How To Internet Market: YouTube, Santa, and Canadian Airspace

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!

There are a lot of ways to associate your product with a holiday, and if you can successfully do that, the holiday can drive huge amounts of sales. Examples include Elf on a Shelf, eating KFC on Christmas (in Japan, it’s a widespread tradition to eat KFC fried chicken on Christmas), and the Disney parade on Christmas.

But my favorite example of Internet marketing over Christmas is NORAD Tracks Santa, located at https://www.noradsanta.org/. NORAD stands for North American Aerospace Defense Command – it’s a joint military command between American and Canadian militaries to protect the skies over both countries. Every year, the website above tracks Santa as he goes around the world delivering presents.

Now you may say: wait a minute, NORAD isn’t selling a product or service, this isn’t an example of marketing. Marketing is far more than just selling a product or service; it also includes burnishing a brand, or building greater awareness of an organization. In this case, I’m using marketing in the context of how NORAD uses NORAD Tracks Santa to build greater public awareness of its mission, and to burnish its reputation. That last part – burnishing reputation – can be helpful for government agencies, especially when asking for funding from Congress.

The NORAD Tracks Santa website is really neat – if you look at it Christmas Eve night, you see an animation of Santa flying over a world map (the world map is provided by Microsoft Bing). Here’s an example screenshot:

A screenshot of the NORAD Tracks Santa page on Christmas Eve.

The reason I love NORAD Tracks Santa as a great example of Internet marketing is how it seamlessly blends marketing, education, and the holidays in one package. For instance, look at this video from the NORAD Tracks Santa page:

A screenshot from one of the Santa-tracking videos on NORAD Tracks Santa. The video embedded on the page is hosted by YouTube. Click on the picture to go to the full video.

The YouTube video embedded on the page goes to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR-_novdArc – go ahead and watch it. Pay close attention to what it says and more importantly, what it does not say.

Here’s a transcript of the video’s narrator if you can’t watch the video:

NORAD is receiving reports that Santa’s sleigh is moving north toward Canadian airspace from the Mid-Atlantic. CF-18 Hornets from the Royal Canadian Air Force are escorting Santa through Canadian airspace. As part of Operation Noble Eagle – NORAD’s mission to safeguard North American skies – CF-18s maintain a constant state of alert, ready to respond immediately to potential threats to the homelands. Santa and his reindeer certainly pose no threat but he can rest easy knowing that the NORAD team has the watch ensuring safe travels across North America.

NORAD Tracks Santa, NTS Santa CAM – Canadian Air Force

Consider how well the marketing is done here. There’s a education element at play (explaining Operation Noble Eagle), a marketing element (associating NORAD with the holidays, which is a positive association) and the entertainment element of watching Santa be escorted by fighter jets.

But also consider what is not said in the video and merely implied. The viewer sees the fighter jets smoothly move into an escort position, implying experience and professionalism in regards to the fighter pilots and the NORAD organization as a whole. The viewer sees the fighters soar across mountainous and ice-covered lands, implying the hard and difficult job of the organization.

Let’s try another example – here is a video of NORAD tracking Santa through Massachusetts:

A screenshot of NORAD Tracks Santa. The video is embedded from YouTube and covers how NORAD tracks Santa through the Massachusetts area. Click the picture to see the full video on YouTube. The red dot at the center of the yellow beam is not a tracking target; it’s Rudolph the Reindeer’s lighted red nose.

The above screenshot embeds the following video, which tracks Santa as he passes over the Cape Cod Air Force Station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGchQuqqwd4 . I recommend watching it, but here’s a transcript if you can’t:

NORAD was notified by Air Force Space Command that their PAVE phased-array warning system – early warning radar known as PAVE PAWS at Cape Cod Air Force Station Massachusetts – is tracking Santa on his way from the US to South America. This radar is not only capable of detecting ballistic missile attacks and conducting general Space Surveillance and satellite tracking, but at this time of year the PAVE PAWS station keeps an eye on Santa as he flies over the Atlantic toward the Western Hemisphere.

NTS Santa Cam English Ground Station at Cape Cod

Again, note the educational aspects of the video (what PAVE PAWS stands for and what it does), the marketing aspects of the video (associating NORAD and the Air Force with the holiday season) and the entertainment element of watching Santa.

But again consider what is not said. The video implies professionalism (someone is manning the station at night on a holiday) and security (someone is on the watch for possible threats).

The Takeaway

NORAD Tracks Santa is a masterpiece of marketing done right. Consider adding similar elements to your online marketing strategy, such as a simple game, amusing videos, and educational content discussing your organization’s mission.

RSS: YouTube Channel Feeds

I’ve remarked before about how I love Newsblur as a replacement for Google Reader. But Newsblur can also watch for new YouTube videos via YouTube RSS feeds!

RSS support is not always clearly advertised on YouTube, but it’s simple to access. In NewsBlur, right click a folder and select Add A Site To This Folder:

Newsblur screenshot: add a new site to this folder.

Then just insert the YouTube channel URL, and NewsBlur should load the newest YouTube videos!

Add a New Site option in NewsBlur

This is a quick and easy way for me to monitor a lot of YouTube channels at once.

Copyright Scandal On YouTube Gaming

A minor scandal popped up this morning and has been making the rounds of YouTube’s gaming section. YouTube user Mumbo Jumbo, famous for his Minecraft videos, suddenly had hundreds of his videos claimed by Warner Chappell – in other words, Warner Chappell claimed that the videos used music they owned, and by claiming the videos, they earned a percentage of the profit the videos generated.

Mumbo Jumbo announced his issue on Twitter this morning:
https://twitter.com/ThatMumboJumbo/status/1130009515766755328 .

Screenshot of Mumbo Jumbo's original tweet asking for help from YouTube.

Twitter user Fwiz, the head of YouTube Gaming, replied that he was looking into it:
https://twitter.com/Fwiz/status/1130128085347516417 .

Screenshot of Fwiz's tweet acknowledging they were looking into Mumbo Jumbo's copyright claim issues.

A lot of news media outlets are picking this story up such as HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953532 and I expect we’ll see a lot more news when business opens on Monday.

YouTube Marks Notre Dame Fire As Conspiracy

An interesting story out of Bloomberg: Youtube accidentally marked a livestream on yesterday’s Notre Dame fire as a 9/11 conspiracy.

Bloomberg Twitter post with screenshot of Notre Dame fire.

The article is here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-15/youtube-flags-notre-dame-fire-as-9-11-conspiracy-in-wrong-call – it comments that YouTube’s automated anti-hoax systems mislabeled the video.

It’s an interesting and difficult problem to algorithmically categorize videos – in this case, it’s easy to see how the Google AI fouled up: both 9/11 and Notre Dame fires were in tall buildings, with a cityscape surrounding them – from an AI perspective both look very similar. YouTube is such an important source for fresh news, I almost think that they should have people on 24/7 monitoring popular livestreams.

Bloomberg Global News On YouTube

I love YouTube live streaming for all the interesting information it has. Recently I’ve been watching the Bloomberg Global News channel, located at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp8PhLsUcFE . They keep up a constant stream of business news and information about the economy.

It’s definitely a channel to bookmark if you’re interested in business, or just want some background talk while coding.

Bloomberg News screenshot on YouTube.
Bloomberg News screenshot on YouTube.

YouTube Shortcuts

Youtube has so many shortcuts, it’s easy to forget about them. So there’s an easy way to quickly look up all of the available keyboard shortcuts. First, go to a YouTube page (I love Disney’s YouTube channel):

https://www.youtube.com/disney
Disney's YouTube page

From there, hold down the [Shift] and [?] keys. The following screens should pop up:

Youtube shortcuts, screen 1
Youtube shortcuts, screen 2

Make sure you read through these keyboard commands, they make it easy to quickly review a YouTube video for information – especially instructional videos!

YouTube – Search Found Nothing

As I’ve said before, I love collecting samples of error pages, especially when companies take the extra time to personalize or make the error funny.

Perhaps this isn’t an error per se, but I love the image YouTube pops up when its search function can’t find anything relevant to the query:

no results found on youtube search. image shows a twisted telescope.

Newsworthy And Non-Newsworthy Searches

I stumbled upon this interesting article from The Verge, where YouTube modified its search results by tagging Brie Larson as part of the news: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18255265/brie-larson-youtube-captain-marvel-mcu-algorithm-review-bomb-trolls .

In short, YouTube searches for Brie Larson were initially returning videos about boycotting the movie Captain Marvel. By tagging Larson as a news item, the search results immediately changed to reflect videos from authoritative news services: ABC, CBS, Entertainment Tonight, and so forth. This is a useful function for most people searching, as most users will be looking for late night interviews, news media reports, and so forth.

A search for Brie Larson on YouTube returns videos from news services – note the Top news notice on the top of the image.

As this article demonstrates, search context can be very important. To fully learn about a topic, it’s vitally important to search Google, review the results, then make more searches that are informed by your previous searches. Let’s say you’re a journalist, and want to write about Brie Larson. You’d start out with a general Google and YouTube search about Larson. Then by reviewing the search results (at least the first 2-3 pages of results) you’d learn that there was controversy over Larson playing Captain Marvel. Then you could search for Brie Larson Captain Marvel. Then Brie Larson controversy.

Possibly you might dig a bit deeper and search for Brie Larson boycott. After you’ve exhausted that route, follow other discussion threads: for example, searching for Brie Larson fans, or Captain Marvel box office numbers.

A search for Brie Larson boycott reveals further information for an aspiring journalist. Why is there a boycott? Further Google searching would help.

There are numerous ways that a good journalist could dig up even more information about this issue – for example, why not use Google’s date searching feature to exclude recent news reports and only search earlier postings?

Googling current-news topics can be difficult, as you’ll see many current news items pop up on your results. With intelligent Googling, you can extract useful knowledge about almost anything.

Extracting The Latest Video From YouTube’s Data API

Here’s a simple function demonstrating how to access the YouTube Data API. This code extracts the title and URL of the latest video uploaded by a given user, then records the information to logs.

The title and URL of the video are contained in the variables video_title and video_url . This code snippet pulls the latest video uploaded by the user TEDtalksDirector – this can be changed by editing the url variable.

/**
 * In this method, we'll pull the latest video uploaded 
 * from a specific user.
 * 
 * @throws IOException May be thrown by the low-level URLFetch service.
 */
public void getYouTubeVideo() {
    try {
        //This is the API url for videos uploaded by the user TEDtalksDirector
        URL url = new URL("http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/TEDtalksDirector/uploads?prettyprint=true&v=2&alt=jsonc");
        //Have the URLFetch library grab the contents of the URL.
        HTTPResponse response = URLFetchServiceFactory.getURLFetchService().fetch(url);
        String response_contents = new String(response.getContent());
        //If the response was successful, process the returned JSON.
        //This line goes through the JSON tree to find and retrieve 
        //the JSON object representing the last uploaded video.
        JSONArray video_list = (new JSONObject(response_contents)).getJSONObject("data").getJSONArray("items");
        JSONObject latest_video = video_list.getJSONObject(0);
        //Pull out the video title and url.
        String video_title = latest_video.getString("title");
        String video_url = latest_video.getJSONObject("player").getString("default");
        System.out.println("Latest YouTube Video Title: " + video_title + " URL: " + video_url);
    }//end try 
    catch (IOException e) {
        System.err.println("IOException while retrieving YouTube data: " + e.getMessage());
    }
    catch (JSONException e) {
        System.err.println("JSONException while parsing YouTube response: " + e.getMessage());
    }
}//end getYouTubeVideo()

To use this code, you’ll need to add in the org.json library and import the following packages:

import java.net.URL;
import com.google.appengine.api.urlfetch.HTTPResponse;
import com.google.appengine.api.urlfetch.URLFetchServiceFactory;
import org.json.*;
import java.io.IOException;