Marketing Pilgrim

We have a Blockbuster store in our town that is still open for business but you wouldn’t know it when you drive by. But if you go down a block to the grocery store any evening, you’ll have to navigate your way around the line of people waiting to hit the Redbox DVD machine.

Now that Redbox has the hard-copy, DVD rental biz sewn up, it’s time to move on to the streaming biz. That means competing with Netflix. Even with all their recent troubles, the online DVD rental company has carved out a deep niche for themselves.

Redbox isn’t worried. They have a plan and a partner – Verizon.

Video may have killed the radio star, but it’s working wonders for the online ad business. According to eMarketer, video is showing the highest spending growth numbers of any category.

Last year video went up 42.1% and it’s expected to keep in the double-digits for the next few years.

More spending, means claiming a larger share of the online ad pie. For video, it’s currently at 7.9%, just barely sneaking past Classifieds and Directories. The share is expected to rise to 15% by 2016, keeping it solidly in third place.

Add in search and banners and these three ads account for 80% of all ads sold. Search, accounting for almost half of all online ads by themselves.

Reuters is reporting that users now upload around 60 hours of video to YouTube per minute. Yes, minute. That’s both frightening and amazing.

This represents an increase of 25% in the past eight months and that’s quite an achievement. YouTube’s no newbie. We’re not talking about that initial surge of activity you get when a site first gets rolling. YouTube has been around since 2005 and it’s been a juggernaut ever since.

But has the quality of content improved over the years? I’d say yes. YouTube is now an excellent source for entertainment and educational short videos. It’s also become a wonderful archive for old TV shows, movies and commercials. (Copyright violations aside, it’s truly amazing what you can find.)

The January issue of STORES magazine has an article called 20 Ideas Worth Stealing. Since they’re advocating helping yourself, I figured they wouldn’t mind if I borrow a few of their ideas to share here.

The entire article is a great mix of basic marketing manners and innovations that use mobile and other digital options to enhance the in-store experience. But there are also ideas that the strictly online retailer can use as well.

Reward Loyalty

Home decor flash sales site One Kings Lane surprised 6,900 of its best customers with a special gift that shipped the first two weeks of November. Based on purchase history, shoppers received taper candles, a silver pitcher or an inlaid bone box.

Today we ponder the question, if people stopped loading videos on the internet right now, how long would it take to watch everything that’s already been submitted?

These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night. It’s like calculating how long it would take me to watch every minute of every DVD I own. I don’t know that either feat could be accomplished in the time we have on this earth.

According to Nielsen, 166.9 million unique US viewers watched nearly 22 billion videos in November 2011. In January of 2011, the unique viewer number was 143,930 watching almost 15 billion videos. That’s quite a jump in only ten months.

Advertisers spent 29% more on video ads than they planned over the past year and two-thirds of advertisers said they’ll spend even more in 2012.

The numbers come from Break Media’s “Digital Video Advertising Trends: 2012″ report and overall, it shows that video advertising is on the rise. Mobile shows the most growth going from use in 39% of video ads in 2011 to an anticipated 55% in 2012.

In order to pay for the increase in video spending, 45% of advertisers are taking the money out of the online display budget while 38% expect an increase in their overall ad budget to cover the difference.

So all this confidence must come with a big reward, right? Could be, say the video advertisers, if only we had a way of measuring our success!

YouTube has done a major redesign and it wants you to think “channels”. They aren’t new on YouTube but now they are being showcased. This is to help the millions of YouTube users get used to the channels especially as more custom content appears in special channels in the future. I could blather on about the features but I really like it when YouTube explains these in a video, don’t you?

This redesign continues to bring the look and feel of Google into a more uniform approach. The new Google bar is doing the same thing.

Personally, I like it. What about you?