More Marketers Replacing Paid Media with Promotional Videos and Websites
If Monsanto's biotech videos get onto YouTube and add thousands of viewers in the process, that's seen as a plus rather than piracy.
At the Streaming Media East show last month, more non-media companies than ever were among the attendees. They were at the show, in its eighth year, to learn the latest in digital video production and
distribution. The companies, from credit card providers to pharmaceutical makers to beer brewers, are not only saving money on media infrastructure (producing with digital technology then distributing via the Internet can save a fortune) but also becoming savvy media producers who don't have to spend as much as they used to on ads.
You won't, for example, see any "image advertising" from Monsanto on newspaper editorial pages or during the Sunday morning TV talk shows. For that kind of outreach the company doesn't "do
any type of paid media," global PR manager Tom McDermott told Jack Myers Media Business Report in an exclusive interview. "We don't believe that paid media is a very effective tool for those types of messages."
Instead, the agribusiness giant last September re-launched biotech-gmo.com a website on
which they put two to three-minute videos of farmers and experts speaking in their own words and, says McDermott, getting taken more credibly than a paid ad would be.
Other companies, too, are speaking directly to "constituents" via video - from GM and its
dealers to Sun Microsystems with its software developers to Wal-Mart producing a benefits video for potential employees -- and directly to customers.
Companies Reach Targeted, Engaged Audiences
Executives of The FeedRoom, which handles video for all the companies mentioned above and some 65 others, told Jack Myers Media Business Report in exclusive interviews that about 80
percent of its growth this year is coming from corporate clients. Meanwhile, business from media companies - The New York Times, Condé Nast, Oxygen, Business Week and others -- has been essentially flat.
As non-media companies get the hang of what FeedRoom CEO Bart Feder calls "direct-to-constituent" media, they're using many of the same metrics as media companies to measure their success. Monsanto, for
example, has seen visits to www.biotech-gmo.com rise some 350 percent from September to March. That month, its videos were viewed about 6,450 times for an average of about four minutes per visit.
In the process, Monsanto is getting its word out to a highly targeted, engaged audience without spending a fortune on inefficient advertising. "To reach farmers in northern Illinois," McDermott said, "you
might be paying to reach 7.5 million people on WGN (TV). Do you even want people in Chicago to see your message [about] killing rootworms? They might wonder what you're even talking about."
It's not just farmers or Monsanto. In Advertising Age this spring, columnist Bob Garfield noted that people who go
to the American Express website to find out about credit cards "may TiVo right past Ellen DeGeneres in an AmEx TV spot."
Creating Their Own Advertising Inventory
In effect, non-media companies are creating their own advertising inventory. Monsanto, GM and others optimize Web pages to show up high in search results, so when someone looks for a relevant term they
click right to their sites. The non-media companies are also happy to see their messages spread outward. Media for them is, after all, a cost and a sideline rather the main thing they make and sell. If Monsanto's biotech videos get onto YouTube and add thousands of viewers in the process, that's seen as a plus rather than piracy.
Still, it's not always easy for companies to make or measure the media they create. Tine Kirkegaard, Web communications manager for Denmark-based Carlsberg beer, says it
can be very difficult to gauge the return on investment. "The first webcast we produced, we thought everybody saw it," she told Jack Myers Media Business Report. "Then it turned out nobody had. There was something wrong with the streaming. But it is a lot easier than three years ago."
Nor is traditional media going away. Monsanto puts plenty of ads in farming magazines, and "it still would be far better for us to have a positive story in The New York Times than anything we could
do ourselves," McDermott says. But he can also foresee a day "ten years down the road" when to reach consumers "maybe it will be possible this way [through Monsanto-created media] rather than through traditional methods."
Media companies and the ad agencies that depend on them need to prepare in case the transition doesn't take that long.
For more information about The FeedRoom contact: Jonathan Brust, Senior Director, Marketing.646.613.7821, jbrust@feedroom.com.
Dorian Benkoil, dorian@jackmyers.com a regular contributor to Jack Myers Media Business Report, is founder of Teeming Media, a digital media editorial and business consultancy. He blogs at MediaFlect.com.
