Interesting moments for custom activities

[Dan_Stevens_]

We've created a custom activity in Marketo so that we can track video views (Brightcove integration).  The following constraints are available when applying this trigger:

We've defined the IM flow step as follows:

But all that gives us is "Watched video: Brightcove Video View".  Can we pull in any of the custom attributes (or even the web page that the video was served from) within the IM details?

[Justin_Norris1]

Dan Stevens​

From memory when I tested this, none of the other trigger tokens work for custom activities. It's a real shame. Test again to be sure but I am 95% positive.

[Dan_Stevens_]

You're right.  I just tried it with {{trigger.Video Name}} and received this:

[Dan_Stevens_]

An idea has been created to support this capability:

[Dave_Cunningham]

Thanks Dan. I've gone ahead and voted that one up.

I'm curious, what has your experience been like with the Brightcove integration? There are surprisingly not too many posts on the topic here. I'm wondering if it is a good/reliable integration overall? On the surface it looks good and I'd love to get the video play data into Marketo, but we are always running into sync issues with Launchpoint partners (e.g., WebEx).

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Dave - it's been working well for the most part.  We did have a period of a few months where no data was being tracked in Marketo as a result of some code changes on the BC side (without them telling us what they had done).  Also, since this only works with KNOWN users on our site, the percentage of users where this insight exists is quite small compared to a overall video engagement.

Here's the information that gets passed to Marketo each time there's known activity:

Which allows us to have threshold-based lead scoring for videos:

[SanfordWhiteman]

Also, since this only works with KNOWN users on our site, the percentage of users where this insight exists is quite small compared to a overall video engagement.

There seem to be a few distinct gaps with this integration (and why I always use Munchkin for video logging instead).  Have you tested to see if, with Unknown Viewers also selected, once-anonymous activities are successfully flushed to Marketo after the session is associated?

[Dan_Stevens_]

We use the REST API for the integration - alongside the Audience module.  And yes, prior anonymous video views do get pulled into known activity records when the user becomes known.

Integrating Video Cloud with Marketo Using the REST APIs | Brightcove Learning

[Dave_Cunningham]

Thanks Dan. Nice to hear that you feel it's working well for the most part. We are going to give it a go ourselves. I try to do as much homework as possible before enabling any of the Launchpoint integrations. They all sound amazing on paper, but the devil is in the details!