Last week, on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, I checked the New York Times home page just to see what was going on around the world.  I was surprised to see that the video window at the top of the page was devoted to a series of 5 short pieces about roasting a turkey, an activity that I was about to attempt just hours later.  A woman chef was dispensing advice on every stage of the process, from defrosting and unwrapping it, to letting it rest after it was cooked.

I had already printed out a recipe to try on my own bird this year, but watched the videos anyway, just out of curiosity.  And I learned a number of small tricks that helped me to successfully produce a beautiful roasted turkey (my first).  Keeping the oven closed, and forgoing the basting were among the bits of advice that she offered.  And so I did as she suggested.

Then, in the Dining section, there was another video, where a professional butcher discusses the best way to carve the turkey once it’s cooled down a bit.  I’d seen this one a couple of years ago, so it’s a “repeat”, but I watched it anyway, just to remind me of how it’s done (not at the table, is his advice).

So, to re-cap:  they provided me with short, concise content, that I found interesting and useful, especially because it was temporally relevant, even welcoming the re-published existing content, and I was grateful for the chance to watch the videos and learn something, which I promptly put to use in my own kitchen.

Damn, this web video stuff works well when it’s done right.

An article I read recently stated that by 2013, Cisco predicts that 90% of online traffic will consist of video.  Pretty astounding.  But we don’t have to wait another year for the tipping point to come, because already more than 70% of online retail sites use video on their product pages.

What this means is that if you are a retail operation with an emarketing site, you are already behind the curve if you aren’t using video on that site.  And it’s becoming more prevalent for B2B marketers to use video, too.  There’s just no better way to engage and communicate with your audience (and potential customers) than video.  Increasingly, it will become what people expect to find when they get to your site.  If all you’ve got is a page of text with a still photo, you’re slackin’.

So what exactly can web videos be used for?  There are many options, and lots of examples of each already in the market, but here’s a short list:

– new product introductions

– product demos

– video FAQ’s or instructions

– video newsletters

– customer testimonials

– promotion of / recapping live events

– community building

– good old-fashioned advertising

I hesitated to put that last one on the list, because I think it’s a huge waste of the potential of web communication when clients take their traditional Broadcast commercials and put them online.  Most ads don’t work in a “pull” environment.  But, on the other hand, if the ad is interesting or entertaining enough, it can be a great (and cheap) way to distribute it.  Just check out how many hits the VW “The Force” ad got on YouTube as an example (over 44 million views so far).  So it works, but only for great content that your audience wants to see.

The biggest reason to use web video comes down to engaging the audience.  Nothing else comes close.  Now, this term “engagement” gets thrown around a lot lately, and I saw an interesting discussion about defining what it means the other day.  Beet TV sponsored a web panel in NY about online video and online advertising the other day (link to the program), called “The Value of Engagement”.   During one of the sessions, Jason Krebs from Tremor Video spoke about what it means to engage an audience.  Tremor recently started selling ads on a “per-engagement” basis, so this is not an academic issue.  They are staking their revenue stream on being able to deliver engagement (and they are the first, I believe, to do so).  What Jason said was that they defined engagement as causing the viewer to take some physical action, to click on something embedded in the video.  That “call to action” could be many things depending on the client’s strategy (a link to more info on a product, to a store locator, to an ecommerce site, etc.).  But the key point is that the viewer had to take some action, not just watch the video all the way through.

 That’s a pretty high bar compared to traditional measurements of advertising effectiveness (awareness or  positive opinion) so it’ll be interesting to see how often they achieve that result.  If they succeed, you can bet that many clients will want to be a part of that deal.  And we may have a new, better predictor of ROI, and measure of effectiveness, than ever before.

Six months ago, a guy talking about the future of Interactive media quoted a study that said that about 30% of the browsers in use were HTML5 compliant (mostly because of Firefox, since they were an early adopter).  The other day another guy on a webinar said the figure was now 67%.  That’s quite an increase in just 6 months.  And by the first of the New Year, I would bet that figure will be over 80%, as people update their browsers to the latest version (IE9, for instance).

So now the majority of web experiences use the new HTML5 standards.  Add to this the recent news that Adobe will not be updating Flash for any new mobile OS, and you have a major shift in media distribution over the internet.  It was great to have Flash on 98% of the browsers for a couple of years.  It made it easy to distribute video and motion graphics.  But the shift to mobile doomed that technology. 

Apparently the Flash plug-in was unstable on mobile devices, causing them to crash, and using up too much power and processor resources.  I wrote about the shift in consumption to mobile devices here recently (hasn’t everyone?).  That doesn’t mean that Flash is dead, far from it.  It’s still ubiquitous, and the advice from the folks at Brightcove is that it should still be your first choice for a video distribution format.  But Flash alone won’t cut it anymore, and we’ll have to serve up multiple file formats for the foreseeable future.  We’re all caught up in another format war between the big tech companies, and it’s not likely that anyone will “win” anytime soon.  Even within a particular OS, there are differences from one device to another that may cause your file to play poorly or not at all.  So we’re stuck with complexity in serving media for a while. 

They are still referring to HTML5 as an “emerging” technology, but I’d say it’s already emerged, and by next year it’ll be the standard.  What this means is that any web site that was designed using earlier specs will need to be updated.  This was bought home to me personally recently.  I upgraded to the latest version of Firefox, and when I checked out my own site’s Home page, it didn’t display properly.  All of the blank areas, which were supposed to be black, showed up white (this only happened in Firefox, not in any of the other browsers).  It took me a couple of hours of digging to figure out what was going on.  It turns out that the <bgcolor> tag is not supported in the <body>  anymore, and you have to use CSS to control any of the style attributes in HTML5.

Those brilliant folks at W3C have created a great website to teach you all of the new rules and changes to the spec, which I found very helpful (http://www.w3schools.com).  It even shows you examples of HTML5 and CSS compliant code for each tag, which you can copy and paste into your site’s code.  Nice.  It’ll still be a lot of work to revise all of the web sites out there, but worth it, because the new <video> and <canvas> tags are going to make distributing videos and motion graphics so much easier.  Not to mention all of the cool new things designers will be able to do with them.  The multimedia party is about to start for real, and it’ll work just as well on mobile devices this time.

If you haven’t checked out your site using the latest Firefox browser (version 8), you should.  You may be surprised that the appearance or functionality of some elements don’t work anymore.  And then you’ll have to get it fixed, so that it’s HTML5 compliant.  But once that’s done, you should be cool for a long time.  It took about 7 years to get this new spec published, and it’ll be around for a long time.  Isn’t the web great?

If you haven’t seen this short doc yet, it’s worth the 20 minutes.  Well done, and a smart look into the future.

Check it out.

The short answer to this question is “shorter is better”, with one caveat.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think :15 spots are generally a waste of money.  It’s not enough time to develop a real story, and (with some notable exceptions) doesn’t usually communicate much of anything, except the sponsor’s logo.  It’s just long enough to be annoying, but not long enough to entertain, unless you’ve got a fabulous site gag that works in 10 seconds (that’s the exception).

Even :30’s always seemed to be a little tight to me.  I’ve noticed over the years how often the first assembly of a :30 spot comes in around 40 seconds.  Then we would squeezed it down and speed it up to make a :30, but that work usually compromised the communication and truncated the storytelling.  No one would ever know that unless you had seen the first cut, but it’s generally been true.

So my best guess is that videos should be between 45 seconds and 3 minutes.   That’s plenty of time to tell a good story, develop some drama, set up characters and situation for a comedic pay-off, or do a product demonstration.  But not so long as to bore anyone.  The research that’s been done to date says that video completion rates start to fall off fast after 3 minutes.   If the video is really interesting, and moves at a decent pace, you can stretch that to 5 minutes, but you’re tempting the audience to bail out before it’s over.

Mind you, we’re talking here about short web content, not a traditional TV series, with a stable cast and long dramatic arcs.  Those work on the web too, but only with massive amounts of promotion and exposure through traditional media first.  My kids watch “Glee” online all the time (it’s time-shifting for them), and have no trouble sticking with it until the end (although they don’t pay much attention to the commercials).

I mentioned the great documentary series that Honda has done for web distribution a while ago.  Those docs are between 15 and 20 minutes long.  I think they did a great job executing them, and I intended to go back and watch the rest of them.  But I haven’t.  Would I be more inclined to watch them all if they were shorter?  For sure.  Most people don’t have time in their day to spend 20 minutes watching a web video.  But they might do it after work if they considered it pure entertainment.  Again, that’s a different content category.

What to do if you have more than 3 minutes of stuff to say?  I have two suggestions.  First, I have been impressed with the way this is handled at Grovo (http://www.grovo.com).  This is a website that publishes videos meant to educate their audience about web technologies (how to use LinkedIn, for instance).  Many of their courses run 15 or 20 minutes total, but they’ve chosen to break them into smaller chapters that can be viewed individually, each chapter taking 2 or 3 minutes.  It’s a great strategy, because you can watch one or two, then if you get interrupted or bored, stop watching.  Then, when you have time, you can go back and pick up the next chapter in line.  It allows you to skip over sections that you already know or don’t have any interest in, too.  I think it works quite well.

The other strategy is to post multiple version of the content.  I produced a video to promote a local charity last year (babyspace.org), and the video turned out to be around 6 minutes.  We had much discussion about the length, knowing it was problematic.  And in then end, we cut a shorter version to post on the main web site that was around 3 minutes.  Then we also posted the full-length version to YouTube, and included a link to that version on the charity’s main web site.  That way we didn’t burden the casual viewer with content that was too long, but also allowed those who wanted to know more to see the longer version.  Problem solved.

So there you have it.  Avoid content that is too short to be of use, and that which is so long as to be tedious, and all will be well.  It’s always a judgment call, I know, but smart publishers will err on the shorter side.