Web video unleashes the power of the web

In the same way that GIF and JPG images added richness to plain text, so video provides a new dimension to the web’s ability to communicate and entertain. Dick Stroud explains why for many it is the most exciting of all the new digital technologies

APPROXIMATELY HALF OF all internet traffic consists of TV shows, YouTube clips and web animations. Within the next 24 months, video is expected to account for 90% of internet traffic. Even though we have just begun the web video revolution, the magnitude of its impact on the internet is already staggering.

A combination of technological developments has made the creation and viewing of web video a mass-market experience.

The costs of video cameras and software to create and edit video have plummeted. Al Gore’s Oscar-winning global warming crisis documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was created using standard Apple Keynote and editing software, and with a video camera costing less than US$ 4,000.

The production team required to create videos has shrunk to two people. One person to act as the journalist/interviewer, the other the cameraman/editor.

The second development is the widespread availability of broadband. There is now a worldwide audience of 300 million subscribers who can access the internet at broadband speeds. This number is expected to double by 2011. The demand for web video and broadband access is now in a cycle whereby broadband take-up is driven by the desire to view video, which in turn increases the audiences and supply of video material.

Finally, the costs and simplicity of hosting, searching and viewing web video have radically improved. There are over a 100 websites providing free video hosting services – double the number at the beginning of 2007. YouTube alone contains over 60 million video clips and now even boasts a channel for the UK’s monarchy.

Google is evolving its video search capability with the development of ‘universal search’. This will process all content including video, images, news and websites combined into a single, integrated set of search results.

Finally, Adobe’s Flash Player has become the default software used by the main web hosting companies, including YouTube and MySpace. Adobe estimates that 99% of the world’s developed markets can view Flash Player content.

The ‘YouTube effect’

YouTube has had a lasting positive, and transitory negative, effect on the evolution of web video.

The positive effect has been to propel web video to the attention of the general public. This has not always been done in the most appealing way. Saddam Hussein’s death, the unguarded statements of politicians and the rantings of celebrities have quickly found their way onto YouTube, often before they were broadcast on TV.

Amusing nonsense videos have achieved audiences of astonishing numbers of people. ‘The Evolution of Dance’, a six-minute video clip, has so far been viewed over 51 million times. YouTube is littered with such clips.

YouTube has thrust web video into the public spotlight but often with the connotations of it being trivial and a faddish thing that is only used by the young.

The negative outcome is for marketers to pigeon-hole web video as being another part of this strange ‘Web 2.0 thing’ and relevant only if you are targeting the tween and teen markets. This is not supported by the facts. According to data compiled by Nielsen/NetRatings, comScore and Quantcast, web users aged 35–64 represent anywhere between 48% and 65% of YouTube’s audience. The average age of US users is estimated at 39 years old.

Maybe it is symbolic that YouTube decided to use a video recorded by an 80 year old to launch its UK web site.

YouTube has demystified web video and made it a mass consumer experience. The repercussions for how we consume information and entertainment will continue long after it has disappeared and been absorbed into its parent (Google).

The marketing applications of web video

Web video is a reality, it is not going away! Marketers need to plan for its use in their organisation to ensure consumers’ time is spent watching video associated with their brands and marketing campaigns – not that of their competitors. The following are the most obvious marketing applications for web video.

Advertising

By far the largest use of web video is to extend or substitute for traditional advertising channels.

Using video to advertise on websites is an evolution from static and animated banners. The objective remains the same: to stimulate click-throughs and raise brand awareness, objectives that apply to both B2B and B2C companies.

Research conducted by the US Online Publishers Association demonstrates the effectiveness of the video format for achieving these goals.

The study found that approximately 80% of all video viewers have watched a video ad online, and 52% have taken some sort of action. This action might be visiting the website (31%), searching for more information (22%), visiting a store to look for the product (15%), or making a purchase (16%).

Unilever’s use of the technique to promote its Dove beauty products is an excellent example of how video provides a relatively inexpensive, but very powerful mechanism, to build brand awareness.

Dove made a video called the ‘Evolution of Beauty’, which has been viewed by well over seven million people on YouTube and other content-sharing websites. The video appears to show how an image of a young woman can be airbrushed and digitally enhanced to create an impossibly perfect image. It is part of the brand’s highly successful ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’.

With this video, Dove found a way to harness the public and the traditional media to grow its brand image. A more recent campaign by Cadbury, using a life-like gorilla playing a drum solo generated over two million views and spawned numerous remixes and look-alike videos.

Volkswagen’s ‘Midlife-crisis Retreat’ campaign was used to promote its Passat car, and employed a viral technique enabling the video’s content to be customised by the sender. When the receiver viewed the video he or she was greeted by an amusing personalised video message referencing them by name and age.

These are good examples of using web video to enhance the impact and reach of traditional advertising. They are the exceptions. Most companies still have a ‘silo’ approach to their advertising, with little attempt to exploit a synergy between the communications channels.

This situation is partly explained by the newness of the media but also because many of the benefits of web video appear to be free and tend to be devalued. In an interview with the Financial Times, Unilever’s Senior Vice- President, Global Marketing Services said: ‘It can be misleading to look at just our media expenditure, because a lot of the value we get from the digital world is essentially free or almost free.’ This is one of the rare times when marketing effectiveness can be increased by spending less.

Improving the customer’s experience

Video can be used to supplement text and images, and extend the richness of the information provided to customers.

The way that Ocado, the supermarket service in partnership with Waitrose, uses video recipes is a perfect example of this application. The company’s website contains recipes listing ingredients and video showing how to prepare a meal. After watching the video, all the ingredients can be added to your shopping basket with a single click. To supplement its cookery programmes, the BBC has added 100 interactive recipe videos to the cooking section of its website using celebrity chefs.

To add a new degree of richness to its books and website, Lonely Planet has created a site dedicated to web video to assist lowbudget travellers researching destinations. For more traditional travellers, Tripadvisor has launched a new version of its website that enables customers to share video experiences of hotels.

Web video’s most obvious use is as a training tool. When Google released its new toolbar it was accompanied by a short (90-second) low-budget video that eloquently demonstrated the application’s new functionality.

Ninety seconds of video provides customers with more knowledge than a mass of text and imagery. It also empowers companies with a rich palette of communications techniques to convey their brand messages.

Extending market reach

Web video creates new ways for companies to communicate with existing customers and to reach new audiences.

CNN’s entry into online video illustrates how the distinction between television and the internet is blurring. CNNMoney.com’s editor succinctly makes this point: ‘The future of business television is online.’ The metrics support this statement. In October 2007, CNN.com’s site serviced 61 million video streams. Interestingly, the average age of its user is 41 years old.

Other examples of companies using web videos to create new channels with their customers include Simon & Schuster. It launched a video-based website providing in-depth interviews with authors as a means of promoting book sales. Haven, the UK holiday company, uses video embedded within its email marketing to engage with potential customers to stimulate them to research and book their holiday online. The video starts playing as the email is opened, showing examples of the company’s holiday parks. The same video content is also promoted through Haven’s YouTube channel.

ShinyShiny.tv describes itself as ‘a girl’s guide to gadgets’. The fact that O2’s Marketing Director and Microsoft’s Mobile Ambassador have starred in its shows illustrates how video can be employed to reach hard-to-reach market segments.

Google has created a ‘talk show’ channel on YouTube, where the company’s representatives interview political and business leaders (e.g. Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg). This gives Google the opportunity to reach a massive audience and expose another facet of its corporate identity.

Conveying complex and sensitive messages

i-to-i is the UK’s largest volunteering holiday company and is experiencing a growth in demand from older people (50-plus). The company’s research shows that prospective customers have a concern about being the only older person on the holiday. This is creating a barrier to booking the holiday. A video was created, featuring older customers and i-to-i service staff, that preempted and answered this objection in a far more eloquent and effective way than text and imagery could ever have achieved.

ING Direct, the online bank, devotes half its home page to delivering a video showing endorsements about its services from a cross-section of customer types. The prospective customer can see and hear other customers talking and can make an instinctive judgement about the bank’s style and culture.

Mattel used video as part of its response to the mass recall of toys. Bob Ecker, the company’s CEO, talked to camera to explain the details of his company’s response, but more importantly demonstrated his personal intent to rectify the situation in a way that a press release could never convey.

Two of the hardest things to achieve on the web are product comparisons and the explanation of complicated tasks.

Perhaps the best example of how web video can improve the product comparison process is provided by driverTV. This website contains standardised video demonstrations of all the leading US cars and enables users to create their own showreel containing the vehicles they want compared. There are multiple applications for this technique – purchasing white goods being an obvious candidate.

VideoJug.com hosts one of the world’s largest libraries of factual content. The video content is either produced by the company or vetted, in the case of user-generated content. The site provides web video on subjects as diverse as cooking a roast lunch and learning to instant message using Skype. Surprisingly, companies that rely on customers understanding complex instructions have been slow to adopt this media. It is interesting to speculate on the levels of time saved and stress reduction that would result from IKEA providing web video instructions for the assembly of its flat-pack products!

The challenges for marketers

Web video provides marketers with a powerful new tool that can be used in all areas of marketing communications. To ensure that their organisations extract the maximum benefit from the technology, marketers must overcome a series of challenges. The following are the five most important:

1. Think beyond the obvious niches. There is a danger of stereotyping the web video user as a young, techie person. Web video is likely to follow the same evolution path as other web technologies, with the consumer’s age becoming irrelevant. Marketers should assume web video will have universal appeal.

2. Be discriminating in its use. There is a temptation to treat video as ‘eye candy’ and indiscriminately sprinkle it around the website. This must be resisted. Video should only be used for applications where it adds significant value compared with other communications media.

3. Apply strong quality standards. The same quality standards should be applied to video as any other communications medium. The novelty value of web video will only last a short time – it may already have passed. Poor quality video will then be ignored or will annoy web users. Remember that video requires script-writing not copy-writing skills. The way things are said is as important as words. In any two-hour feature film script there are usually about 8,000 words of dialogue. That means in a two–minute video you would have just 133 spoken words!

4. Choose the right metrics for judging performance. Judging the effectiveness of web video requires more than simple website analytics. The video will be viewed from multiple sources other than the website. It will be distributed as part of an email campaign, pushed through RSS feeds, viewed via YouTube, or one of its many look-alikes, plus numerous other sources.

5. Understand the intellectual property issues. As YouTube is discovering, it is very difficult to stop people loading and displaying video material they do not own. If a company’s web video uses music and actors then there may well be copyright implications. The same applies if the video is sourced from a video archive like Mochila and Brightcove. Web video adds an extra burden for marketers to ensure their content is legal.

Web video is evolving faster than most companies’ ability to keep up. During the next 12 months, web video will become high definition (HD) web video. Adobe’s latest version of Flash Player and Intel’s new chips are both optimised for HD viewing. For most people the quality of the videos they view on their PCs will be better than that on their TV sets.

A new generation of websites is emerging that are primarily video based, with text as a supporting medium. The YouTube ‘video box’ will disappear, and video will expand to become the core of the website.

The first candidates for these types of websites will be industries where the visual impact of their products and services is of paramount importance (e.g. travel, clothing).

The speed at which video is adopted by web sites will not be linear. We could soon be reaching a tipping point where the presence of video becomes a necessity rather than an optional extra.

[email protected]

References

Dove ‘Evolution of Beauty’ campaign,

www.campaignforrealbeauty.ca

Cadbury gorilla advertisement,

www.youtube.com

Volkswagen ‘Midlife-crisis Retreat’video,

www.midlife-crisis-retreat.co.uk

Lonely Planet TV,

www.lonelyplanet.tv

Ocado cooking demonstrations,

www.ocado.com

Tripadvisor: hotel comparison website,

www.tripadvisor.co.uk

CNN Money.com: financial information,

www.money.cnn.com

Simon&Schuster: author and book promotion,

www.bookvideos.tv

Haven, YouTube channel,

www.youtube.com/user/havenholidays

ShinyShiny.tv: women’s gadgets channel,

http://shinyshiny.tv

Google talk show channel,

www.youtube.com/user/AtGoogleTalks

i-to-i volunteering holidays,

www.i-to-i.com

ING Direct: customer testimonials,

www.ingdirect.co.uk/

driverTV: car comparison website,

www.driverTV.com

VideoJug.com: ‘How to’ video website,

www.videojug.com

Dove’s ‘Evolution of Beauty’ campaign has been viewed by over seven million people.

Web video is a reality, it is not going away! Marketers need to plan for its use in their organisation to ensure consumers’ time is spent watching video associated with their brands and marketing campaigns – not that of their competitors.

Right: driverTV contains standardised video demonstrations of all the leading US cars and enables  users to create their own showreel containing the vehicles they want compared.

There is a danger of stereotyping the Web video user as a young, techie person. Web video is likely to follow the same evolution path as other web technologies, with the consumer’s age becoming irrelevant. Marketers should assume web video will have universal appeal Web video is evolving faster than most companies’ ability to keep up. During the next 12 months, web video will become high definition (HD) web video. For most people the quality of the videos they view on their PCs will be better than that on their TV sets.