When the United Nations asked markettiers4dc to provide broadcast support for its international Decade on Biodiversity, the agency brought the global environmental movement together by hosting a live, interactive web TV show direct from New York's Manhattan on Tuesday 20th September.

By inviting viewers to email questions to two senior UN figures about its plans to curb biodiversity loss, interest in the show surpassed expectations among online environmental and ecological communities, as well as international news services and educational establishments.

Among the 28 outlets and organisations providing links or streaming the programme on their sites were the BBC, The Independent, The Huffington Post, Oxfam, WWF, Friends of the Earth, ZSL London Zoo, a host of specialist biodiversity sites and, representing academia on both sides of the pond, Oxford and Yale universities.

The Twitter interest was phenomenal with tweets generated from locations including the US, Australia, Japan, France and Canada and a tweet reach of 361,944 followers. The 30 minute show included a video message of support from actor and United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Biodiversity, Edward Norton.

It’s incredible to think that you only have to go back to the start of 2005 to find a world without YouTube, yet now, according to Bruce Daisley, the company’s Head of Sales in the UK, 24 hours of video is uploaded to the site every minute.

That’s quite a bit to watch! In fact, 42% of all time spent online includes exposure to online videos with 6.65bn videos having been viewed in September 2010 by 35.1m viewers in the UK spending over 561m hours watching them (comScore). And if you think that’s a lot, Cisco say that by 2013, 90% of internet bandwidth will be video.

We can therefore take it as read that as a brand, to communicate with your audience, you will need to either advertise around video content, or produce it yourselves – and if you know anything about markettiers4dc, you’ll know which of those two camps we sit in (that’s the one that says produce your own by the way!).

Now, sometimes (actually, quite often), when it comes to broadcast PR & marketing, we do something at markettiers4dc that no one else has done before and so we just have to shout about it. So is the case with the latest addition to our armoury in terms of ways to engage with your audience through YouTube, by creating a truly interactive retail channel for your brand.

OK, we’re not exactly the first to create a custom retail channel on YouTube – successful examples from 2010 include French Connection and Waitrose. However, what we’ve managed to achieve, by working with the team at Google, is to integrate our LinkTo(TM) technology that has proved successful in increasing average shopping baskets for brands such as Jaeger, into the YouTube environment. We will be launching this in the next few months for Start Rite Shoes.

Whereas the likes of French Connection have to work with the limitations of YouTube’s annotations, we can integrate all the functionality of LinkTo into the channel that no one else has currently done.

What does this mean exactly? Well, we can track any product as it moves across the video, making it interactive so that a viewer can click on it for more information, pausing the video, so if interested, can then add it into their shopping basket on your ecommerce site, before returning to the video to carry on viewing and hopefully shopping for more items. The product data that they see when they click on the item can be called in live from an RSS feed, so if you are running promotions, the prices can be updated automatically. Jaeger, whose catwalk videos we make interactive on their website, have seen average shopping baskets increase by over 300% from people shopping through the LinkTo video, so we know it works!

We can also integrate data collection forms into the interactive hot spots, so if you want to use the video to build a mailing list, we can help do that too. Basically, there isn’t much we can’t do, so challenge us and send a brief to russ@markettiers4dc.com.

So great! You’ve decided to produce some video content, let’s assume the most engaging, exciting, funny, informative video on your chosen topic. You’ve uploaded it to YouTube, perhaps in your retail channel. The question is how do you get anyone to watch it? Well that’s where we recommend you use every network available to you on our Tube map analogy (below).



Broadcast, online and social media are living breathing interconnecting networks of channels that can be taken advantage of to take your message to your audience, or drive your audience to you.

Long gone are the days when your broadcast strategy should be all about a ‘radio day’ to raise awareness of your campaign – in fact, it never should have been just that – but particularly now if you have video collateral that you want people to see.

The good news is that any one of our tube lines will enable you to engage with your audience, but just imagine if you had the time and budget to use all of them when relevant. Integrating your broadcast and social media activity is when you will get the best return on your investment by driving advocacy through the many seamless connections available to reach your audience.

With 500m active users, a Golden Globe winning movie and a valuation of over $50bn, we thought perhaps Onward could afford to dedicate a little bit of editorial to Facebook.

Whether you think we’ve seen this all before with the likes of Friends Reunited, Bebo, MySpace and the many social networks that have been the darlings of the market and media in the past, one thing that is very evident with Facebook, in terms of brand communication, is that it delivers. And at markettiers4dc we’ve experienced the benefits first hand.

Last year we achieved a number of firsts within Facebook that really excited both us and our clients; and this year we’ll be pushing further ahead with how we integrate our broadcast campaigns into this important communications environment.

In 2010 we broadcast a live and interactive whisky tasting show via satellite from Jerez in Spain into our client’s Facebook fan page which was viewed live and subsequently on demand by tens of thousands of users all over the world.

We were also appointed by Hill & Knowlton to help leverage Castrol’s sponsorship of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. A live interactive WebTV show was produced for their Facebook fan page, giving football fans the chance to put their questions to brand ambassadors Alan Shearer and Ronald Koeman, as well as view a selection of greatest World Cup moments and the latest Castrol Rankings data. As part of the campaign, we also set up separate video interviews with The Sun Online, Telegraph TV and ESPN. Fans of the Castrol Football Facebook page rose by over 20% in the fortnight around the live show.

markettiers4dc also worked with fashion client Gray & Osbourn to embed video content into their Facebook wall, allowing users to interact in a much more engaging way and add featured items into their shopping basket on the client’s website using LinkTo(TM) technology.

This year, we will be making the watching and sharing of videos in Facebook even more seamless as we look to stream our live webTV shows into users’ walls, giving them the ability to join the show using Facebook Connect and easily share the experience with their friends in their news feeds.

This is an incredibly engaging use of broadcast within Social Media for brands to produce their own content and talk directly to their advocates who have chosen to ‘like’ them; and something we encourage you to get involved with in 2011.

Last week I was very kindly asked by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications to write a guest post on his blog ahead of the X-Factor final

You can read it http://www.speedcommunications.com/blogs/wadds/2010/12/12/guest-post-markettiers4dc%E2%80%99s-russell-goldsmith-on-x-factor-and-ofcom/
And congrats to Matt Cardle!

Today the IAB hosted their annual Engage Conference and I was invited to write one of the Official Dossier Case Notes that was handed out to delegates. Before you think I've gone all geeky on you with my references to Marvel Comic characters, the theme of the day was about Supercharging your brand, and I was asked to look at how brands can reach super hero status. Enjoy!

With great power comes great responsibility

So wrote Stan Lee for his creation, Spider-Man - a great line and one that should be considered carefully by brands trying to use social media as a route to elevate themselves to superhero status.

The Internet has a tremendous ability to influence, especially through peer-to-peer recommendation. Brands that can provide a platform for conversation in the social space can therefore create a distinct advantage over their competitors. However, the responsibility lies in ensuring the messages they deliver are clear and transparent as today’s marketing savvy consumers will be quick to share their opinions on Twitter, Facebook or their personal blogs if they thought otherwise.

That said, asking for an organisation to be transparent when comparing them to becoming a superhero is a bit of a contradiction. For example take the late David Caradine’s Superman monologue as the character Bill to Uma Thurman’s Bride in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol.2:

“Now, a staple of the superhero mythology is, there's the superhero and there's the alter ego. Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When that character wakes up in the morning, he's Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic Superman stands alone. Superman didn't become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S", that's the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears - the glasses, the business suit - that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us.”

Bill’s point about superheroes wearing a mask or costume to hide their true identity is something a brand simply can’t do in terms of online marketing as it would probably fall into the unethical and illegal area of ‘astroturfing’ - where as an organisation, you are pretending that the planned and often paid-for online buzz of a campaign is spontaneously generated by the public.

So how can brands therefore change the way they look to make people view them in a better light without hiding who they are?

An excellent example is Prudential’s NMA Effectiveness Award winning campaign, also shortlisted for Brand innovator of the year by Marketing Week Engage Awards. In this instance, Sound Creative revolutionised the traditional communications in annual pension statements, breaking the mould of regional 'pensions seminars' for Prudential by targeting customers approaching retirement using video in the form of a live and interactive webTV show, positioned as a ‘Pensions Surgery' to deliver advice and drive enquiries. By replacing the old style country wide hotel road show that took time, resource and a lot of money, and required customers to be willing to leave the comfort of their own home to listen to a dry discussion on personal finance, Prudential tried something new, offering a more engaging, plain speaking way to talk to their clients over the web instead.

Viewers sent in questions before and during the live broadcast, which was streamed on Prudential’s website and featured consumer finance personality Alvin hall, alongside a Prudential pensions expert.

Prudential also worked their database well before and after the broadcast to drive questions, create an appointment to view and remind them the show was available on demand and it’s since been viewed 30,000 times.

There’s even more that can be achieved with interactive video now that you can stream through Facebook, which is what markettiers4dc did for whisky maker Laphroaig in their recent online whisky tasting event, broadcasting live via satellite from Jerez in Spain to their Facebook fan page. Using Facebook as the media platform enabled viewers to share the link to the broadcast in their newsfeeds so that friends could join in the experience, whilst following tweets about the show from all over the world.

These are just two examples where brands have used video in an innovative and engaging way to elevate their status to their customers - simple, effective and engaging, and by adapting a quote from another Stan Lee superhero creation, The Hulk, I’d recommend embracing your customers in the social media space:

“don’t make them angry, you might not like them when they’re angry.”