Adding Innovation To Your Video Content Marketing Strategy

If you want to see the most creative innovations in video marketing, you need to wait for the Superbowl. Each year, America’s biggest brands roll out their best television commercials, the advertisements with the smartest ideas and the biggest budgets. And the place to see that innovation is now online. After the 2015 Superbowl, Pepsi placed its commercial for Mountain Dew on YouTube. The advertisement showed three young men whose basement video game session is turned into a dance party by a sip of the company’s drink. On the YouTube version, audiences could also click annotations in the video that revealed remixes of dance moves made by elements in the room. What started on television is extended and improved by the kind of engagement and interaction that’s only available online.

That extension started with 360 degree cameras. Popular with real estate firms and hotels, the images they produce force viewers to stop looking and start interacting. As they move the image around the room, zooming in and out of interesting features, audiences stop being passive viewers and become active participants in the picture. It’s a simple, though addictive, form of participation that has now reached and been expanded by video content.

Video Content Turns Leads Into Storytellers

Interlude has created a video content platform that lets audiences engage with the content itself. The firm overlays links that audiences can click to change the direction of the narrative. Instead of simply watching, audiences are forced to engage in a video version of a choose-your-own adventure story. And when they interact with the video, they interact with the brand. It’s a platform that opens a whole range of new possibilities for marketers, allowing audiences to choose the marketing messages that they most want to hear.

INTERLUDE AND Y&R HOLIDAY VIDEO

Another company opening innovation for online video content is Idomoo. The firm’s platform allows content marketers to personalize videos, adding user information to target messages directly at individual viewers. When the platform was used in a marketing video for Barclays Bank, viewers would see their own names in the video and the amount they could borrow alongside shots of what they could do with the loans they took from the bank. Delivered on a personal landing page, the effect of personalized  video content was to more than double open rates and generate a 1,100 percent rise in clickthrough rates.

While Interlude and Idomoo are allowing content marketers to tell stories that audience members most want to hear, GoPro has become one of the biggest sources of innovation in video content by letting audiences tell their own stories. Between 2012 and 2013, the wearable camera firm added $41,000 to its marketing budget — and more than doubled its revenues to nearly $53 million. Its content strategy was to hand out cameras to athletes and other adventurers, and let them upload their own user-generated video content. Those real videos were more powerful than anything the company could have produced.

Video content is undergoing a massive wave of innovation, bringing engagement, interaction, user-generation and personalized storytelling into a whole new format.

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