Vimeo.com: Honda Insight The Medium is the Message

A project I was working on for a client involved embedding a number of short, feature-specific videos, which the client asked us simply to upload to their YouTube channel and embed from there. Easy enough to execute, but I questioned whether this was the best place for high-end, HD video meant to show off their new flagship product. I suggested that he start his own channel on Vimeo.com.

“Vimeo?” he said. “More people on YouTube, right?”

“More videos too. Lots more videos,” I replied. (In fact, YouTube claims 20 hours of video is uploaded every minute.)

Of course, I understood the logic, as the potential audience is indeed much greater on YouTube. However, you probably wouldn’t market prescription drug ads during Saturday morning cartoons (at least, I hope you wouldn’t); likewise, in this new media world, you need to be looking at the demographics of your channels online as well. Otherwise, in an on-demand distribution channel, you’re just noise.

Rapid Growth and a Quality Audience

Like a lot of the channels we update you about here at the Tippingpoint Labs blog, Vimeo provides an easy-to-use content distribution channel focused less on quantity of content, and more on quality. From the site: “Vimeo is a thriving community of people who love to make and share video. From simple moments to masterpieces…. Your video’s quality and security is important to us, and that is why we’ve built advanced privacy options, sharing tools, and high-quality video encoding.” Vimeo is investing heavily in the notion that medium is just as important as message, video perhaps being most powerful among them.

Vimeo’s community skews older and more educated, and traffic has steadily grown in the past year, with big gains in the past season, now reaching more than 4 million uniques a month.

That jump in January largely results from the launch of the official White House Vimeo channel in December, 2008. The volumes are noteworthy, the recent explosion is of particular note.

Crawling through Vimeo’s channels reveals a wealth of creativity and high-end production values at work. Vimeo also has a robust community channel, where users can create “projects” and users from anywhere can collaborate on production. By enabling its users to create bigger and better content, Vimeo effectively makes the channel itself more valuable to potential monetization.

An awareness of the user base’s enthusiasm for cutting-edge video content is what made Honda’s recent “Let it Shine” page takeover an extremely effective use of the medium. Knowing well that Vimeo’s viewers are videophiles, Honda and Vimeo experimented with the channel in a beautiful ad that drew a lot of discussion and much praise.

I doubt Honda will sell that many Insights as a direct result of the ad, but the discussion and positive notices have potentially created brand ambassadors and yield valuable brand insight for Honda. Further, Honda demonstrated a lot of confidence in their product to open themselves up to what is a crowd of video experts, more than willing to critique a major corporation’s marketing campaign. But transparency of this kind has an endearing effect, and with the branding kept to a minimum and the focus on maximizing the medium and channel, the result is largely positive.

OK, so, should I put my videos on Vimeo?

Yes, if you want honest feedback and want your videos presented in the best possible way. (Vimeo was the first online video sharing channel to accommodate HD.) Traffic is going way up, and the use of video on the internet is climbing exponentially. Vimeo sports a devoted audience that craves engaging, original content.

If Vimeo has a shortcoming, it’s in the analytics department. Even the paid Pro accounts offer little metric data beyond views, “likes,” and comments left by other users. However, it looks as though this will soon change as Vimeo has been teasing an enhanced statistics program known as “Project Unicorn” for a few months. I asked Vimeo’s Community Director, Blake Whitman, about Unicorn, but all he’d offer is a cordial, “We are actively working on it now, but it still won’t be out for at least a few months, perhaps more. It’s going to be very encompassing, so we’re taking on time and making sure we do it right. Thanks for your patience, it will be worth it.”

The Takeaway

We are very excited about Vimeo. It’s doing for video production what Flickr did for digital photography: Creating a vibrant, enthusiastic and engaging community around a growing, collaborative platform. I would absolutely encourage individuals and companies producing video to consider creating their own channel on Vimeo. The quality content and rapid growth of the channel, along with a demonstrated commitment to improving the infrastructure (Unicorn), prove that it’s worth considering.

My Question to You

Do you watch marketing content on video-sharing sites? What brands you engage with; which are producing the best content? What qualities do you look for in good online video?

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."