Thoughts on Spokespeople Videos

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January 18, 2010
OpEd Guest Post By Mike Darnell, Social Media Manager for Treepodia

Recently I read an interesting post by Jennifer Meacham on PracticalEcommerce.com entitled “Innovative Video Use Increases Conversions for Merchants.” The post’s main theme is that using spokespeople videos on your site can be very effective.

Don’t mind me,

I’m just walking back and forth on your screen…

Although many of us find these types of solutions highly annoying (especially when they’re set as autoplay), online spokespeople are actually an interesting solution to the whole ecommerce-video paradigm. Their effectiveness builds on our brain’s predilection to trust human figures, and especially faces that talk to us.

Problems of Scale

There is a catch however: to maximize effectiveness you need to invest in creating a unique video of your model walking and talking while demoing EVERY item in your catalog. This is fine if you have a store that only sells a few items, but becomes highly impractical for any store that sells tens, hundreds, or thousands of items. The solution isn’t “scalable”.

Another scale related issue is the ratio between your model’s size and your product’s size. If your selling handheld items which are significantly smaller than a human being, your product would show up near invisible in comparison to your model’s body. Definitely a case in favor of having a talking head instead of a full body.

What to do? What to do?

I recently heard a podcast by Jennifer’s PracticalEcommerce.com associate Kerry Murdock, who conducted with Faculte.com’s CEO Maher Hakim. Maher advocates approaches that I tend to believe are more effective than the spokesperson model:

“Don’t spend a lot of money on producing the video… you can create really nice video by stitching together some photos & then putting in some music and audio and narration on top of that. It looks and feels like a video to the end user”

What Maher is saying, and I’m very much in support, is that you’re online videos needn’t be Oscar grade material. Your’e not going for the Oscar anyway – it’s a sale that you’re after, and then another one, and another one, and another one…

Why video gives you an edge anyway

Using video enhances your shoppers’ experiences because, regardless of how it’s done, it adds new engagement dimensions that help them get a tangible feeling for the products their looking for, increasing their sense of security and comfort about the item and convincing them to make purchases more often.

A 60 second product slideshow, by virtue of being mixed media, simultaneously addresses the needs of different types of consumers and can have a very positive effect on your conversions:

• Voice-over narration attracts auditory learners, who absorb information best when hearing it.
• Visual cues, such as bullet point slides, work well with visual learners, who absorb information best when seeing and reading it.
• The dynamic aspect of the video draws attention to the content – our eyes are designed to follow movement.

The important thing to take away from all this is that choosing to create you first video, uploading it to your site and getting the feedback required to learn what works and what doesn’t, gives a huge advantage over choosing not to do anything. So GET BUSY!

About the author:

Mike Darnell is the social media manager for the Treepodia smart video platform that provides vendors with automated and optimized ecommerce video solutions