In the exciting storehouse of online video opportunities, some strategies are essential, and some just provide empty calories. Deep Focus' media director reveals key tactics for a satisfying video campaign. 

For many a marketer, the world of online video is akin to a trip to Costco: an exciting warehouse of opportunity and choice that guarantees you’ll walk away forgetting what you went there for but still having that feeling of contentment from the chaise-lounge-sized pretzel barrel that barely fit in the trunk.

Last month’s Promax/BDA conference, at which I participated in a “Future of Online Media” panel, confirmed this imperfect exuberance about online video and the need for many entertainment marketers to begin with a basic grocery list. 

Here are six items to consider before your next trip to market:

1. Develop an online video roadmap
Seems obvious, but are marketers developing them? 

Being charged with finding and motivating audiences to watch, download or purchase content in the new digital frontier requires knowing who does what, when and how (i.e., creating a framework all concerned parties can follow). 

This roadmap should clarify an overall media planning/buying strategy, a digital distribution solution (including how to track and measure), budget allocation and how offline and online efforts can and should work together. 

A way to jump-start this roadmap creation for entertainment marketers may be to form a cross-agency, multi-disciplinary task force with vested individuals representing their respective discipline.

2. Create online video experiences for an open syndication world
Fundamentally shaping the online video landscape has been the rise of social media, Web 2.0 technology (especially embeddable/sharable video) and episodic made-for-web video content (for example, Next New Networks, BlipTV, Superdeluxe, The Onion News Network and others). This trend may be the most important in terms of shifting tastes/expectations, signaling a growing demand for legitimate alternatives to the lackluster repurposed TV content by major networks and the randomized cluttered clip culture nurtured by the likes of YouTube. 

As a result of these trends, entertainment marketers will need to create rich online experiences that will travel well across platforms and within consumer’s social circles.  There is also a wide-open opportunity to create quality programming specifically for the online experience and community, with the benefit that such content can often be monetized. But more on that later. 

3. Develop methodologies for serving and measuring in a super distributed landscape
Staying on top of the methods for digital video distribution online can seem daunting.  Just some of these include creating video-enabled web sites (CBS.com, HBO.com, ComedyCentral.com), establishing distribution partnerships (iTunes, Joost, Veoh) and leveraging video ad networks (Broadband Enterprises, VideoEgg) or rich media units (DoubleClick, Motif). Video can also appear informally on sites or pages where users choose to embed a widget with branded content or unique video players.

Such a range of options can make standardization of serving and measurement quite a challenge. The good news is that online remains infinitely more measurable than traditional media, with little that can’t be tracked, tagged or reported on. This gives marketers -- and their digital agencies -- a unique opportunity to build measures of success from the ground level. Start by defining “success” and build the metrics from there.   

4. Be willing to take a risk
Mainstream entertainment has been slow overall in exploiting online as a marketing vehicle, let alone leveraging it as a sandbox for taking risks on new ideas or technologies. 

But it is just such calculated risks that are required to stay ahead in a fragmented and consumer-controlled mediascape. As a contrast, look at the web’s most pioneering and profitable entertainment businesses: pornography. Like it or not, these entrepreneurs represent just such a trailblazing spirit that Hollywood would be wise to emulate in the digital space (within reason, of course). 

Below are some risks worth taking in the short term. (Note: “risk” does not mean distributing trailers and 30 second spots online: the equivalent of going home with the monster pretzel barrel.)

Next: Risks worth taking in the current online video landscape