Videoblogging Week 2006 #3

Enric and I went looking for possible spaces for the Coworking SF group today (tehspace.com). Found some interesting spaces on Valencia but didn’t fair too well near Potrero. What Potrero did yield though were some great textures and a Vlogging Inspired Mini moment.

Something happens to “the can”!

…and finally, after being in shock at the actual wording of an outdoor ad, and the implications of what it really meant, a homeless man came by and gave me commentary on the sign and an ending I could not have scripted any better!

Pictures of “teh” spaces taken by Enric can be found on Flickr

SF BIG – San Francisco Bay Area Interactive Group

I am in the Marines Memorial Club for the Bay Area Interactive Group‘s first meeting of 2006. This place is completely Standing Room Only. Perhaps 250+ folks. Google is sponsoring this event with 3 key speakers. David Greenwald heads up the volunteer organization in BIG. There is a User Generated Ad Show this Spring. Contact Brian at Universal McCann. Accepting entries now. Guests tonight:

Sean Connolly, Worldwide Director of Advertising Intel;
Pat Connolly, CMO Williams Sonoma; and
Rich Buchanan VP marketing/CMO Sling Media

Karen Crow, Director of Advertising Sales for Google, kicks it off as the main Sponsor. She starts with what she calls “Google’s Forward Looking Statements on Marketing”. Online marketing is dead – going away as we know it today. Traditional marketing business units majority of $; focus on brand; broad bottom line metrics…

Online marketing (hard to read with the yellow type she has chosen) is a separate division. Focus on website. Tight metrics. Future: Integrated Marketing: Multimedia, cross channel, data integration.

Some stats. 1/3 of IT Professional’s media consumption is online. 72% shoppers saw product first online and then bought it in store. 70% of sales @ Macys were made within 20 miles of a store. Connected targeted audiences. She is showing Google Map search results (something Tom Churchill and I were doing with NVRI in 1995!), also integrated with Google mobile. 3 points in circle: Agency > Analytics > Google

John Durham (Carat) MCs.

Williams Sonoma. $3.5B Sales. 40% is direct catalog and internet. By end of 2006, should be #3 catalog company. 400m catalog mailer represents 1% of US postal volume by weight! 11th largest consumer e-commerce $.

Intel. Comarketing program. Integrated marketing model. End-to-end mix. Partner awareness. Co-op model is moving in that direction.

Sling Media. 3000 brick and mortar stores. He’d rather sell direct. 10% budget is online marketing. Very strong viral component. Person to person sales.

Question:What is the key challenge that you see today?

Intel: Media Fragmentation. “One more conversation on that will kill us all”. Can’t buy reach anymore. More like to spread the word…beyond GRP..increase depth of relationship.

Sling: Target audience most likely to buy. Navic‘s system in cable is an awesome tool. VOD delivery. Rich proceeds to give away two systems to a lucky guy in the front row to demonstrate the power of viral marketing.

Williams Sonoma: Client tracking. Keywords have a greater multiplier in retail: 2-4x offline impact on results. Pat uses KitchenAid in store window example. WS would snatch up keywords to sync with in-store promotion.

Question: How do you define Engagement?

Intel: Awareness (BMW example)

WS: Increase customer loyalty.

Question: How close are you to a “Dashboard“?

Sling: Targeted DMA. Product Registration rate is running 60%.

WS: Know call center volume every hour. Porting data to email.

Question: User Generated Media/Content and uncontrolled messaging of your brand. Response?

Sling: Community space, Blog space. Sling Execs engage in consumer created content Podcasts/Blogs

WS: We are behind in that. Customer surveys. Personal call on failures save 80% of the 4% that are disatisfied.

Intel: Harnessing that..it will just hurt in the long run. Demonstrate value to those communites. That will be a positve result

Question: How much does a (specific) site matter?

WS: Source, yes there is a difference. Lifetime value of a customer is different depending on source.

Question: How are you overlaying fragmented media?

Intel: Not all the needles are moving. Sharing data from co-op marketers.

Sling: We don’t have conflict in brand (product over distributor).

WS: 10% of our costs are advertising. Bottom up plans. Incremental sales.

John asks Sean about Intel/Apple. Its Power Performance rather than Price Performance.

Question: What keeps you up at night?

WS: Prioritizing Order. Resource monies are scarce. What is the best long term investment. $170m digital media budget.

Intel: Evolve partner marketing.. high teens digital budget. Viiv foundation is digital. 80% of total marketing investment is indirect (due to Co-op).

Sling: Fire drill of a small company. Everything has to be done yeseterday. To his Agency: “2 days ago is when it needed to be done”. Interactive spend is about 10% of total budget. Expanding to cable and VOD could be up to 30%.

Question: How do you compete against China?

Intel: We are strongest in the emerging markets: India, China, Russia. As erging markets take the leap from print to viral, strong brand is important. #5 global brand id.

John concludes discussion by noting a friend at Heavy related to him that they received 300k downloads in 5 hours from the 18 unaccepted superbowl ads they posted today.

Ipswitch Brunch at MacWorld

Just before MacWorld started in San Francisco, Ipswitch invited a few Vloggers to sit down and have some fun. This video turned into the Eric Rice show, with key moments being Schlomo Audioblogging on his mobile, Eric reviewing the Tiger Electronics VCAMNOW, and the Node101 stickering of his infamous truck.

The music is “ The End of the Movie“, by one of my favorite bands, Cake. Sit back and enjoy!

Tagami Vlogs MacWorld 2006

Here is the first of at least 2 videos from MacWorld. What a blast!

Michael Verdi, Ryanne Hodson, Joshua Kinberg, Dave Toole, JD Lasica, and more! Paul Carnine of Vara Software and Peter McClard from Gluon both have cool tools that we may be seeing at Vloggercon this year. Josh let’s us know we are about to get directories with FireAnt, and what appears to be Vlogmap integration!

CES

There is a ton of noise that will be coming out of Las Vegas with the Consumer Electronics Show for the next few days. I hope to weed through all of that noise and find the signal(s) that I am looking for: namely media infrastructure and mobility announcements. Here then is what I have been able to glean from day 1:

Video Cameras: Sony introduces the DCR-SR100 Handycam. Engadget reports that it has a 3 megapixel imager, 30GB harddrive, and optional bluetooth mic…nice!

Also announced today was the Sanyo VPC-HD1, a High Definition SD recording camera. Coming as early as March, this 8.3 oz, $800 camera, boosts 5.1 megapixels and a 10x optical zoom. Wow.

Mobile Video: Thomson’s LYRA X3000 PMP has a 3.6 inch 320×240 screen and 20GB HD, and is 3/4 of an inch thick. Not sure how well it does digital, but it is ready for DirecTV 2 Go’s analog signal. Nice that DirecTV is experimenting with adding Vloggers to their service already.
There has been talk of Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld format coming into the US for over a year, and it looks like 2006 may be the year for it. Crown Castle has enlisted Samsung and LG to roll out product even though no carriers have yet been confirmed.

Distribution: at&t (new lower-case branding) introduced its version of IPTV to a few hundred house holds in San Antonio Thursday according to the Wall Street Journal. Only 200 channels and no HD yet, at&t promises to expand to 1000 channels and enable subscribers to program their DVRs via their mobile as well as choose camera angles for sporting events. It is running on the MS operating system.

Intel (also freshly rebranded in the new year) is revving up it’s dual core processor video solution they have named Viiv (which I assume is a spin on 6 4) with a announcement at CES that includes on-demand news and sports, advertising and entertainment, as well as our favorite Vloggers. Morgan Freeman will be there promoting ClickStar, his company that is planning to shorten the window on movie distribution from theater to IP. This sounds alot like what Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures is scheduled to do with Soderbergh’s new movie Bubble. Bubble is scheduled to release simultaneously in theaters, on cable and DVD this January 27th.

Finally, Creative opened the doors on a riff of iTunes to support their new Zen player. Check out zencast.com

Alex Woodard @ Expression College, Emeryville CA

I had a great afternoon over at Expression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville, CA with David Toole, Enric Teller, Markus Sandy, and Schlomo Rabinowitz. Outhink and the College put together a fun mash-up live event with speedvlogging requirements on the editing side (e.g. 40 min to edit!) and SpinXpress to help us manage files between the 3 editing rooms.

J.D. Lasica (Ourmedia), Chris Ritke (49media), and Mia Garlick (Creative Commons) were also there. While we were busy editing (or in my case, trying to edit), these folks spoke to the audience about the current state of Personal Media.

Alex sounded great, and he really gave us alot to work with. Check out his new album Mile High on iTunes!

I stumbled through our alotted time, but my partner, Patrick, pulled us out of the nose dive. Patrick attends school at Expression. He says classes are 5 weeks long and very intense, so I guess he is used to the pressure. I ripped through the footage I had afterward and came up with this compilation…it just took 8x longer. Hope you enjoy it!

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