• by Jerry Bader , August 3, 2011

If you've ever been bored by a mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation you'll be happy to know that Matthias Poehm, a Swiss public speaking coach, has formed the Anti PowerPoint Party. Most anyone who has sat through one of these bullet-point sleep-fests knows just how bad these kinds of presentations can be. Unfortunately the bullet-point craze has crept into everything from Web articles to Web videos.

There is the assumption that the Twitter generation can only handle 140 characters at a time so we'd better not tax their brains with anything more meaningful than a 15-second spot. On the bright side, SMEs have an opportunity to benefit from their competition's adherence to presentation tactics that don't work and actually hurt their marketing communication efforts.

Professor Edward R. Tufte of Yale University found that PowerPoint presentations actually get in the way of an audience's ability to process information. In his report,"'The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," Tufte explains, "PowerPoint templates... usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis." It's one thing to fill time and space in lectures and on websites with non-productive exercises that masquerade as meaningful presentations but it is another to actually communicate in a memorable manner to an audience.

 Web Video Fills The Communication Void

It's no wonder Web video has caught fire as the preferred means of Web marketing communication among those who understand how information is processed and what it takes to communicate effectively. In Jerry Bullard's blog post, "Web Video And YouTube - A Winning Combination For Your Business," he writes, "According to Ad-Ology's 2011 Small Business Marketing Forecast, 45% of small businesses are increasing their budgets for online video; this up from 2010 by 17%. In April 2010, Internet Retailer reported that visitors to websites who view product videos are 85% more likely to buy than visitors who do not. Metacafe, an online video site, reports that websites with video tend to hold attention ten times longer than sites with just text."

However using the right tool is only effective if you are using it correctly, and using it correctly means more than a technical understanding of what buttons to push. Video marketing starts with concept that is implemented by means of an appropriate script and delivered with an entertaining performance. Much of what we see on the Web is either off-the-cuff winging it by do-it-yourselfers who think they know what they're doing but don't, and mind-numbing corporate videos that go in one ear and out the other. The overall quality of business videos on the Web is appallingly bad -- both amateur and professional alike  -- and it's often the result of business's failure to understand how video communication works, an unwillingness to invest in hiring firms that do, and a penchant for being too impatient to stick to a clear, consistent brand messaging strategy.

Adshel, an Australian, New Zealand, and UK provider of outdoor advertising, released a study by neuroscientist, Dr. Phil Harris of the University of Melbourne, entitled "Neuroswitch." In it he states that memory is the result of "emotional arousal, experiential learning, and sensory branding." These communication elements generate a nervous cold sweat on the foreheads of most business owners, but they do provide the forward-thinking entrepreneur with an opportunity to leave the opposition in their Web-marketing dust.

Communicate Don't Advertise

Instead of thinking about video advertising, a game most small and medium-sized enterprises will lose, it's time to start thinking of video communication, and the place to start is on your website, your central online communication platform. Listing a bunch of features as bulleted points is not communication, even if those bulleted points are presented as animated fly-ins beside a sterile spokesperson spouting platitudes. Real video communication requires context within the script and subtext within the performance in order to reach deeper into an audience's psyche to create a meaningful, memorable message -- that's the essence of real video communication.