Marketing Logic

Video – Annoyingly Powerful

20 April 2012 / Marketing Technology, Marketing Trends / Jonathan Levy

Ping!

The email notification pops up.

From: Ben, an old colleague

Subject: Thought this was funny

It’s photos of ridiculous spelling mistakes on a series of road signs. Pretty good. So I click ‘forward,’ send it on to a few others, then get back to my spreadsheet. And another cup of tea.

Ping!

Again.

From: Rachel, my sister

Subject: Hilarious! You’ve GOT to watch this!!!!!!!

This one’s a link to a video on YouTube. Something about gymnasts falling over. Sounds promising, but it’s two minutes long! And I don’t have my headphones plugged in right now either. What a faff. Probably best not to be seen watching videos in the office anyway. I’ll leave it for later.

It’s the same for the more important and work related emails I get. Send me a chart, an infographic or a link to a blog post about your product and I’ll happily take a quick look. But videos are just inconvenient!

Is it just me? I often find videos annoying. A short article, a photo… They’ll probably get my attention for at least a short amount of time because it’s easy to briefly cast your eye over it, to decide whether you want to go into detail or not. But a video? It would have to catch me at the right moment for me to spend time in the middle of the day watching it through.

This is what’s going through my mind:

• Does it have sound? I’ll have to either annoy everyone else in the office, or dig out my headphones. And even then, the others might assume I’m just on YouTube!
• Anything longer than one minute and I start to feel like it’s taking up far too much time
• And don’t even get me started on the introductions. Long, lingering shots of logos and shiny animations before we get into the meat. Even then I’ll probably still have to sit through a another minute of someone introducing the topic, the company etc.

I’m not going to apologise if this sounds like a rant. It’s meant to be!

At my last company, our CEO stopped our quarterly meetings and started to issue his quarterly updates as webcasts. It was compulsory viewing and we knew that access was being tracked. So most of us opened up the 30 minute video, minimized the window, muted the sound and let it run. He’d sent slides out with the main points anyway – a two-minute flick through told us all the main points we needed to know.

Video gets into our heads and makes us do things we otherwise wouldn’t.

Sure, we all have time for those funny YouTube videos – which is why YouTube is consistently the 3^rd most viewed website in the world (after only Google and Facebook). And I absolutely appreciate how a well-made video demo of a new piece of software can cut out hours of searching through help files. Videos do undoubtedly have their place.

But, I have to deliberately make the time for it. Why is it that I spend more time watching TV than reading books, but when it comes to work, more often than not I’d choose the images or text over a time consuming video?

Does my ranting ring any bells? Or am I just behind the times?

The facts certainly say that I am:

• On March 5^th of this year, a 30 minute campaigning video was posted on Youtube – Kony 2012. Just one week later, along with copies of the video posted elsewhere, it had amassed over 100 million views. That’s roughly once for every woman in the entire USA. In a week!
• According to a study by Forrester, retailers adding video to their websites makes them six times more likely to convert a “browser” into a paying customer.
• And according to this article, research has shown a 23% uplift in consumers purchasing a brand when exposed to online video ads compared to those who were not exposed.

Video goes viral.

Video is effective.

Video gets into our heads and makes us do things we otherwise wouldn’t.

I must have been missing something. I’m either miles apart from the majority of the world’s online population, or there’s something else going on here.

Perhaps it’s that when you watch a video, you’re trapped. You have to watch it through. I can scan a document and decide not to take the time to read the whole thing. I can jump between pages on a website and only really concentrate on small sections when it takes my fancy.

But with a video it makes less sense to skip around. A 10 second clip selected at random from a 2 minute video is unlikely to give you much feel for the content. Videos tell a story, from beginning to end. If a video manages to keep your attention throughout, it will have taken you on a journey, arriving at wherever it is the creators wanted to take you to.

Brands need to find ways to start managing and sharing video better amongst their marketers globally

Conversely, when I’m flicking around a standard website, I’m not following any particular story. Or when I’m dipping into a sales brochure, I’m not being taken on any meaningful journey.

This next stat (from a previous Forrester study) sort of sums it up for me: only 16% of online shoppers say they watch videos on retailers’ web sites, but of those who do watch videos, 64% say they find them very useful.

So the lesson for marketers has to be about finding ways to make their videos more attractive and accessible.

Because videos work. Staggeringly well.

Embrace online video and make it work for you rather than miss out on an incredibly powerful medium.

If you watch a video about a charity, you’d be more likely to donate than if they’d just sent you a leaflet. If a technology supplier can find a way to get me to watch their video, it’s more than likely that I’ll talk about it with colleagues and send it on to them. It’s just a case of making videos attention-grabbing and convenient.

In the past year we’ve noticed a huge increase in the number of clients who are asking us about online video. It’s being used more and more in their day-to-day marketing, so they need to find ways to start managing and sharing video better amongst their marketers globally.

What we tell them is the same – it needs to be convenient.

Find a Digital Asset Management system that is built with video at its core, not just as an add-on. Make sure that users can preview videos straight away without having to download them first. If you need to, integrate with a Content Delivery Network to boost your network speeds and avoid long pauses for buffering.

Because as I’m learning, you just start to sound like a moaning relic if you complain about video. Instead, you need to embrace it and make it work for you rather than miss out on an incredibly powerful medium.