How To Create Online Video That Works
With the recent explosion and expansion of online video, the biggest question is how to best drive viewer action and monetize this new medium. Online video has a lot of promise. It offers what was once limited to expensive TV advertising: reach and emotional engagement with potential customers. And, it’s relatively cheap and provides immediate, measurable feedback.
Even with these strong benefits, most agree that the video opportunity has yet to be fully realized. Companies struggle to best make use of this new medium, and have found that porting television-style advertising to the Web is regularly rejected by the online audience. Thirty-second pre-roll, crazy user-generated ads, and the hunt for viral ads are all a hangover from the old TV world, still hunting for mass appeal without satisfying the demand for relevance of today’s online world.
It’s important to recognize that the Internet and television deliver two completely different video experiences. Television is “lean back” where people engage with the content in front of them when they want to. The Internet is “lean forward,” where people are actively controlling their experience. With users in control businesses must deliver information in a way that engages them when they finally say “OK, talk to me.” Here are six steps to creating online video that works:
1) Make it Authentic
Customers are jaded by typical sales-pitches. When everything is available at the click of a mouse, having a good product is no longer enough.
Creating authentic video that captures the human element allows customers to connect on a personal level. This connection builds trust and drives action.
2) Make it Relevant
With customers in control, irrelevant video is at best ignored and at worst creates a negative impression when viewers feel their time is wasted. Video that works shares compelling stories that resonate with the audience. No gimmicks, no ploys. Respect viewers’ time and provide them with actionable content.
3) Make it Engaging
Good information is no longer enough. With thousands of sites providing similar services, your online video has to stand out from the competition. Entertainment goes hand-in-hand with engagement. Video must deliver content in a format that interests and excites users.
4) Make it Google-Friendly
The advent of Universal Search has changed the search game. Engines now return more and more videos, blogs, news articles, books and more in their results. The new algorithms weigh video heavily, increasing your relevance in search results. Good meta-data, file naming, architecture, and distribution on sites like YouTube all help.
5) Make an Action Path
Our internal research has shown that adding video to a site can drive 36% more clicks, 20% more inbound calls, and more than double time on site. A recent Kelsey Group study found 55% of people who view a video visit the company’s Web site; 30% visit a physical store; and 24% make a purchase as a result of watching.
Viewers only do this if there’s a reason to do so. Provide a call to action, a trackable URL to visit, a coupon, discount code, or unique phone number to call. This way your video can be evaluated against other marketing efforts.
6) Make it Shareable
YouTube taught everyone that video is portable and starts conversations between friends. Videos that don’t meet this new expectation limit their own effectiveness. Sharing is an easy action that viewers can take to promote your business. By enabling conversations to spread you’re giving yourself an easy opportunity to gain viewership.
To promote sharing make sure your video can be embedded, emailed and posted to the different social media sites. (Most video players, like YouTube, Viddler and Blip.tv automatically include those options – so take advantage of them!)
All in All: Make it Happen
Making online video that drives action requires us to understand how the Web makes the video viewing experience different from TV. It’s an environment with infinite choice and limited attention spans with all of the control in the hands of the user. Once this lean forward dynamic is understood and accounted for, making actionable video becomes much easier. It’s the falling back on our collective TV-watching experience as the model for Internet video that stymies action and hurts the success of the video.
All businesses, from the pizza place in Brooklyn to a top retail chain, can leverage this new video consumption to grow their revenue. By focusing on authenticity, and providing a clear, measurable action path, video can become a valuable component of any online marketing effort.
Read MoreCES 2009 Targets Internet-TV Connectivity
One of the greatest challenges for online video has been a strong consumer preference for viewing video on the TV. 2009 International CES is turning into a showcase for companies trying to bridge this gap. Every device platform in the home is now being turned into a channel for transferring Internet video content to the TV.
- Gaming consoles: Nintendo is planning a dedicated Internet video service for its Wii platform in partnership with Japanese ad agency Dentsu Inc., while Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) had already launched a service with Netflix Inc. in November 2008 to distribute videos to its Xbox LIVE console. Steve Ballmer also reiterated Microsoft’s multiscreen video strategy during his CES keynote.
- TV sets: LG Electronics Inc. (London: LGLD; Korea: 6657.KS) has announced that it will launch a range of broadband-enabled HDTVs that will stream movies, TV shows, and other HD videos from Netflix. Adobe Systems Inc. has struck deals with Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), Broadcom Corp. (Nasdaq: BRCM), and Sigma to embed its Flash Lite video format in their chips. This will make Flash available in a range of digital TVs and set-top boxes.
- Blu-ray players and other set-top boxes: LG launched its first network-connected Blu-ray player offering 12,000 videos from Netflix and 14,000 from CinemaNow . It also allows customers to stream other videos from the Internet directly to their new range of Internet connected TVs. Samsung Corp. also has a new range of Blu-ray home theater systems with a similar offering of Netflix videos. Digital set-top box provider Roku Inc. had also announced a partnership with Netflix for video downloads, and has now added Amazon.com’s streaming VoD service as well.
- Home digital media hubs: Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) has launched a series of digital media hubs for connecting devices in the home and centralizing access to audio, video, and photo content in the home. Customers can also upload and download media through any Web browser.
- Programmers: ActiveVideo Networks Inc. has added content from Blip.tv on the ActiveVideo Distribution Network, carried by some cable and IPTV providers. The network offers a combination of traditional TV programming and online video.
- Online companies: Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO)’s Connected TV, a TV-based overlay widget service launched with Intel, has pulled in some high profile support. MySpace will be offering a channel on the service and major manufacturers like Toshiba Corp. (Tokyo: 6502) and Samsung will be manufacturing the TV sets. It’s a great sign that companies across the value chain want to get bridge this gap and drive online video adoption. Recent data from comScore Inc. shows that online video viewing in the U.S. was up by 34 percent year-over-year in November 2008, with 12.7 billion videos being viewed during the month.It is important, however, to recognize that the bulk of video viewing is composed of short clips that are in themselves part of a more interactive Web surfing video experience. For example, comScore reports that the duration of the average online video was just 3.1 minutes. Moving these video clips to the TV may not drive much value to consumers since they do not offer the fundamentally “lean back” experience that TV is all about. What’s much more important is opening a channel for online distribution of professionally produced, high-quality video like movies and TV shows. ComScore points out that the duration of the average video viewed on Hulu LLC was 11.9 minutes, nearly four times the average of all videos viewed in November. Hulu’s offerings are predominantly high-quality, professionally produced programming. That’s also the kind of content that is most likely to create a revenue stream, be it via subscription, as with Netflix; pay-per-view, as with Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN); or advertising, as with Hulu.
So which of the many device platforms listed here will win? Potentially none of them, since getting video to the TV will still require a cost premium of some sort and may not always meet the quality standard that TV has set. There’s also the possibility that service providers will do a better job of creating the link between the TV and the PC and do it before the consumer electronics industry.
Still, amongst the candidates listed, my vote goes to the Blu-ray players. They are movie-specific devices, which sets up the concept of movie download more readily for consumers. More importantly, the content libraries and software for accessing content online is pre-built into the box. With a wireless home network and one of these boxes, consumers have to do relatively little to enjoy online video on their preferred screen.
Read More
