No One’s Watching That YouTube Video You Paid For

  • 2 min read
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MultiVu, a service of PRNewswire, will help you create and distribute a multimedia news release to “more than 100 million consumers and investors who get their news and information on the Web.”

If you have a company video or ad embedded into your release, MultiVu will share it on popular sites like YouTube and Veoh as part of its distribution service. Pretty cool, right? It’s not all good though.

When MultiVu pushes out a release, it distributes your video using the press release headline as the title. Who wants to see a press release headline on YouTube? Not many — and MultiVu’s clients are paying a lot of money (more than competitors Business Wire and Marketwire charge) for the service.

Here’s an example that goes back to the Super Bowl. Pepsi worked with MultiVu to create a multimedia release to share news about the Justin Timberlake ad which was distributed on sites like YouTube.

During and after the game, people could not find the ad on YouTube because the title of Pepsi’s press release was used as the title of the video instead of a simple phrase like “Justin Timberlake Pepsi Super Bowl Ad” — which includes the keywords people used to locate it.

No one could find the video MultiVu distributed, titled “31512 PEPSI’S MARQUEE OF BRANDS, IMAGES & STARS COVER …” Only 238 people (at the time of writing) viewed that one, while millions saw consumer-generated submissions of the video.

Aside from being annoyed about how out-of-place press release copy is on YouTube, I have a hard time seeing the ROI on paying for a service that resulted in only 238 views of what should have been an even more hugely popular spot (from the MultiVu count perspective), considering the attention user-submitted versions received. Unless it’s possible to customize video copy in a way that makes sense for the specific nature of the sites and web users they’ll be shared with, it’s a waste of money.

I spoke with representatives of MultiVu about this issue. They said they can easily customize the titles of YouTube spots, but you have to specifically ask or risk getting lost in search like most of the 533 company spots it has posted to YouTube, which have horrible headline titles like:

– 2009 ACURA TSX TO OFFER NEW XM NAVWEATHER SERVICE

– 31685 TIDE TO GO TACKLES THE SUPER BOWL

– Big Apple Gets Restroom Relief: First-Ever Free Fully-Staffe

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Steve Hall

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