We want to thank our friends at PermissionTV for their review of our latest OTOinsights report Titled "Emotion, Engagement, and Internet Video". The segment starts at 15:55 on the video time line. However, I would everyone to watch the whole session.
January 13, 2009
December 09, 2008
Viewer Engagement with Internet Video
OTOinsights has released its third t=zero report, entitled ‘Emotion, Engagement and Internet Video,’ (available for free download: www.tzero-research.com). Using OTOinsight’s Quantemo™ neuromarketing measurement platform, the goal of the study was to study viewer engagement with internet video.
Analyzing the results from various physiological traces in combination with eye tracking and interview data, the t=zero research team presents a series of three insights with regards to how users engage with internet video. These include:
1. Viewer Responses to Internet Videos are Emotionally Complex.
2. Engagement Scores Substantially Enhance Interpretability of User Ratings.
3. Viewer Engagement and Video Success are Positively Linked.
The full report is available for free download at: http://www.tzero-research.com.
OTOinsight’s t=zero initiative looks to determine useful measures of user engagement and experience with digital and social media. Our third publication, focused on viewer engagement with internet video, is meant to objectively study the ways in which users locate, respond to, and engage with internet video. Our hope is that these findings will help guide future efforts as we see continued innovation in the online video space.
September 25, 2008
Engagement with Political Viral Videos
With the United States Presidential election just over a month away, the airwaves of television and the tubes of the Internet are full of messages from the candidates. Luckily for them, these messages are being received, as there seems to be wide-spread interest in this particular election. Marketingvox has a nice recap of the viewership numbers from the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. McCain may have had 500,000 more television viewers than Obama during the convention, but how did he fare on the Internet?
Not as well, it would seem. Visible Measures collected data on viral video views just after the conventions and had some interesting, but unsurprising results. As of September 8, 2008, Obama had 1.3 million more views than McCain. Unsurprising, because there is no doubt that social media tends to leans towards the left. Jeremiah Owyang, an Analyst at Forrester, conducted a small survey that highlights this phenomenon (also check out Josh Bernoff’s post on the matter).
In his post, Owyang states that “frequency [of viewing videos] isn’t telling… sentiment is.” Here at OTOinsights, we whole-heartedly share this opinion. The core application of Quantemo is to measure a person’s emotional reaction with media. As such, we decided to throw on our political hats and conducted an experiment to see how engaged people are with political advertisements.
Thirty participants were shown nine videos on YouTube. These included a music video, a smear ad, and a regular ad from Obama, McCain, and a neutral ‘control’:
McCain |
Obama |
Neutral | |
Music |
|||
Ad |
|||
Smear Ad |
As with social media, the participants were either moderates or liberals (93%) who planned on voting for Obama (63%). Even though most of the sample was in Obama’s court, we had some interesting findings.
The Quantemo Engagement Index (QEI) is OTOinsights’ proprietary index to determine users’ engagement with media. In short, it is a combination of the users’ opinions of the aesthetics of the media, their emotional reaction, and their physiological reaction. The QEI results for the political viral video study can be found below:
It was not surprising to find that the McCain videos had the lowest engagement scores. But it is interesting to note how the QEI continually drops as we progress from a neutral music video to an ad with malicious intent. This trend occurred with both candidates and the ‘control’. Additionally, we found that no smear ad elicited a positive response. Perhaps smear ads are not the best way to engage one’s constituency.
What makes an Internet video viral is its ability to highly engage the individual so that he wants to share it with his friends. These music videos seem to have engaged the participants more than either of the advertisements did (when comparing McCain to McCain, and so forth). We asked the study participants whether they would send the video to a friend, and again, the music videos would have been sent more than the ads, as shown below:
So, in summary, it would seem that not only are the music videos more engaging to people, but they have a better chance of getting sent a friend. Additionally, since social media tends to skew to the left, one would expect more of Obama’s videos to get sent around the world, and this is definitely the case. You can keep track of the current numbers over at techPresident. As of September 25, Obama had 51.5 million more YouTube views than McCain. That’s a pretty telling figure. A word of advice for McCain: if you want to engage more users on the Internet, it may be time to create more viral videos that users will want to send to their friends.
In the near future, we will be compiling the full results of the study and will make them available here on the OTOinsights blog. If you would like more information about the study, OTOinsights, or Quantemo, please be sure to contact us.
February 04, 2008
Inspired Viral Video: Black Eyed Peas on Obama
Via Salon.com, I found a blurb about a viral video for the Obama campaign. I checked out the video, and I was quite impressed. The production qualities are high, which is what seemed to impress Salon. But that's not what got me excited enough to blog about it; what impressed me was how authentically YouTube this video was. This isn't some political hackery saying "me too!" to the Facebook generation. This video gets it.
One of the great, if not the greatest, creative strategies of online animations and videos is to take a work of mainstream culture and rework it, commenting on it, distorting it, and appropriating it. This is a dominant cultural logic of "hip" entertainment today.
The best examples of this strategy reveal and celebrate the voice of
the remixer. In other words, the source voice is dominated by the viral
video's producer/editor. It's not surprising that political campaigns,
terrified of relinquishing control over their message, would be leery
about fan-created videos. Certainly many inspiring online videos have
been made about politicians, but they are commonly parodies (such as this one about Bush, or this one about John Edwards), or they are propaganda pieces.
But the Obama campaign has got to love how the Black Eyed Peas have reworked Obama's oratory into a video that can stand alongside their best work. This video neither parrots nor subverts Obama's message; it personalizes and extends it into the Black Eyed Peas own powerful idiom.
Jeffrey Bardzell, Ph.D.
Indiana University / Quantemo / t=zero
June 17, 2007
May 07, 2007
Dissecting Numa Numa | A Critical Analysis of Viral Video Content
On April 26th, 2007 I had the pleasure of presenting along side with Dr. Jeffery Bardzel (PH.D. Assistant Professor of HCI/Design and new media at the School of Informatics in Indiana University) and Dr. Carl Marci (Chief Science officer Innerscope Research) One to One's first MITX digital marketing series event titled "Dissecting Numa Numa | A Critical Analysis of Viral Video Content".
Our presentation peeled away the layers of the now world famous Numa Numa video footage, to help uncover the underpinnings of a successful word-of-mouth execution. The session specifically explored the footage's origins, aesthetics, cultural references, neurological engagement metrics, and overall buzz metrics to help identify if there is a specific signature to architecting content that is best suited for viral distribution.
You may download a PDF of the presentation here or by clicking on the picture above.
Link here to read a rather thorough write up on the event by Cesar Brea, Global Practice Leader in Monitor Group's Marketspace Advisory Unit.
Note: Special thanks goes to John Paolillo, Ph.D. and Jefferey Bardzel, Ph.D. and the Indiana University School of Informatics for their initial work that made up a good portion of this presentation titled "Humor, Multimedia, and the Internet: The “Numa Numa” Phenomenon".
Jeremi Karnell-President, One to One Interactive
July 18, 2006
YouTube Trend Report #1
Asi Sharabi, of No Man Man's Blog, has conducted a systematic content analysis of the 100 most viewed videos on YouTube to help "get a better grasp of what makes people tick when it comes to viral content". You may find the results within his post titled "YouTube trends report #1".
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