The 2nd Most Visited Website in the World - History of YOUTUBE!

YouTube and its advertising strategy since its founding in 2005.

Infographic from: Mashable.com
Design by: Emily Caufield
Research by: Lauren Drell

Mindshift Media Honored with a 32nd Annual Telly Award

New York City, NY -- (June 24, 2011) The Winners of the 32^nd Annual Telly Awards have been announced.  With nearly 11,000 entries from all 50 states and numerous countries, this year’s Telly Awards has been one of the most successful and competitive in the long history of the Telly Awards.

Founded in 1979, the Telly Awards is the premier award honoring outstanding local, regional, and cable TV commercials and programs, the finest video and film productions, and web commercials, videos and films. Winners represent the best work of the most respected advertising agencies, production companies, television stations, cable operators, and corporate video departments in the world. 

This year’s Winners include companies, agencies and organizations of all sizes, from large multinational media companies to small ad agencies and local production houses.  A sample of Winners includes: Booz Allen Hamilton, Turner Studios, evans hardy + young,  Jack Morton Worldwide, BSX Digital Productions, Michigan State University, Quigley-Simpson, The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., FOX SPORTS NET, Nickelodeon, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Bass Pros Shops Film & Video Productions, Lockheed Martin, Miami Dolphins Ltd., Vox Pop Films, AEG Network LIVE, Kansas City Chiefs, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts, Outdoor Channel, Time Warner Cable, Johns Hopkins Children's Center, Cause & Effect Productions, Inc., The Lighthouse Film Company, Eveo, Inc.

Mindshift Media was recognized with a Telly award for the category: Internet/Online Programs, Segments, or Promotional Pieces. The online media campaign that was awarded a Telly is the national multimedia marketing campaign launching unsocial.mobi, a mobile based application for the iPhone, Android and Blackberry. 

                                       

                             UNSOCIAL - "Generate Opportunities in Real Time"

How to Effectively Captivate Your Online Target Audience - Broadcast Your Brand!

                                                                                         

In the past, every business needed three things, a good product, a convincing sales pitch and a willing customer. With people doing more and more business online, that list of three has been steadily growing. The latest addition for the successful online business is multimedia.  Having something like streaming video on a website is a must for every business wanting to be taken seriously.

Here is a sample of our home page introduction video, which greets visitors to our website and showcases a short flash video about our business and services.

 

In today's tech savvy world the importance of multimedia can not be understated. Online video can sell products, promote a business, benefit an organization, tell a story and improve the effectiveness of any website. That may sound like a lot for such a simple addition but video is the most powerful tool in the online marketplace. It can help sell products by offering customers a preview of the items they are interested in. Apple does this with all its products both before and after they are released. That way people can get all the information about an item before they buy, and get help using a product they may already own. When people can see the item before they buy, it builds a feeling of credibility that is missing from much of the online marketplace. This also helps to promote a business. Anyone can put up a website so consumers are looking for a professional, well presented company. A streaming video or motion graphic is just the thing to greet customers and welcome them, while also helping assure them that they are dealing with a legitimate company. Building consumer trust is just the beginning. Video and motion graphics can do so much more to promote a business. This is because they stick with customers long after they have left the page.

People remember 20% of what they hear and only 30% of what they see but a whopping 70% of what they hear and see! That means advertising and marketing money is much better invested in something more than just a simple banner add. People encounter hundreds of those each day and most consumers can’t remember a single one. Customers will remember more from a 3 minute video than they will from a huge block of text. That means company names and contact information are much more likely to be remembered. This benefits the entire organization by spreading the world about the company and helping people remember its message and goals.

The addition of multimedia is about more than just selling a product. It is about selling a company and its ideas. The right video and motion graphic can tell people the story of a company or instantly give consumers a window into what a business does. The possibilities are limitless and growing every day. It is the perfect investment for any company hoping to convey passion, excellence and professionalism along with information.

Sample Online Video Marketing Campaigns presented by:

  

Flash Video Marketing Campaigns for Websites

Business and Corporate Multimedia Marketing

Promotional Video Marketing 

Television Commercials Streamed to your Website to Market Your Business

Non Profit Video Marketing

Blog Posting By: Tyler Griffin, Creative Director - Mindshift Media
Written By: Brad Girtz - Mindshift Media Blogger

The Secret Strategies Behind Many "Viral" Videos

 Anyone with online video, dreams of the day their creation will go viral. It is like winning the world cup and super bowl at the same time. A tiny investment in video is suddenly the most talked about thing on the web and everyone is watching it. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that any video will hit it big online. 

People have spent vast amounts of time and money on videos that have fallen flat. That having been said, it takes more than lots of luck to be the next big online sensation. Mindshift Media recommends the following important rules to consider when attempting to produce an online multimedia campaign that will ultimately go VIRAL!

Rule 1: Make a video for people who are bored at work. There are hundreds of millions of people around the world sitting at a computer with nothing to do. They surf sites like YouTube looking for funny or interesting videos and sharing them with friends. While the idea of so many slacking employees may scare any good business person, it has created one of the best and most lucrative avenues for viral videos. By creating a video these people will want to share, companies can tap in to a pool of viewers larger than that of any major television networks.

Rule 2: Use what Jonah Peretti (CEO of Buzzfield) calls “The Mullet Strategy”. That is, business in front, party in back. Keep the front page of your website serious and put all the crazy silly stuff in back. That way the site still looks professional but there is something fun as well to keep people coming back.







Rule 3: Brands should use big seed marketing. That means anyone trying to sell a brand needs to spend some money. By making a really good campaign/video and paying to have it in a few high profile places, social media will pick up parts of the video faster and businesses can get the viral boost they crave for free.

Rule 4: Target the maniacs. The goal of any good viral campaign should be to target people like Lady Gaga, Kanye West and Perez Hilton, because they are the people who get involved and stir stuff up. When they rant about something or get involved with a product, the world knows. The web is run by maniacs and when they speak, consumers listen.

Rule 5: Companies need to always be pushing themselves and looking for new customers and new markets. The moment they stop, so does the companies growth. The same is true for any viral video. The moment people stop pushing it, the video flops.

These five rules are by no means a guarantee that a video will go viral, but they are the result of a decade of hard work and research from many successful corporations and Fortune 500 companies. They may not always work, but ignoring them is a good way to loose the race to go viral.

Blog Posting By: Tyler Griffin, Creative Director - Mindshift Media

Written By: Brad Girtz - Mindshift Media Blogger

Optimizing Online Marketing and Advertising Campaigns

Starting an online ad campaign is an involved process, especially for the inexperienced. Advertising is a specialized field with its own series of challenges. Simply deciphering the jargon can seem impossible. To understand how a good ad campaign is run, it is important to know how to analyze a campaign.

The first step is locating the target audience. Find a website with plenty of traffic, that caters to the target audience. This is like finding a good fishing hole, it may take a few tries but eventually you find a good place. Once you have found a suitable site to advertise, you will need to run an advertising audit. This means looking at every part of the advertising campaign to see what is making money and what needs improvement. First, look at click through rates. This is the number of people who actually clicked on the ad and were redirected back to the advertised website. These numbers give you initial indications of how the ad is preforming, but they can be deceiving. For instance, they do not take into account accidental clicks or people who clicked on the ad, only to immediately leave the site.

To better understand an online ad campaign, advertisers must move beyond click through rates and look at engagement rates and overall ad performance. Engagement rates are the number of people who actually navigated around the site, commented on products, and/or purchased a product. In short, they spent time with the site and its content. These numbers should have a direct correlation with the overall ad performance. Sales should go up in proportion to the number of people clicking through and engaging with a site. Along with these tools, advertisers should be using “intent to purchase studies”. This is a complex term, meaning a study taken before and after an ad campaign, that looks at the target audiences willingness to buy a product. The goal of the study is to gauge any change in the buyers opinion of a product due to an advertising campaign.

Intent to purchase studies provide, what is possibly the most reliable data to understand the effectiveness of an online ad campaign. Using these tools, even a first time advertiser can better understand how to improve and tailor their ad to increase revenue and maximize effectiveness.

Zeekee Interactive Experiences Success with Online 
Multimedia Marketing Campaign 

(Produced by: Mindshift Media and STVP)

Blog Posted By: Tyler Griffin, Creative Director - Mindshift Media
Written By: Brad Girtz - Mindshift Media Blogger