It’s simple; Moving pictures and sound have main lines to our brains.  Reading text based media takes effort and is, unfortunately, generational.

While I or my spouse may like the morning paper with our coffee, our twenty something sons go online with tablets and phones to get the daily info with their java mocha latte. Also, we’re naturally wired from birth to give our attention to another human face talking to us whether it’s live or recorded. It’s instinctual.

Back in the seventies, DARPA (the military research guys) was tasked with figuring out how to best to teach soldiers so that they remember what they learned for a long time. What DARPA figured out was that to get people to understand and remember any information for a long time, it must be conveyed in an interactive audiovisual format. Why? Because it’s the way we all learned to do anything as a child; Monkey see, monkey do.

Any message, whether it’s commercial, educational or political, that’s presented in an interactive audiovisual format will generate among its viewers comprehension and retention rates well above 90%. Text by itself is in the low 40%.

The only media form that enable both audiovisual AND interactivity is the web!

Resistance is futile.

Video on the web used to be too hard and too expensive to do. Most web designers were formally print designers and most webmasters feared video would clog up their data networks. All of that is no longer the case.

The digital piping of the web is wide and getting wider; video signals are tiny yet still deliver excellent image quality and the cost of high definition video production on a per minute basis is very low, just a few hundred dollars, much more affordable than a four color print ad of any size placed anywhere.

Half the battle of making your website effective is getting it seen. Web search engines give preference to sites with video on them. Why? Because searches engines know that people prefer to watch video over reading text.

So they’ll list the sites that SHOW you how to make a cake above those that only tell you how. Why do you think YouTube is the second most popular search engine?

Pull vs Push

The web has changed the marketing paradigm. We all hate commercials and advertisements because they interrupt us from what we were doing; watching our favorite program or listening to music or a discussion.

But the web enables us to pull to us the information we want about a product or service when we want it. We pay more attention to information we’ve asked for and ignore unrequested information pushed at us.

And because we have a natural inclination to pay attention to another human face talking to us, we create familiar trust relationships in our minds with the personalities we see/hear on the screen in front of us.

We’re five to six hundred percent more likely to do what a talking face tells us to do than we are to take action from a print ad; particularly when we’ve asked for the information presented in order to satisfy a pre-existing need or desire.

People buy from people

Video on the web can:

• Capture your enthusiasm for your product or service,
• Display your deep technical expertise in the field and
• Convey your professionalism directly to that prospect’s desktop, tablet or smart phone.

Short, concise videos really help to extend your company’s corporate image directly to your client’s or prospects personal space; starting that one to one relationship before they ever step foot into your office space.

Imagine a sales person that conveys your company’s value proposition in the most effective manner possible 24/7/365 with no days off.