Are the lines blurring, or am I just going cross-eyed? Google announced a number of Labs features that have been graduated out of the nursery test bed of gadgets and technologies into full-blown live
features available to users of the mail interface. Chief among these new odds and ends is the ability to embed YouTube videos that will play directly within the Gmail Web mail client.
If
you're a marketer, you're probably jumping out of your seat right now. But hold on, it's not quite as straightforward as it sounds. What Google is offering is a kind of tease -- an appetizer that
doesn't quite satisfy but does bring us closer to the interactivity of video in email.
The new feature is brilliantly simple to use; there's no complicated scripting required. As a matter of
fact, YouTube's own embed code won't serve up the still image preview overlayed with the play button. In order to add the video into the email and have the preview available, one only needs to put in
a simple URL to the video's location on Youtube.
I know, it's genius, right? Sort of, but I have to ask a simple question: Why not go with what has become the standard way of embedding videos
into Web pages, using the auto-generated embed code? I wish I knew the answer. One could speculate that something about the code might cause delivery issues, or that as usual Google wants to somehow
reinvent the wheel to be a more perfect and harmonious circle. Whatever the case may be, it's definitely a start, allowing marketers to promote their YouTube content and deliver a more dynamic
experience to their customer's inboxes.
Now, it's not all roses. Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports recently detailed the nuances of Gmail's new video in email feature, and there are
definite limitations. I'm sure over time this may change and some of the quirkiness will be fixed (let's hope), but ponder for a moment what this means: Apple's iPad has announced video in email
support, and Google just launched YouTube in the Gmail client. Are we in the pre-dawn days of the video email wars? Google seems willing and quite able to pick a fight with any technology on the
Internet (if they haven't invented it already, they buy it or just reinvent it). The recent addition of Buzz or Wave "lite" effectively takes on Twitter. Orkut was an attempt to take on the social
networks, but ran short of spectacular in the U.S., while making quite the splash in Brazil. The full release of the video feature in Gmail seems like a volley over the Silicon Valley fence at Apple
and the iPad -- except that you have to remember that there's a kind of non-aggression treaty in place between the two titans.
Whatever the strategy, moving forward, video is making solid
inroads into the previous text and picture world of email. Marketers should start thinking about how to convey their messages, present their brands, and deliver content to an increasingly
attention-span-deprived audience that will rely on show-not-tell technologies at their doorstep to inform them of what they should be doing, buying and consuming.
Go ahead: set up a Youtube
channel, test it in your emails, and determine how many Gmail recipients you have, identify their email client if you're using a platform identification-capable technology like MailboxIQ, segment, and
send away. If nothing else, going through the segmenting exercise brings you closer to your data and your own customer base, which is never a waste of time.