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Sponsored: Personalised Videos – The Next Step in Advertising?

by on August 8, 2016
 

It may sound strange that advertising could be personalised to one specific individual but it happens progressively more often without some of us noticing. Your browser will monitor your searches and display relevant adverts on websites you visit – a personal touch on your advertising but it hasn’t stopped there.

Brands such as 888poker have incorporated personalised videos into their marketing materials and have seen a rise in brand awareness since.

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This is something that Nike have also incorporated into their marketing strategy. By pushing out emails with product recommendations based on past browsing and purchase behaviour, it offers customers a personalised feel to their shopping experience. Yes, the concept is still very basic, if anything the videos will include your name based on information you fill in when you subscribe to mailings but the idea is still a very clever one with proven results.

This does sound a little cheesey; if an E-Mail arrives with your name in the subject there is a tendency to disregard it as a generic message aimed at luring you into purchasing something you perhaps don’t want or need. However, the figures can’t be argued with – 272% is an incredible figure for people clicking through from the personalised video to the website proper.

There is something to be said for companies taking information you provide them and using it in a manner that doesn’t offend the end user or cost them anything. Video personalisation has been around for a long time but they have previously been used by video bloggers and musicians as a way of rewarding their followers – as an advertising tool it is fast becoming invaluable.

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Generic advertising in magazines, on the radio or television can become very stagnant – who hoped the GoCompare man stayed away forever? Clever gimmicks in advertising always was the way to net customers – jingles, innovative characters or memorable slogans infiltrated the public conscious and netted copious amounts of business for the company in question but it seems this age is over.

With the advent of Smart TV’s, would it be so difficult for companies to beam personalised adverts to customers who have registered their details to make use of certain services? Surely Netflix will introduce advertising before long and there is no doubt in the mind of the experts they will be tailored based on the viewing history of the user – personalised? Perhaps not but in a way it is.

The technology behind personalised video advertising is no different to the mail merge function found on computers anything up to twenty years ago – an empty field is filled with a piece of information provided by the end user on a generic video but for some reason it is incredibly effective.

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It is very similar to the effect of face to face advertising as opposed to generic advertising. If you consider the last time you were approached by a representative in the street regarding a product you can buy into, you can probably remember at least the colour of their hair if not their name and accent – personalised videos have a similar effect; direct address is by far and away the best method of advertising, isn’t it?