Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Maruxa Murphy for the Video Marketing Telesummit. It was a lot of fun talking about the usage of animation for online marketing applications and having a great discussion on the topic.

There are 11 other interviews done with some outstanding video peeps representing different specialties of online video marketing. The others interviewed for this series include: Michael Koenigs of Traffic Geyser, Perry Lawrence of AskMrVideo.com, Andrew Lock creator of the podcast “Help My Business Sucks!”, Josh Anderson of Internet Business Ideas Inc, webinar expert Stephen Beck, David Frey of Marketing Best Practices, video newsletter expert Michael Yost, Will Franco of jiveSYSTEMS, Joshua Aikens of Flixify,  Michelle Cox of Metacafe (who I’d also interviewed a couple years ago) and video blogging extraordinaire and all around great guy from the Boston social media scene Steve Garfield.

If you are interested in checking out the series it runs from 6/14 – 6/18 (my session happens to be on Friday 6/18 from 1-4pm EST). Register to listen to the entire series or just one session for FREE.

Here’s the description of my session for the event.

Eric Guerin

“How To Grab Your Customers By The Eyeballs And Keep Them Glued To The Screen Through Fun And Effective Animated Videos For Your Business”

Eric Guerin has over 15 years experience in the visual communications field working for marketing firms in and around Boston MA. Eric started his own company, Adelie Studios, in 1999 with the mission of providing an integrated solution to customer’s print and web design needs.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this presentation…

• Discover the 2 types of video animation that is often overlooked in video marketing today
• The easiest and most unique way to position your products in your video marketing strategy
• The #1 way you can grab your audience’s attention in the first 5 seconds of your video
• Why 53% of your current viewers are NOT watching your entire video (and how you can immediately change these stats to your favor!)
• 3 superstar tips to getting your videos viewed by your intended audience again and again
• How to create high-converting videos without your talking head in the video
• The single most powerful way to get more views to your videos
• How Google Site Maps can get your videos dominating Google searches within hours
• 3 major reasons your audience will want to pass on your animated video
• The fastest way to get your audience to see your animated videos through your email marketing campaigns

Register to listen to the entire series or just one session for FREE.

I shared a link with my wife for a video on a major television network site last week. She clicked on the link and said “This isn’t very interesting. Why did you send this to me?” It was a pre-roll ad, before the video I had intended her to view. My wife’s response is fairly typical of how most Americans view pre-roll and overlay ads. It all gets lumped into the “This isn’t what I clicked on to see” category.

According to analysis from eMarketer provided by video ad network YuMe, between Q1 and Q4 of 2009, click-through rates dropped steadily from 1.88% to 0.74%. Completion rates dropped as well, from 77.4% to 66.3%  by the year end.

TubeMogul Research Reports recently completed a study where they looked at nearly 1.8 million videos varying in length from 3-10 minutes and distributed from top television broadcasters, magazines and newspapers. The results were shocking:

• Overall, 15.89% of viewers click away from a video rather than sit through a pre-roll ad.
• 24.85% of viewers click away on top magazine and newspaper sites.

So if I am a magazine or newspaper publisher I’m looking at these numbers and thinking “So pre-roll ads are a revenue stream but I am losing nearly 25% of the audience who was coming to my site to view OUR content because of them.” It’s sort of a Catch 22…but is it really?

I wrote about this in an blog post titled Stop Trying to Force Monetization of Online Video over a year ago when the statistics were already starting to plummet for pre-roll and especially post-roll overlay video ads. I still believe the only occasion where pre-roll ads or post-roll ads could be seamlessly built in around the content is with long-form (online television shows or movies) not every 90 second news story on their sites.

I believe we are in a scenario not that different from when television was in it’s infancy and they tried to apply “what worked” for radio broadcasting to television advertising. It failed. The same way pre-roll and post-roll ads applied to online video content are trying to mimic television commercials and are having predictably abysmal returns.

People have a shorter attention span online than they do anywhere else. You’ve got less than 5 seconds. If the content they clicked to see wasn’t there, they are long gone.

In today’s online world if you really want to get people to view your video content – don’t slap it over another publishers video content…create your own story with a call-to-action built in. Besides if you create content geared and tagged to get found by your demographic, it’s that much more targeted to reach your audience when and where they are searching. Couple that with the fact that audiences are not loyal to any specific publishers online where you would typically pay to run overlay ads…is running pre-roll really worth it?

One of the biggest problems of marketing videos and animations for B2B is many business people don’t have audio turned on in their offices. It’s just impractical for some or obtrusive for others particularly in a company with large areas of open cubicles. Suddenly the CEO’s talking head in your video or a voice-over describing how your service works isn’t heard or conveyed as effectively as possible to your viewer.

So what do you do as a B2B marketer when creating an online marketing video about your product or service? Here are a couple of very simple solutions.

Add Subtitles

In a report published by eMarketer with research done by PLYmedia they found on average that subtitles increased the length of video viewer engagement by almost 40%. Another interesting stat was:

“Comparing subtitled videos to identical videos without subtitles, PLYmedia found that the videos with subtitles were watched 91% to completion, compared with 66% to completion for those without subtitles.”

Even more significant was that subtitles increased viewership of videos on “mute,” by 20x.

This all clearly shows that adding closed captioning or subtitles to your product demo or marketing video will greatly increase the efficiency of your your video when primarily selling it to business people.

Make audio a “bonus feature”

Not literally, but as part of the scripting process for your videos think of the visuals that will be involved so they tell the story for you. This is so simple to do but something that so many people fail to take into account when producing a marketing video. Animation is exceptional at taking concepts or hard to describe features and conceptually bringing them to life for the viewer through visual communication.

Another reason visually scripting your video is a best practice is that the language you produce the video in,  may not be the first language of your viewer or your target demographic. So while having a slick talking voice over may sound fantastic, it may be difficult for a non-native speaker to follow.

Utilizing a visual scriptwriting process for your animation not only reinforces points to your native speaking audience but also communicates your information to your non-native speaking audience. The bonus is this method also delivers your message effectively to your audience who don’t have their audio turned on or are forced to watch it in “mute mode”.

So what about you? What are you doing to make sure your message is communicated as effectively as possible?

A 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?

There is a new podcast called NomX3 – a brilliant idea where two guys (Mike Langford and Jeff Cutler) go to lunch and discuss interesting topics as well as the great food they are eating at different restaurants. NomX3 (or nom, nom, nom best pronounced as if you were a Muppet) i’s a great way to spend your lunch as a viewer at your desk (if you eat lunch like I do) and have a good laugh. It also reminds you that lunch is a great opportunity to get out there and meet some new people or reconnect with old friends.

Recently I created an intro for the podcast and they invited me on to the show to talk briefly about short form online video versus podcasting. Then they profiled the Telly Award winning video we created through JCSI for OpenPages as an example of what we do. The lunch at Burton’s Grill was absolutely amazing and the conversation was great. Enjoy this while you eat your lunch…I know I did.