DECA

Momversation — the vlogging site that regularly features bloggers Alice Bradley, Rebecca Woolf, Asha Dornfest, Heather Armstrong, Daphne Brogden, Giyen Kim, Maggie Mason, Dana Loesch, Mindy Roberts and Jessica Gottlieb — just launched its newest foray into video: Her Story.

By supplying content in a robust, visual manner through video, you can engage audiences on a whole new level. Momversation does this very well through a network of online influencers who contribute videos on topics of interest to moms, ranging from sick days to learning disabilities, to how to keep your kids healthy. The videos provide additional exposure for the influencers involved, and another forum for ad-based revenue.

For marketers, this is a reminder that today’s video goes beyond the traditional 30-second spot. Production quality can vary, length of time can vary, and even tone can be modified, but as with social media, the voice and the content should be authentic and genuine.

Over at the Momversation this week, Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com is leading a candid talk about depression. She has been extremely open over the years about the postpartum emotional crash that led her to a psychiatric hospital. Her fellow bloggers on the video — Alice Bradley, of finslippy.com, Mindy Roberts of themommyblog.net and Danny Evans of DadGoneMad.com — have been somewhat less public about their suffering, and their conversation about what Bradley calls “being filled with crushing despair” is a moving one.

How do you craft a video conversation among four out of 10 extremely opinionated women, all of whom live in different area codes? That’s the challenge Rob Morhaim faces every week as the executive producer of DECA’s Momversation, which distills the mommy blogger phenomenon into a thrice-weekly, 5-minute-long series.

But after more than 100 episodes, Morhaim has it down to a science.

Senator Gillibrand and Momversation were featured on the evening news program of the Rochester, NY CBS affiliate.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is using the topic of health care reform to reach out to a group she views as part of her core constituency: Fellow moms.

Unlike her old House colleagues, who are getting smacked around by constituents at health care town halls all over the country - including New York - Gillibrand eschewed a physical meeting in favor of a “virtual” discussion with a friendly audience on the Web site “Momversation,” a blog run by and for mothers.

Ms. Gillibrand is participating in a new video and blogging site, Momversation.com, where mothers discuss various topics (“Is it right to discipline someone else’s child?”). Questions are now being taped on the subject of “Why moms should care about health care reform.”

Ms. Gillibrand has made an introductory video, in which she talks about children’s health issues, especially childhood obesity and her goal of banning trans fats from food served in schools.

In one of the video responses, one woman says that while banning trans fats may be important, she wanted to hear more about how Ms. Gillibrand would fix the health care system. Ms. Gillibrand responded in generalities about ensuring that everyone had affordable, quality health care.

Still, discipline is the key to success. That was my takeaway from a conversation I had yesterday with Michael Wayne, co-founder and CEO of DECA, an online-only entertainment company whose properties include Smosh, Momversation, Good Bite and others. Michael notes DECA’s success stems from being very analytical about which projects to greenlight. Key success criteria include how large the targeted audience is, how engaged they are (measured by things like blogging, Twittering, commenting), whether other media properties have succeeded with the audience and if there’s demonstrated advertiser interest.

Importantly, DECA looks hard for pre-existing online communities or “tribes” along with “tribal leaders” as Michael puts it - people who have emerged from the online rabble to become recognized leading voices in their vertical space. DECA tries to partner with these tribal leaders to build properties that have video at their core, but capitalize on all the publishing and interactive capabilities the web has to offer. Michael notes the need for all of this to be done on very lean, non-Hollywood budgets.

Momversation hit the vaunted 100th episode marker this week, and the A-list mommyblogger show continues to draw audiences not just as viewers but as active participants. Santa Monica-based DECA, the digital studio that created the web series, says this frequent community chatter was by design.

Shortly after it launched back last November, DECA was able to land retailer Target as an exclusive sponsor for the property, convincing them that their remote assembling of mommybloggers would bring together quite the audience of wired 25-45 year-old moms.

DECA, an acronym for Digital Entertainment Corp. of America, is exploring several ways to produce Web series in unusually marketer-centric ways. It seeks extended sponsorships—generally three months or longer, the prices for which start in the six figures—for specific properties. Rather than attempting to import to the Web the scripted series model birthed by television, DECA capitalizes on existing bloggers’ popularity to build properties that feature established online personalities and are aimed at specific demographic slices. It also enlists its talent to make and star in commercials for its advertisers. If this works, DECA will have found a way to fund online video—having a long-term sponsor or two significantly reduces the pressure to sell lots of ads—and bring chary advertisers into a new media realm.