BTV – Business Television, currently in its 14th year on air, with its format of profiling publicly-traded companies pitched at an audience of investors and potential investors has spun off a whole new brand.

The brand, CEO clips (www.ceoclips.com) leverages B-TV’s  reputation, presence in business circles and its enviable library of past reports to provide access  to top management that investors could only dream of otherwise.

But then, providing investors with close-up access has long been B-TV’s stock in trade. Founder, CEO and Executive Producer Taylor Thoen says the program, which provides the entrée and much of the material for the CEO Clips site, is all about giving investors a close up view.

“Essentially, we take investors there: we go on location so consequently we’ve been to dozens of countries filming mine sites, biotech facilities and oil rigs in faraway places like Iraq and Korea and Nunavut up in the north. We take investors there because really our premise is ‘get to know the company before you invest’. We provide our viewers with a snapshot of who these companies are, what they do and where they’re located.”

“It’s done through key executive interviews explaining who they are, where they’re going, what they’re doing. It’s really a profile of a company and we present it to our viewers who are largely investors. We’re broadcast on BNN National in Canada and on Fox Business News in the US.”

And the CEO Clips brand is a natural outgrowth of this approach, making use as it does of B-TV’s focus on informing investors and its stockpile of film clips.

“Essentially, in a 90 second video an investor gets to meet the CEO. We’ve done hundreds and hundreds of these and they’re all professionally produced in HD TV standard quality. Our content is also on a whole host of financial portals including MSN Money, Thomson Reuters Insider Network and Stockhouse.com to name a few.”

Thoen points to the value of this kind of contact with senior management to the potential investor.

“One of the top three reasons an investor invests in any company is management, our slogan is “Meet the CEO before you invest”. In 90 seconds you can do that – we built a video gallery on our site that houses all this content and we also release it to the companies for their own site and marketing uses.

Thoen cites the fact that YouTube is one of the Internet’s most visited websites as proof of the appeal of online video.

“If people don’t think that investors are investigating companies on YouTube, which is video, then they’re misinformed.”

Certainly, Thoen says, the use of online video “is no longer the wave of the future. It’s a current effective tool, being utilized by more than 80 per cent of the global marketing community. Video is more engaging than any other form of communication and appeals to more of the senses. It provides an opportunity to build trust.”

According to the Economist.com, companies will begin to say goodbye to the written word, with the message being that the basic unit of communication will no longer be typed out in e-mails. It will be shot in pictures and shown on video. Welcome to the future.