Riding the corporate stream

Over the last decade, Joan Dollard-Spooner has seen her job at Ernst & Young go through a dramatic evolution. Ten years ago as a video producer, she was responsible for producing videotapes for corporate training and communication. After several years of that, she moved into the company's professional and organizational department to produce training programs that were broadcast live via satellite. Today, she's into streaming.

For the past year and a half, Ernst & Young's Global Assurance and AABS Infrastructure group has been producing monthly webcasts on the company website aimed at clients and target accounts. These hour-long “Thought Center Webcasts” are live productions designed to showcase E&Y's leadership on current topics while raising awareness of the company's services and capabilities. Since the project's inception in October 2000, the webcasts have attracted 20,000 viewers, 60% of whom come from outside the company.

As an assistant director for E&Y, Dollard-Spooner is playing a critical role in the company's pioneering forays into corporate streaming.

VS: You started out as a video producer for the company, right?

Dollard-Spooner: Yes. I was responsible for communications on videotape. Most of the tapes were training- or communication-based. For example, from the time you join Ernst & Young, there is a whole series of orientation tapes about the firm. And if HR had a new program it wanted to release, like the Benefits Express program, we'd do a video about that. We also did a lot of tapes about new E&Y services or capabilities.

VS: After five years of that you moved on to something new?

Dollard-Spooner: I had the opportunity to move into E&Y's professional and organizational development group [responsible for training], which at the time was part of Ernst & Young, but which eventually was spun off as a separate company called Intellinex. I was responsible for producing live satellite programs. That came to me because the company was really trying to cut back on their travel expenses. So we were hitting really large groups across the U.S. using satellite, and we did a lot of training events.

VS: How were the training programs different from what you'd put on tape?

Dollard-Spooner: Besides the fact that they were live, they were longer than traditional videotape communication and were interactive. It's interesting, when I started with E&Y, people wanted to do tapes that were a half-hour or 45 minutes in length. But gradually the tapes got shorter and shorter because of the need to hold people's attention. Eventually, the requests were for tapes 10 to 15 minutes in length. In contrast, the satellite programs were three- and four-hour events.

VS: Did these replace tapes?

Dollard-Spooner: No, I don't think so. If they replaced anything, they replaced many of the big, area meetings. In fact, we used a lot of tapes as part of the satellite programs. We would go out and interview some partners who the audience would want to hear from but who didn't need to participate in the whole satellite event but needed to deliver a five-minute message.

VS: How long did you do this?

Dollard-Spooner: About four years. And it was during this period that my boss, Bob Dean, who was very much a visionary, started looking at various webconferencing tools. We started out with a tool called NetPodium, which is now owned by Akamai. [NetPodium] had the ability to stream slides and do audience polling, stuff that is typical of that kind of tool today. And it took off. It was just incredible. It was used primarily to communicate important messages from upper management to large, geographically dispersed groups. It helped reduce the need for travel.

After that, we started playing in the streaming video area. We did some pilot projects, but we had a lot of trouble with the E&Y infrastructure.

VS: How so?

Dollard-Spooner: Streaming video takes up tons of bandwidth, and we quickly realized that until the company became multicast-enabled, this was going to have to go on the back burner. So we continued to work with the tech support team to encourage them to make the network multicast-enabled and we spent a lot of time trying to make a business case for doing that. Finally, about one and a half years ago, the network was up and operational.

VS: And that's about the time you got into streaming full-time?

Dollard-Spooner: Yes. The National Global Assurance Group wanted to use streaming audio and video to take E&Y's Thought Leadership to external clients and targets. This was driven by Frank Gori, the head of Global Assurance and AABS Infrastructure Group, who felt it was the only medium capable of doing this and that we could do it fairly inexpensively and still see a return on our investment.

VS: Are these Thought Center webcasts live events?

Dollard-Spooner: Yes. And then they are archived for on-demand access. They are panel discussions in a kind of Meet the Press format. They are an hour long, and we have a moderator managing the discussion. We usually have two people from E&Y, and then we encourage people to bring in a third party. For instance, for the program I'm working on right now, which is about buying and selling a business in an economic downturn, we have two people from E&Y and a lawyer from an outside firm, which is great because the audience gets a different perspective.

VS: As assistant director, do you have to line up the panelists?

Dollard-Spooner: Yes, that's my biggest challenge. Part of my responsibilities, along with my colleagues, includes identifying the hot topics in the market, finding the presenters, and then working with presenters in a design meeting. We basically get in a room together and develop a series of slides and talking points and come up with some of the questions the moderator can ask.

VS: Do you advertise the webcasts?

Dollard-Spooner: Not in the traditional sense. In fact, there were two big challenges in getting this thing off the ground. The first was the infrastructure problems. The second was the marketing. The infrastructure we've got figured out. But the marketing of these things is an ongoing challenge. We are fortunate to have a full-time marketing person on staff. In conjunction with www.ey.com, we've tried full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal. We've tried banner ads on the Internet. Believe it or not, the thing that pulls the most for us is just plain email marketing. That's where we've had our most success — and word of mouth.

VS: What did it take to make this transition from video producer to streaming expert?

Dollard-Spooner: From a production standpoint, that hasn't changed that much. You just need to keep things simple. Use plain backgrounds, don't use lots of movement, that kind of thing. Until broadband is more prevalent, simpler is better.

I think the adjustment really comes in understanding networks, understanding the infrastructure issues, and then really understanding everything else that's important. The video is just one piece of it.

For example, when you develop the front page, and the skin, and the registration area for your webcast, those need to be easy to use. And once someone gets into a webcast, if they get in trouble, you need to be sure to have a good ‘Help’ capability. We spent a lot of time and money making sure our Help line was up to snuff. We actually have somebody on the phone taking calls and walking people through the process. Using email doesn't work. If you send in an email saying you're having trouble, by the time someone gets back to you the session is over.

You also need to consider ways to make the content interactive for the audience. Can you poll them during the program? Can you have them launch an HTML page and find a specific piece of content to follow along? Or can you use a chat or Q&A feature to ask for their thoughts on a particular subject.

Finally, there's the reporting. People want to know who's been there, who's watching, and how much they are watching. So, for video producers, we kind of have to step into areas we are not really familiar with, but they are not areas that are that difficult to get your arms around.

Stephen Porter is online editor for Video Systems.