What’s the Big Deal about YouTube®, Vimeo® and Personalized Video? Everything!RISORSE

What’s the Big Deal about YouTube®, Vimeo® and Personalized Video? Everything!


This blog post is in honor of the new release of XMPie uDirect Video, version 1.5. Read on to learn about great new features that are now available!

The statistics are mind-boggling. All over the Internet there is news about the explosive growth of video sites such as YouTube® and Vimeo®. If you sift through the data, you find amazing metrics for YouTube that include the following: 60 hours of video gets uploaded every minute; 4 billion videos are watched every day; 800 million visitors per month; and 600 million views per day on mobile devices. But even more striking is when you get to the “meat and potatoes” related to growth in the business sector. YouTube is monetizing over 3 billion video views per week globally; 98 of AdAge™’s Top 100 advertisers have run campaigns on YouTube and the Google® Display Network; and more than a million advertisers are using the Google video ad platforms, the majority of which are small businesses www.jeffbullas.com/2012/05/23/35-mind-numbing-youtube-facts-figures-and-statistics-infographic/.  In the case of Vimeo the growth has been very impressive, as well. Socialtimes.com recently reported that over 5 million people joined Vimeo in 2012, bringing the site’s total to 14 million, and more than 675 million people tuned in to watch Vimeo videos last year.

So where is the tie-in to personalized videos? As I have already blogged about, XMPie introduced the concept of video personalization using a versatile Adobe® After Effects™ plug-in, in 2011. Last year, we released our first version of our uDirect® Video software and the interest among marketing service providers, agencies and their corporate marketing clients has exceeded expectations. In many industries, including automotive, higher education, real estate, education, financial services, and non-profits, the XMPie personalized video solution is being used to efficiently pre-generate highly targeted, relevant movies with text, images and video footage specific to the recipient. Most of these campaigns are running on mobile devices and some are extensions of more comprehensive cross-media campaigns utilizing emails and RURLs/PURLs.  Some have used original After Effects (AE) personalized video templates and others have been generated using pre-created AE templates, such as those found on www.revostock.com.  As described in my last blog, the initial response data with personalized video campaigns is showing over 50% click through rates and over 95% conversion from qualified leads to sales (http://blog.xmpie.com/2013/06/news-flash-personalized-video-secrets-revealed/.

In our latest release (XMPie uDirect® Video 1.5) we ensure that customers can leverage the explosive growth of both YouTube and Vimeo. This release allows the user the option to first optimize the rendering of movies, using our unique MovieSet format, and then automatically upload the rendered personalized movies to YouTube or Vimeo. The process is very simple. You just enter in your YouTube or Vimeo credentials, identify the location where you want the videos placed, and the software does the rest. Even better, you can set it up to work with private or public YouTube or Vimeo sites. And for those with the XMPie cross-media platform, the news gets even better. You can now easily integrate videos uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo into an existing XMPie PersonalEffect® multi-channel campaign. Another nice feature of this new release is that you can now use static and variable fields to name your movies, making it easy to name a file Happy Birthday <FirstName>.mp4, for example.  If you are concerned about the complexity of generating these videos, it requires some know-how of Adobe After Effects and base level experience with video content. Other than that, all you need is a database with the personalized content and the XMPie desktop software – which is designed as a “plug and play” solution. If you are worried that jumping into this new media will bankrupt you, let me assure you that at less than $10k for the software package, it will pay for itself with your first campaign.

There are few opportunities that have come along in the past few years with more potential than personalized video campaigns on YouTube and Vimeo.  Marketers know the reach and response power of advertising campaigns utilizing these sites – especially on mobile devices – making the development and implementation of these programs a case of “when” and not “if”.  For providers able to offer these high-value services, the sky is the limit. Investing now in this capability or partnering to deliver it provides a springboard to becoming a true MSP –Multi-channel Services Provider.

For more information on XMPie video personalization, email me at larry.zusman@us.xmpie.com.