Non-Line Blogging

Two years ago I wrote a blog about engagement through video.  I would like to think that the marketing world has embraced the delights of video and animation and taken web experiences onto the next level.  I would have to confess that when I am wandering around the internet there still seem to be less rather than more sites delivering wonderfully engaging content. 

Show me the money

Let's begin with the justification.  Zappo's have found that adding video descriptions to products boosed conversion rates by 6 - 30%.   This is such a big win that all organisations should be thinking about ways that they can integrate video and animation into their web experiences.  If you don't want to justify it with traditional business metrics like making money, then how about "engagement"?  There are more reports emerging into how people consume video via digital media and I am pleased to say that a brand new one for the media industry has been revealed by Brightcove .  They conclude that for media sites video consumption is significant...

On-line video content from broadcast networks average 2:53 minutes watched per stream followed by music labels at 1:50 minutes and newspaper publishers with 1:41 minutes per stream.

I Bet your products are not as boring as these...

No disrespect to Cisco, but I personally cannot get very excited about their 800 Series Routers.  This is a job for Osman Mohammad.  Osman loves routers.  He speaks about them with a passion and he'd loved to tell you about them right now.  Go on, just click.   

Osman can sell 800 Series Routers in his sleep.  His passion for Routers cannot be communicated through the printed word.  He never fluffs a presentation and he's never late. Osman is probably the most prolific sales rep Cisco has ever has.  I hope he's on commission.

So, video is not just for cool sneakers - its for business products too.

Let's take another BtoB cracker.  How do you sell an interactive white-board to schools?  This is the most delightful animation I have come across with cartoon characters in sync with interviews with real teachers.   

It's called "Teacher Comforts" and is drawing on some excellent animations from Nick Parks (of Wallace and Gromit fame) called Creature Comforts in the 1990's.  Skip to the end to watch the out-takes...a leaf out of Toy Story's book!

 How about video to explain things?

Here are 2 of my favourite "explanation" videos.  I run a lot of digital marketing training courses and try to blend the Powerpoint and web learning style with some video content.  CommonCraft is a company that continues to develop really simple, clear videos that inform and entertain.   The one on the left is for "social bookmarking" but check out their site for plenty of others (I can even recommend the "US Election" explanation as a puzzled Brit!). 

The video on the right is an explanation of ChatRoulette, the web phenomenon that seems to polarise opinion almost as much as Facebook did a few years ago.  It's very very well deisgned and deserves a wider audience, so share with your friends - it's from a designer called Casey Neistat and is a lovely piece of work.

So there you have it.  A quick round up of great animated experiences on-line and not a single YouTube logo in sight.  But of course, if nothing else, find a home for all your video content on a branded YouTube page or on your Facebook pages.  

Happy animation 

Here are a few definitions from Wikipedia to get the blog rolling:

Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally stumbles upon something fortunate, especially while looking for something entirely unrelated

Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual's web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual

Stalking is a term commonly used to refer to unwanted attention by individuals (and sometimes groups of people) to others.

We’re not short of data in digital marketing.  In fact, we’ve too much of the stuff.  Let’s take the marketing of expensive holidays:  Every couple of years in the Hughes household wanderlust overcomes us and a couple of weeks in delightful West Wales will not quite tick all the R&R boxes.  So, sensing this restlessness, I venture onto a few travel web sites and see what destinations like Thailand may offer us that Wales can’t.  (Sunshine seems to be the short answer).

20 years ago I went on a Kuoni holiday with my parents and, as it was a great success, I thought I’d check out the delights of Kuoni once again, so Googled the brand and went to their site.  I say this to demonstrate that key drivers to branded search could well be deeply emotional , not just seeing a Kuoni banner a few days ago – oh! the perils of attribution modelling.  Anyhow, I now left a rich stream of data across the Kuoni website and was maybe a couple steps nearer to knowing what I wanted.

Meanwhile in a distant galaxy far, far away...some analysts were piecing together this trail of data. 

• Total pages in session – check. 
• Depth of content viewed  - check.  
• Total time on site – check. 

We have engagement!

Cue the scary music. 

A few days later I am on the Autotrader website looking to replace my recently-written off Fiat Punto (that’s a long story), and what appears before me – a display ad for Kuoni.  But this is not any old banner – it has behavioural targeting under the bonnet:

“Thank you for visiting the Kuoni website” whispers the disembodied voice of the banner.

And then it gets a little more scary.  A couple of page loads later, my stalker says

“Thank you for your interest in Thailand”

Now at this point some people may be looking over their shoulder to see if some Peeping Tom is behind all this.  For hairy old digital marketers like me it’s not a problem – good luck to Kuoni for using all this data in a positive way.  But I can’t help feeling that some customers out there will be a little spooked by all this, which leads onto my real point here...

The medium is the message.

I often use an Amazon email as an example of “as good as it gets” in digital marketing.  A few months ago my TomTom SatNav died and I wandered on to Amazon to check out prices of a new one.   24 hours later I got this delightful email with the wonderful copy...  

I’m a little more comfortable with this “email stalking” because the terms of engagement are different to display advertising:  I leave myself logged in on Amazon because I can do useful things like “buy now with 1 click” and  I expect Amazon not to shout general email offers at me...I am delighted when they notice things that could be worth re-visiting.  Similarly, I like it when they say on the web site

“Hello David Hughes.  We have recommendations for you”

They remind you of things you may have been looking at and fire up the old “collaborative filtering” engine to make things even more relevant for me.   Virgin Atlantic  have a delightful personalisation box in the “My Booking” area that reminds you how long it is until the next time we meet.  They could probably serve that up to me as a banner when I’m on Autotrader, but just wouldn’t be right and proper, would it?

Less is more.

I may wish to keep myself anonymous in certain media, but expect/demand more personal touches at other times.  I do not always expect to be singled out for personal treatment and when strangers start talking to me like long, lost friends I begin to feel uncomfortable.  I’m talking here about a slight shift in creative tone that would have the same relevance but in a less threatening way...

“Latest ideas and greatest offers for Thailand Holidays”

...could have been equally powerful from Kuoni but with far less emotional damage! People like it when they "accidently" stumble upon something fortunate, especially when looking for something else unrelated!  Maybe Amazon has mastered the science of "dynamic serendipity", where people think that stumbling upon relevant things is pure luck!  After all, Amazon don't say:

Last night between 7.21pm and 7.28pm you viewed the Garmin Nuvi 225 pages for 4 minutes, the Navman S30 for 2 minutes and then you had a quick look at the Tom Tom ONE v4.  Here are some special offers.

That would be stalking.

But, Behavioural Targeting is wonderful! 

Wherever I have seen it used, behavioural targeting generally drives up opens, clicks, conversions, average order values and drives down costs per outcome.   It may well be that Kuoni have tested the “less” versus “more” intrusive copy and the ones I didn’t like pushed up sales...so there, they would say.  But for many consumers this “stalking copy” can create the wrong feeling, a sense that something sinister is happening on the interweb.  It's a question of using the right tone and not relying too much on the data to drive the conversation.  The whole BT industry nearly came clattering down in Europe a couple of years ago with Phorm and British Telecom’s sneaky attempts to get it in under consumers’ privacy radars.  Let’s hope that over-friendly creative techniques don’t have a similar impact on people’s goodwill.