by Basho Mosko | Mar 26, 2014 | How-Tos and Tips
Great video is usually expensive, time-consuming, and generally requires an army of specialized personnel focusing on the many pieces of the puzzle. But where does that leave the bright, creative people regularly posting quality how-to videos, product overviews, “About Us” vignettes, recruiting videos, corporate communications, and video blog content on a budget? How can they compete against expensive, polished production when it comes to capturing viewer attention?
The most obvious answer is in the content. Content marketing has become sophisticated, refined, and effective, poising video as the primary delivery device for that content going forward. But there is one common element that almost all great content marketing has in common that has traditionally been missing from video: the effective call-to-action (CTA).
The ease with which anyone with a smartphone can create, upload, and share video content has opened up the world to a flood of video. To be honest, most of these videos are bad, some are good, and few are great. However, it’s not difficult to turn those “good videos” into “great videos” with the aid of Interactive Video (IV) and properly placed CTAs.
(more…)
by Jen Bergen | Mar 19, 2014 | Company News
There’s only one more full week left in March, which means we’re also one week away from Rapt Media’s presentation at the upcoming ad:tech conference conference in San Francisco. The largest digital marketing event of the year, ad:tech kicks off on Wednesday, March 26 with Rapt Media CEO Erika Trautman speaking with and Gaiam TV’s Director of Marketing Andrea Scott about Interactive Video. For those unable to make it to the west coast for ad:tech, you can catch Trautman speaking a week later at ClickZ Live in New York.
(more…)
by Basho Mosko | Mar 14, 2014 | How-Tos and Tips
The term Interactive Video can be used to describe a number of types of online experiences. From Red Bull’s Gives You Wings microsite to Deloitte’s engaging recruitment video, video integrated into website content has not only become ubiquitous but the line between video and website are also blurring. The fundamentals of an Interactive Video, which we dove into a few weeks ago in our What is an Interactive Video post, stay consistent throughout these online experiences, leaving many clients wondering what the best type of Interactive Video for their initiative is.
A menu-driven Interactive Video performs much like a website, allowing viewers to navigate through content to get to the information they’re looking for. With clear navigation links, back buttons, and one-click access to return to a menu, this design of Interactive Video lends itself well to content-heavy video experiences and can result in exponentially higher engagement times.
In this post we’ll go over menu-driven Interactive Videos (IV) and the projects that lend themselves to success with this format. But first, let’s take a look at how to create a menu-driven IV.
(more…)
by Jen Bergen | Mar 12, 2014 | Company News
Rapt Media teamed up with online community Gaiam TV a few months ago to devise a head-to-head landing page competition against a standard landing page to see if Interactive Video would increase conversions, while also communicating and building relationships with its customers. The results were outstanding. At the largest digital marketing event of the year, the upcoming AdTech SF conference, Rapt Media CEO Erika Trautman and Gaiam TV’s Director of Marketing Andrea Scott will elaborate on these findings as well as Interactive Video in general in the session entitled “The Interactive Effect: Boosting Video Performance.”
During the session, the two companies will discuss how Gaiam TV came together with Rapt Media to create an engaging, menu-driven Interactive Video landing page for its streaming media service that gives the viewer control of the content, resulting in an improvement in ROI in less than four weeks, and doubling Gaiam TV’s conversions over its standard, static pages.
(more…)
by Jen Bergen | Mar 7, 2014 | Project Examples
If you’ve ever watched an online recruitment video you know that they usually can go one of two ways. They can be a dry, boring explanation of the company, or they can make the company seem like a Google-esque, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” fun zone. Either way, these videos have one thing in common: They’re both linear videos that are generally unexciting.
However, Deloitte, the largest professional services firm in the world, decided to change the traditional method for online recruitment videos, launching an interactive enterprise video for its graduate and internship opportunities that’s not only informative, but also very entertaining. Little Sister Films (LSF), a digital video agency operating in New Zealand and Australia, built the interactive project for Deloitte, and released it earlier this week.
Tasked in creating something unique and fresh for Deloitte’s 2014 Graduate Recruitment campaign, LSF built a point-of-view interactive day-in-the-life video. According to LSF, the goal was to “create something light-hearted that took you inside the Deloitte culture and educated the viewer on the various service lines the company has to offer.”
(more…)
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.
(more…)
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.
(more…)
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?”
(more…)
by Erika Trautman | Feb 21, 2014 | In the Media
This article about Interactive Video as a corporate communication tool was originally published on Wired’s Innovation Insights blog on February 18, 2014.
All businesses struggle with communication. Getting the right messages across to customers is a constant challenge, but finding a way to communicate between departments, with external stakeholders, and with investors is a whole other issue – and one that we all deal with. And more and more companies see online video solutions as a cost-effective, time-efficient way to tackle these challenges.
But the reality is most companies are leveraging only a fraction of the efficiencies afforded by video technologies, leaving billions of dollars on the table.
(more…)
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.
(more…)
