A question that all marketers and business people should be constantly asking themselves is: How much do I believe in my product? Of course, everyone will SAY they believe in it greatly! However, actions speak much louder than words. This is particularly evident when making decisions based on segmenting and targeting.

In my experience, the first sign that a marketer does not believe in his or her product is a desire to hide the product from the world. The most successful brand in the world does not hide themselves from anyone. In fact, Coca Cola has been criticized for advertising too much! Coke doesn’t believe that it does anything wrong in telling people in distant lands that “Coke is it”!

Even with a local restaurant, you should be thinking about all the reasons people from foreign lands will want to know more about you and even travel to your country to eat at your establishment. This has a lot to do with attitude and with your own standards. Do you believe that your restaurant is worth traveling for? Do you believe that your product is something that should be given as a gift, even it it’s not Christmas? If not, maybe your marketing strategy isn’t the problem.

New York’s Mediapost is the leading online trade publication for media professionals.

We knew there would be more videos. But this many????

Camera phones and digital cameras have completely blown up the video market, as well as a new generation of tech savvy youngsters and wanna-be marketers who are clogging the bandwidth with literally billions of uploads per month!

Here are a few examples:

If you type in “I’m on a boat t-pain” to YouTube, there will be over 1000 videos returned, with anywhere from 15 to 6,000,000 views per video. That’s 50 pages of video, including all the parodies, copies, imitations and the one original.

Assuming you want attention, is there any way to insure that you’ll be on the 6,000,000 views side of the equation and not the 15?

The answer, unfortunately is: not really.

Today, you can blog, share in social media, syndicate across other video channels, post on your website while optimizing SEO friendly copy, buy clicks to your video, and even drive traffic to your video via traditional media buys.

It’s common knowledge that for every $1 spent on creating content, another $3-$4 is spent on media, in order to arrive at an ROI. In other words, if an advertiser were to spend $250,000 creating a commercial, it would be expected that they should spend $1 million in total, which in its entirety is compared against sales targets.

But how the heck do you spend media money properly in a world that’s so incredibly fragmented as online video?

To make matters worse: consider that 70% of YouTube viewers will not watch a video at all if it contains a pre-roll ad, you’ve got a recipe that spells disaster for any company considering a pre-roll buy-in! They hate your pre-roll so much that they won’t even watch the video they were intending to watch!!!

So, the stage has been set for the Adjoy video platform. This is the perfect mix of push/pull marketing, and just the right platform for anyone interested in gaining attention to differentiate themselves (and their business/brand) from the masses!!!

STAY TUNED For May 1st!

The Adjoy video platform solves the most difficult problem that online video marketers face: Now that I have my video, how do I get views? Adjoy is quite simply the best video platform out there, and here’s why: It does the basic stuff that any platform should do (viewership tracking, monthly reports, transcoding from multiple formats, etc.). But what makes this platform unique, is that it gives viewers a compelling reason to watch your videos!

Not to sound like the Slap Chop guy, but THERE’S MORE! Everytime a viewer watches your video, they feel better about your company! Why? Because 100% of your media spend is going to charity!

It’s not too good to be true, it’s just the next logical evolution of online video, developed by an experienced and conscientious core of developers, business leaders, visionaries and customers.

But, How Does it Work? I Mean, Really! How?

That’s a very good question, and one that all marketers right now are asking. Forget the technology stuff! It doesn’t help you for us to say that we have servers plugged into boxes, filled with code. How does it work? In other words, what are the social mechanics of attention?

Here’s what charitable donation gives you. It’s a pretty impressive list, and might just make you think twice about your next big media buy.

1) Permission Space. People hate marketers online and everywhere. By people, I mean “them” as well as you and me! No one wants to be interrupted and told what to do. However, being asked to donate to charity, or -even better- donate a tiny bit of time to charity is a fully tolerated and respected action. In social media, a cause media campaign enables your brand to literally go anywhere: walls, discussion forums, emails, blog postings, comment fields, etc. “We are raising money for Haiti” is much more tolerated than “Check out this vacuum”. Particularly when you’re in a Haiti relief forum!

2) Positive Brand Association. Our market research shows a massive difference between positive brand association linked to charitable giving, and association with other loyalty programs. The same holds true with negative brand association. It’s pretty simple, really. People are skeptical of the quality of your product if you discount or bribe them to buy it. However, if you don’t talk price and focus on the good you’re doing for the world, people just feel good.

3) Reach. Word of Mouth. And More Reach. Have you ever seriously thought about the reach that a major charity has in their database? The numbers would surprise you, and really makes you consider why you’d ever consider other forms of media. And talk about a loyal and powerful database! In any major charity’s database, there could be dozens or hundreds of influential, and passionate bloggers. Pass them a link to your video! Pass them the embed code so they can become publishers, and watch the ticker grow!

4) Accountability.* Your media buy is 100% accountable* and goes 100% to charity. You only pay us for the platform. Also, you can alter your CPM to whatever you want, depending on your strategy, target market, product or service, etc. 1 penny for every 5 seconds of engagement perhaps?? Any budget. Any duration.

* Our definition of “accountability” differs from other media outlets. Rather than “per view” or “per thousand potential views”, “accountable” to us means “down to the 5 second unit”. Another reason to feel the joy!

For the announcement of the making of the medals, the Mint employed Adjoy to display their video documentary on their own site. News media was directed to drive traffic towards the Mint, resulting in a resounding success for both English and French videos.

The viewership analytics that the Adjoy platform offered, enabled the Mint to further refine future creative efforts in order to maximize viewership, site engagement as well as lower abandonment rates. Subsequent creative and video media strategies proved to be ROI positive for e-commerce purposes.

The ongoing relationship with the Royal Canadian Mint has enabled Adjoy to test its platform while being hammered by thousands of concurrent views. In the 6 months that Adjoy has hosted the Mint’s videos, there has yet to be any downtime.

Pull marketing is more of an event than a strategy. This occurs when someone finds a product because they are already looking for it (or something similar). This type of marketing is more about placement  and optics than volume and frequency of exposure. This can be as simple as a shelf talker on a bottle of wine! We know you want to buy one, but -for related reasons- you should buy this one!

Push and pull work in concert with one another. Once your psyche is adequately served with images of the perfect burger or perfect vacation, and you’re ready to buy those things when the time has finally come, all other elements of the business funnel will hopefully converge to draw you in the right direction (or away from competitors).

What we’re launching in May is a form of media that combines the best of push and pull marketing! Stay tuned to find out how this revolutionary platform works. Customers are lined up for a very controlled and beautiful launch, that will hopefully have you pulling for companies that are pushing us further towards our honourable goals!

Read the whole article, published in Mediapost’s Marketing: Green here.

NY based Mediapost is the leading online trade publication for marketing and advertising professionals.