VideoRetailer.org - Exploring the Intersection of Video and e-Commerce.

Dude, where’s my video?

“A bread machine. We gave him a bread machine for his birthday. Him and his wife have no time to buy fresh bread every day, so it’s perfect for them.”

As my father-in-law was saying these words on a beautiful Sunday morning, a thousand questions were going through my mind. How is that possible (making bread at home)? How does it work? How long does it take. How big is this thing? Do you need to know anything about cooking? etc etc. So then I started by quest for answers. What is a bread machine??

Naturally, the process starts with a Google Search for “bread machine”. Lots of results, let’s pick the target.com link. There on Target, multiple choices - each of these machines features 4 or 5 product photos, a short product description that’s not really explaining how things work.

Most valuable are user reviews - but they all talk about how great or bad the product is, but do not provide answers to common sense questions. Dude, where’s my video? Isn’t this the perfect example of an innovative product that needs a little more context than a bunch of photos, copy and some text reviews?

I visited a few other sites and could not find any videos. Perhaps refining my Google query would help, let’s try “Bread machine video”. MUCH better.

The first link is to YouTube, there you can find all the information I was looking for. Look at the quality of the playlist on the right side of the YouTube page:

Found all the info I needed… on YouTube. A few thoughts on this experience:

1) YouTube 1- eRetailers 0. I would have expected the major retail sites to feature product videos, since most of this content is created by manufacturers or content sites like cooking.com. Why is this content only on YouTube? Does not make any sense to have it so far away from the purchase point.

2) Who said you should not syndicate content to YouTube? Users are being educated to find the videos they are looking for on YouTube by Google. Take a look at how Google is pushing links to YouTube videos. Also see how good a job YouTube does putting these all into a nice playlist.

3) Why do I need to append my initial query with “video” to start seeing videos in the Google SERP? This is a challenge to all the theories stating that video gives a huge boost to pages with video in search engine rankings. The videos exist, but you have to type exactly the right query to see them.

2010: not without video marketing (Part 1.)

2009 was a good year for practitioners of video marketing. We saw some really encouraging results -better performance of landing and product pages that include video than those that don’t- especially from e-retailers, like e-bags, Zappos or Pool Tables .

I am looking forward to 2010 because as video marketing gets mainstream for commercial websites we will hear more success stories and we will have more metrics to analyze and to compare, most important how do sites that use video content perform compared to those who don’t in terms of conversion rate and ROI.

This is what I think will happen in 2010.

1. Video use and consumption will rise again.

• Some users, especially “generation Y users” will be more likely to abandon certain sites if they don’t provide video content.

2. Video will become the dominating content format across most industries.

• Especially FMCG and service brands will include video as key elements to communicate with their users and clients.

3. Video is nothing without interaction.

• We will see how conventional  players (play,  stop, share) will convert into widget-based visualization. It’s not enough to substitute text or photo based content by moving images, it’s the widget you can add to the video player that will make the difference.

4. Video will become a commodity.

• The real value will be to think about a sustainable video content strategy not in how to produce the content itself. What e-retailers need is a decent mid-term video marketing strategy. Production has become affordable and can be highly standardized.

5. E-mail marketing gets another chance.

• Including video in e-mail communication and newsletters can increase  click-through rates up to 50%, compared to e-mails that just include text or pictures.

Trends for 2010. Video-based geolocalization: yes. Mobile video commerce: not yet.

Reading through European and North American blogs about digital marketing these days, one gets a rough idea where marketing budgets and efforts will go to next year. Most experts share the opinion that two areas will see a huge growth: 1. mobile marketing, pushed by the rapid adaptation of smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry and cell phones that run on Android, including Google’s Nexus One) especially in Europe and 2. geolocalization.

(For more info on 2010 digital marketing trends I recommend reading “Where Digital Marketing Is Heading in 2010 (Part 1)” published at Advertising Age).

So what does that mean for video marketing and video commerce?

I think that in general mobile commerce is still in a premature phase and it’s too early still to speak about “mobile video marketing” (the use of video content in mobile marketing). Just think about watching a video on your cell phone… While Apple (57 million iPhones have been sold worldwide) and Google (Android) have made sure that YouTube videos can be viewed on their devices, reproducing a video on a Blackberry is still quite a painful if not impossible user experience. In general, it will take more technical effort and time until e-marketers provide relevant web content for mobile users (at least that’s what I predict for the European market), let alone video integration for mobile navigation or mobile video commerce applications.

Having said that, let’s look on the possibilities of video and geolocalization. Actually, it makes a lot of sense to combine content mapping or geolocalization -one of the killer applications on the web- and video content.

Look at Trip TV, “The Hotel Video Guide”, a site that sells hotel rooms around the world. For me it is one of the best e-commerce sites when it comes to integrating video-based geolocalization. The idea is really simple: optimize the user experience by providing the necessary information for holiday travelers.  Users can browse the site using a Google Maps interface that includes videos of listed hotels.

The video player has all the state-of-the-art features necessary to guarantee a great user experience: in video thumbnails to go from chapter to chapter, a more info button on the hotel, a photo gallery and related video (similar hotels) button, sharing options and a “see on map” option.

Click on “Rooms” and you will get short videos of everything the hotel offers.

You got the idea: mash up video content and maps to optimize user experience. The online travel industry shows the way. I wonder why so few retailers are using this simple combination to stand out in map-based search engine marketing. Something to think about for 2010!

Zappos.com: the biggest video retailer in 2010?

Online shoe and fashion accessory retailer Zappos has started to integrate Overlay.tv’s video technology, a simple and user-friendly “clickable” video interface that allows the user to interact with the content, widely referred to as video widgets.

Here a few impressive statistics on Zappos’ online video use:

• In 2010 Zappos plans to offer some 50,000 product videos on their website which will make it the biggest video retailer on the web!
• Zappos’ existing video content on product pages has been able to increase sales (compared to product sites without video) by between 6 to 30%!
• The Las Vegas-based online retailer currently counts with 6 video studios to produce their own content and is planning to run 4 more studios by the end of 2010.

That’s makes them the innovation champion in video retailing 2009-2010, and that’s why

Do you heart Zappos, too?

Forrester says, there are online video opportunities beyond advertising. Start to call it video commerce!

Beet TV has published a video interview with Bobby Tulsiani, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research about the company’s report on video platforms.

The interesting thing is that now even mainstream analysts seem to realize that there is a business case for online video beyond advertising! Good, we are making progress. He doesn’t call it e- or video commerce but he says, … “I think we are looking at a much broader business cause. One could be communication [...]. You can do something like lead generation. [...] It can even be something more [like driving] transactions on a retail website.”

Transactional videos, lead generation! Oh yes, Bobby Tulsiani - I think you know your stuff!

It seems that we are really getting to the point where the mainstream business world starts to understand that video and online marketing is not the same as recycling your TV spots on YouTube but actually helps to convert a user into a client.

Click here to watch the entire interview.

Good video marketing reads for the Halloween Weekend

There are three great papers that were published recently, all of them good reads for everyone who works in video marketing and or in online marketing. And the good news: apart from being really useful, all of them are available online for free.

If your weekend is busy and you only have time to read one of them then go for “Creating E-Commerce Videos that Sell” by Justin Foster, co-founder of Liveclicker and Founder of Video Commerce Consortium . It’s a great paper for everybody how wants to understand the potential of video content in e-commerce; especially interesting were the sections on “Understanding Motivation, Simplicity, and Triggers” and the “Product Video ROI Calculator”.

The second paper I recommend is part of a series of best practice papers published by Adobe Scene7 called “Experience: What’s Best, What’s Next - A Point of View on Building Rich Online Experiences”. The author is Doug Mack (Vice President & General Manager of Consumer & Hosted Solutions at Adobe). Believe me, I have no intention whatsoever to promote Adobe or its RM solution Scene7. But it’s simply interesting and everybody involved in the multidisciplinary art of video marketing can learn something useful from the 7 principles explained. Principle 2 “Movement has Meaning” explains why adding video, animation and voice is so important for a good user experience online, including real cases of videos displayed in fashion e-retailing sites that helped increase performance.

The third is actually a presentation and has no direct connection with video marketing but it dives deeply into the immediate future of the Internet, showing upcoming trends relevant to any Internet marketer. The Top 5 Internet Trends were published by Richard MacManus, Founder&Editor of ReadWriteWeb. You will find valuable information on Structured Data, The Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web & Augmented Reality and the Internet of Things.

When will YouTube be a transactional video shopping site?

This week, eMarketer cites a study by InternetRetailer which reveales that already 41.4% of all Top 500 online retailers are present on YouTube. That’s the second most used social site after Facebook where more than 57% of retailers are trying to do business.

So far social networking sites have been seen by many retailers as part of a multiple-points-of-entry strategy to the e-commerce site. That’s where we wanted to attract the traffic to because that’s where the user is less distracted by other offers. At least, that used to be the common belief. But the article points out an interesting fact that will make us rethink this “single- point-of transaction” strategy” again, especially for those retailers using video for selling.

Shopping is (and always was) a social act, so it’s common sense to let people shop among their friends at their favourite social networking sites.  That’s why forward-thinking retailers want to bring their Web stores to the environments where their customers like to spend time. As a result, almost three-quarters of the merchants in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide have a presence on at least one of the major social networks or social shopping sites.

I think in the future we will have to think much harder about how to integrate the transaction into the video content or player in order to reduce clicks and make online shopping an even better user experience - even if that means that customers don’t drop by our shopping site. Let’s see how long it takes YouTube and other social network and video sharing sites to become transactional.

Video Email Best Practices

Video Email Marketing in 2009: Facts, Stats, Limitations, Possibilities from Justin Foster on Vimeo.

Here embedded an excellent presentation on video email by Justin Foster and Lisa Harmon. Topics covered include:

- Concerns, attitudes, and expertise level of marketers seeking to learn more about video in email marketing
- Forces driving video in email
- Methods for achieving video in email
- Video .GIF vs. Animated .GIF
- CertifiedVideo (from Goodmail Systems)
- Video .GIF pros and cons
- List of which mail clients support video, by video inclusion method
- Email client market share
- Browser market share & video .GIF limitations based on browser
- Which email clients block images by default
- Several examples of email messages that include video
- Video .GIF best practices
- Example results
- Common questions re: video in email

Video Commerce Chronicles Episode 6: Justin Foster’s full keynote at the Video Commerce Summit ‘09

Following our live notes from the Video Commerce Summit presentation from Justin Foster, here is the full length video and the presentation slides.

Video (62 minutes)

Slides from the presentation

Video Commerce Summit: Emerging uses of video in ecommerce

Moderator: Faramarz Farhoodi, Motosport.com

Faramarz remarks:
Strategically analyze the objective of your video program
- Driving traffic to your site (Google Network, Affiliate sites, SEO?)
- Increasing conversion
- Increase average order value
- Increasing page views
- Length of video quite important: under 1 minute, even 30 seconds to avoid distractions - Importance of testing: measure and test conversion
- Misplaced content can hurt conversion

Impact of video on site performance - working with onsite production. Professional resource
- How to videos (how to change tires, change exhaust)

Alison Jeske, drugstore.com
- Affiliate channel is emerging as an important channel to leverage video
- Embedding videos on affiliate site with integrated product merchandising & cross-sell
- Affiliates also commenting on some videos, helping contribute to overall SEO
- Affiliate educating site searchers on how to buy products by clicking on link overlays in videos
- Example of an affiliate gone wild with video: http://www.spreety.com/Fun-Beauty-Infomercials.aspx
- drugstore.com launched first video email campaign in April 2009
- Early results of video in email are promising, but still too early to tell
- Continuing to refine placement for video in email

What’s next?
- Going to continue blowing out video over social media channels e.g. integrating video into Facebook lifestream
- Critically important is bringing video to where the customers are

Goodmail Systems: (Gal Chanoch, VP Product Management)

- Goodmail partnered with AOL, AT&T, BT, Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, Road Runner, Telus, Verizon, Yahoo
- Demonstrated video playing in AOL fat client (including full motion and sound)
- CertifiedVideo enables true video in email, no increase in load times or file sizes
- Goodmail AUP forbids auto-play with audio in email, but does enable auto-play without audio

Certona Meyar Sheik

- Seeing personalized video as emerging trend, dynamically serving most relevant video on site pages, and serving different versions of video
- Sees opportunity for behavior-driven merchandising and cross-sell within video
- As the volume of videos continues to increase, important decisions will need to be made regarding whether to continue showing relevant videos, or to drive someone more directly to product pages via product thumbs and other product metadata