Visible Measures Blog

Here are two video tributes to mothers everywhere. I was very fortunate to have been reprimanded ahead of time by some of my coworkers - they told me that I had to step up my game for my wife as it's her first Mother's Day as a new mom. As for my mom, she may not understand what I do for a living, but she's still the bomb :) Happy Mother's Day!

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) - of which Visible Measures is an active member - today announced new guidelines for the use of in-stream video advertising. The need for standardization is very clear, because the logistics and overhead involved with developing and deploying advertising for new media can be very costly. It is because of this need for standardization that 44 companies have already been certified as compliant with these ad guidelines. Go IAB!

Ok, this is a bit eerie. In a previous post, I highlighted a video parody where Iron Man and Batman go at each other ala the mac and pc ads. Well, a very insightful user on CollegeHumor has compiled this video where the Batman trailer of Tim Burton's era goes up against the Batman trailer for this summer's blockbuster - very cool stuff. What great viral marketing!

In this hilarious spoof that ends up being a viral promo vehicle for the two biggest comic book movies this summer, Iron Man and Batman exchange barbs and witty commentary ala the "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC." commercial series. I think Iron Man comes out on top on this one...what do you think?

Ok, we've got a board meeting starting in 10 minutes and I still couldn't resist taking a few moments to post this video with a tour of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. I mean, who doesn't think this is so cool! (Yes, we are nerdy). This video to me is an example of an untapped monetization opportunity...professional, targeted content. I can't believe we get to work with this kind of stuff everyday :)

So when is deceiving consumers good for your brand image? When you've got a new set of televisions to promote. A major advertising campaign (largely conducted online, was even in a pre-roll of a video I previously posted from The Onion News Network) to drum up interest in a new TV series called "Scarlet" featuring a very attractive female action heroine was actually an elaborate hoax to promote a new series of flat screen LG TV's featuring a scarlet-colored back.

In an environment where consumers are very excited about flat screen TV's yet face a myriad of increasingly complex buying criteria, and where the televisions themselves have a difficult time differentiating against competitors, this campaign could prove to be a boon to LG in terms of brand awareness. I actually thought the Scarlet series looked like it had potential! Potential to be a Dark Angel rip off :)

We were really happy to be highlighted in Joshua Chaffin’s Financial Times piece last month focusing on online video advertising. It was great exposure for us and for the burgeoning field of online video measurement.

During the interview Joshua asked us about initial attention (also referred to as initial abandonment) -- how many online viewers drop off at the very beginning of a video -- across all online videos. We had done some analysis across our aggregated data set (which is small but growing by the moment!) and found that, for our early adopter customers, the average initial attention has been around 30%. Not surprisingly, the distribution of initial attention across our customers is fairly diverse. This means that, in general, for every 100 people who start watching a video, 30 of them leave the video at the outset. Wow.

This speaks to how online viewers consumer video content: leaning forward, hand on the mouse, and ready to click away at any time. If the video doesn’t deliver what the viewer wants or expects in the first few seconds, he or she splits and moves on. And if the product or brand wasn’t in those first few seconds, the viewer never sees it and may have no idea it was part of the video. That's wasted dollars for both publishers and advertisers... and that’s painful.

We think that one way to soothe this pain lies in tracking viewer engagement in your online video content. The act of measuring initial attention will show you just how important the beginning of a video truly is... and over time you'll be able to identify the elements of clip composition and merchandising that positive and negatively affect initial attention.

We're digging through our data every day and, from time to time, will share any gems that are worthy of your attention. ;)

For those of you who have known about Visible Measures for some time now, you probably know that MIT Professor Ed Roberts has been a huge help to us from the very beginning. From the time when I spent six weeks trying to just get a first meeting with Ed as a first year MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, to the time when Ed wrote his first check as an angel investor in our seed round, to all of those times when he served as counsel, advisor, and friend to me and to our team, Ed has meant the world to us. He has been honored countless times, and recently added another award to his collection. Ed was honored as the fourth recipient of the annual Adolf F. Monosson Prize for Entrepreneurship Mentoring.

Seemingly whenever times got hardest, Ed was always there to lend a hand, an ear, or a shoulder to me and to our board when we needed him most. He is like a father figure to Visible Measures and to me personally, and I am very honored to know him.