So my highly esteemed colleague Scott IMed me a link this morning to a YouTube video, Interactive Card Trick. At first I got caught up in the trick, which I proudly recognized was one I had fallen for in an email my sister Kim sent me last year. As you probably already know, Scott didn’t send it to me because of the trick, and of course, he already knew how the trick works. (I have an annoying tendency to be slow on the uptake.) It’s the interactive component that makes this simple video noteworthy. Just think of what that means for videos we create with our clients moving forward. Awesome creative possibilities!
In this week’s episode of Market Edge on WebmasterRadio.fm, Larry Weber interviews Akamai CEO Paul Sagan about the evolution of rich media content on the web.
In this interview, Paul describes the dramatic shift in consumer behavior from TV viewing to computer browsing. But with so much of today’s market dollars still dedicated toward TV a tectonic pressure is building that will soon cause a huge change in the business model of television in the next couple years.
Enjoy the interview and feel free to add your comments on this issues here.
Web Content Technology
Akamai CEO Paul Sagan profiles his companys work in web content technology developed so that end users can easily access web content with the help of thousands of servers , plus he discuss the evolution of delivering rich media content
I caught an episode of “Access Hollywood” the other night. One of their feature stories was the re-launch of their companion website www.accesshollywood.com – Who cares, right? Well, Access Hollywood does…and BIG time (and they should). While I was intrigued by the length and depth of airtime given to this story, it was host Billy Bush’s voiceover commentary that grabbed my attention. In it, he described how central and integrated Access Hollywood’s website has become (in a very short time) to the distribution of entertainment news & media. What used to be a second thought to the on-air broadcast is now a rush to post content online.
And then while watching CNN’s coverage of the New Hampshire primary results, I literally had a “holy crap” moment: Suddenly my “viewer experience” became a seamless “user experience” because of the way CNN converged its online and on-air media.
The highly watched cable news network managed to pull this off in a number of ways:
Purposeful Crossovers: The on-air broadcast of the results maintained a persistent running tally of votes framed around the visual commentary – if a viewer was watching CNN in HD, they’d get access to additional data points along both sides of the frame. Throughout the broadcast, host Wolf Blitzer would lead viewers to reference their laptops and check out CNNpolitics.com in order to drill down and hone into more granular real-time specifics. While lots of broadcast programs lead people to the web, it was the effortless, integrated, “live”, and complementary nature of the use of their website that grabbed me.
Embedded Content: At certain points throughout the broadcast, CNN would feature segments from the various campaign’s live video feeds and direct viewers to CNNpolitics.com to tune into any of the candidate’s specific coverage for further viewing and analysis. Since the on-air broadcast only gave samplings of each campaign event, viewers were easily able to target their preferred candidate online and augment the on-air content. Although CNNpolitics.com was referenced constantly throughout the broadcast, it wasn’t disruptive – it felt right.
Integrated Look & Feel: CNNpolitics.com was a natural creative extension of CNN’s “Election Center” set design and broadcast graphics. The two mediums visually became like one. Viewers who frequently turned their attention from being an online user to an on-air viewer felt a single, integrated experience.
The fundamental shift in the way in which we consume and interact with media has now tipped the scale from the after thought of “supporting Web information” to primary online content. We’ll be seeing many more examples of this in 2008 as TV continues to become an inefficient content consumption technology.
On December 13, ad agency Arnold announced the start of “a viral video series which gives the agency’s perspective on current trends, happenings and important issues in the world of advertising.” They call it Arnold On.
It amuses me that they’re calling it a “viral video series.” A viral video is one that is passed along from user to user (usually because it’s funny or really cool). However, it’s immediately apparent how un-viral the Arnold On videos are, without any regard to the content. There is no “send to a friend” or “forward” functionality. You can’t embed the video on your blog or profile page (not that I imagine the demand to do so is high). Users are instead asked to keeping coming back for updates, which for now involves going to www.arnoldworldwide.com and finding Arnold On under the Our Agency section of the nav. Sure… that’s likely to get tons of repeat traffic.
What should they do with Arnold On? For starters, turn it into a video blog. Allow and encourage comments and feedback. Give it a unique url and/or feature it more prominently on the website. Oh, and if they want it to be “viral,” make it easy for users to pass it along. Duh.
