IBM's Mike Moran on Web Video That Work: Think Infomercial!

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Making a successful Web video for about business is not easy. The medium is different.

We've been working away at this for the past 18 months and some 400 clips. We've tried to find a balance between quality production without the hype and gloss of broadcast news. We try to make the clips that are informational and direct, using the one-to-one sensibility of the Web.

Helping us figure out what works is Mike Moran, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Product Manager of IBM's OmniFind. He dropped by the Beet.TV studio recently to talk about the aesthetics of successful Web video. He likens the winning formula of Web video to infomercials.

OK, so we're not selling knife sets here, but his point about production values coupled with a cause to action is what will make this medium work.

Next week, IBM will publish Mike's new marketing book "Do It Wrong Quickly, How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules." He explains in the book -- and in our chat, how marketing solutions have to be carefully customized.

-- Andy Plesser

Posted on 10/05/2007 at 5:28 PM
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You could be forgiven if, after listening to the excerpts of my interview on Beet.TV, you thought that my favorite television programs are infomercials. But I was trying to make a point. Infomercials, and other direct TV campaigns, have a... [Read More]

Comments

This is absolutely the way forward. It's nice to see that creative production is being recognized, even if by engineers, as the solution and only logical major driver in online video advertising. This content will eventually power search advertising and all online directory sites. You can't enginner storytelling. Video is and will always be a storytelling medium, wether it's a high cost crass TV commercial or a low cost ont-to-one mini-doc web video for a brand. Video information is becoming the interactive layer between text based information and the end user online. Looking at Google today is akin to looking at the innards of a binary processor. Informative web video is the emerging web graphical user interface.

Posted by: Simon Foster | Monday, October 08, 2007 at 05:20 PM

I'm not sure whether infomercials is the appropriate analogy for successful Web video marketing. I definitely agree that good video is informative, but a video must be engaging and entertaining in order to hold viewers' interests -- the Web, after all, offers consumers so much control over what content we watch and when that anything that smacks of a repurposed infomercial will quickly drive them away to the millions of other content sites. Consumer control of online content means that publishers and advertisers must strive further to capture their imaginations than they did during the heyday of the 30-second TV spot.

Posted by: AJ | Monday, October 08, 2007 at 03:51 PM

Interesting. I think Beet manages to tread this path well, but the danger of taking an "infomercial" approach is in a huge surge of corporate pap being churned out in a bid to make the advertising embedded in the content rather than intrusive.

When entertainment or information is utterly subservient to a corporate concern - see such torturous examples as Holiday Inn sponsored "The Smart Show" we are in a territory even more vile than the PayPerPost debacle.

Obviously we all want to make a buck at this, and the idea of a call to action is an interesting one. But overdo this approach and the call to action is to hit the browser's back button.

Posted by: Michael Pick | Friday, October 05, 2007 at 11:00 PM