by Basho Mosko | Mar 5, 2014 | How-Tos and Tips
What’s the ideal length of an Interactive Video? It’s a funny question actually. Would you ask how many stanzas a love poem should have, or what the perfect number of explosions would be for an action film? How about the ideal number of colors in the perfect painting, or the best canvas size?
Interactive Video (IV), like all other creative tools, is simply a new medium for expressing thoughts, emotions, and stories. It is limited only by human imagination and the will to make something that has never been made. From short call-to-action videos that encourage viewer participation to a deeply immersive IV profile of a social issue, the possibilities for success with this new medium are huge.
A great Interactive Video is like a great piece of music – it can elicit emotion, convey a message, get people moving, teach, relax, enlighten, and delight. And like music, while an IV can be any length (some great ones provide a deep content journey), there is a certain recognizable structure found in most successful IVs. Like music, these are usually in the range of 90 seconds to 5 minutes and contain a hook, story development, a climax, and a resolution.
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by Basho Mosko | Feb 27, 2014 | In the Media, Mobile and HTML5
This article was originally posted on Adotas.com on February 26, 2014.
I’m a huge fan of live sports in general, but the drama and excitement of the Olympics takes it to another level altogether. Every two years I’m delighted by the privilege to spend two weeks watching the best athletes on Earth competing against each other in sports I will never experience myself (Skeleton – really?). Yet with limited hours in the day and only basic cable to quench my thirst for Olympic drama, I turned to the Internet to fulfill my wishes.
I have to hand it to NBC for building such an immersive site, and I love that the first button I saw on the page was Play, but navigating the content unfortunately left something to be desired. The amount of premium, jaw-dropping video clips available was enough to make any sports junkie drool, and yet the experience of finding and navigating between those clips nowhere near matches the grace and dynamism of the content itself. I wasn’t able to click on some of the previously aired events, clicking on the sidebar of past dates only worked intermittently, and the cycle of redundant commercials every few minutes made it almost torturous to watch.
This got me wondering about what my online experience would be like while watching the Brazil Summer Olympics in 2016, or what it’d be like watching the next Winter Olympics online four years from now.
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by Basho Mosko | Feb 26, 2014 | How-Tos and Tips
While Interactive Videos aren’t necessarily new (remember Dragon’s Lair?), they are definitely growing in utility, sophistication, and popularity. Today, with easy-to-use platforms like Rapt Media’s, anyone with a creative eye and some video experience can create an amazing Interactive Video (IV). So to help you get started with building your own successful IV, we’re launching a new weekly series of Interactive Video Tips. Each week we’ll demystify different pieces of the IV puzzle (which is actually pretty easy to put together) so that you can fully understand the best ways to make an IV that gives you the results you’re looking for.
From Forrester reports to premium interactive microsites, Interactive Video has captured the attention of businesses, major brands, and the public – but there are still a lot of questions about how to do it “right.” So to kick off our first edition of Interactive Video Tips, we’re going to answer a question that comes up in almost every strategy exercise we conduct with clients: “Where should we put our first choice point?”
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by Basho Mosko | Feb 19, 2014 | Project Examples
Earlier this month, Rapt Media CEO Erika Trautman sat down with ClickZ, a website that covers interactive marketing news, to talk about the state of Interactive Video (IV) and how Rapt Media’s platform is changing online marketing. Along with the full article, which is definitely worth a read, ClickZ also posted a video of Trautman’s answers to questions such as the inspiration behind Rapt Media, what we’ve seen from in the IV space so far, how IV is evolving, what kind of results we’re seeing, and how mobile fits into all of this.
The original video posted by ClickZ was a 7-minute-long linear video that went through all of Trautman’s answers. However, since the story is all about interactive video, we decided to take ClickZ’s video and transform it into an IV.
In about 15 minutes, we imported the original video content into the Rapt Media authoring platform, trimmed the 7-minute clip into five distinct sections, and transformed it into a user-driven Interactive Video. We call that the #InteractiveEffect.
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by Basho Mosko | Jan 1, 2014 | Company News
New Year’s resolutions can be hard to keep up with. Losing weight, quitting smoking, and putting away more money are common declarations this time of year, but we came up with a list of goals for 2014 that’s a little different. This year, we’ve made a list of Interactive Video (IV) resolutions to help us stay on track and make the best IVs we can.
The good news is, like losing weight and quitting smoking, we know these resolutions will help us in the long run. No, we won’t be any healthier by sticking to them, but we will be a whole lot better at making IVs that not only increase engagement with viewers, but also improve overall ROI from video in all areas.
From ramping our videos’ social sharing to focusing on mobile, here are our seven New Year’s resolutions for Interactive Video in 2014.
1. Mobile, mobile, and more mobile.
We will shoot all videos and storyboard all concepts with a mobile-first mentality. The touchscreen interface of smartphones and tablets is the ideal way to fully engage with an Interactive Video, so all of our video content will be optimized for a premium mobile experience.
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