Alex Moss

Okay, so we've heard a lot of exciting things about content, but now we're going to talk about measurement, which people tend to kind of glaze over when they talk about measurement but it's becoming increasingly more important now as a subject. It's now possible to measure, with consistency, third party metrics, preroll and banner overload, adsense content, social video, advanced formats. So how do we actually do all that measurement? We essentially have a technology platform which scours multiple video sharing sites, social networks, blogs, which pulls in and aggregates all this data into one place in our central core database.

So, we organize by Clip, Campaign, Brand and Industry so we can give a very broad overview of what's going on across all those notable video-sharing sites. And then dive deeply into individual campaigns and see how campaigns perform in its entirety. So, all this data gives us an understanding of what is actually going on, on a very broad level with video and how people are behaving, and how they're reacting to content and how they're sharing it etc.

What are the actual metrics we should be looking at when it comes to campaign performance and judging how effective a campaign is being? We've essentially honed it down to these three things: Reach, Engagement and advocacy. By reach, we're talking about view count, essentially, which we could then break down into unique views as well if necessary. We're also talking about the reach that occurs, not just from the paid-for video but also videos that have been uploaded by the consumers, the copies, the derivatives, the sharing, their view counts as well.

By engagement, we're talking about the actual time spent watching that content and advocacy might be a slightly strong word but it's talking about pass-along activity and sentiment, what people are actually saying about that video content. So once we have that data and we're looking at a campaign at that level, how do we contextualize all that data? The industry buzzwords at the moment seem to be dividing it up into paid, earned and owned media. Paid for media, we're talking about the prerolls, the postrolls, inskin formats etc.

owned media, so branded channels on youtube, branded pages on facebook, but then also earned media as well so the social activity that occurs from people creating the copies, the derivatives, the sharing, re-paste and reposted those assets on blogs and websites. So we're going to spend a bit more time looking at earned media. The market's moving very much? More towards choice in the video world, consumers can choose exactly what they want to do, what they want to watch, any one time.

If we look at this data from our database here which shows different campaigns across different verticals, I've put the film industry titles in here, things like Twilight and Harry Potter etc. where consumer-driven activity took up the majority of viewing activity that occurred in the campaign, so this is the reposting of the videos on profile pages or Youtube or on blogs along with websites, the actual sharing activities that occur. They're a good market to kind of take lessons from, essentially, they're fantastic at getting their content watched, but also, getting people to actually share that content and essentially consumers to do the hardwork for you and get the media out there.

So we've got a huge amount of data on what those guys are doing and we're very close to the film studios in the U.S. where we capture that data for them and they use that data to actually help forecast box office proceeds for the following weekend.

But then, there are other brands in other verticals which do phenomenally well within videos. Nike, for example, has some great content which gets huge amounts of the social activities around it where that content is spread, the Old Spice campaign, the campaigns are very much designed in a way that encouraged interaction and response, and a few case s