TurnHere Taps RSS-Powered Ads to Promote Branded Video Content
TurnHere and Pheedo partnership will use RSS to update video clip links in ads around the Web.
Online video platform and production firm TurnHere has partnered with feed-based ad company Pheedo to distribute its branded video content via RSS into ad units placed on Pheedo’s network.
As TurnHere works with its clients to create affordable online video ads and films for placement on sites it operates, the company lacks a scalable means of bringing viewers to those sites. Pheedo meanwhile has developed an ad network and RSS-enabled ad units, called FeedPowered Advertising, that it uses to update existing advertiser placements with new text- and image-based information in real-time. Under this new partnership, video will not play directly within the ad units. Instead, the ads will reflect that new video content has been added to TurnHere’s client Web sites. “Every time a new video is uploaded to the site, the ad unit automatically updates with the latest content,” said Bill Flitter, vice president of marketing and founder of Pheedo.
“We have all these partnership relationships in creating video and they are increasingly asking us for ways to distribute it in interesting ways,” said Bradley Inman, CEO of TurnHere. “Almost all the work we’re doing we already distributed to all the search engines, but we just didn’t have a publishing network as defined and sophisticated as Pheedo.”
To start, the two companies will support video content TurnHere has developed for book publishing client Simon & Schuster and posted at Bookvideos.tv, a project offering video spotlights of authors to help promote new works. Videos from BookVideos.tv are already distributed on Yahoo, MSN, Google and YouTube, but now clips will also be distributed to Pheedo’s distribution network, which includes Slashdot, Popular Mechanics, All Business, and BlogCritics.
Simon & Schuster, which has reportedly been pleased with its initial run of author videos, believes any additional method of distribution for its content can only increase the use and importance of the videos as a marketing tool, said Sue Fleming, VP and executive director online marketing for Simon & Schuster.
“The first round that we did was really a test and we were trying to see if we would get any pick-up and how they would be received,” said Fleming.In the project’s next phase, she said, Simon & Schuster would seize on “any opportunity that we have to get the videos seen by more eyeballs.”
The RSS platform will also track video viewing results like interaction rates and links coming from search engines, said Flitter. “We tie everything together with a deep analysis on user behavior,” said Flitter.
Following the BookVideo vertical market campaign project, TurnHere and Pheedo intend to focus on other vertical markets as well, most likely starting with the travel section, said Inman.
