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

Why I don’t buy into the YouTube cannibalization theory for product videos

Many retailers hope to significantly boost their product page PageRank by adding video to it - betting on the fact that Google favors pages with video embedded in their search algorithm. I have seen anecdotal evidence that it is indeed true - although no one has published a repeatable formula yet, SEO after all is more art than science.

Another common practice for retailers and manufacturers is to publish their videos to YouTube. If you ask around what is driving these marketers to share on YouTube, you’ll likely hear that a) YouTube is the second most popular search engine, b) It’s potentially a lot of traffic, and c) it doesn’t cost anything (free advertising).

On the flip side I have been hearing more and more recently about “product page SEO concerns” - when a video is published to both the product page, and to YouTube. The argument usually goes like this - “I’ve read somewhere that Google favors video by inflating PageRank, resulting in up to a 50x boost in search engine visibility” (whatever that means). “So if I put my video on YouTube, the risk of the YouTube outranking my own product page is high - bumping my position on the SERP down. That’s why we stopped pushing videos to YouTube”.

The cannibalization story is certainly believable and the explanation makes sense if indeed Google has some bias to artificially inflate the PageRank of pages with video. At the same time, I have observed that the most successful retailers with video usually have a very
aggressive YouTube strategy, where every piece of content is pushed to YouTube, without evidence of SEO cannibalization. In fact, the perception among these successful retailers is that YouTube provided an extra SEO boost - and here is why.

1) YouTube is a massive backlink magnet, because so many sites, blogs, articles point it. Its PageRank is high - but more important, since YouTube appends any outbound link with rel=”nofollow”, the PageRank credit of a YouTube page is only spread across other YouTube pages. It’s like an echo chamber.

2) If a YouTube page is linked from a site with a high PageRank, it’ll benefit not only that page, but any related videos that are linked from it. In other words, the related videos on YouTube get a “free PageRank credit”.

3) As a retailer, if your videos appear as related to popular videos, they might start showing high on a SERP because their PageRank is high.

4) High PageRank means more visibility on Google, which may result in third part sites finding and linking to the retail site, sometimes directly to the product page.

With this hypothesis there isn’t a cannibalization risk, because when the retailer pushes a product video to YouTube it is not at the expense of the product page, rather, it earns free credit from YouTube. Perhaps a more appropriate term to understand what is really happening would be “incremental free SEO” from YouTube.

In essence publishing e-commerce videos to YouTube in addition to the adequate product page is something I would consider a must. Important also would be to properly tag the video in YouTube and append a good description, since the key to success is to appear as often as possible as a related video in YouTube.

Content creation for video marketing - think different!

This is the first post of a series about what video marketing really is, which we started at VideoRetailer last Friday. So this is chapter (1) and I will analyze basic aspects about the nature of online marketing video content.

Many potential clients, at least in Spain where I am writing from, still believe that creating video contents for their online marketing mix is expensive, or too expensive for them. They imagine a film crew of 20 shooting a high production value 30 seconds’ commercial that costs a fortune and creates negative ROI (= high cost, low real impact, difficult to measure). It will take us some more time to “educate” the market about what video marketing really is. Maybe this year’s tighter budgets will trigger the learning curve, although I see video marketing more as a new opportunity for SME rather than a online substitute for offline advertising of the big brands.

However, I think there are a couple of things we should be able to transmit to our clients and especially to their intermediaries, their online agencies. First, forget TV commercials and its costly production processes. Video marketing is simpler and cheaper and if it’s well executed, it’s more effective but above all: measurable. Second, think differently about the contents. TV advertising contents tend to picture a fantasy world that most consumers cannot relate to and more important, they cannot react to the message because it is closed away in a unidirectional TV set.

So, what are some of the basic rules designing and producing online video contents regardless of the nature of your business or your sector?

1) Be specific and segment your audience. On the web 2.0, most people still look for answers (only a fraction really contributes). So, make sure your clips resolve the doubts or questions of the users, especially for products and services with a complicated presale phase. There are many good examples around, let me just mention 2 examples. TV Trip and Caja Navarra, a Spanish Savings Bank. TV Trip is a video based hotel guide and booking site where all listed hotels come with their respective clip, allowing to check out the rooms and the location around. The videos have a rather low production value and are not too original but they are of great complementary value because they help to choose the right place for your stay. I love the mash-up with the Google map below. It makes online booking really easy. Caja Navarra has a female video guide on the home page and on interior sites, she pilots you through the different services the bank offers. Simple and nicely executed and of great help to first time bank users or online clients.

2) Adapt the content to the medium. Or said differently, make your content really easy to watch and share. Divide the contents logically and make sure you show the right clip at the right moment. There is nothing more annoying than having to watch a 5 minute video when the useful information shows up in the last 15 seconds. Offer streaming and download versions in easy-to-control players and without any doubt it’s worth thinking about all those who connect to the web via iPhones, Blackberries or other video-enabled phones.  Then, make sure that important text information or subtitles come in legible sizes.

3) Use real people and a documental style. Whenever it’s possible we try to shoot with people who are somehow related to the company or organization. If you are a furniture manufacturer, let your designers speak about their creations. If you are a retailer, bring your satisfied customers in front of the camera.  Another possibility is to find a passionate amateur who love to talk about gardening, recycling, cooking, cars, shoes, travelling, whatever… you name it. Don’t search for complicated locations, involves your camera-loving employees, clients, providers or fans and let them send the message about your product, service or brand.

4) Think big and produce small. Make sure you don’t run out of contents too soon because it won’t be cost efficient to shoot one clip every once in a while. Think ahead about the contents you need and invest time into preproduction to make the actual shooting as easy and smooth as possible. To my experience, you might need between 2 to 6 people in these kind of production processes depending on the briefing, of course. That can include script writer, camera man, photography and/or lighting technician, cutter and maybe a graphic effect designer. Depending on project’s requirement and scope sometimes even 2 people - camera man and cutter - can do the job.

A closer look at SpotMixer

SpotMixer is a video advertising service for small to medium sized businesses. This service is offered by One True Media, a well funded Silicon Valley startup backed by Kleiner Perkins ($19M total in funding since 2006). Even though SpotMixer isn’t exactly playing in the video commerce space, there a couple of ideas worth meditating.

At a simple level, SpotMixer is a nice little service which allows small business to create and run video ads in just a few minutes.

Creating a first video ad with SpotMixer is rather easy. First users select a template, a business vertical and type in some text they want featured on the video, similar to Google Adwords.

The tool is 100% online and requires no software install. Yet, users can upload their own photos, and record a voice-over sound clip to be attached to the final video. SpotMixer also provides a wide range of themes including music which make the video rather fun to build.

The final step of the process consists in selecting where the video ad should be inserted, and assigning a budget. There are a few interesting options like Facebook or Google, which SpotMixer recently signed as a distribution partner. There is also an option to just get the ad and the embed code, to be inserted in HTML pages, for $49/mo.

When considering these separately, the pieces that make up the SpotMixer solution aren’t impressive. After all, putting together a video animation from different templates with some basic customization isn’t exactly rocket science. But SpotMixer goes the extra mile and offers a comprehensive solution for the lower end of the market, which does not want to deal with the complications of HTML code embeds, video hosting or even video production to get a video message out to prospects.

The integration with Google Adwords is also quite interesting. Google has been offering geo-targeting capabilities for some time now. When combined to the SpotMixer ad creation capabilities, it should be possible for a local business to create a nice promotional video and promote it locally to a targeted base of clients. Video is powerful for connecting people, and humanizing businesses. The potential for video is enormous for local shopping, where over approximately 75% of all shopping dollars are spent.

Back to eCommerce and retail in general, SpotMixer is an invitation for smaller merchants to think about video as a way to seduce prospective clients. Every day that goes by a new service or technology is introduce that lowers the video commerce bar for everybody.

Mega-Trend 2009: Live Video Shopping

Shopflick, the video store for indie products, has recently launched online limited daily deals for online shoppers.

These daily deals usually last only 24 hours or until shopflick runs out of products.  To promote the special offers shopflick does produce short video teasers for each sale it’s publishing on its homepage.

With its video deals shopflick combines two hot e-commerce trends:  video commerce and live-shopping in the vein of woot to create a very innovative video commerce feature we may call “Live video shopping”.

Live video shopping could be one of the hottest trends in video commerce, since short product movies and teasers are ideal for stimulating shoppers to impulse buying. In TV classic teleshopping-channels like QVC have been using the principle of Live video shopping already for years to drive their sales.

Honeyshed is Closing - Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater

Adweek is reporting today that Honeyshed.com, a trendy MTV/QVC style online store will be shutting down. Publicis, the main backer of the site has decided to pull the plug on the business, after 15 months of existence.

The site had a few good ideas on the content side, successfully blending ecommerce content with entertainment to create a compelling user experience inside the video player. According to Adweek, the site accrued over 117,000 visitors in December, which isn’t so bad given the site’s low tech approach to e-commerce which makes it hard to compete against established retailers (basic ecommerce features, virtually no SEO, limited video sharing capabilities, awkward shopping experience).

Honeyshed didn’t succeed not because it didn’t have a good video player or the best shopping cart out there. With more patience and solid backers, this site could have done relatively well over the years. The biggest flaw in the Honeyshed model is content distribution. By comparing itself to QVC, the Honeyshed founders probably shot themselves in the foot and inflated expectations. Both QVC and HSN had a massive initial asset: a large audience thirsty for deals on day one, which they continued to build up over the years with cable companies to reach millions of users.

Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture, video commerce is likely to take off growing off existing e-commerce operations, because it offers a simple value proposition to the site’s owner: video improves conversion, increases loyalty and minimizes product returns. The Honeyshed setback is neither good nor bad news for the video e-commerce. Just stay away from comparisons with QVC for the time being and focus on the bottom-line.

Video Commerce Chronicles #2: YouTube’s Click-To-Buy Updates

Discussing the latest Click-To-Buy announcement from YouTube, and covering three points:

1. More validation for video commerce
2. Link overlays are the future
3. More interesting, how is YouTube going to avoid upsetting retailers that are already uploading product videos but may see their competitors’ ad overlays in YouTube?

eCommerce Video Production Tips from the Pros: eBags

Note from VideoRetailer.org: Last fall, I asked Scott Roon and Jason Carncross to share a few video commerce production tips. This is the incredibly creative duo that’s behind eBags.com’s video product and delivery. Some of their most popular videos are the eBags MacroLoader demo, and most recently, the eBags Web Busters video.I put the camera on a tripod and left these guys present it, their way.

Scott Roon: Hey, what’s happening? I’m Scott, new Media Producer at Ebags.

Jason Carncross: I’m Jason. I’m a Senior Web Designer at Ebags.

Scott: He’s more qualified than I am. Anyway, web video is kind of new, right? I mean, I guess. We’re doing commerce web video, but it’s not what you think. Okay, it’s Ecommerce. Alright, and I guess we’re talking about kind of some of the easiest way to get started, I suppose. Basically, I’m just trying to teach them everything I learned in college. How much time do we got? [Scott looks at his watch] Okay. Sound, first and foremost. Right?

Jason: Yeah. You got to have sound.

Scott: Super important.

Jason: Sound, you can jitter video all you want. You can drop frames. You can have black and white, scratchy…whatever. As soon as you have bad audio, people leave. Kind of have to have great audio.

Scott: I think when we started doing video here, I was pretty adamant on trying to sell them on a thousand dollars worth of audio equipment. I could not stress enough how important it is. When you’re shooting video with someone and somebody’s talking, you don’t want it to sound like old Hamm radio. It’s the least engaging thing ever. People will turn it right away. I do that on Youtube when I’m watching. If you can tell just that the audio is not right, that’s sort of a subliminal thing. The thing that sucks about video and producing video, is that if you’re doing your job right, nobody notices because the end goal is to make it look seamless. And nobody knows. That’s why all video producers are people in LA. It’s because it’s a thankless, thankless job, but that’s the whole point. You know? It’s super smooth. And sound is–immediately, you will recognize bad sound.  I mean, video you can…like you said, you can throw filters if you want. You can do whatever you want. You can fix video, but audio is…

Jason: Another thing that’s bad about audio is If you use the same public domain clip that everyone else is using, then you end up triggering mental relapse from the user about some other site they were just on ten minutes before yours, and that association is bad. If you can do original music at all, even if it’s loop based, but original in edit. That’s better than just pulling something off the shelf, and plugging it in and running with it. Most of the people out there are doing that. You’ll get caught. People will come up and say, “Hey, you know that track in your music, I heard that on TV or I heard that on a commercial. It’s like, “Oh man.”

Scott: I see some of the political ones now, and they use some of the same loops we have. But yeah, you start recognizing. Sound is such a subliminal thing. I mean it’s just..you can’t get away with a lot when it comes to sound. So, do not skimp on sound equipment, since we’re in a lesson here. Do not do that.

Jason: What camera do you use?

Scott: I use prosumer Panasonic DVX 100, for whatever that means to anybody out there. It’s the DVX 100B, which is the third generation of that one. But it was the first prosumer camera, which is half pro half consumer, around three grand, $3,000 that shot 24 frames per second which is a simulated film effect as you know. It simulates value. The eye can recognize the difference between 30 frames per second. If you get farther than 30 frames per second, your eye can’t physically tell. If you slow it down, It’s a trick it plays on the eye to give it more depth. That’s what we use. We haven’t found an HD yet.

Jason: Everything’s been small. We use a 320/240 resolution for all of our videos now. That might change in the future, but for right now that’s what we’re using. Tripod or handheld?

Scott: I love handheld. I’m old school. I came from a music background. It’s at your discretion. I’ve done a lot of behind the scenes tours of companies. It’s a more personal feel for me. Again, that’s if you’ve shot it right, and if you know the technique and all that. But first sit down interview. How about yourself? Do you use…?

Jason: I don’t have any preference. I like smooth dolly shots. I like big budget looking shots. Cranes. Throw a crane in there. It’s just that’s how I shoot. I like more high production look. The problem with shooting high production is if you want to maintain that. You can’t do halfway. You can do minimal cost minimal effort. As soon as you start to get used to high end production. You have to do it right, or someone will call you out. How come you shot it at night? So many elements that you have to control in that world. Unless you’re planning on a big budget, you want to try and make it feel as organic as possible.

Scott: There are certain things you can fake. There are certain things that are difficult to fake. That’s where the TV background is helping. Every corner that I can cut. Not to say that we’re skimping on everything but realistically, it’s a business like everything else. You got to know how to efficiently create something. On any given day, you shoot three things a week. It better not be super expensive. Especially, if you can’t really measure success. I mean you can…but…

Jason: What is your philosophy on edits? I know you have some interesting cut through shots.

Scott: I’m a little aggressive when it comes to edits. I hate dissolves. It’s just my personal thing. They are forced, cheesy, and contrived–Disney movie.

Jason: I agree.

Scott: I think the hardest part has been brevity. Creating rich content that moves–gets in, gets out shows people what you want. A lot of that comes from knowing your consumer. I directly take recommendations off of of our testimonials. I need to know the size of it. I get shots of the presentator relative to the size. I make sure I get good shots. A lot of it is listening to what people want.

Jason: I know the answer to this one, but I’m going to ask for their sake–single cam or multicam shoot?

Scott: In theory, what do I want? Or what do I do? I shoot single cam because it’s just me. It’s really hard to do this with two cameras and talk to someobody. I shoot single camera. I’ve found a couple tricks to get around it and to make it look a little better. Everytime, the first thing that I ask everybody is for lifestyle images, still images anything I can use to enrich a one camera shoot. I want two. It’d be nice. But then I need someone else. It becomes more production. That’s one of those corners, I want to try and cut. I hate using that term by the way. It seems so cheap, when I say “cut corners.” But “maximize efficiency.”

Jason: What about your b-roll, How do you keep track of the straps you have to pick up?

Scott: I do the interview first. Generally, time permitting. I shoot the interview first, and keep a mental note of where it is. That’s kind of the beauty of being the pre-production, the production, and the editer. At the end of the day, the one thing that’s terrible is, I have no else to blame. The one thing that’s good is that I know everything i need in order to create. After i do an interview, i know specifically, what shots I’m going to need when i get back to the editing room.

Jason: One more question.

Scott: I don’t know when this turned into a..

Jason: Because you are a better speaker than I am. Is there something that you would call the Ebags style? How do you come up with it? As far as the edit…can you look at two different videos that you shot and edited and say, “Yeah that was done by the same person?”

Scott: Wow, I really try not to though is the thing. Again, if I’m doing my job right it makes it look like we have 7 different producers and a bunch of different people doing this, different editors and different styles. I’m trying to take as diverse of a look as I can.

Jason: You don’t need a response. I don’t know. I just figured it was a good question.

Scott: I figured you were leading me into something where you were going to make fun of me for something.

Jason: If you’d like me to, I could…

Scott: I try and do it as professional looking as possible, but as engaging as possible. A lot of it comes from the Youtube. I surf Youtube not at work obviously, all the time. I’m always looking for the ways people portray just the stupid things that they do, and the products that they they love, and the things they love, and the the people they are. If i can pull all of that together into one cohesive style, then I have effectively escaped this question.

Jason: Ever think of running for office?

eCommerce Video Thumbnails Matter Enormously

It’s the first impression that counts. In the video e-commerce world, the first impression often is a static thumbnail with a white triangle on top. Will the user click or not, that is the question.

Video thumbnails are everywhere. First, because most eCommerce sites will not autoplay videos on their pages to avoid distractions in the shopping process and therefore prefer to present the video as a player with a thumbnail. Second, when video is introduced on a commerce page, the video player itself does take significant bandwidth and may slow down the page if video starts streaming. Thumbnails solve the page performance problem because video will only stream if the play button is clicked on. Finally, there are more and more video delivery formats where the video content is accessible as a popup or overlay, triggered from a video banner similar to the one here below:

Maximizing click-throughs is an art. Let’s take a few examples from video pioneer eBags.com and analyze some of their choices.

1. Picking a thumbnail for a Product video

As you can see above, out of the five possible choices, eBags opted for a close-up of their Macroloader product. In general, if a video is a product review, it’s a good idea to select a good thumbnail of the product.

Sometimes the product has an awkward shape and would not be easily recognizable in a single thumbnail. In this case, an attractive shot of the presenter works well as shown below for the Travel Hammock product.

2. Picking a thumbnail for a How-To video

A little harder would be selecting the right thumbnail for educational videos. In this case, it’s hard to pick an image that summarizes the problem and suggests a solution. Once again I like the eBags approach because it is very tactical and down to earth as evidenced in this selection for the eBags Universal Plug Adaptor.

Notice how the thumbnail summarizes the problem (unfamiliar electrical plug) and the proposed solution (the black adapter).

3 . Picking a thumbnail for a Branding video

Even harder than How-to’s because of the branding implications. Three different examples to illustrate the various approaches.

First, a Jansport video that narrates the company beginnings and history (below). The selected thumbnail is… the peak of a mountain, which symbolizes coolness, endurance, challenge and lifestyle.

Second example - the Nike video for the Edge Elite Backpack. For a recognizable brand like Nike, eBags chose the thumbnail with the Nike logo, a true click magnet.

Finally - my favorite of all. The Lovcat handbags video. Here the marketer is picking a thumbnail that’s sort of mysterious, inviting you to find out more.

Next time you publish your commerce video, mind the thumbnail!