Commentary
Consumers Now Expect Videos From Firms They Do Business With
- by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, May 7, 2015
A new survey from Animoto, an online video-creation application, finds that four times as many consumers would rather see a video about a product than read about it. I don’t want to be too cynical right here in the first paragraph, but if that survey said something different, I doubt you’d have heard about it.
The results of its polling of over 1,051 U.S. consumers are, to me, as obvious as they are important to note.
The finding that 56% of its respondents think any company with a Web site also should have a company video on it seems a logical wish by consumers; also it’s not bad for Animoto, which is in business to help small businesses produce low-cost/low-hassle corporate videos.
The fact that lots of people like to see them and will watch them if they’re served seems to be no-brainer information, but that’s just me. Instructional and how-to videos are one of the top categories on YouTube; business videos just seem to be an extension of that.
This survey says one-quarter of its respondents say they lose interest in a company they’re researching if there’s no corresponding video, and half said they have shared a company video with others. Another 43% said they like newsletters that have links to videos. And so do I.
In the developing online world, how companies fill out that “About Us” or “What We Do” parts of their Web site is revealing to me. The ones that tell the story of their business well are invariably companies I just believe are better, smarter, more focused.
In the tech space itself, a lot of Internet purveyors could stand to produce videos that actually show or somehow visually describe what they do since so much of what they do is, in some way, brand new and at least slightly hard to grasp.
In a kind of informational shorthand I use, a bad “About Us” section is a tip-off. Animoto’s own About Us page video is more playful than informational, but its entire Webs ite is filled with samples and little tutorials that lead me to three conclusions they’d want me to have: Making a business video is necessary, it’s not hard to do, and Animoto knows what it’s doing. (The worst "about us" sections, I find, are ones on news media sites.)
THE GROWTH OF OTT: Dollar signs always tell a story, and Juniper Research now predicts that by 2019, subscription fees from OTT providers will reach nearly $32 billion, which is a neat four times more than what Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, etc. pulled in last year.
As reported by Digital Content Next, the huge swell in popularity is for all the reasons you know and one that is worth keeping an eye on: Juniper says the OTTs are leading the way for 4K or UltraHD content, so that early adopters of that are finding the OTTest places to justify their spend.
THIS IS THE END:The IAB’s marathon NewFronts, and the accompanying spike in hamburger slider consumption, ends today with presentations by TheStreet, Endemol Beyond and The Daily Mail/Elite Daily in New York.
pj@medi-apost.com
P.J. Bednarski has written for MediaPost since 2012 on media and marketing topics. He can be reached at pj@mediapost.com
I'm a bit skeptical of the headline research given how much of the video on websites impedes connecting with the company. I wonder if the true consumer viewpoint wouldn't have something included in it like "video that effectively offers insight or explanation" or another qualifier. The mere presence of bad video likely hurts a website. (My skepticism is increased given that the survey sponsors are involved with video content...)
This reminds me of another survey that found that 85.3% of its respondents would rather have sex than watch a video about it and only 1.9% would skip both having sex and the video in favor of reading about it.
Just because it's like Hershey's commissioning a study to find out how many people like chocolate doesn't make it bogus, just self serving and mildly suspect ;)
Given the number of insanely stupid videos that have garnered 7 figure views on Facebook, I'd say there's not a single iota of relevance between accuracy/insights and number of people who will watch and share the video.