Transcript:

Hi, and welcome to VCC TV.  I’m Justin Foster, Founder of the Video Commerce Consortium.  Beginning today, we’ll begin producing regular installments of VCC TV as a way to share knowledge with the broader video commerce community.  The focus here is on best practices, interviewing leaders in the video commerce space, and sharing emerging trends in the industry.

Today, our topic is “video and email marketing.”  For years, email marketers have sought to incorporate video into email campaigns, but have been plagued by security and rendering limitations in email clients.  For example, embedding Flash video in email was a non-starter as no major email clients support embedded Flash with the notable exception of Apple Mail.  Using any kind of Javascript embeds to load video is also a big no-no: more deliverability problems.  The only reliable way to incorporate video in email campaigns was through the use of animated GIFs.  In fact, our friends over at Campaign Monitor published an excellent study this January highlighting which email clients supported various video embedding functionality within email campaigns, and they discovered what many email marketers have suspected for some time: animated .GIFs were the only real option for displaying video in email.  Now, I don’t know about you, but when I think about animated .GIFs. I’m reminded of a crude Geocities globe spinning around at 4 frames per second or a little annoying clip art animation of a stoplight flashing on and off.  Hardly the stuff that solid customer experiences are made of.  But today, with more people than ever before having access to broadband connections at home and at work, we’re beginning to see a renewed interest in the potential of this somewhat antiquated technology.  New innovations now enable email marketers to embed more realistic, video-like experiences directly into email campaigns, although there are still considerable limitations and pitfalls to look out for.

First, let’s look briefly at some of the drawbacks of animated .GIF technology, share some new industry developments, then close with a brief recap and resources you can use to further your study of animated .GIFs in email campaigns.

An animated .GIF file is built from number of images or frames displayed in succession.  The technology actually allows developers to define the duration each frame displays down to a hundredth of a second.  However, practical considerations restrict the frame rate of animated GIFs.  Displaying any more than 10 frames per second can create instability in Internet Explorer.  Since IE is the most popular web browser and many consumers check their email using web clients like Windows Live Mail, Yahoo Mail, or AOL Webmail, displaying more than 10 frames per second would generally not be considered a best practice when deploying GIFs in email.  Another hurdle to overcome in the desire to increase the frame rate is the potential size of the  animated GIF.  A single animated .GIF displayed at a resolution of 320 X 240  could range between a couple of megabytes to over ten megabytes depending on several factors.  Now, that may not sound like a big deal, but consider that in an email marketing environment, we’re not just talking about a single streaming instance of the video.  We’re talking about up to one stream per video per email. In large scale email deployments, the bandwidth required to publish these files can quickly run off the charts - and with it, costs can spiral upward as well.  Then, there are limitations on the client side.  Decompressing and displaying fast frame rates in animated GIFs does require some CPU horsepower, and users not connected to broadband could easily have poor experiences.  Last, animated GIFs are only images - they do not support sound.  That means that any email marketer seeking to deploy an animated video clip in an email message will be transported back to the Charlie Chaplin era of video.

So, maybe I’ve turned you off to animated GIFs now.  But there are new developments that make GIFs more compelling than ever before, plus animated GIFs are supported in NEARLY ALL major email clients today.  Outlook 2007, which uses the Microsoft Word rendering engine to display HTML, is the lone major exception: that client will only display the first frame of the GIF.

The potential of including simulated video - even at 10 frames per second, can drive up clickthrough rate and revenue generated through email campaigns.  This shouldn’t seem too surprising, as the eye is naturally drawn to motion video over static images, and by using video clips in email, email marketers have a greater ability to represent products as they would appear in real life, providing an additional dimension to the shopping experience.   Video clips also open new opportunities to showcase brand experiences - directly in email - without clicking through to a landing page. Plus, 10 frames per second may not be as slow as you initially think.  I’ve provided some links to examples at the end of this blog entry where you can see 10 frames per second in action.  Go ahead, grab one of the files and send it to yourself.  You’ll see it renders as intended in the major email clients.  Next, given that more consumers now have access to broadband connections at home and at work, it’s possible to push the technology closer to its theoretical limits and improve the viewing experience.  There are new tools that enable email marketers to control at much more granular levels the number of frames per second, resolution of the video clip, post-roll content, number of colors displayed in the GIF, and certain treatments of the video “player” itself.  The reason I use the rabbit ear quotes for the player is that animated GIFs do not technically play in a video player; they play directly in email clients or the web browser.  All of these innovations provide new ways for email marketers to gain additional control both on the revenue/lift side of email video clips, but also options to contain costs and more tightly control the customer experience.

In the end, the only way to know if some of the new innovations with GIF technology will work for your organization is to test them out.  I suspect 2009 will be a year a lot of email marketers start to dabble a bit with the technology, but many best practices are still emerging.  For example, does content perform better when it loops or stops after the first play?  What impact does post-roll content have?  How does degrading the color pallette or frame rate alter performance?  And - at the end of the day - what email marketers are often most concerned about - campaign response.  If the technology proves itself a viable method to generate more revenue than what it costs to deploy, it’ll have a place in the market.

I hope you enjoyed this edition of VCC TV.  I’ll be presenting this Tuesday with Peter Horan, CEO of Goodmail Systems, at the DMA Email Evolution Conference in Scottsdale, where we’ll explore the intersection of video and email marketing in even greater detail.  I’ll make sure to post a copy of the presentation here at video-commerce.org once it’s complete.  Until next time - Happy Selling Everyone!

Sample 10 frame per second animated .GIFs, displayed here at 160X120 resolution: