Commentary: Eyes on the Enterprise—Can't Start a Fire...

You’re not going to do that by plastering brand-building snippets of 15- and 30-second promotional spots in-between YouTube clips. A better alternative is developing worthwhile informational content related to your product and/or industry sector that encourages would-be customers provide their registration information in exchange for access to a company’s online multimedia presentation. Think of it as the multimedia equivalent to the time-honored B2B marketing tradition of publishing and distributing white papers to a targeted audience willing to share their contact information.

Recognizing the proper venue for implementing online multimedia marketing is only half the battle, however. Once executives are sold on the idea of using web audio and video to reach out to a relevant set of registered users, the challenge is finding the budget to apply to these emerging forms of marketing. Indeed, the top barrier to the implementation of online multimedia marketing programs is that the "budget is not allocated" by companies for such activities.

Of those surveyed by IMS, 27% cited budgetary restrictions as the top impediment to deploying online multimedia marketing events. Budget issues were cited almost twice as often as the factors "ROI not proven" and "Can’t reach target audience," which were both cited by 14% of IMS survey respondents as the top barrier to online multimedia marketing.

In short, don’t bet the farm that marketing revenues are going to roll into the online multimedia sector over the short term. Generally speaking, marketers don’t see the web as a venue for the brand building that’s so successfully delivered via television-style commercials. And they have yet to recognize the ways that online audio and video can be leveraged to drive sales leads.

Never mind that video is the most powerful venue for communicating a message. Forget that the web is the world’s most flexible platform for delivering a message to a target audience.

At some point, savvy corporate marketers will connect the dots and recognize the potential for marrying web video with targeted multimedia marketing messages. The technology is in place to spark a marketing revolution. Now, let’s go find some marketers willing to light the match.