Direct Marketing Giant, Time Life, Taps Internet Video To Expand Promotional Distribution & Reach New Consumers

Since the 1960s, Time Life has built an empire through direct sales of magazines, books, music, videos and DVDs. Time Life has pioneered many of the direct response tactics that have become the bread and butter of many of today's mass marketing campaigns -- e.g., direct mail, mail-order catalogs, infomercials.

Today, Time Life announced a partnership with Brightcove to launch a multi-pronged Internet video initiative to expand the distribution of promotional campaigns and reach a younger cohort of consumers -- a market segment that has become accustomed to accessing Internet video and sharing the content through social networks.

Much of Time Life's enormous video catalog includes television programming from the '60s, '70s and '80s. Up the this point, Time Life has repacked this content into DVD boxed sets and used traditional direct marketing to drive sales. With the new Internet video initiative, Time Life will use content to sell content - distributing special unreleased footage, interviews and outtakes to fans, website affiliates and video search sites.

The first campaign launched by Time Life with Brightcove is a holiday promotion for the DVD boxed set of the Mel Brooks-Buck Henry classic television spy spoof, "Get Smart." Time Life is betting that the videos will strike a cord with a new generation of fans through Internet video and social sharing sites, like MySpace.

Time Life has also established affiliate relationships top tier online properties, such as Viacom's TV Land. Here they have established an entire channel of promotional content for "Get Smart with calls to action to drive traffic back to the Time Life micro-site to drive DVD sales.

Time Life's strategy reflects a broader trend in marketing where high-consideration products and services will increasingly leverage the syndication of video content across online communities to drive purchasing behavior.

See also "TV Needs Affiliate Distribution" from Marketing Shift, and "Time Life Taps Video Long Tail for DVD Sets" from Adweek.

(Disclaimer: I work with the Brightcove marketing department.)