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Magicomm Video
We're starting to see video personalisation popping up regularly in direct marketing campaigns. There are now several good examples of effective video personalisation campaigns, including supporterscheerup, Dexter, Bar da Boa and Ave a Word, to name just a few. These are all online viral campaigns which use a FGF (friend-get-friend) model, where a visitor provides information about a friend, which in turn triggers an email notification to the friend calling them to the Web site where they can view their personalised video.
While these online campaigns can be very effective, what if personalised videos were used as part of an integrated cross-media campaign? Instead of an acquisition approach where the audience has to provide information, campaigns could be database driven, based on the data you already have on your audience, sending a personalised direct mail piece to recipients calling them to view their online video.
Some marketing service providers and VDP software vendors are starting to realise the potential of this and are leveraging video personalisation techniques within cross-media. At drupa last month, XMPie demonstrated video personalisation in a cross-media campaign, where registered visitors received a complete cross-media experience generated them for a fictious mobile phone campaign, as detailed in an earlier post.
Magicomm, a full-service marketing agency, has also recently developed a cross-media demonstration campaign for Canon at drupa. While I didn't get a chance to see this working on Canon's drupa stand (due to technical issues), it's now up and running at www.inspiringescapes.com. (Note: if it appears the video isn't working, you just need to be patient as it takes a while to load.)
This campaign, developed in collaboration with DME, uses a set of pre-recorded movies. At the end of each movie, a sign is held up revealing a customised message. To be honest, I feel the personalisation element let's this campaign down which is unfortunate as considerable effort has obviously gone into scripting and shooting the videos—but the personalisation effect really isn't very realistic. In addition to the personalised video, a personalised e-mail is sent to the recipient with a link to download a personalised poster, generated on-demand using PageFlex and DirectSmile (here's mine).
While these video personalisation examples from XMPie and Magicomm are interesting, I'd really like to see this technology used in anger as part of an actual cross-media campaign. Also, I'm keen to monitor the evolution of video personalisation in VDP, which could, in theory, extend well past displaying a personalised video on a Web page. For example, it could be used together with document composition software to create interactive PDF brochures on-demand, embedded with a personalised video.
Nice try Magicomm. I'm looking forward to the next (r)evolution.
Posted on Friday, 11 July 2008 at 7:53 AM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/161
Comments
Thanks for taking an interest in our efforts. Given that we produced the whole campaign in less than 3 weeks, we have been pleased with the feed back from those that have seen it. We are currently working on other projects that include variable video, personalized print, and personalized url's and will keep you posted as they are deployed. I think that we are all still learning how to best implement variability into a video, so I expect that the market will see a significant amount of activity using this technique in the near future. I appreciate your comments and look forward to having more discussions on how to change the way the industry is using variable data in different media. These are fun times to be a marketeer!
Posted by Rick Littrell on Saturday, 12 July 2008 at 12:06 AM