PermissionTV Rebrands, Focuses on B2B Marketing

Written by Ryan Lawler

Friday, October 9. 2009 at 11:45 AM EDT 2 comments

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Visible Gains has a new brand name and a new mission -- to provide the technology platform and professional services for marketers looking to use interactive Web video.

The company, which was formerly known as PermissionTV Inc. , is moving away from the increasingly crowded market for providing online video management tools.

Instead of competing directly against companies like Brightcove Inc. and thePlatform Inc. for customers in the media and entertainment sector, Visible Gains sees more of an opportunity in selling higher-value packages of professional services to business-to-business (B2B) marketers.

Visible Gains vice president of marketing Matt Kaplan says the decision came in part because major media companies weren't buying the types of interactive video apps that PermissionTV was selling.

"We had great technology for creating, not just interactive video, but a more personalized experience," Kaplan says. "So rather than focus on a media publishing model, we saw that marketers had an incredible need to create personalized forms of communicaton."

As a result, Visible Gains is extending its business beyond just providing a platform for publishing interactive Web video, but also providing professional services to help marketers reach desired audiences and measure the effectiveness of their B2B campaigns.

"B2B marketing is going though a huge change right now," Kaplan says. "Buyers are better informed than in the past, and they do most of their research before engaging with vendors... This whole shift is occuring between the push model and pull model."

Not only does the company see a wide-open field in the market for providing these types of services, but it sees a market that will grow substantially over the next several years, as marketers embrace more and more interactive video.

"If you fast forward three years from now, I think it's safe to say every B2B company's site will be more and more video based," Kaplan says. "In three to five years' time, every company will have video."

While Visible Gains has made a shift in its target market, it says it will continue to support existing customers that just use the company's technology for managing their video assets. Even so, it will be interesting to see how long those customers stick around, now that they're no longer in the company's "sweet spot."