Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Streaming Media West: Online Video Publishing and Marketing Strategies

I'm pleased to announce that the first video from one of my two panel sessions from Streaming Media West is now online at: http://streamingmedia.com/videos/. This session discussed online publishing and marketing strategies by a diverse panel of industry speakers. I was thrilled to moderate this panel session and I thank Amir Ashkenazi, Christina Cece, Sanjay Desai and Robb Miller for their contributions (see their bios below.) I'll be featuring other videos from the conference in upcoming posts including the other session I moderated on syndication.

Online Video Publishing and Marketing Strategies
Track A: (A102) September 23, 2008 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

In the world of video publishing, how do you get started? How do you create compelling content? With so many options for live and on-demand video, how do you choose your distribution platform? How do you find your niche? Build your audience? Establish your brand? How do you create a sustainable model to monetize your content and generate income? This is an opportunity to hear some of the most well-known and respected online video publishers discuss online video publishing and marketing strategies.

Moderator:Larry Kless, Founder, President, OnlineVideoPublishing.com
Presenters:Sanjay Desai, VP of Product Marketing, Brightcove
Christina Cece, Sr. Product Manager, Glam Media
Amir Ashkenazi, Co-Founder and CEO, Adap.tv
Rob Miller, Vice President of Sales, Western US, The FeedRoom


Here's a list of questions I prepared that became the framework of the panel discussion:
  1. What drives publishing and marketing strategies? (big idea or fill the niche?)
  2. Who are your customers? (content makers? producers, advertisers?)
  3. How do you get started? in online video publishing? what are the challenges? obstacles? opportunities? How do make money?
  4. How do you find your niche and establish brand? Build audience? Build ecosystem?
  5. What's the key to producing and programming compelling content? (original series, uploads, UGC)
  6. What is unique about your platform? What markets do you represent? Who is you biggest client? Competitor? What other types of content is published?
  7. How important is advertising? Discuss models. Revenue sharing with content makers. Management of analytics.
  8. How do you create sustainable model for monetizing content? Are CPMs an effective way to sell advertising? What is the CPM value of a video ad today?
  9. What works? What doesn't? In world of publishers and marketers, who is really benefiting?
  10. What are your key metrics?
  11. Where are the expansion opportunities and growth areas?
  12. What about the multi-screen strategy? (TV, web, mobile)
  13. What about other social media tool integration? (video comments, Twitter updates) Are they seen as adding value to branding?
  14. What do you see in the short and long term for online video publishing and marketing strategies?

Christina shared these slides showing the Glam Media player.



I had previously posted a profile of my speakers
here but this is an updated speaker profile of the final roster that includes Amir Ashkenazi and Robb Miller along with some additional links.

Presenters:
Sanjay Desai, Vice President of Product Marketing, Brightcove

Sanjay serves as VP of Product Marketing at Brightcove. In this role, he leads the product team responsible for Brightcove’s core service and spearheads product marketing across the organization. Before joining Brightcove, Sanjay spent several years leading product management/marketing for Tellme Networks’ consumer business in Mountain View, California. Prior to Tellme, Sanjay served as VP, Strategic Planning at The Walt Disney Company, focused on ABC’s broadcast and production businesses. Earlier in his career, Sanjay gained experience within Goldman Sachs’ technology, media and telecom M&A group and as a strategy consultant for KPMG. He holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford Business School.

Brightcove, Inc. provides Internet television services. It transforms the distribution and consumption of media. The company provides video marketing solutions, advertising solutions, and advertising and marketing.

Brightcove background information:


Christina Cece, Sr. Product Manager, Glam Media

Christina manages all Glam Media Products. She manages Glam.com, Glam’s owned and operated properties, Glam’s publisher products and internal tools and our flagship video product – GlamTV.

She held senior positions at IBM, MarkLogic Corp (Sequoia-funded xml content server company), Deloitte, and a year as a senior engineer at CafePress. She has a degree in Econ and Computer Science from Duke University.

Glam Media’s vertical content network, with a reach of 77M unique visitors, is effectively changing the very definition of what a media company is in the 21st Century. Glam Media leverages the increasing fragmentation of the Internet —bringing together owned-and-operated websites, including flagship Glam.com, with the Glam Publisher Network of more than 600 popular lifestyle websites and blogs and syndicated content from leading media companies. Glam Media’s distributed media network model effectively bridges hundreds of unique digital “voices” representing the best content in each category relevant to women, and offers advertisers truly unprecedented quality reach through a single brand advertising platform: Glam Evolution.Relevant Glam Media press releases:


Amir Ashkenazi, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, Adap.tv

Amir drives the overall strategy and manages operations for Adap.tv. Most recently, Amir was Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Shopping.com (formerly DealTime.com), a leading online shopping service that helps consumers make informed purchasing decisions by comparing products, prices, and stores Web-wide. Amir launched and successfully led Shopping.com's technology and research efforts. Shopping.com completed an initial public offering in October 2004; the company was later acquired by eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) in August 2005. Previously, Amir was Director of Research for CommTouch Software. He studied Computer Science and Economics at Tel Aviv University.

Adap.tv makes the most of online video advertising. Through its flagship offering, Adap.tv OneSource, the first open and universal video ad platform, publishers can seamlessly monetize and increase the quality and success rate of online video advertising across all networks and all formats. With a single point of control, publishers can match their online video inventory from a collective sum of ad networks based on contextual analysis and past viewer behavior.


Robb Miller, Vice President of Sales, Western US, The Feedroom

Robb joined The Feedroom as Regional Sales Director in 2006 following a 10-year career in the post production, Internet, and new media business. He served as director of sales for Onstream Media Corporation, where he was responsible for worldwide sales of digital asset management services and landed deals with the strategic clients such as the NFL, AOL and Citigroup.

The FeedRoom is a white label video management service and leading broadband video communications company that powers the video sections of some of the largest sites on the web, including the New York Times, Intel, HP, and BusinessWeek. With end-to-end technology solutions, media and marketing services, and content production, encoding, hosting, and syndication services are provided for public and corporate sites. The FeedRoom's unique one-stop-shop serves corporations, media companies, and government agencies. Customers like Wal-Mart, General Motors, Intel, The New York Times, Sun Microsystems, USA Today, Meredith Interactive, McGraw-Hill, and The Pentagon Channel already use The FeedRoom's broadband video products to communicate with the media, consumers, partners, investors, and other key stakeholders.
I shot this short video with my Flip camera following the panel session. While it's not too compelling it did capture the interest and follow up questions from some the audience.