Interactive video is a great way for a company to give visual appeal when interacting when an audience. With this in mind, I became curious as to how something that has already been filmed can interact with its viewers.
According to an article by ReelSEO, a site that explores new online and video trends in marketing, an online survey completed by 400- media executives showed that 67% planned on using online video as a main focus in their digital marketing campaigns for 2009.
One great example of this is the Army. According to an article in the Washington Post the Army was worried about high suicide rates among soldiers. As a response, they created an interactive video where soldiers would be in the place of a distraught infantryman and through choices made during the video would show them how to get help if they were becoming depressed. The video has been distributed for mandatory viewing by infantry since December 2008. In this case, they have used an interactive video to help promote a certain behavior.
On a corporate level, it is great to have videos that consumers can interact with to help enforce brand loyalty. Some ideas would be to have a video where people can make choices which affect how it ends, have videos that ask questions that people can go and vote or submit answers or ideas. Have a video contest for people to submit their ideas for commercials or online videos. By opening up this avenue to work with your publics, it shows that your company is innovative and wants to interact with your audience versus a commercial that speaks at them.
Interactive video is a great idea. I’ve never read anything about it before this post, but I think it definitely has potential not only in the military, but in corporations as well. This reminds me of those books I read when I was younger that would have you flip to different pages depending upon what you wanted to happen next. I think the Army’s interactive video was pretty ingenious considering that their demographic has a high interest in video games. I think anything that gets your audience actively involved is a great thing because it will make your message sink in deeper.
I agree that interactive video is a great way to show a company’s innovation. It is keeping up with the times of Youtube and such. I know that at The Breeze, since we started implementing videos on the Web site, we’ve gotten a lot of comments and more viewers. I found the article about the video for the army very interesting. Videos can show more emotion than pictures or words, especially for an issue like this. I’d like to see more companies implementing interactiveness when it comes to videos, because I don’t think a lot of companies are quite there yet.
I agree with Elaine in that I must admit that I never really thought about the idea of a company using a video format to promote interactivity between itself and its constituencies. With feedback from constituents being such an important thing for a company to receive in order to see what they are possibly doing right or to make changes based on negative feedback, the idea of continuing that feedback loop through the use of interactive videos is great! Videos are already visually appealing in nature, and have the ability to attract and keep a viewer’s attention more consistently than other traditional media, making them the perfect vehicle for promoting the feedback loop.