EUTUBE – what can be done better?
November 29, 2010
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Why don’t we start our own channel on YouTube? That question was asked just before the summer 2006 in a weekly meeting of the people working with communication tools: the audiovisual people, the internet service, those dealing with print and the promotion team.
Nobody had a good argument why we shouldn’t. So we just did it. Technically it is not so difficult to set up your own channel. The key issue is CONTENT. What do we put there?
Do we have material that will pass the test of the critical and impatient eye of the youtube audience?
We started out by copy-pasting clips from the audio-visual library into EUTUBE. The big bang came when the UK tabloids found a clip promoting the MEDIA support programme of the Commission. This clip was a compilation of love scenes of European film productions. This clip was shown in movie theatres and had been on YouTube for quite some time.
“European Commission promotes porn”. It was the best publicity we could get for EUTUBE. And it didn’t cost us a penny.
Since then hundreds of clips have been put on EUTUBE. Some better than others, but always with the intention to show EU policy in a different and attractive way. Not at all an easy task. Often the consultants make typical bureaucratic clips and don’t come up with super creative ideas. Often people in the Commission are too prudent to approve a more daring concept. There are of course the exceptions.
Now we are at a point to evaluate what we have done, and what we could do better. We have a biased view. So we, we need your expert eye. It would mean a lot to us if you could give short reply to the following 2 questions:
1. We are trying to go for clips with viral potential and a high infotainment level. Is this the way to go? Or do we need to put interviews and speeches of Commissioners? In other words: What would you like to see on EUTUBE?
2. We closed the comments function on the channel. We spent so much time just cleaning up the comments. How can we ensure to have meaningful discussion there in stead of a basic pro vs. contra the EU row? Do we need the comments at all? Can we have the discussion on another platform? On Facebook or so?
You will understand that we cannot have a debate about this for months. We will take all comments into account that reach us before 9/12/2010. Give us then a week or so to put this in some sort of report. Note, that we are still an administration and that not all comments can be put into reality, no matter how good they are.
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December 21st, 2010 at 9:57 am
I see that I am late with my comments, but here goes, anyway:
As a platform for audiovisual content, EUTube (or YouTube) is marginally closer than the Audiovisual Service on Europa to the places that citizens really spend their time online. But it is still only a platform, and offers no guarantee that ordinary people will actually find any of the content published there. As a rule of thumb, you should think about spending as much on seeding and syndication as you spend on audiovisual production.
No video is worth making at all unless it delivers real value to some defined audience. The value can be of different kinds – information, entertainment, etc. But if it is neither interesting nor entertaining, why would I watch to the end, click through, or share with colleagues or friends?
There can be as many different kinds of audiovisual content as of written content, but would-be ‘viral’ clips are starting to look as wasteful as the dreadful ‘corporate presentations’ of a few years ago. Why is there so little documentary style content, and why so little in-depth explanation? We should use audiovisual for the type of content it is best suited to – story-telling and ’show and tell’.
Last, any audiovisual project should incorporate a built-in impact assessment mechanism, linked to the original communication objectives. What was the total project cost per view-to-end, per share, and per click-through? Establish benchmarks, internally name and shame underperformers, and compare with other media/channels.
April 27th, 2011 at 9:24 pm
Totally agree with Simon – the vast majority of EU videos I’ve seen are absolutely dire!
These are actually worse than useless: they don’t serve any useful purpose, yet do project a message of an Institution that wastes money trying and failing to make videos and appear hip.
And this is a tragedy, because audiovisual content (not necessarily video) can be an incredibly useful tool … for the right audience, in the right context, with the right approach.