Someone recently sent me info about a company called Bizzabo. It’s an app for smartphones that helps people attending large industry conferences and events to find actual business opportunities while they’re there. Sounded complicated so I went to check it out.
I was happy to see they had a video displayed prominently on their homepage and was even happier once I clicked. It’s a very cute animated video that describes the actual problem…business folks being overwhelmed with all the paperwork and headaches of attending a conference. And then…in comes Bizzabo to save the day and make networking easier.
A very simple video that clearly states the problem and how they can help. The animations and music don’t distract from the message and…by the end…you just want to know more. It’s totally the kind of video that informs and intrigues without bogging the viewer down with too much jargon.
That’s what a good marketing video should do!
Good job, guys!
Seen a marketing video that you love? Or hate? Send it my way and maybe we’ll review it here!
We love helping others. And we love when other people help each other too. We recently completed a project for a Web site called CanAnybody, where folks can sign up to find or offer different kinds of services.
What we really loved about this one was that it covered so many different kinds of services…from catering to math to painting to music…and everything in between. So our challenge was to creatively illustrate as MUCH as we could in a short period of time…without boring the viewer. You’ll see in the video that we have several different sequences of images depicting services and each sequence is different. There’s the round sequence with the drums and the party platter…the hand sequence with the baby and the turtle…and so on…
The last B2B video we added to our portfolio was for a company called Evident. The product, ClearStone, is a comprehensive application performance management system. It’s a quite technical product which gave us the opportunity to get into our tech geek mode and find a creative way to explain something that can be a little confusing for folks who aren’t in the industry. Luckily, the folks who will see this one are also really geeky and they’ll know exactly what we’re saying.
Oh, how we love a good geeky product!
In their own words…
Evident ClearStone lets you monitor performance across NoSQL products, application servers, Java and web apps – all from a single dashboard. The ClearStone management packs extend the product, allowing you to monitor: Oracle Coherence, Memcached Stats, Cassandra Performance, JBoss Performance, WebLogic Performance, DataSynapse GridServer
When RapidFire Video began, we surveyed the marketplace to find the general price range of marketing videos. On the top end of the price range were the fancy 3D ones (which are quite expensive) and the simplest of the simple videos which are more like…ordinary PowerPoint presentations. We couldn’t really relate to either of the extremes, and we absolutely hate the idea of selling selling selling. As a small company, we prefer spending our time doing what we love to do…which is making really awesome marketing videos.
So what did we do? We found a price point at the lower end of the spectrum so that we wouldn’t have to waste so much time negotiating sales and could get right to the work. That’s the important part anyway, right? On the one hand, we could probably earn more per project. On the other hand, in two years, we’ve yet to have to make a sales call or haggle over price. Word of mouth and the attractiveness of the figures we quote has us booked pretty solid.
Recently though…we had an interesting development.
For a while, we had a specific kind of video…keeping everything quite simple. We had called our company RFV because in a typical 2-minute video, you could easily see almost 100 images, showing up “rapidfire.” It’s easy to make changes, even at the last minute, and it really keeps the viewer actively challenged, engaged and excited. Some simple animations help as transitions between images, but that’s it.
But as we grew and expanded our portfolio, we felt it was time to expand our offerings as well for specific clients with stories that really would benefit from a slightly more “animated” presentation. And so…it brings us great joy to introduce our new Premium video offering. It’s our same signature style with the added bonus of Adobe After Effects animations to bump it up a notch. It let’s us do some wild stuff with text, and really clever transitions and animation tricks. We had been hesitant to mess with our tried-and-true formula, but we found that this kind of animation didn’t detract from the messaging and our familiar look and feel…we hope you’ll agree!
Check out the Premium video we completed for the CareerBuilder Talent Network:
We had so much fun with this project. The After Effects really gave us the opportunity to be creative with our designs and opened up the doors for a lot of really cool animations.
Another Premium style we provide is fully animated like this one we did for a billing lockbox solution:
And to answer the obvious question, yes – Premium videos will cost a drop more than our classic version. Roughly a third more. But frankly, unless you’re on a very, very minimalist budget, the figures we quote you are still attractive. Instead of being below the low-end of the market, we’re simply at the low end. And considering it includes script writing (i.e. free marketing advice), the voiceover (a $200-$450 value) and the actual video, we’re pleased to simply have something to offer…everyone.
Be sure to check out our other Premium videos and everything else in our online portfolio.
We’ve mentioned viral videos in a previous blog post, but we thought we’d revisit the subject and offer up our own “viral video” as an explanation.
So you’re convinced that you MUST HAVE a viral video, yeah? You must have it and the only way to measure the success of that video is to watch the number of viewers grow exponentially over the next two weeks. Right?
Well…if your goal is to create an off-the-wall video that is passed from person to person just for the sake of being seen…then yes, perhaps you want a viral video. Think… bed-intruder-ted-williams-susan-boyle-autotune-mashup. Right? Because THAT has EVERYTHING to do with your product. In a video like that, you’d be lucky if your brand name appeared on someone’s t-shirt!
Now consider this: Which is more valuable?
a) Having your bedintrudertedwilliamssusanboyleautotunemashup video seen by 392,048,023,483 people, 5 of whom are actually potential clients
…or b) Having a carefully crafted targeted video seen by 4590 people, 450 of whom are potential clients?
Check out this video that explains our take on those “viral videos”…
Dig it?
Check out the debate on this same issue going on over at Social Times…
Our latest project was for a company called Preton. They provide software that saves businesses on overhead by drastically reducing toner and ink usage. This video was quite fun for us because it forced us to think out of the box. Sometimes our clients have these crazy innovative little gadgets…and sometimes, like this time, we’re talking about printer ink. So how do you talk about things like printer ink while keeping the viewer engaged and wanting more?
…using creative analogies and imagery which the viewer can relate to and enjoy.
Like this…
What did you think? Did the snack food catch your eye?
Or maybe it was the bright colors?
…or maybe the $10 bills ;)
We’re so happy to announce our very first video for an iPhone app! We were really excited to work on it…we love iPhones and all the apps and we knew it would give us the opportunity to be even MORE creative and bold than usual. iPhone apps are designed for people with iPhones…and people with iPhones are generally labeled “fun!”
So yes…this video is fun. It’s for an app called iSnap.it.
And what is iSnap.it? iSnap.it is the only app that allows you to personalize your photos before you’ve even taken them.
We're the team behind RapidFire, and we help make your product into a story. That may be through a RapidFire video or other marketing tools.
This is where we get to rant and rave about great examples of online video, what we've been up to, and of course, entertainingly terrible examples of online video.
