Tried clicking the play button? We thought you might have, all you need is an essay length of words to come looming on the screen and people automatically turn to the video for a quick friendly summary. So don’t feel too bad, because statistically the majority of people do exactly the same thing.
And why do we do it? Well it’s simple really, we all know too well that video can communicate exactly the same thing as copy does but in a more engaging way and with very little – no effort involved. #SCORE!
But it’s more than that, in short it doesn’t just tell us something, it shows us it. As Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research shows, ‘watching a minute of video is the equivalent of reading 1.8 million words’, so yeah, there’s a pretty obvious marketing benefit in it too. So why on earth don’t more companies utilize this media on their websites? The truth is, they’re only just starting to. Year on year more and more companies jump on the video bandwagon as a means of communicating with their consumers – which makes perfect sense as according to retail touch points, consumers are 174% more likely to purchase from watching an online video than viewers who did not. And not only that but 76% of marketers are planning to add video to their sites this year, making it a higher priority to them than Facebook, Twitter, and blog integration.
But it’s not just website content that we’re talking here. With new technology developing at pretty much the same speed as the Higgs Boson Hadron Collider, marking the introduction of new media such as augmented reality & apps, soon video content will be integrated into consumers everyday life in O’ so many new ways (including magazines, billboards and bus stops to name a few!). We will be living in a time perfectly described by Disney’s as, ‘a whole new world’ (of technology that is).
Quite clearly there will always be a place for copy no matter how advanced technology becomes, how could there not. But in terms of which media communicates more effectively, rumor has it that by 2013, video will increase from 30% of Internet traffic to 90% of Internet traffic. And with 9/10 consumers opting to watch the video rather than read the text, it seems pretty clear that video really is the future of online content.
Oh and a video could have summed all of that up for you in under 6 seconds by the way, #justsayin’.
