For today’s blog I decided to tackle a subject that I think about pretty often: the web video. More specifically, the web video as a form of advertising and how it compares to traditional forms of advertising like magazine ads or web banners. Walk with me…
Imagine that 3 years ago Leigh Ramsdell had made a post on a BMX messageboard saying that he was planning a trip. The plan was to fly out 3 riders as well as a professional filmer and film a web video to use to promote Eastern. What would people have said? First off they probably wouldn’t believe him because that idea would have seemed so outlandishly expensive on the surface. All that money on flights and such just to make a stupid web video? I probably would have agreed too.
But, to quote The Clipse… “Cot Damn, it’s a new day!” The web video no longer toils in obscurity, if anything I might argue that it is a more powerful force than magazines or DVDs ever used to be. But more importantly from the perspective of a company owner, web videos are a form of advertising like BMX has never seen before. They are cheap to produce, they last forever and most importantly are capable of creating a lasting impression on the viewer.
But before I explain how the web video fares as a form of promotion, I think it’s important that I provide a fair analysis of 2 other, more traditional forms of advertising in BMX; the magazine and the web ad.
Magazine ads used to be the only option in BMX. Every company who had any hope of ever amounting to anything was forced to advertise in at least one, if not all of the BMX magazines. When S&M and Ride had a temporary beef over Moeller jacking Ride’s logo for a hat design, what did he do? He pulled S&M’s ads from Ride. And it was a big deal! Now there are lots of companies who don’t advertise in print at all, not because they have problems with the magazines necessarily, but because they just don’t think it’s cost effective. The problem with magazines… they are expensive. They are expensive to produce (writers, photographers, designers, paper, office space, plane tickets etc.) and consequently companies are typically charged a couple thousand dollars for a full page ad.
On the other hand, magazine ads are powerful. They are large and in your face and provide a great platform for a company to establish an identity for their brand. Everyone reading this can probably remember a magazine ad that had a big effect on them. Remember the Schwinn poster with the sequence of Van manualing that rail in Philly? It might not have made me trade in my Volume for a Schwinn but it definitely hung on my wall for a few years. The other good thing about magazine ads is that they stick around forever, so if I pick up an issue of Dig from 1998 the Terrible One ad on the inside cover is still there… quite different from a web ad.
The web ad is better than a print ad in some ways, but also worse in other ways. Why is it better? Well first off, web ads are cheap. For the same amount of money a company might pay to buy a 1 page ad in Ride, they could buy a shitload of ads on The Come Up, Defgrip and Vital and still have money left over to go to Chipotle every day for the next 2 or 3 months.
The web ad is also very powerful in that it attacks with brute force. The Come Up gets almost 3 million page views a month. As a company, if your new frame shows up on even 1/10th of those page views, that’s is huge. The fact that thousands of kids will see your product over and over over the course of a month is almost certain to have a positive effect on your sales.
But on the negative side, web ads simply lack the punch that magazine ads provide. Magazine ads are great because they are big and there’s a lot of room for a great action shot, a big ass logo and some information about the company or product. With a web ad it’s difficult to include all that information in one ad, so you’ve got to try and make your ad as powerful as possible and hope that it either has an impact on it’s own or that kids will click through often and spend some time on your site. Has there ever been a web ad as powerful as the Van Homan Schwinn poster? Fuck no. Could there be? Maybe, but we’re not quite there yet.
The other negative about web ads is that they only exist for the time period in which you’ve paid for them. While a magazine might not get looked at too much after the first month or two of it’s release, it’s still there and the ads inside will still be viewed from time to time. The instant a company stops paying for ads on The Come Up, I take their ads down and it’s as if they were never there.
Back to the web video… my initial thoughts when I first heard about Eastern doing their “Inside Out” series was that it was a very expensive form of advertising. But is it really? Here’s my rough breakdown of how much it probably cost to film an episode of Inside Out:
First you have to fly 3 riders out. A plane ticket probably averages around 300 dollars each, so that’s 900 dollars to start. But they also flew out a filmer and Leigh himself to manage the whole thing, so that’s another 600. Hotels probably weren’t an issue since they could just sleep at the team member they were visting’s house. Then there’s food money. For a 3 day trip, the 4 riders, Leigh and the filmer all might get 100 bucks each, so there’s another 600. Then you have to actually pay the filmer for his time. I know of another well known filmer who typically gets 150 bucks a day, so the filmer on one of the Eastern trips might have got just about the same, that’s another 450. That’s just about 2500 bucks right there, and I assume you’ve got to pay the filmer more money to edit the whole thing, so it’s probably a safe assumption that the whole project cost Eastern a little less than 3000 dollars (my numbers might be totally out of wack here but I’m reasonably sure they are pretty close to correct).
A 3000 dollar web video sounds excessive. And in comparison to most web videos, which cost close to zero dollars to produce, it certainly is expensive. But look what Eastern gets as a result: First there’s the initial blast of publicity… the video shows up on the main page of The Come Up and every other BMX site and immediately gets around 10,000 Vimeo views in a day. That’s a lot, but it understates the importance of what they have produced. The Eastern videos actually show a lot of personality from all their riders, they give a feel for what the riders are like and that’s invaluable to a company trying to build a more powerful brand.
The 10,000 Vimeo views is just the start though, most of the Inside Out videos have almost 30,000 views and continue to get 50-60 views a day. A typical argument against web videos is that they show up on The Come Up, get viewed a bunch of times and then are forgotten about, but 60 views on Vimeo a day is a ton for a video that Eastern put online 6 months ago. The old “web videos get forgotten about right away” argument just doesn’t hold up when you’re talking about a high quality video that is promoted properly. Do you think the average magazine ad from 6 months ago gets viewed 60 times a day? Probably but I doubt it is doing as much for the advertiser as Eastern’s videos are.
Oh and one final thing… if Eastern are smart they will probably stick all of the Inside Out videos onto a free DVD and send them out to stores that carry their products. The old foagies that run bike shops are less likely to watch web videos on The Come Up, but having the video playing in shops would be helpful. Just the other day 4Down posted that they are doing something similar.
As you can see, a company like Eastern can pretty easily side-step traditional media outlets to promote their brand. The web video isn’t perfect… if Eastern really wanted to get the word out about a spesific new frame, these web videos wouldn’t get the job done. But in a more general sense, the videos do a great job of promoting Eastern. The web video isn’t going anywhere in the foreseeable future and as magazines become less and less relevant, expect to see more and more companies start producing their own high quality original videos.
Agree? Disagree? Think I totally fucked this blog up? Let me know in the comments.
