I am embarking on a project for the VCC - a new whitepaper/research paper focused on the state of retail video in 2009. The focus is on video content as opposed to placement or channel - e.g. what video content “works,” and what doesn’t. In addition, we’ll mostly focus on on-site video as opposed to syndicated video or channel-specific uses of video in e-commerce.

If you’d be willing to contribute to the report by interviewing with me for 15 - 20 minutes, I’d like to learn about what’s working for you, what’s not, etc. You and your company can remain anonymous in the final published paper if you wish. Please drop me a line at justin [at] video [dash] commerce [d o t] org if you’re interested in participating in this project.  Ideally, I’d like to interview at least twenty-five “Top 500″ retailers for the paper prior to its eventual publication - a task I’m sure will be no small feat.

I’ve noticed more people asking me about the relative merits of Flash vs. Silverlight for e-commerce video, especially since the release of Silverlight 3.0 in July.  I am not a technical expert on the differences between Flash and Silverlight, so I won’t expose my ignorance here by pretending otherwise.  Besides, a simple Google search reveals no shortage of Flash v. Silverlight comparison reports for the curious.  Smashing Magazine’s writeup is one of the better ones.  Read it here if you’re so inclined.

For most executives in e-commerce, my general read is still that the battle between Flash versus Silverlight comes down to one thing: market penetration.  No matter if Silverlight can offer slightly higher video quality playback than Flash, or if its support for languages like C# make it easier for developers to work with when building players or video widgets (as opposed to Flash’s ActionScript, which is proprietary to Flash), very few e-commerce companies I know are willing to risk the added prompt to have a shopper download Silverlight.  In e-commerce, we’re all about shortening conversion funnels, moving people to purchase faster, and making the shopping experience seamless. A Silverlight download prompt is just one more barrier standing in the way of an e-commerce merchant and a sale.

This isn’t to imply that Silverlight’s early adoption is not impressive and worthy of a hard look.  Silverlight adoption has grown at a much faster clip than Flash did in its early days, after all.  Ultimately, however, the numbers speak for themselves: Flash is available on 99.0% of PCs in mature markets, and 97.9% of PCs in emerging markets.  Silverlight, by comparison, is hovering at just around 33%, according to the latest statistics I’ve seen.  In other words, if the statistics are accurate, 99 out of 100 of shoppers on your site can watch video in a Flash player, while only 1 out of 3 can watch video with Silverlight.

Would you rather please 99% of your customers, or irritate 67% of your customers?  It’s no wonder Flash remains the dominant standard for e-commerce video delivery. Have a great weekend everyone.

Happy Selling!

Earlier today, I finally got a chance to watch a presentation co-delivered by ReelSEO Founder Mark Robertson on the subject of video SEO.  The presentation was originally delivered on July 30, 2009, and I’m sorry I missed it.  The amount of relevant, insightful information pertaining to the state of video and SEO you’ll find here is the single best amalgamation I’ve seen on the topic to date.  Browse the PPT below, and follow on with commentary as the findings pertain specifically to the video commerce industry:

- Search engines today still rely primarily on video metadata to classify and display videos in search results. This means that if you are trying to have your video featured in organic search results, it’s important both to make sure that text on the page is relevant to the video, and to make sure the metadata within the video file itself is relevant to the video. Automated technologies do exist to perform speech to text translation, but transcription efforts often involve considerable human effort even when automated technologies are used.  Importantly for retailers, videos that search engines find shouldn’t be focused on video ‘for the sake of video.’  Ensure contextual and in-video links (overlays, hotspots, etc) are directing that search traffic to your site.

- In an 06/08 study from JupiterResearch, 54% of online consumers reported using YouTube to discover video.  In June 2009, comScore released a study showing there were 3.6 billion search queries made on YouTube, accounting for a staggering 27% of all Google queries.  These results highlight YouTube’s continued prominence as a video destination and potential as an advertising platform for online retailers.  What the study did not illustrate (at least in this webinar) were the demographics of searchers on YouTube and the types of video content searched on YouTube.  Most online retailers I engage with are still struggling to generate an ROI from YouTube videos or YouTube branded channels.

- Traffic from videos appearing in Universal search results over Google was (is?) rapidly increasing.  According to a Jan 2008 comScore study, 38% of users who searched Google were served video in Universal search engine results pages.  This highlights the importance of using SEO best practices to aid in video discoverability over Google, and, importantly for retailers, ensuring that any discovered videos are either on the product page, or linked directly to the product page or other site page.

- Top 10 things that you can do to improve your video SEO: 1) Create linked to the video section on your web site (assuming you have one) 2) One video per URL & use unique URLs with permalink keywords, 3) Use embedded players where possible (there is a tradeoff here w/regard to mgmt ease vs. SEO potential here in using embedded players v. Javascript), 4) Optimize video landing pages, 5) Provide context to surround video content, 6) Enable and expose MRSS feeds and allow users to download videos where possible (additional SEO benefit), 7) Enable interaction and social media e.g. social bookmarking, embedding, commenting & rating, Link to videos with rich keyword anchor text, 9) Create compelling thumbnails for your own SERPS, 10) Incorporate video results within your own site search

Hopefully this is good information for everyone.  Thanks Mark, and to everyone else…

Happy Selling!

Last week, I co-presented a webinar on the State of Video Email Marketing in 2009 for my non-VCC gig with Liveclicker (see embed below).  Here’s the webinar in its entirety, in case you’d like to pull any charts/stats/graphs/takeaways:

We spent a large portion of the time in the webinar discussing video .GIFs. What’s a video .GIF, you might ask?  Well, it’s basically an animated .GIF file that looks like video in the end user’s email client.  You can see an example here, here, and here. There are some important elements of video .GIFs that make them different from standard animated .GIFs that I’ll speak to below, then I’d like to put it to readers of this blog to see what you think: are video .GIFs used in email really video at all?

First, some background:

To understand why video .GIFs would be used in email campaigns instead of the more broadly supported Flash video we see on almost all web sites, one first needs to realize the email marketing industry has many challenges to deal with that the rest of us non-video-in-email people can simply ignore.  For one, a hodgepodge of email clients (Outlook 2007, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, various webmail clients, etc.) all render HTML email slightly differently, often without apparent rhyme or reason. Next, email clients and ISPs/receiving email networks (think: AOL, Windows Live Mail/Hotmail, AT&T, Comcast) long ago stripped support for Flash or Javascript within email as a security measure to prevent unscrupulous senders from delivering malware to email recipients.  Rather than have the ISPs simply review embedded Flash videos or rate and approve email senders to ensure they’re not going to deliver a malicious attack to an ISP’s customers through an embedded video (expensive and time consuming for ISPs already overwhelmed with fighting spam), a simpler solution for the ISPs was to “turn it all off,” essentially tossing the world of video in email back to the stone age.

Fast-forward to 2009

Many of us who depend on online video to make a living already know the reasons online video adoption is accelerating: greater broadband availability, changing consumer preferences, and lower barriers to video content creation have all led to an explosion in the amount of video content produced and consumed online.  What if it were possible to harness these trends in the email channel despite the aforementioned limitations?  Well, now it is.

Sort of.

Video .GIFs, coming soon to a store near you

The first new method used to achieve video in email comes from humble roots: the lowly animated .GIF.  Lest you burst out laughing, it’s important to note that it is possible to deliver video experiences in email using .GIF technology.  How?  With so many people now having access to broadband connections (94.7% of active Internet users in the USA, according to a July 2009 report), it’s now possible to up the frame rate and color palette of animated .GIFs so they appear as video, directly in email clients.  Unlike embedded Flash, video .GIFs don’t trigger spam filters, and they’re supported nearly everywhere:

Despite the advantage of near universal support, there are major drawbacks to using .GIF tech to embed video.  Among them:

• Audio is only supported on the landing page, not in the email itself.
• Outlook 2007 and Apple Mail 3.0 will only display static images in place of video.  There are best practice workarounds that can be used to minimize this limitation, though.
• Video displayed is generally limited to 8 - 16 frames per second, far below the 24FPS (theater) and 30FPS (television) we’re used to seeing.  For the nerds among us, think back to the early days of CD-ROM video for examples, or preview some of the live email examples in the second paragraph above.
• Since animated .GIFs are images, they’re subject to the same image blocking that hinders all images in email - unless a certification service is used:

Is it true?  The only way to deliver video in email to everyone else is through an animated .GIF?

An animated .GIF = kind of.  A video .GIF = yes.  Why might I say ‘kind of’ instead of just provide a straight ‘yes or no’ answer for animated .GIFs?  For one, having spent six years of my career in the email marketing industry, I feel assured in saying that most people don’t hold animated .GIFs in high esteem.  When I give presentations, I frequently refer to this animated .GIF to represent what crosses the mind of most marketers when the technology is brought up as a possible video inclusion method:

Most people simply don’t believe it’s possible to deliver a video experience using .GIF technology.  Are most people right?  Below is an example of an animated .GIF created from video.  You be the judge:

So is a video .GIF really just a fancy word for an animated .GIF made to look like video?

One webinar attendee asked the following question during the conclusion of the sesson, “Is the video gif simply a big, huge animated gif place (sic) on a server? In essence, it’s no different from any animated gif, correct?”

Here again, I don’t think a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer is adequate, but this question has really bugged me for awhile so I think I owe it to our readers to present a thorough explanation.  At a high level, the answer to this question is “yes.” A video .GIF really is “just” an animated .GIF placed on a server, no “different” than any animated .GIF.  However, there are many reasons why simply creating an animated .GIF from a video may not work in email.  To get the full picture, it’s necessary to dig a little deeper - to figure out what powers video .GIFs and makes them work in email.  Doing this requires exploring some of the intricacies of animated .GIF technology and email client limitations, two technical areas that quickly become complex.  The areas email marketers need to remain aware of are:

1) Mail user agents don’t support the same ‘frame rate’ for animated .GIFs

Who cares?  What’s a mail user agent?  The answers to these questions are as follows: 1) You should - if you care at all about including video in your emails.  Every email client in existence uses a Mail User Agent to render email, and mail clients do NOT all employ the same Mail User Agent.  2) A Mail User Agent is the underlying code a subscriber’s email client uses to actually display email.  For example, Firefox 2, 3, and 3.5 support higher FPS limits than IE 6 and 7, or Safari 4.0 and Chrome.  It’s important stuff to know, because all email marketers want to deliver the most realistic video experiences in email possible.  Lower FPS = choppier video.  Higher FPS = smoother video.  Most of the time.  It is possible to set FPS too high for an end user’s connection, which would result in having an effect opposite of the desired outcome.

2) Mail user agents don’t support the same compression methods for animated .GIFs.

For example, adding transparent layers to .GIF files is one way to decrease the size of the files, especially for .GIFs with low-motion backgrounds.  Some mail user agents support transparency, while others don’t.  There are other methods that can be utilized to lower the size of .GIFs, such as freezing layers, altering the frame rates of different layers of the .GIF during playback, and other methods, including real, actual compression based on compression algortithms.

3) Video playback is dependent on the end user’s connection speed.

Subscribers accessing the Internet through dial-up connections are much rarer than they were a few years ago, but they do still exist.  Accurately detecting the connection speed of email subscribers is an essential component to rendering video smoothly in email.

CertifiedVideo, from Goodmail Systems

If you thought the video .GIF was the only game in town for rendering video in email based on this blog post, you’d be wrong.  A second new method used to achieve video in email comes from Goodmail Systems, creator of CertifiedVideo and CertifiedEmail.  CertifiedVideo is a certification program for email senders that wish to include video in email.  Senders participating in CertifiedVideo can have their email delivered with a real, embedded Flash video player.  Audio support in email is also provided.  The main drawback of this solution?  Currently it’s only supported at AOL.  So, unless you only plan on sending video to an AOL audience, the usefulness of the solution is still fairly limited.  Of course, it’s worth mentioning that Goodmail does work with many ISPs in addition to AOL (Yahoo, Comcast, Cox, BT, and Telus are among the others) so one might logically expect that CertifiedVideo will eventually get rolled to these other ISPs, and also that Goodmail’s working very hard to make that happen as soon as possible.  Other video certification solutions on the horizon promise to broaden the availability of video in email to other ISPs as well.

Conclusion?

There are only two methods for achieving video in email: the video .GIF, and CertifiedVideo.  What do you think?  Does the video .GIF really represent video in email?  Or is it just a gimmick?  Share your stories, thoughts/comments below.  Thanks, and until next time -

Happy Selling!

One challenge I’ve noticed repeatedly over the last year in the video commerce industry is just how much harder it is for private label retailers to grow their video programs relative to mass merchants.  Mass merchants are often able to lean more heavily on their suppliers to produce video content, which means obtaining that content is often simply a matter of creating solid processes around video content curation and ensuring the business terms for acquiring content make sense.  Private label retailers don’t have such a luxury.  For companies like LL Bean, Gap, Crate and Barrel, J Crew and others, video commerce is a ‘go it alone’ game.

Unfortunately, ‘go it alone’ isn’t always easy, especially for a retailer that’s still only dabbling with video (common).  Even those private label retailers with broad video programs already in place repeatedly run into some of the challenges inherent in private label video production:

1. Justifying the spend on custom video production.  It’s especially a problem for those companies with a high inventory turn (e.g. apparel).

2. Creating high quality content, without breaking the bank.  Here again, those companies with high inventory turn struggle more than others.

3. Creating video content that connects commerce with entertainment.  Private label retailers that are also ‘lifestyle’ brands struggle in this area more than typical direct response merchants, as they often tend to steer away from direct response merchandising and instead use video as a tool to support the brand.

Fortunately, there are ways to overcome some of these obstacles, if one’s willing to think a little creatively, demonstrate a willingness to lose ’some’ flexibility in the creative process, and focus on automation as a goal.

1.  Use production automation technology.  I’m a big fan of TalkMarket. This company developed a technological solution that enables retailers to produce video content in the style of a QVC or HSN for a fraction of the cost.  In essence, they provide software and a mobile video production workstation that largely automates the planning, content idea development, footage review & intake, rough cut content creation, and uploading of e-commerce video.  For the actual filming, their software guides even the most amateur of videographers through the filming process step-by-step.  The tool ’stitches’ together the videos with a soundtrack, and features product shots based on tried and true filming techniques used by the shop-from-home TV networks.  TalkMarket’s founders are from QVC, and the company is funded in part by Amazon.com.  It’s not for everyone, but it’s the closest solution I’ve seen to enabling beginners to create ‘prosumer’ high quality content that looks polished without being overproduced.  Check out some examples on their site:

2. Solutions like SundaySky and Animoto also represent possible solutions.  SundaySky in particular has built a solution that can work with e-commerce sites by downloading your existing product images, descriptions, prices, and other meta-data, then sequences these assets to a music soundtrack, with options to provide voiceovers.  In essence, the solution completely automates (or nearly completely automates) the process of video production using existing resources, without requiring an additional investment in video production.  I’ve met with the folks at SundaySky and, while I’ve seen some very cool examples and also think the technology is highly promising, I’m still in the skeptic camp when it comes to viability for private label retail video for a couple of reasons.  First, I just don’t believe that most private label retailers would accept this type of solution as it’s just too ‘mechanical’ and lacks the quality of true video.  Second, I’m not really convinced it’s video.  Are animations video?  Maybe I’m just splitting hairs.  And, if conversion rates improve, maybe it doesn’t matter.  I do think this kind of solution could be great if used by mass merchants, especially those in the consumer electronics, toys, or hard goods spaces.  What do you think?

3.  Don’t make it harder than it needs to be.  Ice.com is able to crank out a massive volume of video clips because the clips are short, simple, and a high degree of automation is possible within the production process:

4.  If you’re already committed to self-produce video content and have put forward a lot of effort and investment, for goodness’ sake don’t make it difficult for your customers to buy through your videos.  I railed on Cabela’s for this in a post on CommerceVideos.com the other week, and it’s a mistake I see over and over by private label retailers that choose to shoot video from more of an entertainment angle.  Karmaloop is an example I’ve pointed out before, but other private label retailers that have committed to video in a big way also struggle in this area.   Ralph Lauren would be a good example with its RL TV initiative.

5.  Automate, automate, automate.  Customization and design flexibility are the enemy of cost containment and scalability.  It’s just a reality of the medium, so wherever possible try to shoot video using standard sets, repeatable formats, experienced talent and videographers, multiple shoots in a row, etc.

Until next time… Happy Selling!