors don’t report where views actually happen or how people are engaging with the ads on those sites.
3. Optimization – we use our proprietary video viewership data and analytics to optimize for engagement and other brand metrics to ensure most efficient spend for the advertiser
4. Global reach – we are comScore ranked in several major countries and have a strong and growing presence in the APAC region, United Kingdom, India and elsewhere.
5. Ad units – advertisers can choose between a variety of interactive pre-roll, in-banner (click-to play and rollover), mobile and social media ad units.

The bottom line is competitors like Unruly Media are like a black box – they do not provide the accountability and transparency to the advertiser that we do.




How should PR Pros be using you?  What’s the benefit to them?


Clients use OneLoad to increase reach and significantly reduce the amount of time they spend managing their video content on video and social networking sites. For each site, OneLoad automatically handles such things as metadata translation, optimal transcoding, scheduled launching and social network sharing — all without ever having to log in to the other sites. For PR agencies, our multi-campaign capability enables one account to simultaneously manage profiles and video metrics for multiple clients. TubeMogul is tightly integrated with the major social networking platforms so clients can post videos directly to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.


Clients use our PlayTime video ad platform to extend the benefits of organic distribution by using paid media. Advertisers use paid media to guarantee a certain number of video views. However, paid media often has an amplifying effect that drives more organic views and viral sharing of videos beyond what is included in the paid campaign. One way we do that is through rich media overlays for videos with social sharing buttons that enhance the virality of videos.




With all of our services, advertisers and content creators get the most robust, detailed video analytics in the marketplace. This includes views by site, second-by-second engagement by video and site, geographics, embeds, social network sharing and much more. The data is presented in a single dashboard, so clients can see how their paid media is amplifying their social media.




Give pros 3-5 tops tips when using you that haven’t been seen elsewhere.


1) Relevant, detailed meta-data matters — 69.9% of video views referred by off-site sources come via search engines, more than any other category. Sample: 760.7 million streams from a broad sample of top videos in the past 30 days.
2) Mid-length is optimal: for commercially-oriented videos, 60 seconds to 1:30 in length has higher completion rates than both longer (>1:30) and shorter ads (less than or equal to 30 seconds) videos. Sample 19.7 million views from over 100 top brands.
3) Adding Twitter and Facebook sharing buttons onto video players with ads leads to sharing for 1.38% of all streams. Sample: 1.7 million streams from top brands.




What’s the cost! (Be as transparent as possible – good idea here to give a sample). Is there a report I can put up on Scribd to show what they get at the end?


OneLoad has four pricing tiers – it is free for the basic features and also has three premium levels at $100, $500 and $1,500 per month depending on the feature set.  PlayTime is priced on a cost per view basis by campaign – advertisers determine how many views they want and which ad formats they want to use and we create a campaign that meets their goals with the most efficient media spend.




What’s the best case you seen where someone has used TM? What makes it so great?


Symantec recently used our video advertising platform for a major campaign tied to the release of Microsoft Windows 7. The primary audience was IT professionals at companies, as well as strategic IT businesses. Conventional marketing to such professionals would typically include proven direct-response mediums (SEM, email). In addition to these, Symantec decided to try something new — video advertising.


Leveraging TubeMogul’s PlayTime network and both YouTube’s embedded player and TubeMogul’s player for video delivery, the video was served as a standalone ad within Facebook applications and display ad units on targeted technology sites.


A banner overlay clicking off to Symantec’s “7 Steps to Windows 7″ microsite was included so that users would not have to wait to the end of the video to get the call to action.


RESULTS
- Over 500k YouTube views and 7 million views across paid placements in a one-month period.
- 8.5% of all promoted views resulted in a click on the banner overlay.
- Viewers watched 3-10% longer than a benchmark of 10 top tech campaigns tracked by TubeMogul
- OMMA Video Awards finalist




You’ve been inserting ads into games within Facebook – making them become part of the game experience – talk about how that works / the results you’ve seen.


We utilize several different video advertising units on Facebook: Facebook’s official banner video unit, in-app banners and interstitials and socially-activated views within Facebook games. Viewers of video ads on Facebook tend to watch longer and click on more ads than viewers elsewhere — at a lower average cost per view. In case you haven’t seen it, attached is our most recent research on the subject, which includes screenshots of each of these units.


These Facebook engagement metrics are trending higher over time. We updated the research data for this interview with recent campaigns, and found that viewers of video ads on Facebook are watching an average of 1:02 per stream, 14.6% longer than when this research was first compiled in June and 58.3% longer than in-banner video in general.




Talk about some trends for 2011 and beyond with video sites/distribution – where’s it all going?


There is modest stabilization occurring in the video consumption market share among the major video sites. YouTube remains the dominant site for video views, but several niche sites for specific verticals are maintaining their audiences. The major exception to this relative stability is Facebook, which is growing its video viewership rapidly. In addition, Hulu has become the dominant destination for premium video content in the U.S.


How people discover videos, however, is undergoing a radical shift. Social networks (Facebook, Twitter) are growing 25.53% faster per month than the major search engines as referral sources for videos (time period: Q2, 2010). At current rates, Facebook will surpass Yahoo! within the year to be second only to Google in referral traffic to online video content for media companies.




Finally – what do you use to slow the flow of information that comes at you? (think tools, methods, services etc).


Personally? Tweetdeck is invaluable and customized to my interests and Google’s new Priority Inbox is awesome.