Interactive video platform Coull http://www.coull.com welcomes Hitesh Bhatt from MSN UK as its new commercial director.

Bhatt, who joined MSN UK three years ago as a sales manager was more recently acting head of agency sales.  His latest role involved managing a team of nine sales people, negotiating annual contracts with key agency groups such as Aegis, Omnicom and Publicis and was involved in the strategic direction and running of the MSN UK sales team.

He is an advertising and media industry veteran with more than 15 years of experience and joins to lead the Coull sales team.  Previous roles for Bhatt have seen him work for EMAP, MTV UK and Yahoo!  He will be responsible for expanding agency relationships, optimising business opportunities and growing revenue from the Coull Engage product.

Hitesh brings invaluable experience to Coull.  His appointment demonstrates Coull’s commitment to building closer relationships with agencies, advertisers and publishers looking to embrace interactive video.  “With Hitesh, we will fully understand our clients’ business needs and work in collaboration to develop effective video advertising products and services” says Irfon Watkins, CEO at Coull.

Hitesh Bhatt, commercial director at Coull comments, “It’s an incredibly exciting time for technology providers, agencies and brands as the online video advertising market begins to demonstrate its effectiveness in an extremely competitive arena.  Coull is delivering innovative, brand-driven, measurable campaigns that allow online video to truly engage with audiences in a non-intrusive way. I look forward to the opportunity to demonstrate how far the medium is moving along and how brands can maximise the effectiveness of online video campaigns using the Coull platform.”

This is the fourth senior appointment to the Coull head count with Claudia Giovannoni, marketing director joining early March 2008 heading up the marketing department.  Other new members of the Coull team include the board of directors appointments including Gillian Kent, former MSN UK managing director and CEO of Propertyfinder.com and Creative Ventures Group founder Spyro Korsanos also joined the board as non-executive director.

Coull received series B financing earlier in the year from Finance South West Growth Fund (managed by YFM Group), Creative Ventures Group and private investors.  The funding has allowed Coull to release the ‘Coull Engage’ product to assist brands maximise the return on investment (ROI) of their online campaigns, which are currently being used by Agent Provocateur, Boots and Renault.

Irfon Watkins, CEO at online video company Coull and chairman of the IAB Video Council discusses how brands can maximise the effectiveness of video campaigns.

Our emotions play an incredibly important role when it comes to our decision making processes; particularly when those decisions involve purchases.  At one point or another, as consumers we have all made a purchase that was driven by the emotion attached to the product and/or the brand.  As brands, agencies and marketers, we try to tap into this emotion, and drive an action – whether it be sales or awareness led.

If we were to define brand engagement it would be, “The culmination of what your consumers think, feel and do in relation to your brand,” or to put it simpler, “how plugged in” they are to our marketing messages.  Brand engagement is the attachment they have to your brand (both consciously and unconsciously) and the action they take based on that perception.

Since we became a digitally charged society, it’s become ever more important (and thusly, more challenging) to connect and resonate with our existing and potential customers and depending on the product and/or market, there will inevitably be different driving motivating factors, such as a sense of fun and style, or reliability and roots etc.  Traditional advertising and marketing campaigns, such as television, billboards and radio will always have their place, however unlike the internet, they don’t provide the means for consumers to ‘plug in’ instantaneously. 

With something as intangible as a thought or a feeling we need to qualify it by marrying it with an action – and this is where many stumble.  There is a widely held perception that measuring how digital activity contributes to customer engagement is difficult, but with the amount of tools at a marketer’s disposal today, it is now easier to measure an online campaign than ever before (such as web analytics, social reputation software or reports from individual services).   At Coull we have been measuring the effectiveness of such activity for several years and the benefits of doing so are obvious brands understand how to enrich their messaging.

Rich media is one such way that technology providers using to drive consumer and brand engagement online.  The beauty of an online campaign is that it gives you the unique opportunity to view interaction levels as the campaign un-folds in real-time.  This in turn gives marketers the ability to address any changes that can be implemented to drive brand engagement whilst the campaign is still ongoing.

For FMCG in particular, where cost is lower and competition fierce, having the brand / campaign resonate with the target audience is absolutely crucial. Digital marketing agencies have been trying to find ways of increasing FMCG involvement in a variety of ways, some examples being social media initiatives and new online advertising formats that employ rich media Flash experience or interactive videos.

There remains the idea that brands can ‘exploit’ a medium, we’ve all seen the articles and heard the phrases brandied about.  But exploitation is a dirty word, and brands, agencies and marketers alike should be thinking about engagement, interaction and awareness.  Brand engagement is not always about waving the brand or product in the consumers faces, with the expectation that if they see it often enough they will act and think in the way we want them too.

We (Coull) have managed interactive video campaigns for brands such as Boots and Renault - both of whom showed above average levels of user engagement.  With the Boots campaign, over 30% of users interacted with the products in the video advert, and it also drove five times the average play rate than similar, non-interactive videos.

Forrester estimates that US online video advertising alone will be worth in excess of $7.1 billion USD by 2012 which represents a 72% increase whilst interactive marketing as a whole (of which online video is a huge component) will more than triple to reach $61 billion by 2012.  Forrester also predicts that budgets for interactive marketing will grow from 8 per cent of all ad spend to a very significant 18 per cent. 

These figures are very encouraging, and we can only presume that we will see similar growth in the UK.  Consumers remain advertising sensitive, and whilst “traditional” online advertising (such as banners, skyscrapers etc.,) will always have their place, interactive marketing, particularly video, will continue to have a more important role to play in how well our brands resonate with our consumers.

Click here to read the comment on Mad.co.uk website.

Online video is certainly one of the hot areas for growth both this year and heading into 2009, and your Special on the subject addressed many of the key areas that we at Coull are observing (NMA 22.05.08).

You say that brands are relying heavily on repurposing existing TV commercials online and, as an interactive video platform, we see a lot of this. As video production can require a significant budget, it makes sense that marketers feel they could (or should) use the same creative for online.

However, the ability to bring qualified responses following a call to action is significantly higher with interactive videos because they provide the viewer with the means to learn more about a particular product, service or brand. This creates a lean-in experience rather than just the lean-back one typical of TV ads.

From Irfon Watkins, CEO, Coull  

Click here to read the comment on the NMA website.

Coull has been around since 1998 and making videos interactive since 1999. A long time before anyone could have foreseen the current growth in online video content.

Consciously choosing not to promote user generated content, clients of Coull consist of Media Agencies and rights holders and publishers of professional content. “We see our position as offering publishers and content owners something different and I think that’s been successful for us.” Stated Irfon Watkins, CEO of Coull in an interview with AdMarkTech.

With in-house developed technology Coull gives their clients a method for simplifying video production and adding user interaction. Taking care of all the technical elements of the process, clients are left to focus their budget not on technology, but on the important issues of creative design and marketing. Using the Coull technology platform to add interaction to videos takes approximately five minutes per video once clients become familiar with the platform.

Consisting of a team of 16 people based in Bristol, England, Coull has spent the best part of the last 10 years building the in-depth technology. With the lack of broadband, it has only been the past 18 months that they have really been in a position to benefit from the technology that has no real competition in the current market place.

Their client base consists of clients such as MindShare who, in turn, are utilizing the Coull technology platform to service international clients such as Unilever. “We’ve been working with other media agencies like MediaCom and Carat on brands such as Renault and Alfa Romeo. We also work with MySpace, Fox, MSN, Yahoo, Bebo and many other publishers and media agencies. We don’t tend to work directly with the brands themselves. We focus our sales activity on the agencies and publishers.”

The revenue model can work in one of two ways and all revenue is generated as a result of published videos. Coull host all the video content and use 3rd party content delivery networks such as Limelight or Akami to deliver the videos.

“The whole philosophy of Coull, from an ad perspective, is to make the platform open and allow the advertising client to work with existing systems that they already have. Using MindShare as an example, Mindshare would upload a video to our dashboard; bearing in mind we’ll take a video in any file format. They would then make the video interactive themselves. It’s a simple process to do with no need to involve creative or technical knowledge. Any junior within the account team can make the video interactive using the Coull technology. Selecting the player is the next step. Mindshare used this technology on a Unilever product called ‘Sure for Girls’ which is a deodorant. They branded the player ‘Sure for Girls’ and then our dashboard generated a tag. The tag conforms and is served through existing ad property systems like DoubleClick or Atlas. Additionally it is also format compatible with publisher sites such as Bebo. MindShare use our platform to make their videos interactive, split server tag, traffic that tag to their existing systems and publish them on partner sites. Our format is approved across Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Fox and MySpace.”

With relatively little competition in the video analytic space, Coull is gaining huge traction in this area of service.

“One of the big issues about the online video space is if the objective of the online video ad is to get you from that ad to another site as quickly as possible, then why spend a lot of money making a 30 second video clip if it’s designed for you to navigate away? Using our format drives engagement with the video. Coull technology allows a viewer to click on objects within the video and find out a little bit more about what they’ve clicked on before choosing to exit to go onto another site. We’re measuring everything in terms of what objects are clicked on and every bit of user interactivity once they’ve clicked to play the video. This is what we class as engagement.”

Additionally, using the Coull technology, videos can be shared in multiple ways. Using a url, email or embed code to drop into MySpace, blog or the user’s choice of Social Network, all the advertiser’s branding stays perfectly in tact, therefore benefiting the advertiser by all method of distribution.

But what does the future hold in store for Coull?

“We will continue to grow our business in the online video advertising space and also move very aggressively into the social networking space, allowing anybody to upload and make videos interactive and publish. Then we’ll connect it to the revenue and advertising model. What you’ll see a year from now is an interactive video version of salesforce.com. A site which is fully transactional where you can upload a video, publish it and link it to contextual advertising models and networks and share revenues that are generated from published videos.”

Having just signed a deal with JWT, Coull are looking to extend their current relationships with marketing agencies and enter the US market by the end of this year.

Click here to  see the article on AdMarkTech.Com.

I enjoyed your article on “Why brand engagement matters”, but I found it strange to read about perceived difficulty in measuring how online activity  contributes to customer engagement.

The difficulty  in measuring online campaigns can be corrected by providing brands and advertisers the appropriate bench-mark measurement indexes.

With the amount of tools at at a marketer’s disposal, it is now easier than ever to measure an online campaign. Tools, such as web analytics, social reputation software or reports from  individual services, are readily available - albeit at a cost. We possess more accessible and accurate data to crunch when we’ve decided what metrics and method to adopt in measuring activity.

Rich media in one way technology providers are assessing new ways to measure consumer and brand engagement online. Focus group have their place but an online campaign gives you the unique opportunity to view interaction levels as the campaign unfolds real time. This enables marketers to make changes to drive brand engagement while the campaign is still ongoing.

Irfon Watkins

CEO

Coull