Tech Profile: Pixability

What is Pixability, and how did you and your team get started in this field?

Pixability provides solutions that help companies and agencies use YouTube as a powerful marketing and business platform. Emerging from MIT and headquartered in Cambridge, MA, Pixability was founded by Bettina Hein, a seasoned entrepreneur and business strategist, to make online video drive business results by getting the right video in front of the right audience to trigger the right action. Major advancements in video production and advertising were amplified by YouTube, which radically changed how online video could be used.

Bettina assembled a team of top-level players representing all the positions of the online video marketing spectrum: videographers, motion graphics artists, film editors, web developers, Internet specialists and digital marketers. All shared a common passion for customer service and a desire for quantifiable business results.

How should the marketing/advertising industry utilize Pixability to create better end-results for its clients’ video needs?

With its powerful combination of video marketing services and software, Pixability helps organizations use YouTube to achieve dramatic increases in views, social media, click-through rates and web traffic.

What trends and changes in the market led you to realize that Pixability would fill a void? Describe the void.

Three trends helped us fill our void: 1) Video production and editing became democratized because the costs of gear and editing software plummeted; 2) distribution became free with the rise of YouTube; and 3) real video advertising was accessible and economical for the other 97 percent of the market that wasn’t buying television ads.

What are some of the most common mistakes businesses make when venturing into creating video content?

The biggest mistake made by businesses large and small is spending the entire video budget on production and zero on marketing. There’s a lesson from Hollywood: you have to spend on marketing (at least initially) to get people to watch. Another lesson? Keep producing video content that aligns with your digital strategy and get those videos on YouTube and embedded on your website.

Pixability also works with businesses on search engine optimization for videos. What are some of the key factors to consider when optimizing a video for search engines?

Don’t go into Video SEO with a Web SEO mentality. The searches on YouTube are broader, and in many instances, counter-intuitive. That’s why we developed our software as well, because it would take years to comb the digital ecosystem looking for viewing patterns. That’s why both our paid and organic video work is so effective.

Besides views, what video metrics should brands and businesses measure to understand the value of the video content produced and distributed?

Anyone can buy views. Even as a vanity metric, aggregate view count is flawed. It’s important to look at traffic sources for views, which includes important metrics such as related videos, embeds and search. In our opinion though, web traffic is the number one metric. We often have our customers benchmark their web traffic before they begin a YouTube campaign. Why? Because our experience has shown that more video-influenced traffic is indirectly sourced from YouTube to a website, more so than direct clicks from YouTube.

Rob Ciampa is Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Pixability, a YouTube video marketing company based in Cambridge, MA. He is also an award-winning marketer who’s used video to help bring 75 innovative products and services to global markets, generating over $1 billion in sales. Rob co-founded NetEffect and grew it into one of the world's largest specialized systems integration firms. While there, he built the industry’s first in-house video production studio. Rob has a BS in Computer Science and an MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, and an MBA from Boston University, all with honors. He holds two patents in technology management. On a personal note, Rob is the father of two teenage boys who transformed their attic into a video production studio and subsequently built multiple successful YouTube channels with over 8 million views.