• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, March 27, 2013

There was an 70s funk group called Cameo and in one song, the lead singer laments to his ungrateful girlfriend that, “ I bought you things I couldn’t even pronounce.”  

Man, I can relate.  My nightmare is to meet a woman named Siobhan at an Au Bon Pain. Then I would buy lunch for a woman whose name I would guess is Seeoban and that we were eating at a restaurant that had something to do with kinky sex and French bread.

I need instruction and demonstrations. That’s why I have a built-in interest in Invodo, the Austin-based business video experts who have carved out a nice market devising consumer-friendly videos for businesses to deal with goods and products whose use might be clear but whose operation is totally baffling, and doing viewer research to make sure they’re hitting the right targets.

 Your other best option for information, Invodo CEO Craig Wax says, is the store clerk and that is quite a crap shoot.  

As a kind of bottom line, people who buy a product would like to have the sense that they will be able to use it.

A little while ago, Invodo issued a set of  rules of consumer engagement with video. It sort of goes without saying that some of these stats are Invodo-serving but if they were illogical or didn’t ring true, I’d just call them on it.

Their research says 67% of consumers engage with video regularly and 45% have watched at least five product videos over the past three months. And while we are increasingly being told the PC is as dead as CompuServe, when asked over what kind of device they watched a product video on, 81% said it was a PC.

Invodo’s vice president of marketing Russ Somers says. ‘Of all the data we got back, I think that PC stat is the one I would have least guessed.”

 But consumers use all the devices, of course. Some 62% say they get enough product data from a video on tablet to be sold on making a purchase; 57% can make that decision after watching on a smatrphone.

Wax says if he had to tell a client the one place to put a product video, it would still be on the client’s Website, not on YouTube. But that’s not really the best advice. The best advice is to put it on the Website, and YouTube and on a retailer’s site if you can do it, and everywhere else it can go.

There are a few other rules, common-sensical enough. Wax and Somers insist you should make product videos that are longer than 30 seconds if it’s doing some work. Not that you’re blabbering on, but that you’re showing the features, explaining the benefits, comparing it against the alternatives. The buyer is there to be sold. They don’t’ have all day, but 37% will watch a video that goes for three minutes. Much longer than that, it seems to me, and you are getting into the War and Peace neighborhood.

Invodo did a Whitepaper with the e-Tailing Group that also showed that 57%  of consumers are more confident if they watch a video before making the buy, 52% are more likely to stay on a Website if there’s a product demonstration offered, and just generally, that consumers like to see how things work before they buy them. This is the no-brainer revelation of the week. Speaking as a consumer, I need all the help I can get, though it just might be that I’m a hopeless case.

pj@mediapost.com