Marketer's Lab

Speed Date - Feedroom

If you're exploring web video one of the vendors likely to show up on the radar is Feedroom.  The team at Feedroom was kind enough to spend a few minutes on the phone walking me through their application and sharing a little about their business.  One of the big things the Feedroom team was pretty excited about was the launch of their new Feedroom 4.0 platform.  The new platform has been completely re-architected and utilizes the newest infrastructure technologies.  They feel this is a huge differentiator and provides their clients a host of advantages in terms of reliability, scalability and overall product capability. 

The Feedroom client base is evenly split between media companies/publishers and enterprise organizations using the Feedroom platform for internal communications.  Feedroom recently acquired Clearstory, a digital asset management solution whose technology is now used to power those elements of the Feedroom platform.  The brief overview I saw looked great, plenty of horsepower to manage a variety of digital assets. 

Amongst their roster of clients, Feedroom has a diverse lineup including everone from the Department of Defense to Sundance Institute to ESPN.  Pricing is always tough to nail down but my takeaway was that for a very small operation Feedroom might be a little pricey, but if you have a little budget to work with and plan to do a lot with video, they have a very nice solution.  They have a nice little piece on their site that gives a feel for their overall positioning. 

If A Picture's Worth A Thousand Words...

I have to admit I'm pretty enamored with web video right now.  Web video is benefiting/suffering from much of the same hype as social media/social media marketing/etc. There's a wealth of coverage about how web video works with/against TV, how publishers are monetizing it, how marketers are using it and how it fits into the overall marketing and cultural media landscape.  Riveting perspectives and ideas out there in all the aforementioned areas, but I worry with so much attention on these other areas, we might be losing sight of one of the biggest web video opportunities.  The opportunity to bring a story to life. 

I think this is what advertising icon Lee Clow had in mind when he recently said:

“The ability to use the internet in terms of great brand storytelling is still at its infancy,” he said. “The internet advertising media, cross my fingers and hope to God, with bandwidth and with some ability, is going to become more artful; it’s going to become more interesting. … But it’s going to take creative people to embrace the possibilities of what you can do on the internet in terms of advertising and storytelling and make it a little better and smarter”.

It's easy to get sucked into the gadgetry, there are a multitude of incredibly exciting tools and applications making web video more affordable and accessible.  The technologies are tactical, web video strategy should be more about stories.  Many marketers just don't use the "marketing muscles" that drive the process of creating communication strategies involving video.  Not to stereotype too much, but it seems the B2B space has the hardest time with this.  

What every marketer should be crazy excited about is the fact we now have a medium with the proven ability to communicate messages in extremely powerful ways, the tools for creating, delivering and monetizing this content are getting better everyday and consumers in every category are embracing quality web video content.  Web video is a medium for all marketers, large and small, B2B and B2C in every industry. I challenge you to think about how you and your organization are using web video, and if you're not, consider why.  You have a story to tell, think about how to bring it to life with video.