• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, January 3, 2014

So many ads. So little engagement.  Incite Media Labs, a six-month old company that delivers information about video distribution and viewer behavior across all social networks, has just prepared a pretty significant bunch of data about just that subject.

It tracked over 250,000 branded videos released in 2013 and watched how they performed on places from Facebook to Pinterest to YouTube and Twitter. The object was to find if the brands seeking engagement were getting it, and where. It was measured in EPMs, or Engagement Per Thousand, a phrase I hadn’t heard before but makes a certain kind of sense.

The top performers on Incite’s list run the gamut  from surprising to the usual, good suspects, topped by Chevron,  followed by Papa John’s, Lanvin, Hilton, Hard Rock Café and Tiffany’s.

The bottom feeders are also surprising. You read the list of laggards and you want to scold them—Hey! You should know better! But no.  Engagement is no easy thing, especially for PNC Bank, which tops the list of the worst, or Zurich Global which is second worst.

But neither is it such an obvious concept for Crest, Exxon Mobil, Aveeno, or—and this really surprised me—Chobani, the big Greek yogurt company.  Or Burger King, or Maybelline. Like I said, that list of the bottom 100  is not a pretty picture.

You can read the whole list of the top and bottom 100 right  here. And you can see a weekly list that Incite puts out, here.

Jon Whitticom, Managing Director, CTO, explains, “The ‘quality’ of the content plays a role in distribution success, but the distribution strategy and how brands are determining what audience to target plays a critical role.  Brands that focus on ‘view count’ as their [key performance indicator] end up relying on ‘instream and incentivized’ as their primary distribution strategies and miss the benefits that the online video format offers.”

In short, there’s a a little engagement and well, there’s better engagement, which is what Incite Media Labs seems to want to prove and help along. Whitticom sent me an Excel sheet of a few specific media campaigns—no names here—that seemed to do a pretty decent job getting their campaigns seen.

But when it got down to getting comment, or passalongs to Facebook mentions or re-tweets, some of the messaging worked great and some definitely did not.  One four minute YouTube video from a giant energy company got about 27,000 views--and an awesome 25,000 engagements. But others, from that company and another unrelated firm, did from bad to middlin.’ One bank’s YouTube preroll got seen over 900,000 times. But nobody (or at best just next to nobody) cared about it on Facebook or Google+ or Pinterest or Twitter or anywhere. It seemed almost invisible. It was a pre-roll. They probably didn’t think it would go viral. But compared to what’s demonstrably possible, it seemed stunningly ineffective.

“If If a brand’s goal is to build an online audience and have a continued conversation with their customer, they need to engage them – not bombard with preroll,” Whitticom says. This data seems to prove that point.  

pj@mediapost.com