Even if you’re still a bit unsure of the benefits Web video brings to your marketing efforts, think of the commitment Google has invested in YouTube and then you’ll know where the biggest search opportunities exist. So let’s all agree, video is where it’s at, but hold on just a second, let’s call it compelling content presentation, or more precisely, properly conceived, professionally produced, attention-to-post video that delivers a meaningful memorable message in a manner that is less advertising and more content, less pitch and more experience.

Can you do this yourself, doubtful but maybe, so before you run out and blow the petty cash on the latest HD video camera, proper lighting equipment, editing and motion graphic software, how to DVDs like ‘You Can Be The Next Ridley Scott’, a computer and hard drive powerful enough to handle HD file sizes and software processing, custom photography, signature music and sound effects; and before you ask your accounts payable person or spouse to shoot you in your office with a backdrop of photos featuring last year’s office picnic and the broken office chair you’ve been meaning to replace; ask yourself, is this really how to go about marketing my company? I mean maybe your appearance is camera friendly, maybe you have the right voice that fits your message, maybe you understand body language, maybe you have acting experience, maybe you know how to write a script and maybe… while you get the idea? And we haven’t even talked about content and concept. There is a place for amateurism it’s just not in business.

The Ad Content Challenge

The real challenge in website design is not backend technical issues, search engine optimization, or feature proliferation but rather how to turn advertising into content, and content into an experience. We know nobody likes to be sold, especially if it’s a hard sell pitch demanding instant decisions and immediate action. People are more likely to run from such a sales attack as quickly as possible, particularly on the Web where escaping is just a mouse click away.

Let’s assume for a moment that you want a professional Web presentation and not a homemade ego-satisfying customer-repellent video. Let’s also assume that you’ve hired a team that has the necessary skills to deliver the ‘right stuff.’ The next step is to provide that team with the assets they need to do the job.

Gather Your Assets

The first thing you’ll need to do is get all your resources together. Here’s a checklist of things you’ll need to supply or have created in order to get started:

1. Logos That Work

A properly designed logo is a must. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had to design or at least redesign logos for clients who have been in business for years. A video campaign is all about communicating a corporate personality and that identity needs a visual tag to affirm that brand image.

Most business people realize they need a logo but they generally only think of it in one dimension, graphically. With a properly designed logo in hand an audio logo tag can be associated with it so that your brand message is penetrating both visually and audibly. Remember your goal is to turn advertising into content and to do that you must create a memorable experience, and the whole point of using video is to communicate your message using sight, sound, and subliminal psychological persuasion.

2. Mission Statements – It’s About The Why

Mission statements are generally useless exercises in self-congratulatory bunkum. If your mission statement says your company aims to have the best products, at the lowest prices, featuring world-class customer service then you know your mission statement is useless. When people hear those kinds of platitudes they yawn and move on. When was the last time you heard a mission statement that promises inferior crap, at inflated prices, with little or no customer service support?

Instead of a meaningless mission statement, create a ‘Why Statement’ that answers the question, why should anybody want to do business with you? I’ve already given you our version – “we turn advertising into content, and content into an experience” it’s what we do, what we are committed to, and if it’s not what you want then you need another production team. You have to give your clients a reason why they should care about your company, why they should do business with you. It is a commitment not to be feared, but embraced. It is the message you want to deliver, the one thing your audience will remember about you that will distinguish you from your competition, and ultimately it will be the reason they do business with you or not.

3. Six Things You Need To Know

The Why Statement provides your brand point-of-view and personality. It focuses audience attention on the key benefits you deliver. So the next thing you need to provide is the six most important things you want to say about what you do.

Why six? You need to show some discipline in your messaging in order to be effective. Limiting the number of things you say emphasizes what’s important so that it doesn’t get lost in a haze of marketing jibber-jabber, and it avoids creating information overload.

4. Realistic Expectations

You hear and read a lot about ROI and the importance of scientifically measuring results in order to fine-tune commercial communication. Business is constantly trying to make craft into science and it’s the fool’s gold of advertising. Ad agency politics has always been a push-pull fight between the creative teams and the account executives. Account executives like their bulleted points, pie charts, stock images, and PowerPoint presentations. The trouble is it’s all a shell game, an illusion used by rote-trained corporate sales people that lack the insight to commit to what really works, psychological persuasion. Instead, they settle for a seemingly impressive, but often deceiving set of facts and figures.

No one is suggesting that Web video presentations should be art-for-art’s-sake; we’ve all seen visually stimulating commercials that don’t seem to have any commercial point, but to ignore marketing’s dirty little secret that purchase decisions are based mostly on emotion and not rationale reasoning would be folly.

“Do or do not. There is no try.” – Yoda

You’re going to make mistakes. Some things will work better than others. It’s all about fine-tuning your message based on your Why Statement. You need to commit to a Web video strategy that is more about delivering memorable content in service of your Why Statement than merely a series of easily dismissible sales’ pitches. Web videos can engage an audience, attract attention, deliver informative, enlightening material in an entertaining, memorable manner, and that is how they should be judged.

Web Video Is Commercial Storytelling

What is the best way to illustrate why people should do business with you? On the Web there is a necessity to be bold, creative, and entertaining. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling legal services or leg warmers, if you don’t make an impression, your audience won’t listen, and if they don’t listen they won’t remember you, let alone why they should care.

There is a lot of emphasis today on speed, but your website is not the place to encourage it. In fact you want to do the exact opposite. You want your audience to slow down, relax, listen, and absorb what your video has to say. If your video delivers informative, entertaining content then your audience, the ones that are serious about what you do will listen and one of the best ways to get them to listen is to tell a story.

All stories, at least the ones you are going to remember, have three key elements. Think of how professional comedians construct a story: there’s a setup, a twist, and a punch line. A well-constructed Web video has similar elements: a setup that presents the problem, an elaboration of difficulties, issues, conventional wisdom, or false solutions, and the ‘aha’ resolution. Remove any one of the elements and the presentation falls apart. If speed is your goal, buy a sports car, if marketing success is what you want; demand the three elements that make a presentation worth watching.

When It’s All Said and Done

When your video production team comes back to you with a concept, ask yourself is it bold. Is it something people will remember? Does it speak to the question why should anybody want to do business with you?

One last note about deciding whether or not the concept you’re presented is the right one. If your spouse, best friend, or in-laws don’t understand it and are afraid some people will be offended then you know that it’s targeted, and it’s probably the exact right approach to take. If you play it coy so as not to offend anyone, and if you insist that everything you do and every feature and benefit you offer be highlighted then for sure you will fail. A production team can only be as good as you let them be.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Assembling Your Web Video Marketing Assets is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

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The trouble is, most busy, results-oriented business owners and managers want quick, simple answers to complex marketing questions that involve psychological and sociological issues. Buying a mobile phone, makeup, or a car is more complicated than which option provides the most features at the cheapest cost. Even if that was someone’s intent, it’s a purchasing strategy that is defeated by the myriad of confusing and conflicting feature packages offered: you can get this with that, but not that with this, unless you get the other thing you don’t want, and of course whatever you do want costs a lot more. To clarify the situation you can always consult the specifications with the help of an engineer to explain them to you, or you could read some user-generated consumer reports that were probably written by some paid shill or someone with way too much time on their hands. As a last resort you could just buy the one that comes in the nicest color.

What gets lost in all the paradox of choice, technological hype, and fad-marketing confusion is no matter what you sell, tanks or toilet paper, it’s people who buy it, even if those people work for mega corporations that order in container-load quantities. People are frustrating after all, it’s hard enough negotiating where to go for dinner with your friends, so what chance do you have of convincing strangers to part with their hard earned cash. As a result blogs and newsletters present a steady diet of search engine optimization, social networking, and link building tactics with some mobile marketing thrown-in. It’s not that these things aren’t important marketing tactics, it just that they are tactics not strategy, and in order for companies to maximize their marketing impact and sales, they must implement a broader more complete marketing approach that deals with the issues that trigger buying decisions and customer loyalty.

A System’s Approach To Web Marketing Development

There are three reasons why people use the Web: access, content, and communication. These are the critical elements needed to build a Web-based business. The Web has become vital to business because that’s where the customers are, both business-to-consumer and business-to-business. The Web is important because it provides access to a huge international audience. And the reason the audience is there is because the Web is the largest depository of content the world has ever known. All of which wouldn’t be of much value if it was all hidden away in some gargantuan library instead of being easily, and for the most part, freely accessible to send and receive; making it the most efficient communication environment ever devised. From a system’s perspective the Web provides input, process, output, and feedback, a classic business system’s model.

We can all get a little carried away with the latest marketing trends and technological solutions but when all is said and done a Web business strategy must be based on delivering content in the form of text, images, audio and video in informative, entertaining, and above all memorable presentations that influence perception and trigger action.

Everyone understands businesses have to make money in order to survive, but all too often companies waste valuable resources following trendy techno-fads that don’t deliver meaningful, memorable content that influences market behavior, creates brand awareness, delivers service support, promotes positive public relations, generates leads, or increases sales.

Confessions of a Social Networking Misanthrope

There are two basic financial website models, sites that provide niche content that uses advertising as its revenue source, and sites that provide content about the products and services they sell. If you’re in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers you want as much website traffic as possible; but if you’re in the business of selling merchandise or expertise, you really only want interested traffic. In other words, if you sell anything other than advertising you only want traffic that might actually buy what you sell.

Of course there are hybrid sites that want it both ways, they sell a service and provide a blog that contains advertising in order to support the effort. The trouble is the advertising bleeds off a lot of traffic, the very thing the content was intended to attract in order for the company to prove its expertise and thus gain new clients. And with today’s sophisticated behavioral advertising these ads can be sending visitors to indirect competitors even if direct competitors have been restricted. Even if the advertising is totally non-competitive, it is still a distraction drawing people away from your ultimate objective of gaining new customers.

This notion of distraction has even led to a new trend that supports putting all hyperlinks at the end of a presentation rather than spreading them throughout, which has been the norm and often recommended practice. The current thinking on inline hypertext links is that they are distracting and get in the way of the message so they should be relegated to the bottom of the page and used for reference purposes only.

Advertising sites want traffic, and any traffic will do; product and service sites want an interested audience. When all is said and done it’s not traffic that website businesses want, it’s awareness, engagement, and leads.

You Have To Influence Your Audience

It may not be trendy, and it sure isn’t easy, but if you want to make a pile of dough, you have to influence your audience, you have to change perception, alter attitudes, target emotions, and facilitate positive change.

I know, I know, you only sell shoes or the thing that fits inside the thing that turns the other thing that you don’t sell, but all that doesn’t matter because whatever you sell you can make a difference if you stop worrying about traffic and the latest social networking fad du jour.

And that statistical analysis that arrives in your in-box only tells you what happened, not why; it presents only a sterile snap shot of history, it doesn’t foretell the future; otherwise we’d all be driving flying cars, wearing Dick Tracey watches, and have so much free-time they’d have to legalize polygamy just to keep us busy.

Successful companies change the way we think and ultimately the way we act, and it usually revolves around the consistent communication of a simple idea or concept. Ever heard of a company called Apple? Wasn’t it the firm that all the Wall Street stat-geeks and techno-wizards told us just couldn’t compete and was going to go broke not so long ago; so much for blind statistical analysis.

When Apple first introduced the Mac they talked about a computer that was “convivial,” meaning enjoyable due to its ease of use and quality of design. And with that guiding principle Apple has changed how we design things, how we communicate, how we listen to music, how we view video, and they’re on their way to changing how we read books, newspapers, and magazines. Apple has not just influenced its audience; it has changed society. Oh yah, they’re now the computer company with the largest market capitalization, and it’s all because they stuck to their core philosophy and message, and presented it in clever, meaningful, memorable marketing campaigns.

Business Websites are Communication Platforms

Poor communication is worse than no communication at all. Poor communication kills trust and credibility. You may be the greatest expert in widget technology or software engineering but if you’re a poor communicator or are represented by ineffectual media, videos, and websites, then you’re doing your business a disservice. If you want to make a lot of money you have to change attitudes, alter perceptions, and influence people, and you can only do that if you communicate effectively.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

How To Make Money On The Web is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

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The concept has been a hard sell as it flies in the face of a lot of conventional wisdom about advertising formats, attention spans, and content credibility. Like most good ideas it seems that branded entertainment’s time has finally come. Various marketing blogs are all a twitter about Orbit Gum’s new campaign called “Dirty Shorts” featuring it’s first branded entertainment effort, a 5 minute branded video from Jason Bateman and Will Arnett. It seems these well-known actors have enough faith in this advertising format that they’ve formed DumbDumb, a branded video production company. Their first effort, “The Prom Date,’ was viewed 110,000 times in just three days.

Commitment To A Core Message

Of course not everyone has the deep pockets required to hire Jason Bateman, but with proper planning and implementation a branded entertainment video campaign is within reach of most successful small and medium sized companies.

The single biggest obstacle in implementing this kind of campaign is not the cost, but rather, the commitment to a style and format most business owners find hard to swallow: the need to focus on a single core reason why customers should buy your product or service and to deliver that message in some bold or offbeat manner.

All to often entrepreneurs think of advertising in conventional terms like display, banner, and classified (e.g. Adwords). Even Web video has been pushed, prodded and crammed into pre-roll and post-roll television style spots. The Web isn’t television; it requires a whole new way of thinking when it comes to marketing presentations.

The Web is by nature an unconventional arena that demands bold content. You can say and do a lot of things on the Web, but the one thing that won’t be tolerated is boring your audience. Add to that the fact that we live in a product placement world where the line between advertising and content has been permanently erased and you have an advertising environment that demands something different.

You must stop thinking of your website as a digital brochure and start thinking of it has a total immersive multimedia advertising environment that connects to a target audience using standout, break-through communication techniques. The goal is quality engagements not shotgun traffic.

The Goal Is Quality Engagement NOT Traffic

For the average Web business it is important to remember that huge viral numbers don’t come from clever campaigns alone, but rather, are the result of great campaigns plus advertising support, extensive pr, and paid-blog placement. That is not to say that small and medium-sized companies shouldn’t pursue this approach but rather, the goal of these campaigns should be quality engagement not quantity traffic – a far more affordable and productive objective.

How To Deliver Break-Through Advertising

There are various ways to achieve what ad agencies call break-through advertising, but in every case those methods call for content that stands out from the crowd, be it humorous, offbeat, alarming or just plain entertaining, if it doesn’t standout it won’t make a connection, and your website presentation will be instantly forgotten.

The best and most complete example of branded entertainment that I have seen was the brilliant Shredded Wheat “The Palace of Light” campaign. It was very funny while delivering a powerful marketing message. Unfortunately the campaign is no longer running, but if you can find some of the videos on the Web, they are definitely worth seeing. They are great examples of how to turn advertising into content, and content into a memorable experience.

In a speech about break-through advertising, Chuck Porter, co-founder of Crispin Porter + Bogusky states the average person sees conservatively 1600 to 3000 marketing messages a day. That’s a lot of advertising. If your marketing communication doesn’t standout is some way, you are probably wasting your advertising budget.

Two Kinds of Advertising

In response to a question asking whether advertising was technology and data driven, or creatively driven, Porter explained that there are basically two types of advertising.

The tech-data driven ad is all about finding that person who needs what you sell at a time when he or she wants to buy it and then delivering the message to them. This is the reason why so much of what you see, hear, and read in marketing journals and blogs is filled with statistics and analysis of who is doing what and where. All of which is perfectly fine if the only customer you want is the one that needs what you sell instantly or who is motivated by impulse.

This kind of advertising is all about immediacy; the customer needs or impulsively wants what you offer right now. The key is instant access. If customers don’t have instant access, chances are the impulse to purchase will fade, or the prospect will find it more convenient to get the product elsewhere. In this type of advertising, timing and immediacy is paramount. The downside is no long-term relationship is established.

Digital products that can be downloaded instantly seem to be most appropriate for this approach, however that must be qualified by the level of cost and sophistication associated with the product or service: the higher the cost and the more complex or advanced the offering, the less impulsive the decision, and the more a client must be wooed. Advertising theory commonly suggests it takes seven engagements in order to win over a client.

The other kind of advertising is creative-based; it’s advertising built around brand awareness and identity. This is the kind of advertising that creates customers, and establishes long-term loyalty. This is the kind of advertising that can benefit from implementing a branded entertainment campaign.

Why Branded Entertainment Works

If branded entertainment is done right, it engages an audience, it informs and enlightens, it entertains and amuses, it’s meaningful and memorable and potentially viral. Branded entertainment is more than advertising, it’s marketing, and it is designed to influence attitudes, change perceptions, and prompt action.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Branded Entertainment: Web Advertising’s Future Format is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

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If you’re like me, always trying to improve, learn, and grow your business, then you’ve probably been frustrated in your search for truly useful information that you can actually use to improve your marketing, branding and sales efforts.

There seems to be a wide choice of articles dedicated to surefire courses on do-it-yourself marketing that will make you a Web-Media-Mogul overnight (usually available for a mere three payments of twenty-nine, ninety-five) and of course, there’s always lots of stuff on how you just got to get onboard with the next big social networking fad. Excuse me while I delete another email about an absolutely fabulous linking strategy I just can’t live without.

It’s all too familiar and for the most part, a waste of time. If this nonsense were really the answer to growing your business, then you’d already be rich, sitting on some Bora Bora beach sipping pina coladas, and not hunched over your computer trying to find something useful that will actually help.

In One Word Or Less

When it comes to marketing, it really doesn’t matter what venue, method, or media you employ; marketing is simply a matter of effective ‘communication,’ easy to say, not so easy to do.

Your ability to communicate is the key to marketing success, or conversely, your inability to communicate effectively is what is holding you back. So the time has come to grapple with the real problem, and that is how do you communicate your marketing message in the most effective manner to your audience; how do you tell your brand story so people pay attention, and care.

The first thing to understand about marketing communication is that text messaging, Twitter and all other limited, one dimensional solutions, stifle the very thing that’s necessary to implement effective marketing communication: the nuance, depth of understanding and emotional value inherent in what you offer – the very thing your audience needs to know about what you sell. The key being ‘why they need what you offer’ not ‘what.’

Communication Is A Complex Process

The second thing to understand about marketing communication is that it involves five critical elements in order to be effective: the Message, the Method, the Messenger, the Audience, and the Venue.

Ask yourself, why are you on the Web at all? If it’s because everyone else is on the Web, then you’re never going to have the marketing breakthrough you crave; but if it’s because you have something to say, a story to tell, a reason for people to say, “I need some of that!” then it’s time to get serious about developing the right message, delivered by the right messenger, sent to the right audience, employing the Web venue’s best method of multidimensional communication – Video.

This is nothing new. Web Video is now accepted as the most effective communication tool available to Web businesses, so what is the difference between Web Videos that are an utter waste of time, and worse, counter productive, and Web Videos that turn companies into marketing phenoms?

Unlike one-dimensional forms of communication, Web Video delivers your message by accessing multiple senses using visual and auditory techniques. Just by adding a human being as presenter goes a long way to making an impact.

Because video communicates by accessing multiple senses on both a subliminal and direct level, it demands knowledge and expertise in concept creation, writing, casting, graphic and motion design, video production and editing, audio, music and sound design, as well as the ability to get it all to work together in an effective presentation delivered on time and for an affordable investment.

But all of this expertise and skill can be wasted if your video campaign lacks an identifiable emotionally relevant conceptual design. One of the hardest marketing concepts for bottom-line oriented business executives to accept is that the value of their offering is found in the emotional satisfaction their product or service provides. Telling people what a company does alone is not marketing, telling them why they need what you do is. Companies that focus on ‘the what’ turn their products and services into commodities, products that are indistinguishable from the competition, but companies that focus on the emotional value they provide, deliver the answer to the question, why people buy from one company and not from an other.

Effective Marketing Communication is Concept Based

All good marketing is based on an emotionally based concept. This is especially true on the Web, where content and attention span go hand-in-hand. If your Web marketing is not interesting, informative, and entertaining, it will never be memorable; it will never have the lasting impact you need to meet your sales and marketing objectives. Effective marketing communication starts with an emotionally charged concept, one that can be spun-out into a long-term presentation strategy, a concept with legs.

Coming up with an appropriate concept that will work for your product or service takes a bit of creative thinking, but it really isn’t as hard as you think. One caveat that often escapes clients, when they come to us with their ideas is that the concept must be executable for the available budget. Anybody can come up with fantastic ideas that are impossible to implement or are cost prohibitive. The trick is to develop a concept that can be implemented on time and on budget.

Executable Brand Video Campaign Concepts

One method we use to develop affordable brand video campaign concepts for clients is to combine the emotional value proposition the client offers with a recognizable presentation trope.

Tropes are metaphorical expressions, or in this case, storytelling-scenarios that audiences recognize and accept in terms of their implied expectations and implications. Used properly within the context of a Web Video presentation, tropes can simplify and shorten a complex message, and provide cover for what would otherwise be a boring, blatant sales pitch, or desperate plea for business.

Human beings are all programmed for pattern recognition, it is a basic skill needed for survival, and it’s been hardwired into our DNA. Our very survival as a species is dependent on our ability to recognize danger and opportunity. Business and marketing is no different. And that is what makes communication tropes effective. This intrinsic aspect of our nature allows professional video marketing experts to tap into the motivational triggers that govern our subliminal decision-making responses, the kind of responses that get people to buy what you sell.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Web Marketing Ideas You Can Actually Use is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

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The ability to tap into an audience’s emotions is the key to converting interested visitors into paying customers and long-term clients. Marketing and advertising executives have experimented with all kinds of subliminal and psychological techniques over the years, when the most powerful and obvious technique was staring them right in the face, or more precisely reverberating in their ears.

You’re Not My Wife

A woman phones her husband who’s in the hospital after suffering a head injury. The man recognizes his wife’s voice when she tells him she’ll see him in an hour. An hour later she arrives at the hospital, enters the room, and attempts to kiss him on the forehead. The man looks up at his wife startled, and says, “Who the hell are you?”

The man recognizes the woman in front of him as someone who looks like his wife, but he is completely convinced that she is an imposter even though he recognized his wife’s voice over the phone only an hour earlier. This is a classic case of Capgras Delusion. The part of the brain responsible for visual recognition is functioning fine, but the part that makes the connection between his wife’s appearance and what she means to him emotionally has been severed.

Without An Emotional Connection Marketing Appears Fake

The brain is made-up of various systems that operate both separately and in unison with each other. The brain’s interpretive emotional mechanism, the Limbic System, is what gives meaning to the objects, images, sounds and people we encounter. Without this emotional connection things have no meaning and, in fact, can be regarded as fake.

Observations of Capgras Delusional patients illustrate how fundamental the sense of sound is in giving meaning to the world around us. Sound, it appears, is an even more important sense than sight in terms of attaching meaning to what we experience, a fact website owners and marketing executives need to consider when developing a Web video presentation, or in any brand imaging effort.

Sound: The Final Frontier

Sound is fundamental to our survival as a species and our functioning as successful communal creatures both in our private and business lives. Sound is one of the most complex and least understood tools marketing people have, but at the same time it is probably the most important, especially when associated with video imaging.

Julian Treasure, sound expert, tells us that sound affects an audience in four fundamental ways: Physiologically, Psychologically, Cognitively and Behaviorally.

Sounds paint emotionally charged mental images even without the aid of visual stimuli. The sound of a crackling fire, coffee percolating, a baby crying, or a woman screaming evokes vivid images and associations in our heads and fills us with emotional responses. The sound of thunder sends us scrambling for cover. The rhythmic beat of a favorite song gets our toes tapping and our heads bopping. The sound of a catchy fast food jingle gets our mouths watering, creating an instant craving for a hamburger and fries. The rhythmic recital of the alphabet helps children remember their ABC’s. And so on.

Sound can get your heart racing with excitement or slow it down to a state of mellow meditation. Sound can remind you of things you love, releasing endorphins and a desire to pursue the object of attraction. Sound can inform, enlighten and educate. Use sound wisely in your Web video or in your place of business, and it will communicate, influence and persuade; use it poorly and it will send your potential customers racing for the exits or clicking to your competitor’s website without a second’s hesitation.

Sound Tools

We associate sound with entertainment, but for marketers it is a tool to be used to convert prospects into clients. When someone comes to your website they are for at least a moment, a captive, attentive audience. If your goal is to maximize impact you must use all the tools available, and that means both sight and sound.

Voice

The sound of the human voice is the most powerful sound tool marketers have at their disposal. The ability to control tonal quality, pitch, cadence and phrasing is unsurpassed as a means of delivering a meaningful, memorable marketing communication. Sound is the foundation of experience and nothing is as capable of infinite variation, nuance and meaning as the human voice.

If you pay attention to television commercials you will recognize many signature voices associated with brands: Gene Hackman, Kevin Spacey, Sam Elliot, Keifer Sutherland, John O’Hurley, and the list goes on. Those old enough to remember the original 7-Up Uncola commercials of the 1970s will remember the distinctive sound of Geoffrey Holder, or the unique clipped phrasing and cadence of Rod Serling’s late 1950’s ‘Twilight Zone’ introductions. Would people still remember classic television shows like the original ‘The Prisoner’ or ‘Dragnet’ without the sounds of Patrick McGoohan and Jack Webb ringing in their ears? Remakes and sequels just don’t work without the power, presence and impact of those original distinctive voices.

Music

Music has always been a central and significant part of people’s lives. You need think no further than the notion of “our song” a musical representation of how two people feel about each other. Every generation has their sound, their musical heroes, and a play-list of their lives. The smart brands know how to use music to create emotional context and memorable experiences. There is no reason smaller companies can’t do the same thing.

In an effort to promote radio advertising, Bob McCurdy created a website presentation ‘The Power of Sound’ to introduce people to some of the fundamental influences of sound in a commercial context. In his presentation McCurdy mentions numerous examples, including an article by Adrian C. North, David J. Hargreaves and Jennifer McKendrick, that were featured in the ‘Journal of Applied Psychology.’ The example describes how sound can influence prospective customers: when French and German music was played on alternate days for an in-store wine display, sales of French wines outsold German wines on the days that French music was played, and the reverse was true on days when the German music was played.

In another example McCurdy refers to an article by Adrian C. North, Amber Shilcock and David J Hargreaves as reported in ‘Environment and Behavior.’ It details how classical music played in a British restaurant led to higher per table spending by customers as compared to the days when pop or no music was played.

Rhythm

No truer words have been spoken, or in this case sung, than when Gloria Estefan sings ‘The Rhythm Is Going To Get You.’ Watch the images of the crowd in the video below. The crowd moves in synchronized response to the rhythm in a form of brainwave entrainment, a phenomenon describing the brain’s ability to synchronize it’s own electrical cycles to external rhythmic sensory stimulation.

Entrainment is a natural occurrence in nature and was first discovered in 1656 by Christian Huygens, who found that the pendulums in a room full of grandfather clocks all synchronize themselves to the same rhythm even when they initially all started swinging at different rates. In his paper ‘On the Effects of Lullabies,’ Johannes Kneutgen describes how a baby’s breathing, rhythmically responds to music. Since brain waves pulsate like sound waves in cycles per second it is easy to see how the phenomenon of entrainment can have a fundamental affect on how we think and react to rhythmic stimulation.

Context

In Bob McCurdy’s presentation ‘The Power of Sound’ he describes how in the 1970s, IBM worked to eliminate the sound of their new electric typewriters in an attempt to provide a better work environment, but the effort had a negative effect. IBM had to add back an electronic sound to the typewriters as typists found the silence disconcerting. The rhythmic sound gave the operators assurance that they were on-task and accomplishing something and that the typewriters were working properly.

A Nissan team of engineers led by music consultant, Toshiyuki Tabata, had to create an artificial high-pitched sound similar to the flying cars in the movie ‘Blade Runner’ for their new hybrids, as drivers felt the silent running hybrids were missing something. And in fact the silent automobile was a potential traffic hazard as other vehicles and pedestrians could not hear it coming. In the same regard when the Las Vegas casino, The Bellagio, tried to eliminate the irritating sound made by slot machines, slot machine revenue decreased, forcing them to put the familiar sound effects back on the machines.

We are surrounded by sounds that give us reference, warning and comfort, without which we would lose much of the contextual information we need to function effectively on a daily basis. Big business uses sound design to create differentiating mental references for their products and brands ranging from the signature sound of how different car doors shut, to the unique crunch sounds of various breakfast cereals.

Sound Effects

McCurdy cites Herb Shuldiner’s report in ‘Motor Matters’ regarding British psychologist, David Moxon, who found the sound of a Maserati engine turned-on women more than men, even if those women had no previous interest in cars. An observation that must not have escaped Mazda when they created their “zoom, zoom” campaign. Perhaps any guy who wants to dump the suburban van for something with a bit more zip should take his wife to a Maserati dealership.

People react to sound instinctively, a phenomenon referred to as an ‘orienting reflex’ first described by Ivan Sechenov, a Russian physiologist, in his 1863 book ‘Reflexes of the Brain’ and later referred to by Ivan Pavlov, famous for his stimulus-response work with dogs, as the “What is it?” reflex.

Sound effects are the mnemonics of our lives; they attract attention, they generate interest, they stimulate emotion, and they create desire.

Conclusion

The power of sound is an essential tool in a marketer’s effort to communicate, influence and persuade an audience, and isn’t that what your website is suppose to do?

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

How Sound Design Affects Customer Response And Action is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

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Related posts:

1. Enhancing Web Effectiveness With Audio Sound Design
2. The Sound of Business Part IV
3. 8 Things That Motivate Web-Audience Response

As we have seen in previous installments of Killer Campaigns, the commercial broadcast industry, despite its economic and time constraints, has plenty of good examples of techniques that can be used effectively in Web video campaigns, if you understand how certain elements affect an audience.

It’s easy to misread a commercial’s true marketing effectiveness and assume the big flashy special effects and grandiose production stunts are what makes a commercial work, but in fact those kinds of things generally only make a commercial more expensive. True the big-deal aspects of a production may attract attention, but it’s the small things that are the most important, the most effective and the most affordable. It’s the things you hardly notice like writing, casting, music, performance, and campaign consistency that have the most impact on a presentation’s ability to communicate, influence and persuade. It’s the production techniques to which the audience pays little attention that maximizes sale-conversions and increases the bottom-line. Take nuts for example.

Color Me Nuts

Nuts, the edible kind, not the irritating relative kind, are about as generic as you can get. So how do you go about creating a marketing campaign for something as mundane as nuts?

The Wonderful Pistachio “Get Crackin” video campaign and micro site got a lot of things right. This series of videos use the same format, style, message, and color in order to turn a nondescript, seemingly unbrandable generic product into a hip, sexy brand. Each element of the presentation re-enforces the other leaving a lasting brand impression without blowing anything up, or spending a fortune creating animated baby skateboarders.

One element that turns this campaign into a great campaign rather than just a very good one is its use of color. What could be simpler?

Pistachios Newlyweds Do It

The campaign’s consistent use of a signature color palette, green and black, combined with a great tagline and a series of clever sketches deliver the kind of memorable impression that prompts instant recognition and impulse-purchasing when seen on store shelves.

Pistachios Dominatrix Do It

One video is not a campaign, so Paramount Farms had seven different videos created, all following the same formula so the audience’s recognition and retention was enhanced and re-enforced every time they watched a new video segment.

Pistachios Mobsters Do It

This technique is not new; in particular Danone uses color co-ordination effectively in their television commercials to distinguish their various brands of yogurt: Activa uses a green color palette, DanActive uses yellow, and Silhouette uses purple. The Danone commercials don’t have the edginess of the pistachio campaign but their use of color is well thought-out and effective even though the messaging is pretty standard.

The edgy style, consistent format, and color branding definitely qualifies the “Get Crackin” videos as a Killer Campaign.

The Color of Money

Another campaign that makes an impression by means of its clever use of color is the Edward Jones “Join Us” campaign. If you’re not familiar with the commercials they are available on YouTube but unfortunately the embed option for them has been disabled.

These commercials were shot on a white background in black-and-white, a technique that draws special visual attention to the yellow-and-black Edward Jones logo. The whole package is very clever from the way the videos are shot, to the dialog, the music, and of course the clever use of color, or lack-there-of.

The same visual style was repurposed for a companion print ad campaign further establishing and enhancing the brand image in the minds of the audience.

Signature Color Branding

Colorcom is a color consultancy located in Hawaii and New York. According to their website, color branding increases recognition by up to eighty percent; it aids memory processing and storage; and it attracts attention, increases comprehension and mentally engages the viewer. That’s pretty powerful stuff, and you don’t have to be a mega corporation with deep pockets to implement color effectively.

Color Affects, a London-based color consultancy, explains how color effects perception on a physiological level through the electrical impulses that pass from the retina to the hypothalamus area of the brain that controls our hormones and endocrine system. The hypothalamus controls behavior patterns, sex and reproductive functions, metabolism and appetite among others.

Color By Association

Color by itself is not enough to get the job done. The pistachio campaign added the format, style, messaging and performance elements in a consistent campaign that re-enforced the message and the brand.

In the end, Web videos are not as much about making a sale as they are about making contact: contact in the sense of connecting to an audience on an intellectual and emotional level. Web videos designed merely to flog some product or service have built-in limitations, and an abbreviated shelf-life, whereas video presentations designed to engage can become eternal.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Killer Campaigns Volume 4 is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

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You know you need to hire a firm that has the creative staff capable of not just shooting video, but professionals who can write, direct, edit, and add all the post production elements you need, including signature music, sound design and on screen text. But are there other things you need to be aware of in order to maximize the return on your investment? You bet there are.

There are lots of production companies that just want to crank out the work at the lowest cost without providing any marketing guidance as to what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps these firms don’t know the difference or perhaps they just don’t care. The company you hire should be willing to provide some advice as to the best way to present your message so that it delivers the best return on your investment. Too many Web videos are technically proficient, but lack any marketing impact. The last thing you want is a bland, boring, lifeless presentation that goes in one ear and out the other.

When you’re ready to add video to your marketing and sales tool kit make sure you avoid the following seven deadly video development sins.

Doing It Wrong – 7 Web Video Mistakes To Avoid

1.  The Need To Get It All In

Everyone wants his or her money’s worth. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that as a general principle, but getting your money’s worth means more than hiring the cheapest bidder or cramming every possible product, service, benefit and feature into a single video.

You’re better off creating a series of shorter videos each about two to three minutes in length, and each focusing on a particular aspect or sales point. Ten minutes is generally the maximum you can hold someone’s attention, but it will be more effective if you break that ten-minute presentation into a series of shorter segments. By creating a presentation that flows from one focused video to the next, you lead your audience logically through a voyage of discovery that is far more interesting and memorable than a single over-stuffed information-onslaught that overwhelms the audience. Each video becomes an opportunity to re-enforce your marketing image and embed your brand personality by consistent use of color, style, format, and message.

2.  The Desire To Appeal To Everyone

Whatever you sell, not everyone is going to buy it. No matter how good your offering is, there are people that you are never going to convince. We believe a properly implemented video presentation is the most effective method of delivering a marketing message, but no matter what the evidence, there are some people who just won’t buy into the idea. If you try to appeal to everyone you will end-up appealing to no one wasting a lot of time, money and effort in the process. Trying to appeal to everyone merely dilutes your message.

By concentrating on the most appropriate market segments allows you to fine-tune your message. And if you create a series of videos each highlighting a different aspect of your offering as described earlier, people will be able to pick and choose what they are interested in and what they want to watch. In this way your audience won’t get bored or frustrated by listening to things they may already know, or are just not interested in hearing.

3.  The Fear Of Commitment

Marketing is all about creating an identifiable, unique identity, a personality that people will recognize and remember: a brand. It’s what will set you apart from your rivals and give you a competitive edge; if done right, it’s the one thing your competitors can try to copy but will never be able to duplicate.

Success requires a commitment to your brand image and to the marketing strategy from which it flows. Strategy is the big idea that guides everything related to your business, and it should not be confused with tactics. Tactics are the ways you implement strategy. If you confuse strategy and tactics, you will find yourself running in circles never accomplishing anything.

If you commit to and successfully target one market segment, you not only establish and enhance your brand image but you also create a ‘drag effect.’ For example, the success of Apple’s iTunes and iPods dragged their computer sales along with it. Once people became Apple customers for one product they were more likely to buy another; and even though iPod advertising was originally aimed at a youth-oriented market, it’s success dragged both younger and older consumers along for the sales ride.

4.  The Need To Accommodate Everybody’s Agenda

As companies grow they hire new people, and wherever there are groups of people there are opposing opinions, and opinions can very easily turn into agendas. Your sales people want lower prices, your accountant wants higher prices, and your advertising people want something new; everyone has an agenda and they all conflict with each other. The result is compromise. And compromise kills brand personality and corporate identity.

Even big companies with deep pockets and access to any and every expert in the world are susceptible to agenda creep. Take the fast food giant McDonald’s for example. Their television advertising is all over the place. They use different themes, different approaches, and even different music in almost every commercial, each aimed at a different market with a different product offering. The only thing that seems to be consistent is the logo and signature jingle that is slapped on to the end of each spot. As individual commercials they may stand up, obviously they have high production qualities, but as a marketing message strategy, they become mere advertising noise rather than building on each other to form a coherent approach and brand message. What they seem to want to say is that McDonald’s is for everyone no matter what age or food preference, and that kind of approach only leads to a muddled message. McDonald’s may get away with it in the short term because they are McDonald’s and have a long history of effective advertising. Whether McDonald’s simultaneous multiple campaign approach is the result of a desire to accommodate different agendas, or just designed to appeal to everybody doesn’t matter, the result is the same – muddled messaging.

5.  The Lack Of Vision

And speaking of corporate identity, do you have one? Do you have a vision, a point-of-view, an attitude; a perspective on how you can best serve your clients. The idea of a corporate vision is something that is easy to ignore, after all, how much is a corporate vision worth? It’s not like you can go on eBay or Amazon and download one for a few bucks.

I recall seeing a documentary on a very successful clothing manufacturer. The founder of the company was reviewing the company’s latest line of running shoes. He looked at the shoes, looked at the product manager, and said, “Where’s the logo?” to which the product manager answered, “We can add it anywhere.” The company CEO in no uncertain terms told the executive that that wasn’t good enough. The logo represented the company and the company represented a particular lifestyle. The shoe being presented was just another shoe and that was not acceptable. The shoe needed to fit the ideal for which the company stood. The CEO had a vision and everything the company did had to conform to that vision. Developing and presenting a unified corporate vision is how you create a brand and how you build a business.

6.  The Fear Of Failure

No matter how good you are, you are bound to have some failures. These are learning experiences from which you can develop new and improved initiatives. Building a brand identity is a slow and continuous process and it doesn’t always move forward without some bumps in the road. Sometimes what initially appears to be a failure is not a failure at all, but rather the foundation for future more successful efforts. As long as your company has a vision of who it is, what it does, and why your audience should care, and as long as you stick to that vision, you will ultimately find a way to get your message across as long as you keep trying.

Like any kind of advertising program, whether it’s video, print, or anything else, one-shot efforts almost never show results.

7.  It’s All About The Features

The insistence on promoting features without tying them to an emotional benefit is one of the most common marketing mistakes made. You may be offering your customers the most features available but unless you also offer them an emotional value proposition, you will never get beyond the whose-the-cheapest kind of sale.

No matter what features you add to your product or service, you know your competitors will follow with something better, and probably at a lower price. It’s a game no smart marketing executive should play. Discovering the emotional value in your product or service is not always easy when viewed from an internal perspective. If you haven’t discovered what that underlying subliminal value is, and how to communicate it, then your producer needs to help you find it. It’s the most important element in building long-term marketing success.

Conclusion

There you have it, the seven deadly video marketing development sins. No one said this stuff is easy. It would be nice if you could just look at your analytics, and eureka, a marketing solution would appear, but that’s not the way it works. Marketing is a psychological marathon that takes time, commitment, practice, and a good coach you can call on to move you in the right direction.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Seven Deadly Video Marketing Sins is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

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Related posts:

1. HyperRealism As A Motivating Factor In Web Video
2. How To Create A Video Campaign Concept
3. Video Microsites

A good story has a lot in common with a good marketing presentation, and one of the best ways to deliver your marketing message is in the form of a story. It’s how you turn advertising into content, and content into a memorable experience.

Web marketing presentations must engage, enlighten, entertain, and above all be memorable. If you leave out any of these elements your presentation will suffer.

The Dog Ate My Homework

We’re all familiar with the kid who goes to school without his homework and blames poor Fido for his trouble. It’s familiar to the point of being hackneyed, but let’s give Fido a break and blame something else, like maybe the young man’s computer. Who hasn’t lost some important work because they pressed the wrong function key? Or maybe their laptop was infiltrated by HAL from “2001 A Space Odyssey,” or perhaps they just bought the wrong computer. That’s the story Apple tells in this very clever Switch Campaign commercial.

Apple Switch Campaign

Why The Technique Works

1. The Story

Using a story-style presentation provides a framework and structure for delivering a marketing message. All stories must have a beginning, middle, and end; in other words, they must take the viewer from one mental position to another. Marketing stories need to move your audience from curious to motivated. It’s a simple concept to grasp, but not so simple to execute.

One method of peaking an audience’s curiosity is to build your story around a relatable scenario or incident like the computer/dog ate my homework. It provides common ground between the seller and the buyer, and generating common ground is essential to all negotiations. And for online marketers, Web video presentations can be that first step in completing a successful sale’s negotiation.

2. The Storyteller

A story is only as good as the storyteller. It’s the storyteller’s character and style that engages an audience and connects to them on an emotional level, a level that brings believability and personality to the presentation.

There is a common misconception regarding the relationship between reality, acceptance, and motivation in advertising. It’s currently trendy to use client-generated content in advertising, and real employees as corporate spokespersons. Occasionally it does work but for the most part it is a mistake. Great advertising isn’t real, it’s hyper-real: hyperrealism is a communication approach that generates desire and motivates action by presenting a stylized version of reality through a more focused perspective that cannot be achieved by true reality. Reality is messy and confused; hyper-reality is concentrated and clear, and when it comes to marketing messages, concentrated and clear is the goal.

3. The Performance

A great concept, a well-written script, and superior production will still fail if the performance is lacking. The ability to communicate using verbal and non verbal performance skills in front of a camera is not something that should be left to amateurs – after all, it’s your identity and brand image that’s at stake.

The capacity to sell on a one-on-one basis, or even the ability to effectively deliver a speech in front of a live audience is not the same as performing for a camera. A video camera magnifies your appearance, your behavior, and any physical, verbal, or performance flaws you may have. But it’s not just a case of looking good, having a good voice, and getting through a script without stumbling over the words, it’s about leaving a memorable impression and that requires the unique ability to deliver a message with suitable personality and panache. On the Web, boring is as detrimental as incompetent.

4. Solve The Puzzle. Find The Gestalt.

Everyone has heard the expression “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” In the same way a pixel by itself is meaningless but viewed with a lot of other pixels it forms a picture. It’s a simplified version of the Gestalt philosophy that is the basis of a lot of creative thinking. The Gestalt approach stresses the human mind’s search for meaning in patterns. It’s a hardwired survival technique our ancestors needed to learn.

The human mind automatically wants to solve a puzzle, fill-in the blanks, or resolve a discrepancy. Those who couldn’t figure-out the sound in the bushes was something dangerous didn’t survive to procreate, and evolution did the rest. It’s something we needed to learn, and something that is ingrained in our psyche.

The Switch Ad never comes right out and says buy a MAC, the young lady just tells us a story and let’s us come to our own conclusion. By making the audience work at coming to their own conclusion rather than hitting them over the head with an obvious sales pitch, the message becomes much more powerful, and makes a much more memorable impression.

5. A Story With A Twist – Not In This Weather

The following Mercedes Benz commercial is structured very similarly to the joke in the opening paragraph of this article: it tells us a story with a clever twist.

It never verbally mentions the product and it allows the audience to put the puzzle pieces together without coming right out with a sales pitch. It’s clever, it’s smart, it’s sexy, and it has impact. In short, it too, is a Killer Campaign commercial.

6. Where You End Is Where You Start

The next video illustrates how to combine a story scenario with a memorable tagline. The tagline is your brand destination: it’s the short form mnemonic that people use to remember your company. Finding the right tagline to end your video is the best place to start when developing a campaign.

In this case the campaign uses taboo language to punctuate the stories’ tagline. It’s funny, bold, and provides an unexpected shock. Like it or not, you’ll remember it.

Cause If It Ain’t Memorable, It Ain’t Content

The WaySpa.com campaign of a few years ago was a hysterically funny series of videos all based on presenting bold, relatable stories, superior storytellers, topnotch performances, and a “can’t believe he actually said that!” tagline.

In addition, this campaign squarely comes to grips with the idea that you have to give something up in order to gain something in return. Some people will absolutely hate this series of videos, but those that get it, will forever have the brand image embedded in their minds. All too often marketing fails because companies try to appeal to everyone, and that is an unachievable objective. It is a blueprint bound to lead to boring, uninspired, and instantly forgettable advertising.

Television has rules and broadcasters are licensed, so advertisers inherently lean towards the bland and innocuous so as not to offend anyone. Instead they rely on repetition and sound compression (make it loud) techniques to the point of psychological torture. The Web is different, your audience is not a captive of primetime programming and can choose what to watch and when, and most importantly, they expect you to provide a memorable experience, or they’ll never come back.

WaySpay Video Campaign

Conclusion

People are always willing to listen to an interesting, funny, or entertaining story, so if you have trouble getting potential customers to listen and remember what you have to say, then you should consider using the story technique as a way to get your message across. Wrapping your marketing message in a metaphorical story scenario is just one way a company can turn advertising in content and content into a memorable experience.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Killer Campaigns Volume 3 is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

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Related posts:

1. Killer Campaigns Volume 1
2. Killer Campaigns Volume 2
3. Web-Video Campaign Creation 101

The issue is one of successful communication. What you say and how you say it are what motivates people to connect with your company, the solution provider. Websites, blogs, social networking, and mobile sites are merely venues for communication. All the Facebook friends, LinkedIn contacts, and search engine traffic in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you have nothing interesting, memorable, and persuasive to say to them.

In our view, Web Video is the most powerful communication tool available to businesses today, but if you don’t use it properly it isn’t going to help, and the same thing applies to copy, graphics, photos, and blog posts. What you say and how you say it are the critical elements of whether or not, people respond to your website presentation.

What Needs To Be Said

Marketing consultants have for years suggested the use of Mission Statements as one way to get companies to focus their thinking and communication efforts into something meaningful. They are intended to be a kind of ‘Rosetta Stone’ for corporate communication, but instead, they have become a graveyard for innocuous platitudes and inane statements of self-congratulation. It’s too bad because the idea of a core guiding statement that defines purpose and personality is central to developing a framework for marketing communication content and delivery.

If websites are about motivating action, what do we need to communicate to our audience to achieve that objective? If Mission Statements aren’t the solution, what is? The answer is not a price proposition or a feature proposition but rather a presentation of emotional value because it is the most persuasive motivating factor you can offer. It is something that your competitors can’t copy, undercut, or even compete with.

Your Emotional Value Proposition Is Your Brand

If you ever thought branding didn’t apply to your company, well now you know better, because branding is nothing more than the implementation and communication of your company’s emotional value statement: the core guiding principle used to formulate all marketing communication efforts, including website video presentations.

In Lee Eisenberg’s book, ‘Shoptimism’, he outlines four reasons people buy things: to make themselves happy, to transform themselves, to express themselves, and to achieve a sense of permanence. Each of these reasons is based on an emotional value, which is why all the features and price-cutting in the world can’t compete with a well-established emotional return.

Presenting Value In Marketing Communication

Eisenberg’s four reasons to buy are really a variation on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs that form a pyramid of need, want, and desire: the basis for everything we require and everything we crave, starting with survival and ending with self-fulfillment. Most of us have moved up the pyramid from basic survival and procreation needs to more sophisticated desires based on belonging, identity, and self-actualization, the elements that form an Emotional Value Marketing Proposition.

Most sophisticated marketers understand the power and importance of self-actualization as an emotional trigger upon which a brand identity can be established and promoted; however a distinction must be made between the audience’s desire for individual fulfillment and a company’s objective of meeting its marketing goals.

In a Web-based business environment populated with newly minted entrepreneurs who do not distinguish themselves from their businesses, it is easy to understand why this confusion exists.

A business is a living breathing entity unto itself and should not be confused with it’s owners, managers, and employees. It may be trendy to think you are your brand, but unless you’re Tony Robbins, with his personality, performance skills, resources and ’shtick,’ it’s best to implement a less egocentric strategy.

Where self-actualization in marketing plays out is as a basis for presenting the emotional value you offer your audience: a desirable value that motivates that audience to act, and thereby fulfill your corporate marketing goals.

An ego-based misreading of self-actualization has led to a plethora of self-promotion and do-it-yourselfism that works against business success. It’s the fulfillment of your audiences desires that management needs to be concerned with, not their own.

Perception, Reality, and Communication

Once you’ve figured out what your Emotional Value Proposition is, the next thing is to figure out how to present it, which brings us to the idea of hyperrealism, a term we use for developing effective Web-based video presentations.

Marketing communication is essentially a storytelling discipline that relies on shorthand reference and pattern recognition wrapped in the context of an idealized reality, what we call hyperrealism. In art, hyperrealism is intended to convey something deeper and more significant than what mere reality can convey, and the same principle holds true for marketing communication. Reality is messy, complex, and confused, while hyperrealism is simplified and focused, a prime directive in any effective marketing, branding, and advertising strategy. You need to simplify in order to clarify, in order to persuade.

Beyond-Real Realism

This E-Trade commercial demonstrates the principle. It tells a story and makes its point using a real-life scenario wrapped in a hyper-real context. They could have shot the same commercial with an adult instead of a baby, but it wouldn’t have been as effective. It’s the beyond-real realism that makes it work.

HyperRealism As A Concept Development Principle

Every sane human being understands gangsters and serial killers are bad, yet television audiences flock to consume episodes of the ‘Sopranos’ and ‘Dexter.’ In the same way most of us know the images presented by Victoria’s Secret bare little relation to reality. These examples may be obvious, but all effective commercial presentation is stylized, not because it’s an effort to mislead, but rather because it needs to focus and clarify a message aimed at engaging and connecting to an audience on an emotional level.

In order to connect to your audience your marketing presentation must communicate something more than the lowest price, or the latest feature, it must show the way to that idealized version that viewers have of themselves that only exists in their minds. Once you come to grips with that reality, you’re on your way to developing a successful marketing communication strategy.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

HyperRealism As A Motivating Factor In Web Video is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

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Related posts:

1. Web-Video Campaign Creation 101
2. Seven Deadly Video Marketing Sins
3. A Website Without Video Is Like…

CSI begets CSI Miami, which begets CSI New York, which begets NCIS, which begets NCIS Los Angeles, which is just about as much as anyone can take. If something is successful you can be sure more of the same will follow.

Despite the occasional success story, most clones either fail completely, or never live up to the success of their groundbreaking predecessors.
Most of the copycats fail because the clone-masters behind them don’t understand why the original worked, and as a consequence, they clone all the wrong elements. This is as true of commercial presentations as it is with broadcast programming.

Cloning a successful format is not the same as Slipstreaming. Clone marketing is just rote copying of technical elements without any reference to why the original worked, whereas Slipstream marketing takes a familiar idea and plays off it like a great jazz musician reinterprets an old standard.

Kleenex “Let It Out” Campaign:
Recognizing The Emotional Value Proposition

What is more generic than facial tissue? A consumable paper product that you use once and discard; it is the very definition of a commodity, and as we all know commodity-sales are primarily based on price. Enter Kimberly Clark, one company that has managed to turn their commodity product into the industry standard to the extent that the commodity itself has become known by Kimberly Clark’s designated brand name – Kleenex.

The Kleenex, “Let It Out” campaign is just one example of a company that recognizes that in order to turn their commodity product into something of higher value, they have to link it to what we refer to as “an emotional value proposition:” the implied psychological or emotional connection between the product and the consumer.

The original series of Web videos was housed on a dedicated video microsite. The series of videos showed a casually dressed interviewer with an engaging personality asking people to sit down on a couch in the middle of a busy street to chat about some significant emotional moment in their lives. Some people talked about their children; one woman even discussed Katrina and the impact it had on her. People cried, and people laughed, until tears came to their eyes, at which point, the interviewer handed each person a Kleenex: Kleenex and emotions go hand-in-hand. Let It Out, the concept was brilliant.

The following version was created for television; it is a compendium of clips from various videos, and as good as it is, it doesn’t have the same emotional power of the Web video versions that concentrated on each person’s emotional response to the interviewer’s questions. It’s good, but not as good, but it does serves to illustrate the point. Unfortunately the individual videos are no longer available.

Kleenex “Let It Out” TV Commercial

Everything in the commercial works: the interviewer’s manner and personality, the visual imagery of the couch in the street, and the memorable music message. It’s all good, very, very good.

On The Other Hand…

Rogers Communication Inc. is a large Canadian communication company that provides digital cable TV, high speed Internet, and mobile phone services. Their primary competition would be Bell Canada.

In order to promote their new Home Phone service Rogers initiated a series of commercials featuring a man on the street interviewing people passing by, asking them to compare their phone service to their competitors. They used a red and blue couch in the street with the red side of the couch representing Rogers and the blue side representing Bell. They handed each person a blue phone and asked them to call a friend or relative; then they handed the person a red phone representing Rogers, and asked them to call the same person. Then the interviewer asked them to compare the service, which according to the commercial was the same. The difference of course was in the price.

Anyone who has seen both campaigns could come to only one conclusion, and that is the Roger’s commercials were patterned after the Kleenex, “Let It Out” campaign. Did it work? Take a look.

Rogers Home Phone Campaign

On a very superficial level, the commercials are eerily the same, both have a couch in the street, an interviewer, and a passerby; but on an emotional and psychological level, they are as far apart as you can get.

Kleenex tied the use of their product to people’s most personal feelings, their response to emotional reminiscence, while Rogers relied on price only. There service isn’t better, it’s the same; just cheaper – so the ad says. The Kleenex interviewer is courteous, interested, and responsive, while the Rogers representative is glib, and a bit smarmy.

The Technique and Why It Worked

The Kleenex campaign works for all kinds of reasons, the most important of which is that it engages the audience with an intriguing visual presentation that resonates on a psychological level by providing an emotional value proposition associated with their brand. On the other hand, Roger’s value proposition is price.

You may say, price is important, but pricing tactics are a dangerous game. Competitors aren’t just going to sit back and let you drive them out of business. If you fire a price missile across your competitor’s bow, you can bet they’ll respond, and that’s exactly what Bell did.

Whoops!

By not understanding what Kleenex had done in their campaign, and not following Kleenex’s precedent by associating their brand with an emotionally resonant value proposition, they laid themselves wide open to a slipstreamed response by their competitors, who created a campaign that riffed on their imagery, and one-upped them with an alternate price comparison.

Rogers Advertisement

Bell Advertisement

Conclusion

If a commodity product like facial tissue can become a major brand by employing marketing strategies that emphasize their emotional value proposition, then so can your product or service. Delivering a marketing message based on it’s underlying emotional value is a better strategy then price and feature selling, a tactic guaranteed to be short-lived. Features are forever being added and prices are continually under competitive pressure, but emotional relevance is sustainable.

For many companies, it is very difficult for them to see the emotional value their offering brings to the table, but the conceptual basis of any effective marketing campaign starts with discovering that underlying human connection your product or service has with its audience.

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Killer Campaigns Volume 2 is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

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