Brands must go beyond in-stream advertising to fully utilize the medium

Online video content provides an increasingly effective marketing opportunity as consumers' preferred social medium and has engagement levels almost as high as display advertising with growing popularity. Online video content works for multiple marketing goals, encourages interactivity, can be targeted to customer profiles and life cycles, and be used to extend offline campaigns.

Brands interested in developing and maintaining a healthy brand ecosystem can use online video at different stages and touchpoints in the customer life cycle. For example, assets from TV commercials can be repurposed for the website.

While most brands are not new to creating content - even traditional broadcast footage has probably been created before - video creation for the online environment can feel unfamiliar and raise questions like where to get content from, where to find audience, and will online viewers interact with the content?

There are three ways to generate branded video content:

• Become a content creator
  Making video content doesn't have to be complex. At a minimum you can repurpose content form other channels to use online.

• Identify content partner opportunities
  Your traditional media publisher (the "reach" part of your ecosystem) likely already creates video assets and facilitates content partnerships. Embedding the brand into the content, not just advertising in stream. Engaging immersive video experience within the reach layer of the ecosystem.
  
  
• Engage audiences as a content catalyst
  Create content-driven experiences by engaging viewers to share, engage with, or promote video across the engagement channels of your ecosystem or catalyze audience to create video content.