Where will YouTube take us next?

Live streaming has its uses.  Catching sports games or watching Presidential speeches online could make waves but now a new force has emerged to support musicians: YouTube Concerts.

In November U2 streamed a concert out of the Rosebowl in California and had over 60 million people tuned in.  Quickly following suit Alicia Keys dressed up her YouTube channel and joined the ranks of U2 just hours ago.  Notice the live Twitter feed…nice way to start trending.

American Express tagged along with some exclusive branding so no one got a free lunch.  When Jay-Z walked on stage and the song “Empire State of Mind” began you could start to see how the pieces would fit together in future concerts.  This particular concert is part of World Aids Day so this new form of musical distribution has benevolent roots.

CD sales don’t exactly excite most musicians these days.  Record labels take most of the cut anyway.  itunes has a nice monopoly on the per song online distribution method so what’s the new hope for musicians?

Well, why just have a concert and rely solely on ticket sales and T-shirts when you can stream it live and sell advertising?  At least for now big bands can tap into a new promotion/revenue/distribution model.

Cheers!

In previous decades the question was debated through examples of companies like Comcast and Disney (who almost joined under one umbrella way back when).  Comcast and Disney both flirted with the idea of having Pocahontas and Simba following through cable pipelines controlled by one entity, but they are still pitted to battle over what is king. 

When the distribution nuke (commercial Internet) dropped, companies like YouTube formed and Dan Ackerman Greenberg released an article in November 2007 titled “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral Videos”.  The article itself has reached an astounding number of comments (757, March 16th 2008) and rehashed the argument as to whether content is king in this New Media age.      

The comments, like any really good article, are full of opinions from both sides.  Some recognize that marketing has been manipulatively presenting material for years only the back end work took place in the pubs, restaurants and clubs that the newspaper editors or TV tycoons use to hang out in.  Now the playing field has moved online.

Secondly, others think it’s disgusting and that Dan is ruining the credibility of the Internet as a medium, instilling paranoia and distrust in the readers of online content.  

Thirdly, the middle of the spectrum opinions outline a few things that Dan is doing are actually unethical, such as having a conversation with himself via fake users (creative self spamming) but, see the value in the other strategies present.         

Here is the fine line between promotion and spamming.  Dan’s claim that there’s just too much content out there to dream of your video ever becoming viral rings like a justification for the strategy but viral videos still make it to most viewed pages organically.  It depends on the subject matter of content.  

Dan is right in the sense that a video designed to steer an audience towards an agenda of driving attention or sales to a company is not the most appealing content for the majority.  Therefore, the Comotion Group has decided to implement these tactics to compete with the mass amount of “real” videos that they are competing against.  

The above posted video shows the irony of his claim that content is not king.  There are numerous examples of organic content going through a series of events to reach Viral status.  Cue Star an A Cappella Tribute, Her Morning Elegance or Everything’s Amazing Nobody’s Happy to name a few recent ones.  

The category of content Dan needed to promote (trailers) is said to be the Film Cloverfield.  Trailers have marketing budgets and can be referred to as “Flu Virals”.  They appear, are extremely visual and exciting, everyone talks about them, the release date comes, the actual (peer) reviews come out and people are inoculated getting their fix or decide it’s not worth it.  
Arguably there are a few trailers that change the upper echelon of viral videos.  Slumdog Millionaire for one, but that film boast pure quality.  It won numerous Oscars and is scored with an example of viral music; MIA’s Paper Planes.      

Finally, the concept within the Cloverfield trailers is driven by content.   The fact that you never see the monster in the clips isn’t a distribution element.  It is a classic tactic of suspense creation.  To borrow from Lucky Number Slevin’s line “That’s when villain is most effective”.   

Content is king.  Certain people or companies, with built up networks focusing on certain subject categories will be able to influence the attention specific content gets.  This is especially true if they implement Dan’s tactics but by no means should this be considered the Bible of viral marketing, maybe just a chapter in Revelations.

Cheers!

Update March 20th: Zideo.nl is a video content site and the founder has this strategic advice for youth when making their videos.    

Create the video around these guidelines:   50% Content, 15% Metadata, 20% Thumbnail and 15% Promotion

You will have to excuse the substantial amount of quoting in this article but it is needed in order to demonstrate that some of the elite thinkers of this world have thought about and printed the very economic concepts that are usurping the music industry. So it begins.

All quotes are from Eric D. Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth (2006).

To start you must understand a concept of the S-Curve from Richard Foster’s book; Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage. The S-Curve graphs:

The level of effort invested in improving a technology versus its performance

Got a grip on that? Good, now Beinhocker referencing Clayton Christensen’s book; The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Christensen claimed that whether a technology [Internet/YouTube/P2P] is disruptive depends less on how radical a technological advance it is, and more on its specific effect on the S-curve. If a technology pushes performance up an existing S-curve, even very rapidly, then the technology tends to preserve the power of existing players.

The music industry moved through record, tape, to CD while maintaining their centralized power. No disruptions to the players controlling the economic model and a higher quality product was delivered to the end user. (Life in the 80’s and 90’s).

However, when a technology requires a new S-curve, particularly when it starts at a worse price point-performance point then the current technology [online media is free which is hard to beat], the newer technology tends to be disruptive and to change the industry structure.

Cue Napster, Kazaa, iTunes, Pirate Bay, Google, YouTube or Metacafe which are all a result of the ability to be connected via the internet.

This is because any executive in a successful incumbent company [RIAA, Warner Music Group, Viacom, Etc] would have a difficult time justifying investing resources in a technology that offers, at least initially, worse price performance.

Welcome to an age in which anything that can be digitized will need to first consider the Internet as a critical resource for distribution.

The Evolution of the Business

Evolutionary theorists refer to Orgel’s Second Rule (named after biochemist Leslie Orgel), which says, “Evolution is cleverer than you are.” Even a highly rational, intelligent, benevolent Big Man [Big Corps] would not be able to beat an evolutionary algorithm in finding the peaks in the economic fitness landscape [highest value, to keep it simple]. Markets win over command and control, because of their effectiveness at innovation in disequilibrium.

Markets win over command and control because they percolate value to the top and value is the life blood of markets.

Cheers

Thepiratesdilemma.com pulls together a scrambled conversation around the net generation that the music, telecommunications, publishing and traditional media industries consider kryptonite.    

These are exciting times for anyone except those losing out in the above industries.  The industry is not disappearing though, it is merely shifting.  The true question is when will the new paradigm settle into a definition?  

Combined the telecommunications, publishing and media industries have an enormous influence over society.  They can unleash their agenda by having McLovin tell us not to “F with his DVD money” or call on any one of their high profile celebrities to make a couple statements.         

In Sweden this week the fate of a few men are being decided concerning their involvement with “facilitating piracy”.  According to the CNET article creators of Piratebay.org are not money pits (nor are they the only ones in Sweden with the will to put out sites like piratebay) so large gains from making an example out of these Swedes will not be in the cards.  

Indexing is not difficult to do and programmers are gifted people so piratebay.org copycat ideas are inevitable if the site goes down.  Considering the restrictions of sovereignty the task of hunting down similar people will be incredibly difficult to accomplish.  Think about how incredibly difficult it would be hunt down the sources of all the bootlegged material that originates in China. 

So what is to be decided in Sweden will be a watershed for law in respect to the future of sharing/peering.  A two year sentence for this “crime” is dangerous in the sense that the verdict is going to look like it was issued by business and not the people.  Governments aren’t fast enough to catch up and establish laws about this ever changing world which has left the courts to make up the grey area between a shifting mentality and what they have written down as laws.  After two years these people may be released into a world that has incarcerated them for what they now embrace depending on the speed in which the paradigm shift occurs.     

Business is having troubles adapting as well.  Many of the big media companies like Warner Music Group, Viacom or Sony engage in talks with YouTube for developing revenue sharing models (targeting bootlegged copies that users upload) but recent turmoil with Warner Music Group has left the industry looking to punish and impede progress.  

The music industry has been the guinea pig, canary or science lab rats to the Net Gens power grab that is spearhead by the consumer.  In the book The Pirate’s Dilemma the elements are laid out from a music background and should have all the above mentioned industries drastically shifting their strategies.  They can take a lesson from the myriad of success stories in both the books; Wikinomics and The Pirates Dilemma.  

Cheers

The San Francisco company has launched a new viral effort it hopes will attract young men to pass along videos of customized “beasts” emerging from the button-fly of Levi’s jeans. At Unbuttonyourbeast.com, visitors can choose from nine different animated characters with names like Trout Troutman, Paul the Pincher and Sock Nasty, then customize the beast’s message by calling a toll-free number. The effort, unsurprisingly, is geared to young men just out of college.
 
The e-mail arrives with the subject “Do you dare to unbutton my beast?” Users can customize the message to friends. The default borders on the risque, reading, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, but I don’t want to freak you out. That’s why I’m sending my beast to do my dirty work.” Senders receive a confirmation e-mail that their message was sent — along with a 15 percent off coupon for jeans.
Source: Adweek

While the creativity and technical savy is definately there the interaction has some disturbing elements to it.  With a couple creatures appearing from the crotch of Levi’s 501 jeans looking like they just stepped out of B horror movie, it is unclear whether the young male target will really relate to this.  I bet some guys will get a kick out of it, but I would hazard a guess that most guys don’t relate their male member to a honkey tonk pig or a jewel wearing crab claw.

No one doubts that sex sells.  The ability for users to personalize the message by calling a toll free number has some appeal, but I’m not sure if girlfriends and boyfriends alike will appreciate the inivitable love note from the “Cookie The Cougar” character which looks like something out of Alien vs. Predator.

Time will only tell if Unbuttonyourbeast.com sees some viral success, but the saving grace for the site and the messaging is that this latest initiative is part of a broader itegrated campaign.  Would be players in social media take note.   

Levi’s has already seen some admittedly surprising results with the release of “Jumpin’ In” on YouTube with over 4.4 million views thus far.  “['Jumpin' In'] was supposed to be a small seeding activity,” said Robert Cameron, VP of Marketing, Levi Strauss, San Francisco. “We didn’t know it was going to blow up.”

The video is part of a series produced by Cutwater, the same people who produced the Ray-Ban “Catch” videos.  While no one at either the agency or Levi’s could have predicted its success the video has a universally appealing theme.  Backflips it seems resonate with young males and probably more so than crotch humor.

The positive take on these efforts is the willingness of Levi’s to jump in (no pun intented) to the new social media space as they try to reinvent a brand for their younger male target.  After all it is stories like these that inspired AboutViral.

Andrew Cherwenka of Trapeze presented on behalf of Facebook platform developers. His most important comment about the “new” Facebook is that it will be simpler for the user. New to the user interface will be a series of tabs at the top of the screen, “Creating a photos tab to handle the billions of photos was simply a priority.  Other improvements include an info tab on your profile and the customizable newsfeed.  Now you can decide how important things are for your friends to see by changing the size of information on the Minifeed.  First off it was great to come together and meet all the developers of new applications.  On display were some widely known applications like Mouse hunt, and the FedEx package as well as some up and comers like Refresh, Slangbook, and Praized.

In my opinion Facebook applications are like a sleeping giant. There are countless examples of rehashed ideas popping up with a slight tweak here or an adjustment there. For example, Praized, one of the applications showcased looks like something that may catch on. It utilizes user input to generate valuable knowledge for those who may be searching for pretty much any business. Praized visually displays areas, buildings, establishments that much like Digg, or any online voting system, can be ranked.

We already have these review based consumer sites on the web, think Yelp.  Restaurantica has been running for years and has hundreds of thousands of reviews on restaurants. What may push Praized to the forefront are two simple features. One, it will rank any business and two it has social networking built in thanks to Facebook. Imagine if Restaurantica had a personal profile to back the comments being submitted. The social networking aspect of this App has strategically linked the confidence of ones own network of friends into an opinionated map of the city.

Mouse hunt on one hand looks great. Very visual and appealing but the skepticism remains as to how long people will continue to buy their virtual cheese. Interesting none the less and here’s hoping the talent of the organization will push out more great applications in the months to come.

Monetizing the applications was the question of the night. So what was the answer? According to Rebecca Sawyer, Director of Monetization for Facebook, the best way to make money on your App was to buy advertising on Facebook to catapult the viral spread. She stated upfront the presentation “was not a sales pitch,” but really what else could it be. Here top five points were nothing new for advertising. Target your audience, write compelling headlines and copy, use multiple ads, then measure and optimize. That strategy is the key to success not matter the medium. 

However, if you are like most independent developers you have put all your dollars into development. Most of this group is looking for the Holy Grail in the way of sponsorship. A relevant game can generate sponsorship like MGM’s recent sponsorship of the up and coming Flip Cup game to help promote the soon to be released movie College targeting youth. The App is still a work in progress and the next round of improvements are set for August according to the brains behind it, Keith Canivet.

If there was ever to be a killer App it may be thanks to the event sponsor Refresh Partners. Their new analytics tool claims to be able to provide aggregate demographics of App usage. This measurement is going to help developers and marketers report back to clients on their success of integrating a brand into the social network. But all of this is still in its infancy. Apparently development of this was only two weeks. Seems to be an awfully short development time for something of this magnitude (but then again I’m not a coder). I am going to be keeping a close eye on this one to see what impact it has on this budding industry.

The most rewarding part of the night was seeing how eager everyone is to jump into this emerging market. And coming from this blogger once companies learn how to integrate their brand with an application, release it in the right virtual market with a solid measuring system for ROI we will see more growth in major corporate spending.

Stuart Dykstra with notes from Doug Watson