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by: Jerry Bader
According to eMarketer August 2008 video ad spending will increase a thousand percent over the next
five years. This means Web video is on the way to becoming the must-have Web presentation tool.
Some may see video as merely the next trendy marketing tactic that you should have because everyone
else has it, but that would be a misreading of the trend. Discounting the importance of video
presentation as just a fad misses the underlying human motivational impact of engaging an
audience's neural network, a far more important network than the social media network that seems to
occupy Web-marketers time, and consume large portions of marketing budgets.
The real reason Web video will dominate website presentations over the coming years is that it is
the most effective presentation technique that engages the brain and embeds information as memory;
it is the most complete Web presentation method available for establishing positioning: the brand
ownership of an audience's consciousness.
Over the years we have come across numerous psychological and cognitive concepts that support the
significance of using multi-sensory inputs as a way to engage interest, embed information, and
enhance memory retention - the true measure of an effective, meaningful marketing campaign.
1. The McGurk Effect
Harry McGurk and John MacDonald first described the McGurk Effect in their paper published in
"Nature", entitled 'Hearing lips and seeing voices.'
As described in Wikipedia: "The McGurk effect is a perceptual phenomenon which demonstrates an
interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. It suggests that speech perception is
multimodal, that is, it involves information from more than one sensory modality."
What this means is that multiple senses stimulated together work in tandem to delivery a message to
the brain and encode it an audience's memory. The significance to Web marketing professionals is
clear: the combination of audio and video working together with a professional onscreen presenter
is the most effective way to deliver a marketing message that engages an audience and embeds
information in their collective memory.
2. The 10-Minute Attention Span Rule
John Medina, Developmental Molecular Biologist and Director of the Brain Center for Applied
Learning at Seattle Pacific University has written a book called "Brain Rules" and has a website
called brainrules.net. It is not only an interesting and insightful look at how the brain works, it
is also a great example of how to use video to promote a marketing initiative.
Medina's Rule #4 states: "We don't pay attention to boring things." That seems pretty obvious, but
have you seen some of the corporate videos that are being produced. Just because someone knows how
to shoot a competent video doesn't mean they know how to develop a dynamic, memorable marketing
presentation.
According to Medina what people pay attention to is emotional content. In fact a brain-imaging
study done by Benedetto De Martino, University College London Institute of Neurology, confirmed
that decision-making depends on emotion, not rationality, despite what some would like to believe.
So if your video presentation doesn't elicit an emotional response, it is not going to register in
the brain as important enough to remember, nor is it going to influence decision-making.
There is a misconception as to how long people can remain engaged in a presentation. There is no
reason why Web presentations should follow TV commercial time constraints; the whole 15-, 30-second
spot is based on a 'cost + interruption + repetition' model; one that doesn't hold any meaning on a
website visited on purpose by an interested audience.
According to Medina, a presentation that engages an audience on an emotional level can hold an
audience's attention for about ten minutes. To keep an audience's interest beyond that, you have to
stimulate them again with another emotional hit.
This is why our preferred video presentation structure consists of six two-minute videos for a
total of about twelve minutes (6-2-12 Technique), a structure that allows us to re-stimulate the
audience every two minutes, retaining their interest and attention so they won't get bored.
3. Chunking
No, Chunking is not a Chinese restaurant, it’s a term coined by George A. Miller in his 1956 paper
'The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing
Information."
Chunking refers to the fact that we process and remember information better when we group it into
manageable units or chunks, hence the notion of seven as the optimal number of things we can retain
in memory.
A misinterpretation of this effect has led to an epidemic of boring bulleted-point presentations
that have become the plague of business meetings, conferences, and website presentations.
When we read, we are actually chunking: we do not process a word as individual letters but as a
group of letters that are recognizable as an image that relates to its sound and meaning. In other
words, by grouping a set of letters into a unified structure called a word with an associated sound
and meaning, we can easily retain it as a useful method of preserving and communicating
information.
It is important to understand that the viewer's ability to retain your message depends on the
skillful use of words, the quality of performance, and the artful use of timbre, tone and cadence.
These conceptual, visual, and auditory elements combine to form a memory chunk in an emotional
context.
4. Uni-Tasking
Today we hear a lot about multi-tasking. Job descriptions are full of things like, "must be able to
multi-task," and we are all so proud of our ability to surf the Web, write an email, and talk on
the phone, all at the same time. The reality is we are not doing any of these tasks justice.
Multi-tasking is in fact a fallacy.
John Medina, the author of "Brain Rules" points to the area of the brain called Brodmann area 10
that is believed to be responsible for ordering tasks in some kind of orderly, hierarchical
sequence.
It's a bit like how a computer works: the speed of the calculations is so fast that it appears that
many things are happening at once, but in fact the computer is just processing things one at a time
but at a very high speed, giving the illusion of multi-tasking. People unlike computers aren't
quite so efficient, and the result of so-called multi-tasking is just poor overall performance.
The point is a properly crafted and performed Web video engages the audience and focus's attention
on the presentation. The job of a website presentation is not to be quick so visitors can move-on
to your competition's website, but rather to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, get them to put
down the cell phone, coffee, and Game Boy, and focus on your message. If your home page does not
hold your audience's attention for the time it takes to deliver your core marketing-message, then
it is not doing its job.
In Search of Oz
"The Wizard of Oz" may only be a children's story but its message has universal appeal and
time-tested meaning. The story is really an allegory for life, both personal and business.
In today's turbulent economic climate, businesses often feel lost (think Dorothy), desperately
searching for The Answer from The Man (think Wizard), but lack the courage (think cowardly Lion),
brains (think Scarecrow) and heart (think Tin Man) to what it takes to succeed.
As much as we want to believe business is all about rational, bottom-line decision-making, the
truth is, it is not. The more we understand how the brain works, the more we know decisions are
emotionally based.
For the next four brain-branding concepts see "8 Brain-Branding Web Presentation Concepts, Part
II."
About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio
and Web-video. Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads,
http://www.sonicpersonality.com , and
http://www.136words.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com
or telephone (905) 764-1246.
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