Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Video killed the radio store…will the video iPod kill the DVD store?

I took the plunge and bought a video iPod recently. I’ve been playing around with it and thinking about it from a communications perspective. I think that it has amazing potential for companies when it comes to public relations, advertising and word-of-mouth marketing because it combines the online and the offline world. Please note that I used the word potential though.

Basically, I can download content from iTunes that’s relevant to me and show it to my peers. So if I liked the latest 50 Cent or Madonna music video, I could download and then show it to my friends. This is hugely important for two reasons: on-demand media and relevant social networking.

On-demand media - 2006 is going to be the year of on-demand media for me. What I mean by on-demand media is the ability for consumers to select a song, TV show or video game online and download it. Using my previous example, I don’t have to wait to hear 50 Cent or Madonna’s song on the radio or tune into MTV to watch it anymore. I can get them instantly via iTunes. It’s already evident that this will be a popular trend if the success of personalised ringtones is anything to go by. Companies that recognise this and enable their customers to take advantage of it will make big bucks over the coming years.

Relevant social networking - Relevant social networking builds off the success of on-demand media. What I mean by relevant social networking is that what one customer downloads will be exposed to other potential customers in their social circle. As a result of being exposed to it, they in turn may purchase it. Sticking with the ringtone example, I’ve witnessed plenty of people hear a ringtone, ask the owner where they got it and then download it themselves.

The video iPod builds upon this because of the types of content it can store. I love the cinema and a few of my friends enjoy movies also. So if there’s a film I’m really looking forward to, I can download the trailer, put it on my video iPod and then show my friends, thereby increasing their chances of going to this movie. Unfortunately Apple don’t seem to have realised this because you don’t seem to be able to download trailers from the iTunes store easily. Stephen Davies pointed me in the way of Flixpo instead. Ed Byrne tells me that there is a way of dowloading through iTunes, but they really need to improve their interface.

My main gripe with the video iPod is trying to get content for it. It has amazing potential for viral marketing, but I haven’t had much luck downloading virals for it. Just look at the most popular viral doing the rounds on the Internet at the moment, Saturday Night Live’s ‘Lazy Sunday‘. It was made available for free on iTunes, but only people with a US credit card or residents of the States can get their hands on it - no use to me living in Ireland. There is no way of saving videos from YouTube, the service which is most likely to take Flickr’s mantle for sharing videos, so at the moment there’s no real way of getting your hands on a comprehensive library of material.

It’s also complicated putting the existing material you have on your computer onto the iPod. Thankfully Mac users can take advantage of the glorious free ware that is iSquint. This is annoying because it means having to go through an extra couple of hoops to show my friends fan films like Batman: Dead End.

It also has great presentation potential. We film things for presentations sometimes or have pitches on DVD. How cool would it be to present a pitch for a viral effort on an iPod? Programs like Handbrake make that a possibility.

Apple and other companies who hope to take advantage of the marketing potential of the video iPod will have to strive to make content easily accessible and downloadable. As John Wagner recently pointed out, you can’t predict what is going to take off, but you can do a lot to help it spread. Saturday Night Live got it spot on with the ‘Lazy Sunday’ effort. If the video iPod is really going to take off, then a lot of work has to be done on making content available for it and it has to be easily transferable.

This is all pretty amazing from a Public Relations perspective because every organisation in the world is now a part media publisher. They have the ability to create and deliver content to a widespread or specific audience with ease via the Internet.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Buzz Marketing, CGM, Chronicles of Narnia, iPod, John Wagner, Lazy Sunday, Marketing, Piaras Kelly, PR, Public Relations, iSquint, Saturday Night Live, Video Blogging, video iPod, Vlogging, YouTube