By now you know the drill: broadcast television is switching from analog to digital signals. There are a few ways to keep receiving television of course: if you get cable or satellite nothing will change, but it you’re still using an antenna signal on an older television you’re going to need a DTV converter box. Fortunately you can get a U.S. Government issued coupon that covers most, if not all of the cost of these new set-top boxes before the transition on Friday June 12th, 2009.

While you probably know all about the Digital Televison transition, chances are you have family members or friends who still aren’t ready, even if they’ve already heard. So the Department of Commerce (partnering with the CEA) consulted with myself, as part of a group of American University students, to get the word out to young people so that we could help those we know prepare for the transition. Using a YouTube video contest, our objective was to strategically reach out to this audience so that they would be ready to help others get equipped in time before the transition. With our sights set on the original February 17th transition date, we were ready to use this contest to target these technology-connecting audiences.

Of course creating buzz with a YouTube contest takes more an announcement and a prize; although our partners had produced an original video and sent out press releases, the contest did not gain traction (or stand out from dozens of others competing on YouTube at any time). So my consulting group needed to do a little more: we created a social media presence for the contest on Facebook and used word-of-mouth marketing to engage potential entrants on YouTube.
We even wrote a script and shot a short video (watch above) mock-entry into the contest to show just how easy it could be to make a qualifying entry. These tactics helped to spur 12 contest entries, 5 videos of which were deemed finalists for the public to vote on the winning entry. More importantly the contest created discussions, both online and offline by contest participants and viewers, about the DTV transition within this target audience.

Ultimately it’s hard for any group to take credit among the myriad of messages supporting the switch, but I’d like to think our tactics contributed an outreach to a key public whose unique role might make the difference. Of course we’ll find out for sure on Friday June 12, 2009 just how many American’s television sets will be left in static.

Everyone already knows that putting a video on YouTube might be a good way to get the word out about your campaign. Of course it’s not very easy for yours to stand out, so it’s important to explore the new venues where your message could be seen and heard.

To be sure YouTube is still where it’s at: for most internet users it is the default site to visit when you’re looking for a video, making it the second most popular search engine behind their parent Google. But although YouTube is supported with the largest collection of video in the world, it is not well designed to support productions of high-quality content from the Entertainment industry; their video ubiquity does not equal market dominance in video forever.

Even as YouTube prepares to launch a new video platform for premium content (ie broadcasters and advertising), HULU has begun to establishing itself as a successful haven for broadcast programming and advertising on the internet. In a little over a year HULU has become the #2 video site (behind YouTube of course) with 34 million viewers in February, and is expected to earn at least $120 million in ad revenue for their operating partners – NBC and FOX. And while many platforms for online video have launched in the past few years, HULU is backed with a marketing budget of $50 million from their partners.

Part of their success owes to knowing their own limits: if you search for a show or video that is not part of Hulu.com, you will be returned with search results from other networks and even other websites. At first glance this seems to allow visitors to leave Hulu, but it might be enough for users to return to Hulu.com next time they want to find a video. So while Hulu may never have the video repository that YouTube was able to build, it is positioning itself to be the video site for everybody else.

For the foreseeable future, it still makes sense to put your video on YouTube, where it could be seen by a few million more eyes worldwide, if not for all those other videos you’re competing with. Chances are that even if you make a great video and promote it well, the audience still has to want to watch your video in the first place. This depends on the audience for the video – in some cases it makes more sense to include the video on your Social Networking website, posting using their respective video player. If I had to do the DTV Convert Now video contest over again today, I would have asked members of our Facebook group to upload their own videos there, where all of their friends would see it.

Of course video is changing everyday; just watch the video at the top of this post to see what I mean. 12seconds is akin to Twitter for video, so if you’ve seen video responses on YouTube, you’re already familiar with the concept. And with Video Podcasts, Vlogs, and live streaming changing the uses of video, it shouldn’t be a surprise that video is becoming more like other new media everyday.