Where in the World are Laure Manaudou and Hope Solo?

Laure Manaudou is a French Olympic, European and world champion swimmer. Hope Solo is a goal keeper for the US Women’s National Soccer team. Both are very successful athletes whose notoriety has reached far beyond their respective sports. Laure Manaudou‘s new found fame was generated by a humoristic piece entitled “Laure Manaudou Sex Video” on YouTube that drew more than 1M viewers. The joke is that the video was about monkeys and fortunately not about Laure Manaudou. Because of all the attention it garnered, Laure Manaudou was also in the top 5 searches on Technorati for quite some time…

As for Hope Solo, she gained tremendous publicity through her temporary exile from the U.S. Women’s National Team. Indeed, her exile became the dominant story line at the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Unbeaten Hope Solo was benched by the coach in favor of veteran goalkeeper Briana Scurry just before a crucial semifinal game against Brazil that the US ended up loosing. USA today reported that this incident drove up ESPN’s ratings and filled blogs and comment pages with a passion not seen since the big USA win at the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup and Brandi Chastain’s jersey toss. In addition, there was a back-story to this incident recounting Hope Solo’s relationship to her father and his tragic passing a few months before the World Cup.

I’m relating these two “soap” stories to illustrate how public attention – though ever so short term- is driven by what I’d call the phenomenon of “Tribal Voyeurism”. I believe that it is critically important for B2B marketers to research and understand the mechanics of “Tribal Voyeurism”. Indeed, the glaciers between the B2C and B2B worlds, if they ever existed, are definitely melting! They’re melting not because of global warming but because, as noted before, of the ever increasing use of social media tools in the enterprise. Moreover, the hyper-mediatized “prosumer” has been completely saturated and become indifferent to the un-imaginative, un-inspired gobbledygook prose dished out by the vast majority of B2B marketers, and is hungering for a more genuine and entertaining style of communication!

I’m by no means suggesting that B2B marketers should become unsavory, voyeuristic, and soapy, but rather that they need to learn to appreciate and accept how professionals access and evaluate information. There are many successful companies that have succeeded in attracting and keeping the public interest either through style, meaning or both. This includes the likes of Apple, Salesforce.com, Facebook, PG&E (yes, the utility company), Interface and many others. So, break the mold. Create. Imagine. And have some fun!

YouTube and Viewer Responsiveness Index

Today, it was too cold for me to go on a bike ride... Instead, I played sleuth and joined the digital natives on YouTube! I explored the correlation between “brand” and the number of video viewers for a selected set of companies. The results were quite surprising! The companies I selected are enterprise apps companies Oracle and SAP, Internet juggernauts Yahoo and Google, Salesforce.com as the enterprise 2.0 proxy, FaceBook as the Social Network / Internet platform, and Microsoft as Microsoft.

In an effort to remain objective, I chose to be very quantitative. I added up the number of viewers for the first five videos for each company, sorted by “relevance” and “all time”, as well as the number of comments and ratings. I then created a ratio that I call the “Viewer Responsiveness Index” – VR Index – to characterize the engagement of the viewer vis-à-vis the video.

Et voila, the winner on total views is FaceBook with more viewers than Google and Microsoft combined! And, first place for the VR Index goes to Microsoft with a score of 3.80, but keep on reading as the numbers themselves aren’t the whole story.

Indeed, quantitative analysis is great but it can only take you so far. So let’s enter a more subjective and qualitative world.

Oracle and SAP have the worst VR Index which may be explained by the fact that their videos are geared at techies and that watching a video about SAP NetWeaver or Oracle Fusion doesn’t necessarily generate a lot of excitement. By contrast, Salesforce.com videos are packed with humor and more fun to watch. So, while total viewership is the lowest of the companies surveyed, Salesforce generates a VR Index of 3.41 with mostly positive comments!

So by now you must be thinking: How is it possible for Microsoft to obtain such a high VR Index? Well, if you work in Marketing at Microsoft, don’t get too smug… The most watched video for Microsoft is Microsoft Surface Parody with 1,550,904 viewers. And, Punish Your Microsoft Developer garners 214,280 viewers alone… I guess people like to make fun of the Redmond Empire.

Google’s technical videos got a little bit more traction than Oracle’s or SAP’s, but what really boosts Google’s numbers are the Google Earth videos that all told reach nearly 2,000,000 viewers. As for Yahoo, the number of total viewers would have fallen below 80,000 if it weren’t for a Japanese video called Hard Gay Japan with 203,392 viewers.

So, where am I going with all of this? One thing is for sure, as the video-web becomes more important than the text-web, companies will need to keep an eye or two on what’s happening on YouTube. And while one could argue that comparing Oracle to Google in the context of YouTube is not meaningful, I hope that everybody will agree that comparing Google to Yahoo is very relevant! The unresolved question is whether the VR Index is a backward or looking-forward indicator.

OK, it’s time for me to bring my daughters to soccer practice. Happy holidays!

How far can you reach with IPTV?

Do you think that IPTV is television over the Internet?

If you said yes, sorry to disappoint, but you loose. IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television. It’s a transport mechanism that telephone companies and cable operators use to deliver a television like experience. For now, most of the operator-deployed IPTV systems are designed to be walled gardens.

The systems operators want to deploy in walled gardens to ensure quality of service (QOS) and limit hacking and piracy. IPTV over the public Internet is called “streaming video”. As mentioned in a previous post, Shelly Palmer describes these technologies and their application very well in “Television Disrupted”.

A predictable quality of service and control over content aggregation is very critical for advertisers as they want to enhance the viewing experience and protect their brand. They also want to have as good a knowledge as possible of who is viewing their ads. IPTV offers a two-way system that allows for census based measurement – as opposed to sample based like AC Nielsen – and transactional user experience. In addition, the deployment of IPTV systems on video game platforms, portable video devices, and the growing adoption of DVRs allows for a consumer-based time-shifted experience.

This is, pardon the cliché, a true paradigm change! Clearly, to be effective in this new framework requires to think in terms of addressable and dynamic ads… It also requires having tremendous creativity and imagination, as well as, good processes to keep budgets under control. I find this so very exciting: Better knowledge, more imagination and more fun!

If you think that I’m getting carried away, take a look at the IPTV Subscribers Wordwilde 2006-2011 forecast from iSuppli Corporation and eMarketer from April 2007. The survey predicts the number of subscribers worldwide to grow from roughly 4 million in 2006 to over 100 million in 2011, with 45% of the viewers in Europe, 39% in Asia and 16%in the Americas.

Television 2.0?

One thing is for sure, you need to step-up your game to keep winning. It applies to soccer, a game that I love, and also to advertising. As you determine your media planning strategies, remember that we are moving from an age of sample-based measurement (AC Nielsen) to an age of census-based measurement. While this has always been true on the web it’s now happening with TV, as it moves from broadcast to IP based. There is an excellent book that covers this transformation in details: Television Disrupted.

In Television Disrupted, Shelly Palmer does a great job at presenting the probable futures of TV. From broadcast to narrowcast, from linear to dynamic and time-shifted,from analog to digital, Shelly explores and tries to anticipate the response of "old media" (networks) to "new media" (networked). How will "IP" and user generated content overcome inertia and established advertising / revenue models? All fascinating questions in a well thought-out framework. In the end and as always consumers will choose and define what is to become a much richer experience known as Television 2.0!