Online video is said to be the fastest-growing medium of all time. Is your company effectively creating and distributing video to brand itself? In this issue of Engage, Peter McCluskey, divisional vice president of PR Newswire's MultiVu, talks about the key principles for strategically distributing a video campaign. Take a look at our video interview and the Engage blog for even more. If you get even one great idea, Engage is worth reading and watching.

INDUSTRY BUZZ

A Hulu for Glossies?

Time Inc. is said to be in talks with other publishers, such as Conde Nast and Hearst, on the creation of a digital newsstand that could become the “Hulu for glossies,” where magazine-like publications are delivered via e-readers. More details about the new venture, including a possible third party that would act as the storefront, should be announced this month, with a launch date of 2010.

ASME Adds Digital Media Awards

The American Society of Magazine Editors announced that the 2010 National Magazine Awards will expand to include 12 categories for digital media. These new awards—the National Magazine Awards for Digital Media—will be presented at a midday event in March.

More Augmented Reality

Esquire is pulling out all the stops and making its December issue the Augmented Reality Issue. It’s the first time a magazine has used this technology (you hold up the magazine page to a webcam, triggering video segments on your screen) within a substantial amount of its editorial content. Read the whole story here.

GQ Puts an Entire Issue in an App

Conde Nast has developed the technology to offer the December issue of GQ on Apple’s iPhone through a $2.99 app. This is the first time a major consumer magazine has made an entire issue available on a custom-built reader on an Apple app. See the full story here.

Profit Spike for Meredith

Meredith just reported $18.3 million in net earnings for its first quarter 2010—that’s less than 2 percent down from the same period last year. The national media group also reported $39 million in operating profit—a 14 percent increase over the prior-year period. Check out the whole story here.

20 Truths About Magazines

The Magazine Publishers of America opened last month’s Magazine Innovation Summit with a video showcasing fun facts about magazines and their ROI: “Twenty Tweetable Truths About Magazines” Check it out.

DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

Going Viral: Online Video Distribution Is Serious Business

Make no mistake. Those goofy online videos your co-worker keeps sending you links to? Those are actually serious business. Dubbed “the fastest-growing medium of all time,” online video viewing has increased year over year by 25 percent, according to recent stats released by Nielsen. Now a person’s average online video viewing time totals over 3 hours per month. Those valuable video minutes are quickly establishing a level playing field for companies of all sizes trying to brand themselves.

“Before, distributing video was just done on television, so you had large budgets to make a national footprint or reach a national audience, and it required a sizable investment,” says Peter McCluskey, divisional vice president of MultiVu, a division of PR Newswire that offers multimedia production and distribution. “Now, a small company, if they are creative, can take advantage of placement opportunities and distribution online and can resonate just as much as the big company in their particular market.”

Watch Peter McCluskey talk about online video distribution here.

Companies that use television cast a wide net and reach the largest possible audience in the hopes that their message will reach their target. With online video, companies can target their exact audience through strategic distribution. “A revolution has been going on for some time online,” McCluskey says. “It’s democratized information, in that consumers are the ones finding this information, and they are engaging in a direct relationship with different brands, and they are clearly saying what appeals to them, whereas before everything was force-fed through television.”

And while video distribution might seem easy—after all, it only takes a minute or two to upload a clip onto YouTube—marketing it so that it will reach the right people takes strategic planning and legwork. McCluskey recommends three principles for an effective video campaign: Know your message, keep it simple and know your audience. Having that solid foundation will get you off to a good start. “If you’re not optimizing your content then you’re missing an audience that is naturally searching for your information, your idea, or your products.”

The next step is monetizing it through advertising, which is easier said than done. Last month media makers, brands and marketers gathered at the OMMA Video conference in Los Angeles to talk about online video and how to best monetize it. After all, for all the billions of online video streams, ad spending on digital video is still only 4.3 percent of online ad spending this year, according to EMarketer. But the group predicted that online video would eventually become a $16 billion market. “It should pass newspapers shortly,” Ross Levinsohn, general partner for Fuse Capital, predicted at the conference.

So get started early and get your video distribution tactics in order. Check out our Best Practices for online video distribution.

Best Practices: Online Video Distribution

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