Are you either a full-time or part-time freelance animator? Would you like to pick up some project based marketing animation work? Well…Adelie Studios is looking for a few reliable animators with great personalities and insanely creative animation skills to work with.

What is Adelie Studios all about?

We are a virtual organization – we work with freelance animators, voice over artists, writers, musicians and character designers all over the country for projects on demand. This allows us a lot of flexibility when quoting projects because we can keep our overhead costs very low.

What skills do I need?

• We are looking to work with animators who have a strong background in Flash animation.
• 1-2 years freelance experience producing Flash animation.
• Used to communicating, working independently and meeting deadlines in a virtual environment.
• Experience producing animated marketing videos or a strong interest in producing marketing animations.
• Creativity oozing out of every pore and not afraid to speak up as everything we do is collaborative.
• Sparkling personality to match is a must.

That sounds like me, how do I find out more?

Excellent! Please contact us and include a link to some of your animation work you have recently done. We look forward to speaking with you and hopefully working with you on a project soon!

Let’s say you have a website and you post regularly to a blog. At some point someone (not affiliated with your company) randomly posts a comment on one of your blog posts mentioning another company or linking to a video about that company on YouTube. Then that company mentioned sees the comment and isn’t happy about it. Rather than engaging in a conversation in the comments to defend their brand position or asking that the comment be removed; they have the power to shut down your ENTIRE domain. Sound like censorship? It is.

The Protect-IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are bills which would give corporations and government the ability to censor websites on the net. Both of these bills had, at their heart, good intentions. However both bills are so horribly written with vague definitions of piracy that basically ANY website including any form of user-generated content could be at risk of being shutdown. Think of Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and the implications these bills could have on the way these websites fundamentally operate if passed into law. All of these websites rely heavily on user generated content. SOPA /PIPA would completely alter the way Americans would be allowed to use the Internet. Key word in that last sentence is “allowed”.

It also presents a nightmare for web hosting companies which will be forced to police all of the domains that are hosted by them. Let’s say you own a boutique baby clothing store and you had a post about how babies do the cutest things on your website blog and someone posted a link of their baby dancing to a top 40 song. If that top 40 song’s recording company were to claim that this content were piracy, your web hosting company would have to shut down your ENTIRE domain as soon as the complaint was received. There would be no pre-shutdown notification email and no friendly ‘please remove this from your site’. The next day you’d wake up and like flicking off a light switch – your entire website would be gone.

Companies such as DreamHost where the Adelie Studios website and blog are hosted, have over 1.2 million domains that are hosted by them. If this layer of enforcement were required because of the liability they’d be forced to take on, you can all but say goodbye to affordable web hosting. DreamHost has their own response denouncing the bill and the negative effects it would have in their blog post “Don’t drop the soap, drop SOPA!”

As a small business producing niche animated content and marketing animations for the web, both of these bills are incredibly frightening to us. Fight for the Future produced a great little animation (which we are always fans of people using animation) to explain and illustrate the way these bills could potentially censor the internet. Check out their animation below.

SOPA comes up for a vote on Tuesday, January 24th. To find more about the SOPA & PIPA bills yourself and to see what actions you can take, visit: http://americancensorship.org/

 
 While clicks are not the only key metric for video advertisers, they are one of the easiest to measure. Most video ad goals are some sort of call to action, whether that is to like the brand on Facebook, some sort of social sharing or getting the viewer to take an action like buying a product online; many advertisers still use clicks as the main tracking statistic for specific campaign goals. This may be because tracking after the click can become too labor intensive for small marketing staffs or they lack the understanding of how to measure beyond the click.

So if measuring clicks is your primary measurement and you believe the campaign reached the right demographic, did you reach them at the best time to drive these clicks? TubeMogul just completed a research report to answer this exact question. You can read the full report from TubeMogul with their key findings on their research report “Driving clicks, ‘Likes’ with Video Ads?” Here’s my quick thoughts on the results…

While completion rates do not differ significantly throughout the day, click-through-rates steadily climb during business hours to a peak around 5pm. After 5pm, clicks drop significantly, reaching less than half the peak value by midnight.
 

CPMs for both 0:15 and 0:30 second pre-roll ads show very little variance over the course of the day of less than 10% difference for both video lengths. While CPMs for the two video lengths closely mirror each other over the course of a day, 0:30 second ads consistently commanded a higher CPM than 0:15 second ads.

During the working day between 7am – 7pm, Cost-per-click (CPC) remains very similar for both video lengths. However, as the Click Through Rate (CTR) of 0:30 second ads fall in the evening, CPC becomes more attractive for 0:15 second ads in the evening between 8pm – midnight.

So…what does this all mean?

I’ll admit up front, I’m not a huge fan of pre-roll video ads and TubeMogul also reported in an earlier case study that nearly 87% of unique visitors to a site’s homepage featuring video will never watch a pre-roll video ad. However, in certain circumstances and on select community or news based websites, pre-roll ads can be very successful. I think the biggest takeaway from TubeMogul’s findings is if you are using clicks as a goal, you may want to think about increasing the volume of your 0:15 second ads during the evening hours to take advantage of higher CTRs during this time. To be successful with your video advertising you should be opportunistic with your spend to get the biggest bang for your buck by buying at ideal times. Your thoughts or success stories with video advertising? What worked for you?

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know that I am a proponent of using video in email. In the past I have written about how non-profits can use video in email to increase donations and how you can greatly increase your click through rates by including video in your email marketing strategy. I’m a bit of a tech geek so its always been easy for me, create a thumbnail image that “looks” like a video will play and link to the video on a landing page. A simple formula. However having the right tools to edit that thumbnail image has always been a bit of a hurdle for the less technically savvy to get videos integrated into their email design. Thankfully Constant Contact has come up with a very simple and intuitive solution to solve this problem.

They have added a feature so you can very easily add a video link that will automatically generate and insert a video player thumbnail image into an email template. To begin, open an email layout. I recommend you select a block near the top of your email, if the video player appears within their email preview window, they’ll be more likely to open the email or click the link directly within the email window. Within a block on the email, place your cursor where you want the video image link to appear. Then click “Video Link” button that is under the insert menu on the left side (see below).

When the new window opens all you have to do is copy and paste the URL link for a specific video on YouTube, Vimeo, Goldmail or Blip.TV. Then click the “Create Image” button. This will automatically pull the thumbnail image for the video you selected into your email template. If you need it larger or smaller you can utilize the slider function to resize the image so it visually fits the block within your email template as you’d like it to appear.

You can also optionally change the title if you are segmenting your list and you want the video’s title to be geared specifically to the audience’s needs. Leave the “Title” field blank if you want the video to show without a title or text underneath.

Click insert and the video will appear within the block. Save the block and, as always, don’t forget to save and test the email by going to preview, you want to make sure that the video will actually link correctly to any links you include (not just a video).

This feature makes it incredibly easy for pretty much anyone to add videos to their email. If I had to say one thing I don’t love about this feature is that it’s limited to integration with YouTube, Vimeo, Goldmail or Blip.TV. I know, I know most people have their videos on YouTube. But if you had the choice between driving the viewer of your email to your website or to YouTube, which would you prefer? On your website you can guide the viewer easily toward what you want their next action to be rather than on YouTube; the giant candy store of visual distractions.

One way to get the viewer to take the next step over to your website is to include a link at the very top of the video description on YouTube (see below). There you could include a call to action to watch the video with additional features, download a free related ebook, etc. Then once they have clicked over to your website, you have them in your playground and you’re holding the ball.

My nit-picky comment aside, this is a very cool upgrade by Constant Contact. Ideally you want to drive traffic to your website not YouTube, Vimeo, Goldmail or Blip.TV. The bottom line though is if you keep viewers interacting with you content, no matter where it is – it’s a good thing. Kudos to them for developing this to make it simple for their general user to integrate videos into their email marketing. They’ve also developed a short screencast video showing how to use the new feature. Have you used this to integrate video into your email marketing yet?

Maybe you have heard the term “video snacking” in regards to consuming online video content or maybe this is a new one on you. It has nothing to do with wolfing down mini Reese’s peanut butter cups by the handful; not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it may be more similar to this than you may think.

Snackable content on the web refers to how people browse and search for information. Usually it’s somewhat casual poking in to read something, watching a quick animation, reading product reviews, etc. When you market online you don’t have people’s attention for very long. In a blog post I wrote about online video viewing habits - 10% of your audience clicks away after only 10 seconds and more than half click away after a minute.

Think about that for a second.

More than half of your audience leaves after one minute. This is why it is critical to make sure you keep your video content short. Here’s where the snacking comes in.

If you try to cram everything you do into one video it’s going to get longer and less focused. That’s how you loose viewers online. You are better off creating shorter, more focused videos because the end user is more likely to consume more of your content that way. That’s because most video viewers don’t specifically go looking for video – they come across it while browsing a web site and are curious. So they click to watch. If it’s less than a minute, there’s very little time commitment needed. Video snacking feeds that curiosity and keeps people engaged on your site for longer periods of time.

As an example – let’s say you make software. Your lead video should be a very short and focused video of what problem your software solves. Then there should be a call to action either in that video or around it to watch a short video about how the software works. From there you can keep linking through calls to action to short 10-30 second videos throughout your site of customer testimonials, specific functions that the software does to make the user’s life simpler, etc.

You should also sprinkle these video clips throughout your website. Have a technical specs page? Include a few videos showing some in-depth features or “How to” style tutorial animations. Have some case studies? Include video testimonials from some of those customers. Snackable video content on your website allows the consumer to feed their inquisitive nature while at the same time passively pulling them closer to a purchasing decision. One video clip at a time.

To bring those Reese’s peanut butter cups back into the analogy; it’s the difference between a Reese’s King Size and a bag of Reese’s Miniature Cups. If you leave a stack of Reese’s King Size with four full peanut butter cups per package in your lobby area, the casual passer by may think it was left there for someone else or they may possibly pick one up. If they do, they may just eat one or two of those peanut butter cups but by the time they get to that third or fourth full peanut butter cup, unless they are a teenage boy with a cast iron stomach, they’re probably feeling sick and full of regret.

Then try putting a bowl of tiny Reese’s Miniature Cups in the lobby. They were “created” to be a browsing snack. People will grab one without even thinking about it. They will grab a couple for their friends. Before you know it the whole bag will be devoured and people will be looking for more every time they walk by.