Why Broadcasters are failing at ROI:: Discovery and others are scaling back:: That's Whack!!

A recent post read: Discovery CEO David Zaslav, speaking at the conference, said that despite the large content library that Discovery owns, viewers are unlikely to find any of it on line in the near future. I had to investigate and was quite surprised by what I “discovered”.    When I visited Discovery.com and the homepage loaded, it was covered in advertisements for Maxi pads.  Although I am a female, and they do track demographic information (see Privacy Policy bullet 4 (four) under (2) Non-Personally Identifiable Information ), any demographic information that could be tracked via my PC or Browser would Identify me as a 72 year old male, by design.  😉

Do the Advertisers know who their dempgraphic is?
Do the Advertisers know who their demographic is?

That is strike one.  Having paid close attention to how and what is advertised at me over the years, and being a marketer and a technologist who is known for intensive QA (Quality Assurance) processes – it is clear that no one is actually checking to make sure that the campaigns that are going out make sense and/or that the targeting is working correctly.

OK, homepage is one thing – I made my way through the site to track down a long form video “full episode” on the Discovery.com site – I found something that was even more bizarre.

There are only two Programs left in long form, so I navigated over to Prototype This!: Robotic Firefighter Assistant and as the page loaded, I found all the ads were also pointing at a different demographic than what I had expected – so what is with the baby products and feminine hygiene obsession? 

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RESEARCH PROJECT:: VIDEO SEO :: SHOW ME THE SAUCE

There is a lot of noise lately regarding how video content and SEO work together – there are many companies evangelizing their ‘wares to the hungry marketers of such video property; however, I don’t believe any of it for a second – it’s not working as advertised.

Recently I sat through a demo of a product that promised enhanced search-ability for video content that was essentially “tagged” by their product.  At the end of the demo, I asked if we could examine how the tagging impacted the SEO of the client sites we looked at, using organic keywords that pertained to the video content we had just reviewed.

They proceeded to “plant” ordered keywords into Google to show how their tagged video appeared magically – with a rigid set of keywords that no human would “organically” input for a search.  Having said that, the tagged video did not come up first nor did it come up as a prioritized web asset with more or less relevance than any other web page that pertained to the keyword set they used.

The tagged video appeared third and had no special indicator that this was a link to video enhanced web content.

On Google the special video category is relegated to video content originating from YouTube, so many of the products and “specialists” out there on VIDEO SEO are just going to post clips on YouTube and point back to the client website – so save your money and do it yourself.

Google search for interviews with Madonna
Google search for interviews with Madonna

Here is an example, if I do a search for keywords “interviews with madonna” on Google, I get the quick drop down from the homepage that tell me there are over 4 million results that have relevance.

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