FierceOnlineVideo Leaders - Scott Broomfield, CEO Veeple

FierceOnlineVideo got a chance to catch up with Veeple CEO Scott Broomfield to discuss his company's progress so far in 2009, as well as to get his thoughts on the online video industry and trends he sees currently.

FierceOV: In your opinion, how has Veeple performed so far in 2009? 

Scott Broomfield: The 2^nd quarter was our first full quarter in market, and we hit all the milestones we'd set for ourselves. We surpassed our projected trial rate, we passed our goal for customer acquisition rates. We also exceed what I like to call our "pull through" rate, which I define as the percentage of people who try the service who actually subscribe eventually. I think these results really validated our positioning and messaging in the market.

We also announced two important strategic relationships, with TubeMogul and BitGravity. If I could make Q3 look like Q2, I'd be very happy. 

FierceOV: What are some trends you're seeing around your core interactive video offering you'd like to take advantage of going forward? 

Broomfield: I'll offer a couple of interesting data points. What we're seeing with interactive online video, is that it's really gone to the next step. Adding in interactive analytics has shown how effective it can be, as we're seeing around a 22 percent click through rate for people who have made their videos interactive

Also, 70 percent of our customers are making video interactive, and 30 percent are just using the platform without the interactivity. I think that shows how attractive this form of marketing is becoming.

We want to keep increasing the rate of adoption, as interactive advertising rates in general are trending up. We need to both engage the user and than measure the engagement effectively to drive growth and good results.

Agencies are themselves beginning to adopt interactive video, and they can buy directly from us and then manage the offering for their clients. Agencies can bring clients into the Veeple platform and manage it directly for their customer. We anticipate getting a certain percentage of our adoption from agencies as well as direct selling to businesses. 

FierceOV: What are some important things to consider and do when making effective interactive online video? 

Broomfield: Most people, when they think about interactive online video, think about ad insertion, and just that. But we think the context around the ad insertion is very important, and then, specifically inserting advertising is only one of the five use case categories we see for interactive online video. A customer won't want to insert an ad 4/5s of the time, because they are often using the video for the service's own purpose. If you're using a video to sell a router for instance, you don't want an ad for ScottTrade on the bottom 1/3 of the ad. Media companies put in a ton of ads because it works in that context, but other companies have different needs. We see four other areas: E-promotion; E-learning and communications and training, where you're trying to educate a customer or viewer; Branding itself, by creating a message and telling a story about a passion, service or product; and social networking, by connecting the viewer to the social networking ecosystem, with a link to the Wikipedia site, for instance, or interactive click through to Twitter, MySpace or Facebook.

Online video needs to step up from the hosting on YouTube, as the professional marketer and agencies are ready to go to the next level. To do that, the interactive video must be relevant, interactive, and engaging, without being intrusive, which is where the art comes in. How do I make the video both engaging and non-intrusive? The context the interactivity is delivered in, and where the points of interaction are put are things we're constantly refining to try to achieve those goals.

FierceOV: Where do you think the online video industry is headed and where would you like to position Veeple in that progression? 

Broomfield: I like to use Cisco's zettabyte terminology, and I'm a full believer that the vast majority of IP traffic will be video and rich media. I think that any business that has a website will use online video, because it is so apparent how much more engaging video is than static web objects.

We're starting to figure out what the right business models are, but we're still asking questions about the right metrics and ways to measure it.  Is it per view, per GB streamed, is it going to be pay per click, which models will win?

I think customers shouldn't look at how much an offering costs per month, but how much video does it let me show. I think customers will begin to get very smart about the pricing models, if you're priced too high and not creating enough value, they'll notice.

I think video will start to become the primary aspect of the web presence, HTML inside video, rather than video being stuck in the code, because videos travel, but websites don't. Not only will videos become interactive with the advent of the HTML5 spec, but with the advent of Chrome and other browsers supporting it, as well as video standards build into HTML5, I think we're moving in that direction.