This weekend The FeedRoom will celebrate its 10^th anniversary as a provider - and pioneer - of online video solutions.  Indeed, The FeedRoom was one of the very first entrants in the online video market and, well, we’ve come a long way, baby.  Over the years, our customers and staff have helped to transform Web video from a one-way mass medium reserved for content providers and major news outlets into a popular platform for delivering engaging, online user experiences on the Web.  No longer viewed as “emerging technology”, tools for creating, managing, distributing and measuring video content have matured to the point that we enter our second decade in a business climate where online video is not only widely accepted, it’s widely expected. 

As timing would have it on the eve of this great milestone, research firm Interactive Media Strategies yesterday announced the winners of its inaugural ‘Excellence in Enterprise Video Awards’, or EEVAs for short.  We are proud to say that 4 of the 8 winners are FeedRoom customers!  Testament to our industry’s evolution, these awards were expressly created to recognize the outstanding business achievements of companies using Web video to address real-world sales, marketing, PR, customer support and internal comms.  More than just vision, hype or even cool technology, these acknowledgements are all about results - viable business applications with measurable and compelling results. 

To learn more, we invite you to watch - and read - some of the interviews with the 2009 EEVA winners as they explain their ground-breaking applications of online video.  These thought leaders are illustrative of the business executives who will take our industry into its second decade and beyond.  On behalf of all FeedRoom employees, we salute their accomplishments.

Learn more about The FeedRoom’s decade of innovation.   -Lisa C.

Each day I come across stories of customers doing really interesting, if not superbly cutting-edge, things with live and on-demand video in their marketing and business communications. Some of these applications involve missions of great importance, such as ensuring the protection of animals.  I use this specific example because our customer, The Humane Society of the United States, was just named a finalist in the annual Interactive Advertising Bureau - or IAB - MIXX (Marketing and Interactive Excellence) Awards. This prestigious international competition honors campaign innovation, strategy, creative execution and ROI.

A finalist in the non-profit category, the nominated HSUS campaign aims to create awareness of the brutal realities of the Canadian seal hunt that took place in the Gulf of St. Lawrence earlier this year. To capture the video, HSUS’ senior video producer Frank Loftus and his group flew by helicopter to the Canadian ice floes, and then boarded an 18-foot Zodiac to film the seal hunt.  During the video capture, HSUS had media standing by to gain access to the video.  As Loftus traveled back by helicopter, he quickly produced the video on his laptop, accessed FeedRoom Studio via air card, and was able to upload and publish the files to their Website very quickly. By the time the crew landed, the media was downloading broadcast video, and high-resolution images for the world to see. 

Rebecca Aldworth, HSUS ‘Protect Seals’ Director (Photo by Frank Loftus)

As a result of HSUS’ work, the boycott of Canadian seafood has grown to include some 600,000 individuals and more than 5,000 food-related businesses. It has cost Canadian fisheries $750 million (CAD) in lost snow crab exports to the U.S. since it began in 2005. Public awareness also played a role in a recent vote by the European Union to ban seal product trade, including the import of pelts.

Compelling video footage that is shared across multiple distribution channels is an extremely useful way to foster a critical message and affect change.  Congratulations to Frank Loftus and the entire HSUS team on their outstanding work with this campaign.  Winners of the annual IAB MIXX Awards will be announced in New York City on September 22.  Best of luck to them!  -Lisa C.

Last week I had the opportunity to address several hundred senior communications professionals in healthcare and related industries at a conference The FeedRoom co-hosted in New York.  What impressed me was the significant level of interest and eagerness to utilize digital media more productivity in healthcare marketing, corp comms, training and PR.  What impressed me further was that it wasn’t just the CDC, AstraZeneca and other giant Pharmas in the room, but also folks from middle market and emerging-growth companies looking to navigate the ins and outs of the regulatory and legal issues involved with planning and implementing cross-media communication strategies.

In an article I wrote last year for Pharmaceutical Executive magazine, I discussed how online video would represent the next evolution in healthcare communications. For the viewer, it adds limitless on-demand access from any computer; content can be searched, shared, tagged, and downloaded at will. Audiences can rate, comment, and blog about videos.  More importantly, the publisher of the content can track all of this behavior.  There’s no other communication platform in memory that combines this level of compelling, rich media with interactivity, virility, and metrics the same way that online video does. 

Thus far, the healthcare industry has only scratched the surface of what’s possible, however, mostly through consumer-focused initiatives.  One recent example is Bristol-Myers Squibb’s “Prevailers” campaign, which promotes the brand to a wide audience, from financial analysts to industry journalists. The videos feature stories from cancer and HIV survivors, as well as others who have faced serious illness. The end goal is two-fold:  first, to inspire any viewer, whether he or she is a consumer, an employee, or some other type of influencer; and second, to increase awareness of the impact Bristol Myers-Squibb has on patients’ lives. The effect on the viewer is powerful and memorable.  I encourage you to watch one here: http://prevail.bms.com.  Moving stuff.

In another example, Bausch & Lomb used Web video for crisis management, after recalling a contact lens solution with possible links to eye fungus. Instead of a generic press release, visitors to the company’s home page found a video featuring CEO Ronald Zarrella speaking directly to the issue, detailing the steps being taken by the company, and providing information on where consumers could turn with questions.  

While video can certainly put a human face on an issue, digital media, and online video in particular, has altered the way that news is being consumed.  This powerful medium presents a compelling opportunity for healthcare marketing and PR professionals to maximize global coverage and build, protect and promote their brands to the online public with unsurpassed speed, transparency and control.  We’ve come a long way in 12 months.  The issue is no longer if healthcare communications professionals should get involved, but rather how to get involved and what digital media practices will best serve their internal and external communications goals. - Matt D.

Is your company’s leadership slow to embrace streaming media to tell your message, or reach your constituents? Do they need to see some real-time use cases to help solidify the concept? Just ask them to take a few minutes and see what GM is doing in the realm of live and on demand video.

In addition to the other monumental changes they are making in their business, they are continuing, even accelerating, their use of video, especially live, to meet their goal of transparency and immediate communications.

Simply check out the corporate news channel on GMTV. In addition to carrying all the press conferences live on their site, they have a robust archive of them in one convenient location. And it’s not just there. GM has diligently worked with their active list of press, bloggers and car enthusiasts to offer up all of this immediate news on their own sites, with simple embed codes prior to the live event. So GM can have their live press event directly watched from virtually any Web site.

From the 100^th Anniversary of the company last Fall to the continued transformation of the past few weeks, it’s all been available live, in real time, right on your desktop. Send me an email to learn more. (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).  -Brian K.

Just heard that IDC’s CMO Advisory research team is pulling together their 2009 Benchmarking Survey. Always a good read, and a great help in not only planning out, but also justifying your marketing budget.  IDC’s July newsletter also includes a preview of CMOs’ marketing automation priorities for the coming year, with a more comprehensive analysis in their 2010 Marketing Investment Planner, due out sometime this fall. 

A few areas in their summary of surveyed CMO priorities really stand out.  In no particular order, they include:

• Development of a formal marketing automation roadmap.  CMOs are looking to take a fresh look at marketing tools and applications for redundancy and cost savings. (Shows that more investment in automation is not necessarily a priority, but process improvement is, followed by whatever automation is required to achieve efficiency.)

• Sales enablement and marketing asset management technologies.  OK, now here’s something we marketers instinctively suspect - quantified, at last, by a leading international research firm: 40% of all marketing assets handed over to sales are not in use today!  According to IDC, this includes assets that have been developed for sales, channels, prospects and current customers. Moreover, they estimate that at least 30% of companies’ marketing investment, including program and people spend, is dedicated to creating content and marketing assets.   

Wow. What if you could achieve a 3-5% reduction in your asset development spend in 2010 and reallocate it to something else?  Like customer retention programs or opening up new markets?  Isn’t that roughly the same thing as a bigger budget?   FeedRoom can help.

Our digital asset management system provides out-of-box capabilities for workflow configuration that deliver instant cost reductions by automating and streamlining marketing asset management - while also significantly reducing the overhead required to manage these assets, including those that are expired or could be re-used instead of re-invented.  In fact, that’s what many of our customers like Autodesk, Raytheon, TAC and others are already doing every day.  If you want to learn more about ActiveMedia and its workflow automation capabilities, check out this Webcast from last week. -Lisa C.