I've been trying the create a newsletter to let people know about the latest/best videos added to our site. Ideally, I would like to do this by feeding a BOTR RSS playlist into something like MailChimp and then pull the video titles/link/descriptions/thumbnails from the RSS feed into the newsletter. That way, subscribers would get a weekly/monthly email with whatever videos I put into the playlist via the dashboard. I just want to put the video title, description, link, and thumbnail. Pulling the text elements is working fine but it's been impossible to get the thumbnail into the newsletter. The <media:thumbnail> element seems to be buried too deep in the RSS file for MailChimp to pick it up.
Has anyone tried doing anything like this before? Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
The <media:thumbnail> property is how things should be done according to the MRSS spec. Given that MRSS has been designed for distributing video files (for example to iTunes), it isn't very surprising that things don't fully work with MailChimp.
It might be best to use our system API to render out a custom RSS feed that matches MailChimps requirements, but this might be a more technical than you're comfortable with.