• Google Trends: The Video Show
    As if to underscore the video-fication of all content, Google launched an informational video series last week called Google Beat. The weekly show lasts only a minute and a half. As a brand extension, it is nicely done, especially for the usually ham-handed Google. The lovely hostess Anne Espiritu stands before an oddly decorated backdrop of assorted furniture on a Google-white stage. Googling and the trends it reveals is the topic at hand. Each show will highlight and explain some of the top search trends for the week.
  • NBC Emmy Feeds Save The Best For Live
    Jimmy Fallon breathed some welcome life into the usual tedium of awards shows last night. The Emmys actually were fun enough to keep this jaded awards-averse viewer watching through to the end. I even held off my "Mad Men" viewing until 11 p.m. Fallon has that rare talent of being entertaining through sheer earnestness alone. Even when the lyrics of his comic tunes aren't particularly clever, he manages to sell it with his boyish eagerness to please. The opening skit, giving Springsteen's "Born to Run" the "Glee" treatment got us on the kid's side right off. Alas, NBC, which otherwise …
  • Super-Funny True Author Satire
    The online book trailer is one of the oddest aspects of the digital video marketing landscape. Does anyone know if these things sell books? And yet they have become a necessary part of the mix for book launches. As we noted months ago in this blog, the trailers have become impressively elaborate in some cases and often obscure and self-mocking. More than a few authors take a haughty view of the practice and make videos about how they can't believe they are making an online video for a book. Not Gary Shteyngart, bless his heart.
  • As The World Turns (And My Head Spins) With ABC News' iPad App
    The ABC network has done famously well with the video app it had ready on launch day for the iPad. Less than two weeks after the early April iPad launch, ABC was already boasting that the app had been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and had streamed 650,000 time-shifted TV episodes. Months later it remains one of the best examples of a beautifully designed pure video experience on the iPad. And so the arrival of the ABCNews app last month was a bit of a puzzler.
  • Using Video As A Market Research Lure
    As streaming video became ubiquitous online and emerged on mobile, the format almost became an end it self rather than a medium. I am always a bit surprised when a clip is offered to consumers as a special treat. "Click here and get a free video" some messages will say. This is especially true on mobile now. Marketers will prompt users to opt into an SMS exchange to "get a video link." Really? In an age where buildings literally come alive with live TV feeds and HD screen are at check-out counters, video in and of itself is a value-add?
  • Serious Play: The Cool Surrealism of the Modern Game Trailer
    This summer has been a famously bad one for blockbusters. I have lost track of the number of disappointments many of us have had these past few months with underwhelming film releases. From "Iron Man 2" on down to "Clash of the Titans 2" (well, OK, we saw that one coming), a lot of the stuff that looked awfully cool in the trailers turned out to be something less than spectacular over two hours. I think all experienced film-goers know that some of the more talented editors in the biz must be working on the trailers rather than the movie. …
  • The Return Of The Trippy Music Video
    I have been a dutiful student of popular culture lately and working to fill in some of my lapses in coverage. This week I have been catching up on my Gaga. I have to admit, as someone who came to adulthood in the MTV age, it is good to see a revival of the old music video aesthetic of strangeness. Gaga's fashion-driven, highly polished, film-style productions have a bit more in common with Michael and Janet Jackson music videos than they do with some of the truly disorienting weirdness of the very early Blondie spots or that strong run …
  • Hold Onto Your Wigs, Fellas: The Drag Queen Web Series Is Here
    We've had foul-mouthed Long Island Neanderthals enshrined as working class heroes on "Jersey Shore." We have seen Upper-East Side housewives behave like gum-snapping high school 'mean girls.' We have David Hasselhoff ready to do a reality series. For God's sake -- David Hasselhoff! Frankly, girlfriends, a reality series about drag queens may be a programming upgrade for us all.
  • Verizon to Bring FiOS TV to iPad ... Sometime
    Verizon is planning to take its TV programming to the iPad early next year. At a press demo of new FiOS features at the home of company CTO Shaygan Kheradpir, Verizon showed off an iPad app that would pull live streams of channels from the FiOS system. Reuters reports that the "What Hot" app would let the viewer choose the channel from a touch-screen menu that may also have a range of sorting options.
  • Getting Beyond the Mobile Pre-Roll: Conversations, Not Impressions
    If you want to get better performance from a mobile video ad campaign, then start thinking outside of the video player box. In its latest report on user behavior and ad activity on its own mobile network, Rhythm New Media found that packaging banners and full page ads with video pre-rolls together in an app produced significantly better results than with banners alone. In the one set of data on campaigns, a banner ad campaign alone achieved a .3% CTR while the inclusion of pre-rolls increased the banner CTR 45% to .5%. Likewise, full page ads alone achieved about a …
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