Video is the Answer — or Is It?
The message is getting louder and repeated again and again: Video is the answer to online marketing. It also seems everybody is jumping onto the bandwagon. Promotional emails direct you to a website where you are presented with a video screen and a opt-in form.
Am I the only person who has a problem with this? I don't argue with the usability and convenience of video but before I sign on I have a wish list I want to present in the hope that some clever software developer can propagate or materialize the ideas.
If I access video from YouTube, I would probably watch something that I am likely to find enjoyable. Music, movie snippets, humour, news would be likely topics.
What about promotional videos, EVEN IF it happens to relate to a topic or product that is of interest.
The worst case scenario goes something like this. A video screen is displayed and the video launches itself automatically. The control bar with the Play, Pause and Fast Forward buttons have been suppressed and are not accessible. The presenters launches into a sales pitch, all too frequently accompanied with a verbal outline of their life story. I am stuck in my chair in front of my computer with some inevitable questions going through my mind.
- What is this all about?
- How long is this presentation going to take?
- Do I have the time or inclination to be stuck here listening to something that MAY NOT be of any interest to me?
This is not unlike fielding a cold call sales person on the telephone, or a door knocker trying to sell me life insurance.
How does this compare to a written sales page? For me, the written page wins hands down and it is not because I can speed read. Like most people surfing the Internet, I can SCAN the written content VERY QUICKLY, skip what I don't want to read and decide within a few seconds if I want to stay or leave.
Not so with video. I have no idea what is ahead in the presentation and I cannot scan forward quickly. If I were to watch 10 video presentations a day, compared to scanning 10 written sales pages, the videos would consume 10 times as much of my time. This for me is totally unacceptable. So what do I suggest?
This is for the next generation video developer:
- I want to point my mouse anywhere on the video progress bar and get a 5-10 second recording of what the presenter is talking about just there.
- I want to find out the duration of the video presentation up front.
- I want to find out the duration of the video presentation up front.
- I want to Fast Forward or Rewind with rapid response time to simulate what I am doing when scanning a written document.
Now, the aficionados are screaming that I would destroy their precious presentation. Hard luck! I can scan a written document and I want to scan a video as well instead of wasting my time locked into passive mode waiting to hear what a presenter wants to tell me, something that may or may not be of any interest for me.
