Our latest online promo film has just gone live for The Park at Mawgan Porth – a unique holiday destination on the stunning and unspoiled north coast, just east of Newquay. Set back from the beach, the sheltered valley location hosts a collection of air stream trailers, eco lodges, cottages, yurts and cabins complemented by trees lined walkways, indoor and outdoor heated pool and a cafe/restaurant. Our task was to capture the off-season vibe and the unique mood of the place. The choice of soundtrack and capturing human interaction were key.
We’re now working on the social media aspects of the project using youTube, Twitter and FaceBook in conjunction with the client’s website.
No, we’re not making each other sick on the roundabout or seeing who can go higher on the swings… we’re filming a new piece for The Park at Mawgan Porth which redeveloped it’s restaurant over the winter. We’ve been back there recently capturing the unique ambience of the place, the passion that the staff have about what they do, the connection between the restaurant and it’s surroundings and of course the hero – the food. And man, it’s good!
Coinciding with the launch of a new restaurant website, the video will be live in a few week’s time.
The classic ‘piece of string’ question that has been bouncing around the professional forums and LinkedIn groups forever now gets some very insightful and clearly presented data presented in a well organised summary article with good supporting commentary.
Length of video is a very significant factor in determining the success of a piece of video and the ROI, but it should never be viewed in isolation. So much depends on the story being told and the reasons why. Hence some longer videos outperform shorter ones.
Video is a powerful way to affect change. Sometimes the best way to do this is with a short, punchy, direct piece. But not always. So much depends on the subject matter and appropriate treatment.
Another aspect is the relationship between watching the whole video to the end and engaging in a call to action – it isn’t a straight forward equation but there’s a lot of talk currently about front-loading online video with main propositions and calls to action to get around the drop off rate. The downside is, you’re setting the stall out to people who don’t yet care and that approach can turn more people away.
Of course, if you’ve invested in a media asset, then naturally you want the maximum number of people to experience all of it. Being disciplined about length is important, but making it a quality, immersive and engaging experience is essential to motivating people to give it their focus and time, and then take the action you want them to take, including sharing the video with others.
After many months of planning and development, the new website for long-standing client Deep Blue Apartments is live. We created a fresh brand identity and look & feel while working with Channel Computing to develop the database functionality resulting in a Joomla and Google API based solution.
Now users are enjoying more versatile and intuitive searches as the site serves up executive apartments to compare, shortlist and reserve and Deep Blue is enjoying the benefits of a distinctive brand and online offering.
Media and advertising companies still use the same old demographics to understand audiences, but they’re becoming increasingly harder to track online, says media researcher Johanna Blakley. Shared interests, viewpoints, values and tastes are the emerging aggregators of people online – cutting through gender, background, income, age and location. This is shattering the  simplistic, false illusion of commonality which comes from the outdated demographic model. As social media outgrows traditional media, and women users outnumber men, Blakley explains what changes are in store for the future of media.
As FaceBook gathers real traction as a method of promoting online brands and connecting with consumers, these articles make interesting reading.
1 in 4 pageviews in the U.S. are for FaceBook. What is salient is that they are therefore not trawling search engines for information but relying instead on social media bringing content to them.
When comparing page views for a well established blog embedded within a business website with a well established business page for the same company on FaceBook, a massive difference was reported: 3,810 views whereas the blog part of the website only received 130 views for the same period.
Certainly many businesses underuse or miss out on the potential benefits of FaceBook as part of their web presence and a method of pushing news. Big Brands however take the social media channel very seriously, even to the extent that some of them have ceased emailing all together favouring FaceBook’s news feed as the consumer-preferred way of receiving updates. However, having a distinctive website with it’s own rankings in the search engines is still very necessary. Read more…
To ‘enable innovation’ and move towards embracing ‘completely open codec technologies’ Google is avoiding having to pay significant royalties to the H.264 patent pool – which includes Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Sharp and Cisco when it drops HTML5 support for this widely adopted codec from its Chrome browser.
Of course it has to be noted that Google owns YouTube, which up to now has used the H.264 codec to serve its 2 billion – and counting – videos a day. YouTube is moving fast to get off the H.264 train before it has to buy a ticket, but they could even be liable for retrospective royalties of the patent pool which owns H.264 push hard enough.
Part of the problem is that the patent pool hasn’t been firm in collecting royalties for use fo the codec, to encourage widespread adoption, but Google doesn’t like being held to ransom, especially with such a large exposure via the acquisition of YouTube.
Google will continue to support Flash (whose player includes H.264 for video) so Adobe come out winners for the time being but Google, along with many others in the community, has plans to get behind the development of an open source codec standard ‘WebM’. We’ll be seeing a plug-in for Safari and IE9 very soon. Read more…
Interesting blog post about photo stories. The current series that Light Circus have in production fit right into this genre.
Most still photographers say their best pictures tell stories. To a limited degree, this is true. But photographers need to start thinking about more complete and complex stories, not just the best story they can tell in a single frame. This is where the opportunities lie.
Currently, there is such an abundance of single-frame stories, created by amateurs as well as professionals, that the market is saturated. It has become difficult to compete. Amateurs are taking a significant share of the market for this type of imagery.
Unfortunately this is not as simple as saying ‘as long as your video is under 45 seconds, everyone will watch it to the end’.
Last year TubeMogul came out with research claiming that 53% of online video viewers move onto something else after the first sixty seconds. More recently this research was released:
But with some long-play videos bringing higher end-slate views than really short clips, there are a lot of opinions and conflicting evidence out there with no clearly emerging trends. Why? Simply because every video has intangibles that affect how viewers respond to it and there are so many different applications for video (for example there’s a massive difference in metrics between video ads and contextual content or serialised clips etc…).
However, there are a few over-arching fundamentals. It’s all about holding attention and a big part of that is promising a story. If viewers are following a narrative they can connect with, they are more likely to see it through to the end. The piece has to have a pace and feel appropriate to the role it is fulfilling. It needs to engage the user at the earliest opportunity and hold attention through to the end by continuing to offering something of genuine human interest.
Of course there are clever ways of presenting video which don’t reply on the call to action being restricted to the end frame. At Light Circus we’ve made players which offer interactive calls to action that are omnipresent and work independently of playback – to great effect.
But if you’ve invested in a significant asset like video, of course you want people to watch it… all. After all, if a video didn’t grab you enough to watch till the end, you’re hardly going to be bothered to share it with mates or colleagues. Whereas the reverse is of course is equally true – and tapping into the exponential effect of social network sharing is what we want to see happening.
So what’s vital is to have access to information that gives an accurate picture of how a video is performing, so the right decisions can be made and future strategies developed. This means looking beyond the often misleading impression provided by just looking at the number of views (and the scant additional stats offered by YouTube) and understanding important metrics on ‘drop-off’ and syndication etc – the kind of insights that come with ‘proper’ video hosting.
Imagine your inner response if a salesperson said that to you. The minute someone says something like this to us, we hesitate and begin to examine. We may even become cautious or suspicious.
In contrast, when we find ourselves feeling trust rather than having it imposed on us, we accept it. Without stopping to think about it, we follow our instinct.
It’s a lot easier to get that right when you’re face-to-face with a customer. Harder when the only link between you and them is among the results of a Google search. Establishing trust is vital for any company or organisation using the web to promote itself or sell online – so how can your website convey trust in the right way?
Working alongside ubiquitous elements like branding and interface look & feel, there are many aspects of a website that collectively provide a reputation building effect and they all have something in common – a strong human element. Something that breaks down anonymity, breathes life into the technology, makes propositions come alive and creates a bridge between you and the user that feel trustworthy.
It’s people that have ideas and it’s people that respond to them. The human stories behind a brand, service, product or idea are where the raw material comes from for ‘reputation effect’ to be crafted. The passions, aspirations and beliefs of the people with ideas are the very things an audience needs to access in order to feel and ‘buy into’ whatever is being sold.
Conveying authenticity isn’t easy. You can’t just tell people to trust you. Real evidence of trust has to be demonstrated in emotive ways on many levels. No other medium comes close to HD web video for its capacity to create this ‘reputation effect’, and positively influence people, because no other online medium is better at telling human stories.
