Problem

Clients were looking for a way to identify target markets for products they wanted to introduce to market and then advertise directly to potential buyers while staying with specific budgets.

Solution

A suite of internal and client facing tools geared towards professional management and execution of channels for professional content creators.

Major Features

• Channel Tools →The goal of the channel tools is to automate and enhance the management of professional YouTube channels. Change the look and content of a YouTube channel based on a day’s programming.
  • Banner Vault → Allows user to experience a banner as it could be displayed on a desktop, mobile device or TV.
  • Section Manager → Allows user to create custom sections for display on YouTube
  • Programmer → Allows users to create and schedule recurring programs for future usage
• Analytics → Provides users with deep insights on channel and content performance on YouTube.
  • Rollup Analytics
  • Video Analytics
  • Monetization Information
  • Audience Data
• Video Tools → The suite of tools within Video Tools allows a channel owner to manage the creation and upload of videos to their channel
  • Single Uploader → Allows users to both upload videos on YouTube and create a post-roll
  • Asset Manager → Management of asset by both internal channel managers and external clients
  • P2 Request → Request batches of videos be rendered with P2 to receive the postroll treatment
• Channel Alerts → Provides channel owners additional insights into their channel, fans, and other metrics which may not be covered in the Channel ID Analytics dashboard.
• P2 → Manages the postroll creation, YouTube upload, and adding annotations to make the postroll clickable. It can upload batches of several videos at a time.

Results

Prior to development, the Beta period was projected to contain 12 clients (due to the, at that time,  largely manual process) and were not expected to pay for their 3 month trial of the tool. After development, it was realized that given the automation of several of the manual processes, channel managers could now support 25 users on the tool, as we had reduced the necessary time for channel setup and ongoing channel optimization by 75%. Given the new toolset, ZEFR was able to charge beta clients which brought in $250,000.

Delivered under budget and ahead of schedule, allowing ZEFR meet the time to market the new tool in Cannes for MIPCOM as well as use the money initially budgeted for development  to pay for the trip expenses.