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.
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 This is shattering the  simplistic, false illusion of commonality which comes from the outdated demographic model.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.
econsultancy.com features an interesting case history on the HoodieBuddie campaign which used combined online video networks to propagate its video ads and nothing else. A rare opportunity to get some naked stats and peer beyond the usually fuzzy veil of ‘engagement’ to look at actual differences in brand awareness and intention to purchase.
The results were impressive. A 62% increase in sales overall and impressive uplifts in both brand awareness and buying intention.
What’s great about that for developers and content producers? Well the argument goes that if RockMelt gains any traction at all in the Explorer, Firefox and Chrome dominated market, leading browsers will adopt SM integrated features faster. That spells more sharing of content as the high degree of integration makes it easier than ever to share something you think will be of interest to others.
With SM integrated browsing, Video becomes even more powerful as a content component by, among other things, engaging users who may not necessarily be searching for you, but will be referred by other users.
The RockMelt website features a video walk-through. College grad, turned online software designer ‘Tony’ apparently moved all the way from California to Minneapolis to work for RockMelt – so how he found time to re-train as an actor I’ll never know but the video promo does little for me.
YouTube feedback on the promo feels very mixed with a lot of people saying they’re rather stick with Chrome and just use the Facebook extension.
And what are the chances of them having an OSX Beta from day one?
