The phone rang. It was Toyota digital marketing calling.

It was one of those phone calls that was exciting, scary and life-changing, all at the same time.

Mind you, this was many moons before coronavirus or on demand webinar services like Zoom, GoToMeeting and Google Hangouts existed.

In fact, it was before using live webinars as part of B2B content marketing campaign was popular, because it was still pretty tough technically to pull off.

Back then, live streaming video online was a risky proposition for even the slickest digital marketing consultant.

It was hard enough to get online marketing consultants to agree on what is a webinar, let alone agree on how best to produce webcasts vs webinars.

No Easy Way to Live Stream

Back to the phone call. The internet marketing team at Toyota was concerned.

In the past, they’d always revealed their new models exclusively for the news media at the Detroit Auto Show.

But the economy was in bad shape, and only a third of the press pool had pre registered to attend their press conference. 

At this time, newspapers were canceling their Automotive sections all together.

Automotive advertisers were strapped for cash too, and the mainstream press has already started to feel the impact classified advertising defecting to digital media.

It no longer made sense to give their news exclusively to the mainstream media.

It was time to go direct to consumers with their news, much as the movie studios are doing these days with the movie theaters shut by COVID-19.

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If they wanted to get their news out broadly, Toyota would have to become a media company almost overnight, and they needed help.

Toyota Motors USA wanted to live stream the reveal of the new Prius online. They had no idea how many people would view concurrently. And they wanted my startup to produce the live internet broadcast.

And to make it even tougher, they didn't want it password protected. They wanted anyone to be able to watch the live stream on the internet.

Well it took a small army of engineers and a lot of sleepless nights, but my company did it. We took the live video feed via satellite and encoded and streamed it live to their website in near real time.  

It was the world’s first live stream of an automotive reveal.

Someone posted a link to the stream on Digg, a popular social link sharing service at the time. 

And we saw a huge spike in traffic.

But we managed to keep the stream and their website up, with the help of a team of streaming video specialists working behind the scenes.

The good news is, you don't need a streaming video team anymore. Now you can do it yourself.

Tools like Restream make it possible to simulcast live streaming events to multiple destinations at the same time.

Marketing in Times of Crisis