Recently my co-worker Faisal, like many in the Web 2.0 world, started a blog, (actually it's a tumblelog) entitled My Science Project on Tumblr. Tumblr is the answer for those who have something to say, but don't want to say it in the editorial style that has become the norm for most blogs. Faisal has posted pics, links, quotes and, of course, video Overlays.  What's so cool is how seamlessly the Overlay.TV player fits into Faisal's template, as though it has been designed specifically for Tumblr. Our design team re-designed our player, so that aesthetically it would look good on virtually any site, but to see that it actually does is just ... well, neat.

So to prove a point to myself I decided to make a Tumblr account of my own, just to see how our player would look with a different Tumblr theme. Faisal has chosen the "Minimalist" theme for his tumblelog, so I chose "Litewire" as my theme and I must say looking good:

Simple, clean ... elegant. And something else that is almost as satisfying as the player looking good on Tumblr, is how easy it is to embed an Overlay. Seriously. Click "share" on our player, select a size (in my case small), select "video" on your Tumblr dashboard, paste in the embed, add a caption, click "create new post" and you're done! Tumblr's all about the easy sharing and so are we.

aesthetics · embed · Overlay.TV · Platform · player · share · Tumblr · Web 2.0

Wendy is my friend, and has been my friend for many years. She has seen me through a lot of hard times, always making me feel better about myself in the process, and now Wendy needs my help. Wendy has gone and made a video, a viral video, that is not doing as well as she had expected and, hopefully, I can lend a hand.

The Wendy to which I am referring is of the eponymous fast-food chain Wendy's. And I wasn't joking when I said she's been a good friend and helped through some hard times. The Big Bacon Classic, or Combo #6 Biggie fries with Coke as it's known in the drive-through world, has been my go-to meal for many years now and has seen me through many a bad day. So naturally I was delighted when they introduced their Baconator, which was brought to my attention through some extremely clever commercials describing Baconator eaters as "meatatarians." Funny stuff.

Anyhoo, I was sent this article from Advertising Age about "Crazy Lettuce," a viral video Wendy's has developed and its mixed reviews from the online community. So here's where maybe I can lend Wendy a hand regarding "Crazy Lettuce." At the end of "Crazy Lettuce" there is a URL to meatatariansunite.com where you can sign-up and get a coupon for a dollar off a Baconator sandwich. Delicious. The problem was that when I read the URL I read it as 'meatatarian institute dot com' and not 'meatatarians unite dot com' and of course did not get the right website when I typed in the URL, a step which is frankly annoying even if I had typed in the right address. It would be much easier if you could just click on the URL right in the video and be taken right to meatatariansunite.com, or even better have the coupon hidden in the video itself. If only there was a company that could do that. Oh wait, I work for a company that can do that! Here is the Overlay.TV take on "Crazy Lettuce." Find the coupon, or if you can't (which I doubt) then just click on URL at the end of the video. Enjoy.

· advertising · Baconator · Crazy Lettuce · Overlay.TV · viral video · Wendy's

One of the overlooked features of Overlay.TV is how easy it is to integrate us with your existing analytics package, be it Omniture, FireClick or any package that utilizes transparent gifs to deliver the tracking pixel.  This can be done in a couple of minutes to any video, and of course you have the option of adding other widgets to the same video (product, clipart, text, etc).

To do this you first need to generate the report or goal in your analytics package and determine the increments of engagement.  For example, if you have a 3 minute video, you probably want to measure how many people made it to 1 minute, 2 minutes and 3 minutes respectively.  Whatever page you embed the video in will record the number of views the player gets, and the player itself will measure how many people hit play.  This last stat is available in any Overlay.TV video by clicking on the info pane at the bottom right.

Once you have generated the 3 pixels, you simply advance your video to the appropriate point in the timeline and open the Link widget.  In the Image field, paste in your transparent pixel.  Complete this for each of the pixels you have created.  Now you go ahead and embed your video in your page, start building traffic, and let the pixel and your analytics package do the rest.  To get the most of your experiment I would create a custom report that graphs usage statistic across the 3 pixels.  This will measure drop-off engagement etc.

If you are using other widgets like the products in our affiliate catalogues I would suggest placing them near that pixel, either right before or right after based on what you want to measure or understand better.  This will then give you a map between engagement and revenue or referrals, which will make your report even more powerful from an ROI perspective.

I am planning on building an example of this with a report - so if you would like me to do it to your video, leave a comment here with a link to your video and a way to contact you and I will work with you on this.   If you have other ideas or analytics issues you are trying to sort out, let me know and I would be more than willing to work with you on them.

analytics · engagement · tracking pixel · Video

Gather round kids it's story time ...

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there lived a girl, a girl who loved to create. One day she happened upon a website by the name of Overlay.TV, and her creative skills flourished. She created Overlay after Overlay, adding clipart, widgets and products to every one. Her favorite thing by far though was to find just the right video to use, and create just the right products to add to her Overlays (and maybe make a little money on the side, but I'll save that story for another day). She would search high and low for the perfect video and the perfect products to add to her Overlays, everything from clothing to iTunes, and manually paste in the URLs. But as time went on, the girl who loved to create found that she was so good and so fast at creating Overlays, that to manually add the URLs every time just wasn't fast enough. "There must be an easier way," thought the girl, who loved to create. "If only there was a tool that lived in my browser that I could call upon to harvest products and grab videos quickly and easily, without having to leave the site I'm on every time." What was a damsel in creative distress to do?

One day, while admiring her proverbial garden of Overlays, she found the answer she was looking for right there on her Overlay.TV MY PAGE. It was called a Bookmarklet, and did everything she wanted and more. It lived in her browser, it harvested products quickly and easily, and gave her the ability to start creating Overlays on videos right from their site, with just one click of a button.

Now, the girl who loves to create uses her Bookmarklet whenever she wants and so can you. Install your own Bookmarklet  and use it to create products and grab videos to Overlay. Read ahead to find out how to use the Bookmarklet and live happily ever after ... (more...)

Bookmarklet · Overlay.TV · overlays · Platform · products · tips · tool · tricks · videos

Social networking online comes back to bite users by Julie Beun-Chown, For Canwest News Service

It's the kind of story usually dismissed as urban legend -- but this time, it's true.

In June, 20-year-old Joshua Lipton was found guilty over a drunk driving incident that seriously injured another driver.

That he was charged wasn't surprising. What was shocking was that the prosecutor in the case found an incriminating Facebook picture of Lipton at a Halloween party held two weeks after the accident, showing him dressed as a jailbird and sticking out his tongue. In court, the prosecutor offered it as evidence of Lipton's unrepentant ways. The judge concurred and gave the Rhode Island man a two-year sentence. [MORE]

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Overlay.tv: quick media overlay video embeddable creation by Avatar

Overlay.tv surprised me. when i first read about it, i thought it was like the lite version of PLYmedia. IT IS. but that turned out to be a great thing. Overlay.tv offers media overlay integration to video embeddables (video widgets) timed to the video. the media in question can be text, graphics, short video, photos and links. this makes it display the overlay content just in the same way viddler displays its video comments as the video rolls. what overlay.tv created was to make a application that resembles the simplicity of Windows Movie Maker, but for the web and that you output in flash video embeddables. that is of course the intention of it because it will feel familiar and anyone will know how to use it just by looking at it.  [MORE]

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In Part 1, we setup the Player SDK, tried out the test player and created a skeleton widget that can be animated on top of a World of Warcraft in-game video. Now we get into the fun part. We're going to query the WoW Armory, initially with a hardcoded player name so that we have some results that can be styled in the ViewPane. At the end of this post, the view should be functional and show some stats for a hardcoded player. In Part 3 we'll make a configuration pane which will allow an author to configure a player of their choosing.

(more...)

armory · in-game videos · MMORPG · Player SDK · widget · World of Warcraft

For a lot of reasons, I've been thinking a lot about video lately - not only in terms of how it can help build brands and community through social media and PR, but specifically how we can understand what the results of this brand and community building mean.

In most cases, unless you're spending a ton of money on analytics packages and hosting videos internally, you get one metric about your online video efforts - views.  In many cases, what a "view" means is not even particularly clear - is it based on people watching a whole video or just the first few seconds?  How are offsite views counted?  In general, measuring views of a video is a blunt metric that gives a general idea of how many impressions a video gets.  Once again, we're measuring eyeballs.

Katie Paine, of KDPaine and Partners, often calls out measurement companies and consultant for focusing on impressions in online media, when what really matters is action, and I think it's just as important for understanding how online video fits into the architecture of persuasion.  Consider which is the more valuable insight - knowing the number of people who watched some part of a video, or knowing how many took action at a specific point in a video, and the percentage of people who took action as a result of one message versus another.

One of the reasons that this has been on my mind in the past few months is due in large part to the fact that one of my clients - Overlay.TV - is making this type of measurement possible by allowing content producers to make any video interactive by adding links, text, animation or even video-in-video and in-video chatting.

So now, in addition to measuring impressions, by simply adding a few elements to a video, content producers can measure, through their existing analytics software, how many of those viewers actually took action and visited a site, purchased a product through an affiliate, or entered the sales funnel as a direct result of the video.  By using the chat widget, they can also gauge real-time reactions to a video and begin to understand more about the content they're producing and how it relates to the audience.

Overlay.TV came out of beta late last week, and is now available for public registration.  It currently offers a number of widgets that make it easy to add measurable interactivity to any video in just a few seconds.  If online video is part of your marketing mix, I highly recommend checking it out and experimenting with the tools.  Overlays can be as complex or simple as you need, so it's easy to add a few quick links or create a fully interactive video, and even easier to measure the actions that come out of it.

As online video evolves as a marketing medium, measurement that goes beyond impressions and allows marketers to better understand how a video drives action will be more important than ever.  To see it in action, check the newly-launched Overlay.TV or read about the company on TechCrunch.

[Originally posted at http://www.ryananderson.ca]

kdpaine · measurement · techcrunch · Video

Overlay.TV Turns Your Favorite Videos into Cold Hard Cash

While online videos have given us many laughs, monetizing them has remained an ongoing issue…until now. After a successful 6 month beta trial, Canadian-based Overlay.TV just announced the general availability of their interactive video platform, giving video creators and viewers, as well as marketers the power to cash in on popular videos for the first time. [MORE]

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Overlay.tv making some good progress

I previously wrote about Overlay.tv back in April. It’s an innovative approach to embedding more information into videos. Basically, while watching a video you can click on targets that allow you to find out more information about different aspects of what you’re watching. While watching a video of a band, for instance, you can click on a target to see where to buy their album, get a link to their MySpace page, etc. [MORE]

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