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I'm back online after neglecting my blog for a few weeks. Actually I never went offline, but a couple of trips (XMPie Users Group Conference in Vegas and PacPrint in Melbourne) combined running my own company, has knocked me around and I've hardly had enough time for my day job, let alone blog. But hopefully that is starting to change.
One thing I've noticed over the past few months is the increase in personalised video campaigns. A handful of providers are mastering the art of leveraging Flash to include personalised elements (text and images) in video, and their techniques are steadily improving. At the Users Group conference last month, DME (who has a dedicated production team and studio for video personalisation) demonstrated their latest personalised video campaigns, which included some very realistic and impressive effects—a notable improvement from their earlier work. DME now use Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server to stream their personalised videos, which enables a better viewing experience than streaming Flash objects directly from the web server, as the server includes a quality-of-service monitoring feature that detects changes in your viewer's bandwidth and smoothly switch between streams during playback--helping to ensure a high-quality, uninterrupted stream.
After reviewing the many recent personalised video campaigns live today, one thing that's alarmingly obvious is that they almost all follow the same theme—a TV News Report. Here's just a collection of campaigns that I've recieved over the past few months, and they all follow a news story:
Like image personalisation, running the same theme over-and-over again quickly tires the humour (and viral) element from the campaign. While a TV news report where "you" are the story easily lends itself to a wide variety of campaigns, it's a lazy, overused and plagiarised idea.
In advertising, "borrowing" a concept from another ad is despised within the industry—people get very upset when an agency "re-creates" another agency's ad concept or execution. But taking someone else's idea is not only lazy, it's cheating. Anyone can do that.
So, if you're in the business of producing personalised video campaigns (you all know who you are), I urge you to drop the news theme. It's quickly reducing the effectiveness of this emerging personalisation media, which has a lot of opportunity. So please, start using it properly and effectively.
Posted on Sunday, 7 June 2009 at 3:18 PM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/209
I agree. The "news reports" are becoming far too overused. In addition, the Miami Dolphins example failed to load my name in all of the relevant spots.
They obviously put a lot of work into this one, with cooperation from players, coaches, cheerleaders, front office, etc.. But the only places that showed my name were the opening segment and closing message. All of the jerseys and signs were blank - I'm assuming they were meant to show my name.
If there is anything worse than an overused execution, it is one with obvious glitches.
Posted by Dave Boyd on Thursday, 11 June 2009 at 12:15 AM
Wow, we are just beginning to talk color VDP, topics like: transpromo, personalized DM... This is my first time see personalized video. There is no end for the technical innovation. But it's like too early to move to video all. I dreamed that one day when client receives one piece of mail. He/She just needs to open it. A 3D personalized video just comes out. no screen/LCD used. just like we saw in "war of stars".
Actually, what we need to do just this monment?
Posted by Sean Mei on Friday, 3 July 2009 at 6:36 PM
Personalized Videos? Check: www.yes-no-maybe.net
Posted by Adrian on Monday, 12 October 2009 at 11:19 PM