Part II:

Transcript

Brett Tabke: This is Brett Tabke back here again at Silicon Valley and joining us now is Gregory Markel of Infuse Creative founder and president, CEO. You have been in it since 2001.

Gregory Markel: I've been in search since the Lycos Northern Lights Days so 1994-95, but Infuse Creative was founded in July 2001.

Brett Tabke: Okay and you have been focusing on multimedia video, video.

Gregory Markel: Well, actually we started on the music side, worked with every music major super star group you could imagine and then you know the budget started going like this down the music industry side and then we got a film. We did a lot of film stuff, a lot of movie studio stuff and also a fair degree of independent film stuff as well, but a major number of blockbuster type films, and we were sort of known as the entertainment company because of those two things, and I think when we launched we actually sort of positioned ourselves that way, but in fact along the way in almost a too quite manner we have actually added all sorts of different types of clients, Mazda, lead generation. We took Mazda into search for the very first time. PacificCare we took into search for the very first time, lead generation. Gibson Musical Corporation, which is also Baldwin Pianos, New Line Cinema Television film DVDs, a couple of non-profits, great nonprofits, Teen Source which is a teen sex education site and also Maharishi University of Business Management, which is an amazing university in city in Fairfield, Iowa. It is very interesting.

Brett Tabke: I am from Iowa and they are their claim to fame is they are the highest domain owners in the mid-west. They own more domains

Gregory Markel: Why is that?

Brett Tabke: They registered up a storm. At one point they had six seven thousand domains when there was less than a million domains in the entire world.

Gregory Markel: Oh, well, alright, see that is where you have the domain AdSense millionaires are living, in Iowa...

Brett Tabke: Yeah, Fairfield, Iowa.

Gregory Markel: Yeah, so we diversified our client portfolio considerably in terms of different types of campaigns, but you know the multimedia stuff is sexy to everybody so it gets a lot of talk.

Brett Tabke: Well, you think multimedia, I throw music in with multimedia too

Gregory Markel: Yeah, yeah. Well, what is interesting though and this was your segway really to the core of what we are talking about is that all of our clients are becoming multimedia clients because of the direction the search is going in. Real Executives International Global Real Estate company part of our strategy involves continually releasing you know thematically relevant keyword focused video both high level, high production and blog or blog type stuff. So even traditional old school companies are sort of becoming multimedia search companies, companies that have a multimedia search concern.

Brett Tabke: Let's talk video um, it is hot these days and we know what happened with YouTube, but where do you see it all going? What is the current big trend other than just more, more, more?

Gregory Markel: Well, I mean the foundation of the house right is how can you not be interested in a marketing channel that has such a vast profound reach and has zero cost per action associated with it. So right off the bat you are paying attention right. You know it makes sense and then there was a time when people thought well, corporations thought well, you know we can only release videos that meet this kind of traditional high production value standard and you know we can't spend $30,000 or $100,000 per video and now even those companies are realizing that all they need is you know someone in the office with a digital camera and a decent light and that has become sort of the new accepted standard. So in terms of where it is going when you combine that with the universal search like results of Ask and Google the Google who is still in their infancy of that by the way, it is clear that this is now something that everybody has to pay attention to. Now it is also the Wild West and for guys like you and me that have been around such a long time thank god for that because

Brett Tabke: Deja vu.

Gregory Markel: Yeah, but it also keeps things interesting for us right because otherwise you are like oh, meta tags but this is you know it is a new platform. It is a new methodology it is the issue of analytics and tracking is wide open right now and challenging and within those types of dynamics there is always a lot of opportunities as well, but this is something now when we talk to a perspective client this is on our inventory list because it represents such quantifiable value and then people are also using it in ways that one might not immediately think of like for example let’s say that your company that has five corporate videos and of course we are going to market those for you and track those and report the benefit to the marketing of those videos, but let’s say that in addition to that you have found because wherever vertical you are in I am intentionally keeping brand names out of this that there is a sea of user generated content about your content or similar content these companies are now hiring agencies like ours to also find that video content, aggregate it, tag it, and report it as a brand impression, which exponentially magnifies you know our efforts and delivers outrageous you know brand impression value at either zero or you know next to zero cost. So that is something that we have recommended clients only recently that we have seen clients do more and more because it makes sense for example if you are a TV station or a movie studio who is actually paying somewhere to show a particular clip let’s say even in the new YouTube paid video channel and that exact clip is showing up in 20 iterations on the user uploaded side and you can track those views it is part of your overall marketing effort. So

Brett Tabke: We were talking of Google Universal earlier it just changes the whole nature of the ballgame for organics anyway.

Gregory Markel: Yeah. Well, in so many ways and here is one way that I have not heard come up in conversation yet that we are dealing with. It also can be. You know the issue of brand reputation management within our industry where a corporation has someone say something negative about it and all of a sudden it is a real problem in the SERPs and there are so many things that you can try and do to help push down that negative content or remove it. Well, universal search now is actually an additional tool for that between news releases and video.

Brett Tabke: Proactive about it?

Gregory Markel: To be proactive or reactive as well in terms of anything that will give you another pushdown of an inch or more, whether it is a local business listing, which is another technique or a news release, which is another technique or two videos will push down the SERPs about what two inches or so, right. So that is the way in which people you know, there is a slight key to the catle revealing that people had not really thought about in terms of video search. As far as universal search goes interestingly Ask is in a way sort of ahead of Google in terms of their deployment whether it is actually working or not let’s say, but I saw some recent numbers that are very encouraging for them. They are saying publicly that they are seeing less page two views because people are more satisfied with the first page results than they previously were with the traditional SERP. So that is all they need. Now as far as Google universal search results go I was lucky enough to hear Eric Schmidt speak at Seoul Digital Forum about this a couple of months ago and even luckier to sort of corner him for about three minutes as he looked very uncomfortable and ackward, you know because there was a crowd that is like so, you know, he couldn’t move right and I felt confident based on his talk, which really you can find it by looking for it, but I don’t hear anybody talking about outside of Seoul Digital Forum, but you can find it on the video search engines. Between his talk and our brief conversation I am absolutely convinced that what we are seeing right now is like it is baby you know it is diapers time there is so much more coming, not to mention the integration of the personalization behavioral geo-targeting etc. with the universal result set.

Brett Tabke: Universal has only turned off its state side right now it is not in Europe, not in Africa anyplace else around the world. So that is an other shoe to drop in all this. They are still playing with it. They are still playing with it.

Gregory Markel: Yeah. What fascinates me is a client called today, a perspective client called. It fascinates me how few major marketers, major corporations really know about it. In our circle it is like oh, this is old news. It is spanking brand new to so many VPs, SVPs of marketing.

Brett Tabke: Oh, yeah, we did a couple of interviews here a couple of months ago and popped up blog was numbered one, the video was number two and our site was number three and boy did their competitors call us

Gregory Markel: Oh, Brett can you imagine when you quantify this from a monetary standpoint how much money somebody spent on a website and the marketing for that website and whose video you know was pulled up YouTube. It is crazy.

Brett Tabke: Yeah, that two-minute video that they made.

Gregory Markel: Yeah, so to that end though other than just getting the content out this is very important something that I talk about when I speak on these things brands need to be conscious of branding that video experience of having an initial brand experience in the first frame of watermarking each frame thereafter. Then spending the last five or ten seconds with a teaser, a offer of some kind or an incentive or go to, etc. and really that is in it's infancy, hardly anyone is doing that.

Brett Tabke: Well, speaking of YouTube and coming in under the limit. We are at that magic ten minute mark. So thank you for being with us Greg.

Gregory Markel: Thank you very much Brett. I very much appreciate it.