Tag: video

The Strongest Advertising Tool

Posted on by Josh Geyer
Image by Teono123 No

Humans are visual creatures. In general, if you have to choose between watching a video or reading text, you will probably choose the video. 60% of users will watch video before they read any text if it’s available (Boast.com), and the popularity of YouTube at over 2 billion users is certainly a testament to this as well.

Video was first used for advertising in the 1940s, when a watch company put on a short ad during a sports game. From there, video advertising blossomed into a massive industry, and today it has become a key component of any marketing strategy. But why exactly has it become so popular?

The first reason is that video moves. The human eye is attracted to motion, so video is inherently attention grabbing. When scrolling through social media, a sudden motion may be enough to catch your eye and make you stop, which is key for setting yourself apart in a sea of content.

The second reason is that it stimulates multiple senses at the same time. Combining sight and sound creates an immersive experience that more closely mimics our realities, and this helps to keep our attention. It also takes considerably less mental effort to watch a video than it does to read, and in a culture that increasingly caters to shorter attention spans, this is an important factor.

Another positive aspect of video is that it can be used in a lot of different ways. Short, medium, long, television, Internet, social media, billboards, these are just some of the potential variables that can be manipulated to create an extremely personalized campaign. Furthermore, even though video can be very expensive at the highest levels, a basic but effective video marketing campaign could be created with a small budget. With all of this in mind, there is no reason in today’s world to not incorporate video into your marketing strategy, so how can you get started?

First of all, you need to identify what kind of content your business should be producing, which means identifying your target audience. Are they younger? Then you are probably better off with Internet advertising on streaming services like Hulu or YouTube. Are they older? Then consider TV advertising or Facebook advertising. Once you know the platform and demographic, you can start making decisions about other key variables, namely length, tone, style, and
quality.

Length is obvious, it’s just about how long or short your video is. Longer videos have more potential for providing information and telling a story, but they also have a high potential of losing your audience’s interest. Short videos are much more likely to keep the audience’s attention for the entire time, but they can’t communicate as much information. Both can be effective or ineffective depending on the situation, so just be careful and work to find the balance between being informative and keeping people’s attention.

Tone and style are closely related. Tone describes the attitude of the video, as in how happy, sad, funny, or emotional it is. Style describes the technical characteristics of the video, such as the speed, the music, the editing, etc. The style determines the tone, and the tone plays an important role in how audiences will feel about your brand. Is your brand about comedy? Is it about being serious and emotional? People frequently buy with emotion, not logic, so make sure that your tone fits your brand’s goals.

Finally, there’s quality. Quality is generally determined by what resources you have available to you, but it can also be an important factor in what you are communicating about your business. Think about online video marketers, such as the famous Tai Lopez, who walk around holding their cell phones in front of them, talking for several minutes. There is nothing special about these videos, anyone can make them, and these individuals certainly have the money to hire a top-class video crew, so why don’t they? The reason is that this low budget style feels very personal and human. They are showing that they are normal people just like the rest of us, they don’t need fancy crews to do the talking for them, they can do it themselves. This personal flair makes them seem more genuine and trustworthy, and it helps them to sell their product. So, before you go hiring a crew to make you the highest quality video you can afford, think about your company and the people you are selling to. They make like a high quality video, but it’s just as possible that it will make them feel disconnected with your brand.

Video is a very powerful tool if you use it right, and you don’t have the break the bank to get it. Although there are a lot of variables that make it easy to fail when it comes to developing a strong video strategy, its potential to grow your brand and capture audience attention makes it a key part of modern advertising.

How the Internet Changed Advertising

Posted on by Josh Geyer

Image: The Mill

My personal love affair with advertising began many years ago when I saw a commercial featuring “the man your man could smell like.”

I always thought advertising was boring. Prints and visuals were just extraneous visuals in our lives that didn’t get in the way but didn’t really matter, and all commercials did was take time away from the thing that you actually wanted to watch. But after seeing the aforementioned commercial from Old Spice, and many more commercials like it from the same brand, my mind changed.

Old Spice commercials are fundamentally nonsensical. In one, Terry Crews is trapped in a painting while his rival plays chess with a lion. In another, a pilot is panicking as he flies through a storm, but a beautiful woman instructs him to put on Old Spice grooming products. After doing so, he regains his composure and crashes perfectly into the woman’s house, where a romantic dinner has already been prepared for the two of them.

These commercials make no effort whatsoever at explaining why Old Spice is logically the best deodorant, but they are hilarious, and every time I see one, I fall more and more deeply in love with Old Spice as a brand. These commercials showed me that advertising can be exciting and entertaining, but without the internet, I don’t believe they ever would have existed.

The rise of the Internet has led to the birth of a new culture. The internet gives anyone with a computer an equal shot at sharing their content, which means unique styles that had never been seen before, mostly because they weren’t mainstream enough, were able to come into the light. The style that is reflected in the Old Spice commercials was born out of the unique content that the Internet has allowed for. It is difficult to describe this style, but it is something like this: “fast-paced green screen intensive non sequitur comedy.”

Before the internet, this style would not have been accepted. At it’s very core it is strange and seeks to defy all conventions. But younger generations raised with the weirdness of the internet have adapted to it, and as a result, brands like Old Spice have been able to come in and capitalize. Commercials and videos like these showed me how cool advertising can be, and none of it could have existed without the culture created by the internet.

This isn’t the only way the internet has changed advertising. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook have stolen massive quantities of viewers from cable television, and streaming services like Netflix and HBO have taken even more. This means that classic TV ads aren’t worth nearly as much as they were, and online marketing has become essential. Thus, appealing to the aforementioned internet culture is incredibly important, but it is not easy.

If a brand attempts to be trendy and “appeal to the kids” when they are out of touch with reality, they will be viewed very negatively. An example would be advertisements from people like Tai Lopez. Lopez gained a huge amount of negative attention for his ads, but because it was still attention, a bunch of other people started trying to copy him. But because everyone already saw Lopez as a scam, any video styled after him is viewed as a scam too, so at least for me personally, there is no way I would trust the advertiser

The Internet has changed advertising and public relations forever, so for a brand trying to market itself well, they must connect with their audiences on the Internet. This can be very difficult, so consulting with future consumers first to see what they really like, not what you think they will like, is perhaps the best answer.