Commentary
CMO to Agency - I Want Video that is Measurable, Successful and Totally Original! Stat!
- by Daisy Whitney , Op-Ed Contributor, November 16, 2011
Digitas has been one of the most progressive agencies working in online video via its Third Act division and regularly executes successful online video campaigns, such as those for Kraft, Starburst and Holiday Inn Express. So when Digitas executive Dave Marsey, senior vice president and group media director, spoke during a Beet.TV online video Webcast this week about what makes online video campaigns work, my ears perked up.
For starters, Marsey said agencies must work first to understand what the customer is thinking, how they consume various channels of content, and how they watch linear video versus streaming video.
The next step is to identify the desired actions a brand wants to elicit in an online video campaign. “If you are a CPG brand, it may be printing out a recipe. If you are a travel company it may be researching a hotel. We try to measure the activities our clients want and then correlate to sales,” Marsey said during the Webcast.
The brand’s goals could be encouraging viewers to watch a video, to engage with the video, to like a Facebook page or to share a video. Marsey pointed to the recent Kraft “Real Women of Philadelphia ” video series that drove high engagement with its videos and social campaign, and as a result bumped sales of the product by 5%.
So if online video can drive that kind of sales jump, why don’t more marketers spend more money in the medium, asked Jason Krebs, Chief Media Officer for Tremor Video, who interviewed Marsey during the Webcast.
Less accountable mediums like TV still deliver a big audience so they’re not going away. Nor are marketers stealing dollars away from TV to plunk into online video. Instead, marketers are aiming to amplify their paid media spending with more earned media, Marsey said. That’s why social media has become so vital to any online video buy, because a share on Facebook is free and lets consumers do the heavy lifting.
While online video spending is growing by about 50% this year, CMOs still expect brands and agencies to bring them highly measurable ideas that are category exclusive and haven’t been done before.
Piece of cake, right?
“You have to instill confidence in the CMO that you have done everything you can and that there is a reasonable chance of success,” Marsey said.
No problem. We can do that. Although it is worthwhile to note that there is no such thing as a truly "original" idea. Everything has been done before in some way, and what we call originality is really a new way of combining existing elements, or a new take on an old story. I recently read a great book called "Where Good Ideas Come From" which is an examination of how innovation occurs, and worth the read.