So you gotta water it down: Who are the target customers for the advertisement, what message will – on average – resonate best with them, and how can you fit the whole thing into 30 seconds? Broad message + broad audience = broadcast.

Designing a message for the masses and their averages is bound to shut a lot of people out: Those who have no need for your product. Those who don’t care about the product. Those who aren’t interested in the particular features you picked. Hit and miss is part of advertising. Or was part of it.

Alright, so broadcast isn’t quite dead yet. There is plenty of TV to go around for a long time to come, but things are shifting quite noticeably: Viewership on Hulu is through the roof. Google’s Web TV is imminent. YouTube is transmitting live sports events, and even Microsoft Silverlight is sponsoring live streaming of Nascar races and Olympic content on the internet.

Increasingly watching TV doesn’t involve the TV at all anymore.

Yet TV advertisements have– apart from gaining some color in 1954 – seen little change. Sure, advertisers have become smarter about placing their ads, identifying value propositions, increasing reach. But the basic premise is unchanged: one broad message, distributed shotgun to all viewers.

Does anyone really think it’s a great idea to show me an F150 Super cab commercial, when my IP address makes it obvious that I’m watching from downtown San Francisco? Is it really a great idea to have a show sponsored by a well-known feminine product, when I’ve clearly stated that my gender is “male”, when I registered on the site?

Sure, there is a slight chance that my wife is watching from my account. Or that I’m an avid pickup fan who just “happens to be” in S.F. at this moment. In all reality though, odds aren’t on the advertiser’s side here.

Even if you hit me up with a product I could be interested in – with all the CRM data companies have collected over the years, shouldn’t they know by now WHICH features I’d ACTUALLY care about?

Enter the narrowcast

Narrowcasting provides the unique ability to specifically cater to countless of atomic known audiences: One viewer at a time. No longer do advertisers have to craft a broad message that appeals to the largest common denominator across what they expect the viewership of their message to be (since it is all based on historical data), but instead they can apply everything they know about each actual viewer, and put it to work to speak to every one with a unique voice!

That’s pretty powerful – showcasing your product in exactly the way that is most effective for each individual viewer.

But it gets better.

Stop thinking about delivering the right speech for a single product, and consider that many companies have more than one brand in the race. Watch some TV in the evening and take note how many ads are really from the same company, just a different division, brand, or product line.

With narrowcasting there is a huge opportunity for marketers to leave the individual, separate budgets and marketing efforts for each brand and product behind, and look at how to best split up the “total population” among their portfolio instead.

Let’s take your run-of-the-mill multinational (say Johnson & Johnson), and observe the amount of commercials broadcast over the course of an evening for any of their brands: Acuvue. Listerine. Neutrogena. Carefree. Rogain. And so on.

On TV, these are shown to everyone watching, indiscriminately . But how much actual overlap is in the target audiences for these brands and products? Would you show Acuvue to someone with 20/20 vision? Rogain to a teenager? Carefree to men?

What if you could automatically and instantly decide what is the “best” product to advertise to each individual viewer as well as the message and fashion to do it? What products across your entire brand and product portfolio would you choose to advertise to 45-year-old Females from New York? The product with the highest margin? The brand with highest likelihood of being purchased? The product range with the greatest lifetime customer value?

How would your product portfolio look, if spread out on a multi-dimensional graph. Do you really want to show your newest hair coloring products to all men? Even to all women? Would you tell every viewer about the same features? Or is there things you would tell blondes, brunettes, or red-heads differently if you’d know who’s watching?

It’s a whole new world with exciting potential once you start jotting down a message delivery matrix across divisions and products…

It’s good to live in the future!
Mark / @muuque

Now, the fine folks over at Wieden+Kennedy deserve some serious props for what they did. That idea was nothing short of brilliant. But what if you could take it further? Right now, those videos are done. They aren’t going to change. They might make some more later on, but Guy Kawasaki and Kevin Rose aren’t getting any new messages unless there’s a reprise. But with BizGreet, those videos could be personalized and constantly change for every additional unique viewer.

Let’s talk about some possibilities. Our platform enables videos to change based on who’s watching. We can give them a personalized intro. You can also throw some special ones in there for specific people. Then, depending on their gender they get one of these messages:

…Until Pepsi Sees This…

Yes…we have been selected out of hundreds and hundreds of applicants (I read somewhere around 400) as one of the top 40 in the Pepsico10. (we have no idea if we’re #1 or #40, just glad to be in there.).

So…we had to create a video submission for the next round of selections, talking about how we’re different, what our technology does, how we can help Pepsi achieve their goals, yada yada.

This is not it. Not by a long shot. But when there’s a camera rolling and an under-appreciated team member with an ax to grind, you know that there will be plenty of B-roll documenting us making fools out of ourselves.

So…thanks for putting this together Brian

As more companies look to put up more online video, it’s important to not just recreate the TV commercial format by putting it online. That completely ignores the power of the medium. Remember, the only time people watch TV commercials are when they appear during shows they watch. Online videos have to be something that people actively seek out.  If they don’t engage people with something that keeps their interest and gives them something to share, then it’s really a waste of everyone’s time.

Obviously, we think BizGreet is a pretty good way to do something interesting with online video that you can’t do on TV. But there’s plenty of other things you can do as well. You can start an ongoing video podcast series. Shoot some videos of people using your product or service. Have customers talk about ways they use your offerings. Start a mini-series of your product coming alive and interacting with other office supplies (I would love to see someone do this). The possibilities are endless.

The important thing to remember is that your video should be different from everyone else’s. Imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery when it comes to advertising. If you’re doing the same thing everyone else is, why would anyone want to watch?

We get that question all the time.  Some customers want us to do the video production for them (we don’t really do that anymore), and others just want to know who else can do this (we have a few Certified BizGreet Producers).

The short answer is…rather…the “ideal” answer is…we want to make it dead simple to produce these videos.  So simple, in fact, that ANY competent video producer can follow our instructions and make your BizGreet work.

We’ve recently posted a few guidelines to our Wiki:  http://wiki.bizgreet.com/cgi-bin/view/Main/BizGreetVideoProductionGuidelines

Take a look….and if you know of any video producers who want to become certified to do this, it’s very simple:

The certification process will happen as the production team makes their first BizGreet with some limited supervision/check-ins with our team.

As they make the first BizGreet, they will learn, following our processes and checking in files for us to preview and approve.  Afterwards, assuming all is well, they will be BizGreet Certifiied.

If you or anyone you know is interested, let us know!

Traditionally, the call to action in a BizGreet channel has always been a dynamically assembled web link, driving the viewer back to the client’s web site – a registration form, a Point-Of-Sale, a special offer, a donation form, etc.

However, with this new partnership, real-time appointment scheduling can be enabled on any channel with the flick of a button. Tungle.me is a scheduling application that syncs with existing calendars in real time, thus allowing BizGreet viewers to react instantly to their video message by scheduling a meeting with e.g. a sales rep.

Imagine not only watching a car commercial that speaks ONLY about the car models and features that YOU care about when buying a car, but also enables you to schedule a test drive instantly.

Could the closing of the loop from a prospect to your sales team be any shorter?

Mark / @muuque

Facebook and its approach to users’ privacy have been constantly in the news over the last few weeks, so given a few questions we have received lately from customers and users alike, we want to clarify how we use (and don’t use) Facebook data.

First and foremost there is always your consent. Be it before you access our Facebook app or when a website would like to personalize our video streams with your Facebook data – we don’t get to see or use any of your data without that. When you do agree to let BizGreet access your personal information on Facebook, this permission is for BizGreet only and can be revoked by you at any time. It will not enable other web sites or services to use your information (any access is tied to our own domain name, e.g. bizgreet.com), and we will never share this information with others. And really – we have no interest in even keeping your data around for ourselves!

We are passionate about making video content on the web more relevant to viewers (there is so much noise out there, we like to make some content stand out and a little more interesting), and to do that we usually take a quick peek at your demographic data and then decide how to tailor a video stream especially for you (this could mean looking at your first name to make sure that the video addresses you the right way, or looking at your language settings to play the video in your native tongue, or even seeing if you are married or what your hometown is).

However, in the vast majority of BizGreet uses, any information that we are granted access to for a viewer (doesn’t matter if we use it or not) is instantly destroyed after the personalized video has been assembled. Even though we sometimes retain data (e.g. to report success metrics back to our customers, or when data was supplied through an existing customer database), we stay far away from gathering or distributing any personal identifiable information such as email addresses, etc.

If you prefer not to grant BizGreet access to your information through the Facebook Graph API, that’s of course fine, too. We’ll present you with the standard video stream to watch, which is still a compelling message, but just not tailored to who you are.

We are Internet users, too – so we are all for you being in control of your data and who gets to use it!

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The answer is pretty straight forward: These two are the biggest concerns we have. Period.

BizGreet exists to make messaging and marketing on the Internet a little more exciting and relevant to our audience. We don’t care about harvesting user data. We don’t want your email address. We’re not going to send you spam.

We do everything in our power to ensure that we are treating any customer data entrusted to us (be it explicitly or inferred) with utmost respect, lay out very clear policies to not disappoint the viewers for our service, and ensure that we only collect and process data we need make the service work and report success metrics back to our clients.

But what does that mean in detail for you?

1) We only care about very few data points. When setting up the service for our clients, we work closely with them to identify which information is actually required in when determining the video stream – and encourage our clients to only supply these data points to the system, and nothing else. This is usually exclusively non personally identifiable, demographic information, such as gender, location, first name, etc. In most cases the BizGreet system will have absolutely no information at all to make a viewer personally identifiable – just enough data points to ensure that the video stream is personalized to the viewer.

2) We do not accept the hosting of any sensitive or regulated information. Credit card numbers, billing addresses, bank accounts, specific medical information, etc are all completely off-limits for us. This type of data is not used in our service and has no place in the BizGreet system. While our clients might have access to this information because you gave it to them on their websites, we do not permit them to supply this sort of data into our application.

3) In most cases our pages are created dynamically. That means that information about a viewer is only retrieved the moment someone views a BizGreet campaign (from e.g. Facebook, your Browser, a CRM system), and this information is instantly destroyed as soon as the viewer closes the page in the browser again. This ensures that we don’t keep any information about visitors, beyond what’s necessary for our performance metrics that we report to clients.

4) Pre-visit data. In some cases where customer data is supplied to us upfront (e.g. from a client’s CRM system with existing customer data) we can track and report whether individuals have opened and viewed the video, but even here we limit any information supplied to us to those demographics and characteristics that are necessary to tailor the video content – we do not see (or have any interest in) seeing customer IDs, past purchases, payment methods, etc. All that stays safely with the companies you have done business with. We don’t even want your email address! Email addresses do not need to be transferred as any distribution via email is usually at the client’s prerogative.

5) Masking sensitive data points. We understand that in certain instances our clients would like the video to fork based on information of a more sensitive or personally identifiable nature. In these instances we strongly encourage them to mask their data with “dummy variables” that act as beacons for other data points (that remain unknown to us).

A great example for this are charities. E.g. instead of passing an explicit past donation amount to our system, these clients would indicate to our system “donor_category_A”, “donor_category_B”, or “donor_category_C” for a video segment, without us ever learning what explicit underlying data created these forks in the video stream. Again – we just care about making the video relevant to our viewers, we don’t care how much you donated last year!

As a BizGreet user we would like you to take a look at our Privacy Policy to which you will find a link at the bottom of every one of our web pages and video pages. This policy states how you can expect us to handle your information, and how to contact us should we ever fall short of your expectations.

If you ever have any other concerns about data security or privacy, please contact us and we’ll work to address the issue.

Mark / @muuque

The Tell-a-Friend module lets people easily send a personalized message to their friends and family. It can help people make connections to people they know, but won’t necessarily see during the week. Both churches saw the number of people invited in the triple digits from their members using Tell-a-Friend. We’re excited to help out these churches and are looking forward to helping more in the future.