Filed under: Player's Corner 2.0, Vidiots | Tags: advertising, online engagement, online video, online video trends, rich media, seo statistics, video seo
I wanted to share some data on current statistics regarding online video and its impact in marketing and entertainment.
The most astonishing news is in SEO.
According to a recent study by Forrester Research Video SEO is 53 times more likely to produce a first-page search result than traditional techniques. Google, for one, is pushing video to the top of all its search results. Results can be achieved in a matter of days, and there are publishers who succeed in getting at least 25% of their videos to produce first page results.
This video must be on a landing page or home page (not YouTube) and be submitted correctly to the search engine companies. Here is an article on the subject.
Then there is video rich advertising.
This was tested in 5 categories: Aided Branded Awareness, Online Ad Awareness, Message Association, Brand Favorability and Purchase Intent. Video was the front runner by far in all categories except Message Association. Video beat Simple Flash by an average of 400% across all metrics except Messaging. Please see below for the breakdown.
A more in-debt analysis can be found at Double Click.
Other notable findings from December 2009 from ComScore include:
- 86.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
- 134.4 million viewers watched more than 13 billion videos on YouTube.com (97.1 videos per viewer).
- 44.9 million viewers watched 423.3 million videos on MySpace Sites (9.4 videos per viewer).
- The average Hulu viewer watched 22.9 videos, totaling 2.2 hours of videos per viewer.
- The duration of the average online video was 4.1 minutes.
Additionally, research of rich media video ads conducted by AccelaCast, consisting of 32,000 viewers concluded the average engagement per viewer was 4.6 minutes.
All this is good news for VTA when looking into the future. With broadband accounting for nearly 75% of online users, video is a natural fit. Please look to us to help you with your online video for 2010. Contact me and I’ll be glad to talk strategy and rates.
- Brett Player, Creative Director
Filed under: Player's Corner 2.0 | Tags: advertising, assets, campaign, irony, media, outdoor, video, witt
When working with Spanx to create and launch the brand Assets, a Target Senior VP called the work “arresting”. She went on to say it would stop consumers, force them to look and then consider buying the products.
I later heard this same term tossed around by executives at Quicktrip to describe their campaign for sticky buns, while defending the headline “Life’s Too Short for Oatmeal.”
How fast does a consumer’s brain need to work to reverse this logic and conclude Oatmeal will extend your life where sticky buns may not. Perhaps that’s the joke of the message? However, unlike funny ads like Crispin Porter’s “Wake up with the King” campaign, this seems dry and humorless.
During the recent Vancouver Games, in a McDonald’s campaign, the messaging read, “You don’t have to be an Olympic Athlete to eat like one”. Again, reverse this logic and conclude, “Olympic athletes do not eat McDonald’s.”
I believe the campaigns above communicate in an ironic, almost cynical fashion to consumers. Where this may connect to adults who immediately understand the irony of good health in relation bad choices, it becomes dangerous for children who do not.
So are these ads funny? Do they work? What is the purpose of these campaigns? Let me know what you think.
-Brett Player
Filed under: Player's Corner 2.0 | Tags: advertising, interactive, marketing, networking, online, recruiting, social networking, video games, virtual
I was coming to work this morning, listening to NPR and heard a story about Military Gaming. I listened intently, because I thought a virtual military training client of ours, FATS Inc. may be featured. But instead the piece focused on an online game produced by the Pentagon called, “America’s Army” for the general public. It went on to talk about gaming and modern warfare with the inherent social and political issues involved.
But what caught my attention was not the story’s direction, but one outstanding fact within the story. “America’s Army” ranks in the top 10 for all downloadable games and has been more effective as a recruiting tool than all other efforts combined. Wow! Now that’s a testament to a digital experience driving results.
To a small to medium size business this may sound great, but also outside of their resources. This is where social networking becomes nirvana. Only a couple of years ago I was tasked to create social networks within corporate websites. But today, no longer is the brand website the place where brand loyalist interact. Nope. It’s Facebook or Twitter. And what a great feeling it is to break the technology dependency for communication. Now it’s the social networking platform’s responsibility to flush out all the tech issues.
Hence, the Army or Coca-Cola may have digital environments for gaming or virtual interaction. But so does Joe’s donuts, on Facebook. So what I’m saying is that it’s important to interact where you can. And in today’s landscape the opportunity to tell your story and converse with your audience is wide open. Let us know your goals and ideas, we can help.
- Brett Player
Filed under: Player's Corner 2.0 | Tags: advertising, brand, branding, graphics, identity, interactive, logo, marketing, olympic website
I recently went to the Winter Olympics website and thought, wow, this is a beautiful design. The functionality seems great too. So I scrolled down to see if there were site credits. Sure enough, it said “Powered by Bell”. I clicked on the Bell icon.
I nearly fell out of my chair! I saw the Bell site and immediately thought of Dell. It reminded me of the movie “Coming to America” when McDougles was McDonalds. But upon further inspection, going to the Dell site and back to the Bell site, I noticed the logos were quite different. Then why did I immediately consider the 2 logos an identical match when viewing?
They both owned the same color blue, and both logos were type driven, san-serif and very clean. White space drove the look of the sites too. It was this minimal look, leveraging photography and simplicity that mirrored each others brand. I began to consider this and came away with one resonating thought, the logo and graphic language must act as one for a memorable visual brand. Dell had done its job so well, I immediately thought, copy infringement when looking at the Bell site.
You decide for yourself!
Here are the 2 sites:
- Brett Player
