Tag Archives: marketing

Buzzworthy Wednesday: Adventures of Captain Inbound: Episode One

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This week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday is an animated video created by HubSpot for the “Adventures of Captain Inbound: Episode One“.

Full Disclosure: I may be a bit biased here since I was the writer and animator on this project. While I tend to be hyper-critical of my work (is any creative person not?) I am more impressed with the strategy behind the branding video carried out by HubSpot.

They didn’t just create the video and throw  it out to the whims of the internet, they had a plan. In the word’s of the Episode “Guru” of David Meerman Scott “Create exceptional content that people will want to share, and point the world to your virtual doorstep.”

So the video was posted on their blog, they built a custom landing page for the series to reside (oh yes…there will be more), started a fan page on Facebook and launched a Twitter account for Captain Inbound. Practicing what they are preaching. The video was also mentioned as a great example of how “Content Rules” on the  MarketingProfs blog today by Ann Handley. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

Adelie Studios 2.0 – the relaunch

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So as promised the first step to relaunching Adelie Studios was the new logo design, thanks to all those who helped with the design process.

Now I have completely overhauled the website making it more user friendly, focused on online video animation and generally cooler in all ways. I give you the 62% more awesome…Adelie Studios Website.

It still needs work – I’ll be writing and adding an e-book about online video marketing, adding new blog posts and specific online video landing pages but for now…I rest.

Thanks to all who have been supportive during this process and if you know someone who wants to find a more entertaining way to market their business online…well you know who to call. Thank you.

Rebranding Adelie Studios – The Reveal

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The people have spoken! Many through Facebook or Twitter, some by email and a handful on the blog in the comments. Crowd sourcing the design was definitely a great idea and I got a lot of ideas and feedback that I wouldn’t have gone to on my own.

#6 was the overwhelming favorite however a number of people liked elements from #7, particularly the ink blot rather than the traditional circle for the play button because of how that ink blot related to the style relative to the animated work I do. I felt it also gave it less of a “corporate” design studio look and what I do is definitely not traditional messaging as I tend to make branding more interesting and entertaining. So there had to be a fun element to the design too. So… a la peanut butter and jelly sandwiches…I combined the two elements into one logo.

I also decided to play around with the colors a bit, I felt like the dark burgundy (or PMS #1815 to those geeky designers out there) was too strong and would function better on the website in small quantities used to stress links, thin rules and such. So after playing around for a bit I came up with the following.

I bring you the new and improved logo for Adelie Studios.

Adelie Studios...better, faster, stronger

Adelie Studios...better, faster, stronger

I truly appreciate all the feedback I got which made the rebranding far more fun getting other peoples perspectives, constructive criticism and input. Special thanks goes out to Mark Cahill, David Saraiva, Jenn O’Meara, Mark Shunney, Mike Langford, Lisa Middleton Griffin, Melissa Fetterhoff, Tammy Miner Stott, Ian MacLean Davis, Paul Scannell, Jeff Brouillet, Matt “Klawful” Smith and of course to Leah Guerin, my wife who put up with my incessant “What do you think of this?”, “What about these colors?”, “What does this make you think of?”, “What if I move this over here?”, “Is there any coffee left downstairs?”…you get the picture.

Thanks to all of you and be on the lookout for the website relaunch in the next couple of weeks!

Buzzworthy Wednesday: Liberty Mutual "Good Vibrations"

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Liberty Mutual has been using the “good karma” branding message for a number of years now. This week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday is a recently created animated addition to their Responsibility Project. It’s not often that you see a company take the marketing strategy to create change and to be authentic about it. I think this message was successful in grabbing the viewer to show the impact a simple action can have in the lives of others but comes across seeming disingenuous in others.

The animation is very well done and their pay it forward puts an emotional touch on their brand to communicate meaningfully with consumers.

Where I think it fails in some ways is in the use of the office building…let’s be honest most large office buildings are occupied by large corporations, financial and insurance companies and Liberty Mutual is no exception. Is this a reach? A sort of pessimism on my viewing part? I don’t know. It may be I’m seeing some symbolism that Liberty Mutual hadn’t considered when working on the project. It’s also a little long at a little over 4 minutes so part of the reason it may have gotten so few views is the fact that many online viewers have a shorter attention span than this video requires to unfold.

Either way, it’s definitely very well crafted by French animator Jérémy Clapin, the director of Skhizein. Clapin’s visual voice is incredibly strong and make this brilliant piece a pleasure to watch regardless of whether or not I am reading into the crowd in the office building symbolism too much. I guess if you remove Liberty Mutual and its marketing message from the equation I find it much more enjoyable and captivating short to watch. What about you? Am I crazy here?

Don't Stay "On Message" Think Like a Human

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dodo_birdA recent post by Chad Northrup at Chatterbox about LinkedIn being the “No Fun Social Network” recently got me thinking about many of the companies I have worked with that are clinging to the old school methodology of marketing by constantly staying on message and not seeing what is going on right now in the online world.

Years ago, staying on message was how you branded your business. So whether someone saw your newspaper ad, brochure, radio ad, TV spot, etc. it all had the same look, feel and message. Recognition through replication.

Now however things are changing. Branding through certain visual markers like colors, fonts, logo, etc. is still equally important but the message is different because people online want to engage and interact with your brand. They don’t want to get your mission statement delivered to them, they want to know about what interesting projects you are working on or how your product is going to help them personally. You need to have a conversation with your potential audience not deliver a soliloquy.

Given this seismic shift, you also need to change how you brand yourself and your business because the people behind the brand are taking center stage now. Your voice is now equally as important to your branding as your logo. Don’t handcuff your employee brand advocates – let your companies personalities shine!

Another pitfall companies fall into is being bland. I can’t tell you how many businesses I have met with and all they want to do is plug their same boring sales message into video format. Why? Do something wildly creative! Solve one of your most frequently asked questions or problems in a creative story. In every blog post, in every video or podcast you create there’s got to be emotion or opinion to trigger an action of some kind. Make interesting content that people want to read/view and if it’s REALLY interesting share with their network. No one is going to share your mission statement unless maybe you make it into a rap or something entertaining.

Creative thinking and authentic engagement will be what makes some brands more noticeable in the coming years…not how much money they dumped into traditional advertising. Small companies like Blendtec will be the household names of tomorrow because they are creating online content that people like to consume and be entertained by.

What about you? What do you think the future holds for branding?

Buzzworthy Wednesday Video: Nike SB

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So this week was a little light in terms of newly released online marketing videos that I would consider buzzworthy. However my pick this week is for Nike SB to celebrate the release of professional skateboarder Paul Rodriguez’s (aka P Rod) third shoe (the skateboarding son of the famous comedian). Set to the grooving tempo of the Ice Cube song “Today Was a Good Day”, the Nike video kind of parallels the original Ice Cube music video storyline just through the eyes of a skateboarder with one slight humorous difference at the end. It’s had over 370,000 views since being uploaded about 3 weeks ago.

Nothing earth shattering here. No crazy production. No trick camera skills. No dancing babies or flash mobs. While there are some very cool skateboarding tricks, I’m not a particularly big fan of skateboarding. So why did this video appeal to me? I probably just like it because the skateboarding tricks ARE cool, the tempo of them follow the music well and it’s set to one of my all time favorite rap songs. There I said it. Sometimes it’s all about the music and how it moves you or grabs you.


Effective call-to-action with e-commerce video

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e-commerce-shopping-cart

Recently there’s been a lot of talk online about how video can help e-commerce and adding interactivity to video is a natural progression to keep the viewer engaged. There was a great blog post written on effective trigger design for interactive video commerce which answers the question – how should video interactivity be applied to e-commerce video? It’s always been part of my approach on each project, what is the end goal? Are you a non-profit looking for donations, a company selling products looking for a purchase or maybe you are looking for viewers to contact you for more information and become more engaged with your brand? There are three steps (according to the Video Commerce Consortium blog post) to creating an effective trigger or call-to-action, I’m going to elaborate on each:

1. The trigger must be noticeable. This sounds self explanatory, but you’d be surprised to realize that most consumers are passive viewers of online video content, they aren’t used to interacting with it. It also needs to be blatantly obvious to the viewer that interaction is possible.

2. The trigger must be associated with the targeted behavior. When you are creating a call-to-action, think carefully about the wording and design because they can have a huge impact on the viewers expectations. Don’t have a button that says “Product information” really be a link directly to add an item to a shopping cart. As an example, we have a customer who sells generally to engineers who will want to see product specifications before they consider purchasing so we incorporated a “Download Specifications PDF” right into the video. Carefully design the call-to-actions within your video experience to meet your viewers expectations.

3. The trigger must occur when the user is both motivated and able to perform the target behavior. The great thing about online video is we can be more subtle with a call-to-action. As the Video Commerce Consortium blog post points out “clicking a mouse is still easier than picking up the phone”. But scripting the video so the ask is part of the story is key, when are your customers most motivated to buy? Is it after a particular product or feature where a button can pop up so they can click that for more information about that feature?

Not sure where your video is peaking curiousity or if there is a falloff in viewership before they get to your call-to-action? Using a video measurement service like Visible Measures can precisely calculate video engagement by capturing every event that occurs within an Internet video player – each play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, share, embed, and more.

Not sure how to build those call-to-actions within your video? I recommend Flimp which has a great WYSIWYG interface to create landing pages and e-mail integration with Constant Contact as well as a few other major email service providers. I also suggest Permission TV which offers an outstanding video platform allowing you to build those call-to-action links right into the video player creating more interactive experiences to everyone who visits your site. Both offer outstanding analytics so you can track and analyze your video’s performance.

Ultimately a call-to-action is useless unless the video itself is engaging and can easily be found. If your video is buried on your website, who’s going to see it? What if the content is so boring no one ever gets to the call-to-action?

What you need to do is to think of the call-to-action within your video and the trigger button or action as one seamless process, not separate parts. That is the future of online video, it’s all part of the viewer experience.

That’s what I think anyway, what about you?

 

 

Online Video Driving Automotive Recovery

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constant-contact-zak-barronIn a great article recently published on the Online Video Insider by Eric Franchi, some great statistics and insight were shared which are particularly timely given Chrysler’s and General Motors’ recent bankruptcy announcements. Perhaps as they pick which road to take the companies future on they should reassess their level of participation in social media and particularly online video.

Here were a few of the highlights from that post for the automakers to keep in mind and my thoughts on these suggestions:


“83% of new vehicle buyers visit video focused Web sites prior to purchasing a car. This means 31% viewed videos on brand, product or company sites; 24% on auto-specific Web sites, 11% on YouTube; 7%, Yahoo Video; 7%, news sites; 6%, MSN Video; 4%, MySpace; 3%, Facebook; 3%, AOL Video; and 3%, other.”

These numbers from a recent Google sponsored study highlight a few really important factors that automakers need to keep in mind regarding online video and how viewers are searching and researching online. I’d be willing to bet that in a short amount of time YouTube, Yahoo Video, Facebook, etc. will garner a much larger piece of the viewership.


“Don’t skimp on production. A full one-third of auto shoppers watch the video content on the product site.”

So once you have the viewer engaged with a demo of the vehicle, why not lead them to other videos of the same vehicle they are looking at instead of (or maybe in addition to) pages of text information? Maybe it’s crash tests…shown from different angles? Maybe keeping something fragile like an egg inside safe during the crash? You can get really creative here but the object is to keep the viewer engaged and on your site.

Think about Blendtec and how they engaged their viewers by showing them real simple demonstrations of how their blender worked by blending ridiculously common things. Many of those interested viewers became brand loyalists for them.


“Investigate the broader video opportunity. Brand and auto-specific sites only make up slightly more than half of the automotive shopper’s online experience. Creating a presence on YouTube and other video destinations will help round out the plan.”

Why stop there? While video sharing sites like YouTube are a place that I think the automakers MUST have a presence, what about Facebook, LinkedIn or smaller automobile enthusiast user groups? The automakers could use these brand enthusiasts and interested buyers for research and development. They could find out what features and options people are REALLY looking for in a car. Let the group members participate in the design of new cars, show them videos of new concepts as they are created based on the group’s input and get feedback from the group. Imagine that kind of empowerment could turn them from potential buyers into the automakers brand evangelists.

David Meerman Scott wrote an outstanding post on marketing ideas for the automakers reinvention outlining 5 simple things GM could do to accelerate their hopeful rebound. I hope GM and Chrysler read his post because it had some great ideas. Automakers will be under a watchful eye with their marketing budget, so doesn’t using a tiny portion of their bloated television advertising budget to put a creative online video and social media plan together just make sense? Obviously I think so…what are your thoughts?

Buzzworthy Wednesday Video: Sun Chips "One More Piece"

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This is episode 8 of a great little animated series on the YouTube channel awomansworld. The series, channel and accompanying website called Only in a Woman’s World are all part of a marketing campaign being done by the FritoLay to promote their “healthier” snacking options such as Baked Lays and 100 calorie snacks, although you’d never know it. The short animations are just little humorous bits that all end with a “brought to you by…” and a teaser call-to-action to visit the Only in a Woman’s World website.

This episode was released a few days ago and already has over 12,000 views. Their YouTube channel is ranked 8th overall for subscribers and is the 8th most viewed channel this month.

 

 

 

Increasing Donations Using Video & E-Mail Marketing

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How Stanford University increased alumni donations.

Seeing how I’ve already talked about how integrating video in your email marketing can increase your click throughs by 175% I thought I’d profile another success story I read about online. Much of the information on this is exerpted from a great blog post by Tyler Willis for MediaPost called “When Juggernauts Collide: Email Marketing Meets Video Marketing” Here are the highlights of what I found most interesting from his post.

“Recent grads are far more likely to give a valid email address than a number (93% of the captive population vs. 38%), meaning that email marketing gives Stanford a better and more widespread ability to connect.”

Snail mail and “dialing-for-dollars” are incredibly inefficient ways to connect with new grads. Namely because direct mail is assumed to be junk mail by most recipients and you only get a response of about 2% (if you are lucky). Phone calling on the other hand is incredibly interruptive, who knows what the end user was doing or what you interrupted them from doing. Email is passive and can be opened or read when the end user is ready to read or respond to it.

Scott Jahnke, the Director of Student and Young Alumni Development, explains why he chose to combine email AND video as part of Stanford’s new alumni drive “Technology gives us the ability to do so much more than just text. How then, can we most effectively tell our story to thousands of people and inspire them to give? I believe that a combination of using email AND video to answer our three questions (why are we asking you for a gift, what is going to change if you give, and how will our organization make that change happen) is the so-called ‘secret sauce.”

“At Stanford, the Young Alumni office produced several inspiring videos of students who had directly benefited from alumni contributions and attached a clear call-to-action to the end of each video, delivered via a Flash overlay that asked viewers to donate.”

This was key, by providing this call to action they were able to easily and effectively drive their alumni to take the steps they wanted them to take. Without a call-to-action, online video doesn’t effectively do it’s job.

“Calling out these videos, and providing a direct link to them in four out of five emails sent during Stanford’s fall campaign, helped increase gifts by 23% over the previous year’s fall campaign.”

This is a great first result and if they continue to refine their approach will probably become even more efficient. Couple this with the fact that they probably dramatically reduced their printing and postage costs from their direct mail campaign and/or their costs if they hired current students to do the telemarketing as part of a work study program. How does that affect their operational costs? Does it make their alumni gifts go longer.

If one of the most respected universities in the United States was able to buck the old trend of typical alumni gift campaigns and get these kind of outstanding results, what could combining the online marketing super powers of email marketing and online video do for your business or non-profit?