We have put together a simple guideline that will help describe your product, service or idea effectively for ad copy.

Start with the copy points:

What are the pieces of information that you must communicate?

What are the reasons for someone to buy your product or service?

Then describe your target:

Age, sex, education level, personality. What about them makes them attracted to your product or service

Describe the tonality you want the advertising to have:

If you are selling funeral insurance, you will likely decide that a sarcastic tone will not work for your audience. Likewise, a serious fact-filled description of a new wine cooler drink will turn-off your audience. What tone will work for your product and target: serious, scary, sarcastic, cutting-edge, futuristic?

Once you have those directions settled, create some ideas for settings. Just brainstorm a little. Decide on the look and feel. With all that done, the actual script will come easy. You should be able to come up with a pool of three executions that fit all your copy points.

When writing ad copy for a radio or television commercial it’s easy to get carried away. How much is enough? The short answer is enough to get the message across. OK, but how does that translate into a word count for a 30 second spot or a 60 second spot?

Great question. To help give some guidance, we’ve created a handy chart for you to reference the next time your are writing some ad copy.

The 30 Second Spot Word Count Guideline

30 seconds, 65 words = lots of inflection, sincere read
30 seconds, 78 words = typical, straight read
30 seconds, 90 words = fast read
30 seconds, 100 words = hard sell, maximum speed read

The 60 Second Spot Word Count Guideline

60 seconds, 130 words = lots of inflection
60 seconds, 155 words = typical, straight read
60 seconds, 180 words = fast read
60 seconds, 200 words = hard sell, maximum speed read

Numbers (such as a phone number), symbols (@ symbol or www) , etc., count as one word each.

We hope you find this information useful when you are creating a script to describe your product, service or idea.

Stay TUNED!

When planning your online video marketing campaign there are a few things to keep in mind.

1. Get Creative!

Make the most of colour schemes.  Matching hex codes with your site and your videos creates consistency. When you are developing your website be sure to get all of the hex codes related to your site.

Reuse images that are already in your site.  This helps reduce cost and again creates consistency.  It also helps your video producer get a feel for your product or idea and gets them creating your masterpiece immediately.

Also creative music and audio involves more brain processing, which increases the likelihood of learning and remembering.

2. Make it Personal.

Find your target market and go for it.  Once this is established a video producer can create characters and compose music that will grab the attention of the clients that are looking for your product or service.  When something is familiar, it is more likely to be retained.

3.  Appeal to Emotion.

Make your video jump off the screen.  No matter what product or service you are promoting make it exciting with motion graphics and text, as well as audio effects. Create humour to engage your audience or even add some shock value to ensure stickiness.  You want to stand out from the rest of your competition.

4.  Throw them the Unexpected.

Make your video fresh.  Surprising statistics or novel behind the scenes information gets their brain working.  This is your chance to inject information that your clients may not see within your site, while increasing cognitive processing.

5. Keep Them Guessing.

A simple question holds the attention of your potentials and creates suspense while they wait for the solution and gets them to interact with solutions of their own.

Remember, enticing clients to use more cognitive processing, results in the retention of more information and more successful advertising.  So put their brains to work!

Check out the Info-Graphic:

When you plan your advertising campaign be sure to include everything you can to get your point across.  We all know that visuals are more likely to grab your potential clients attention than text.  However when you combine motion graphics with text and add audio in the form of voice-overs and music, it uses more cognitive involvement and therefore holds the attention of your potentials.

In other words, to get the consumer to pay attention and remember a product, a service, anything it has been proven that a combination of motion graphics, text and audio will win over static images and plain text.

Here are a couple of hard facts:

If you only provide text OR audio, your visitor will only remember 10% of what they read or heard 72 hours later.  If they are engaged in a video with motion graphics, a voice over and a soundtrack your viewer will retain 68%.

The bottom line is to keep it simple and know your audience!

Copyright law also plays a major role in video marketing. Preliminarily, in almost all cases, using video images copied from YouTube or from a television network’s or a show’s Web site without consent is a copyright violation. While the basics of copyright infringement are usually obvious, the concept of copyright ownership is not. As a result, affiliate marketers are often not aware that just because they pay someone to create a video, they do not necessarily own the copyright in that work.

In many cases, the person who actually creates the video is considered the work’s author and the owner of its copyright. In fact, everyone involved in the creation of the video, including the script writer, the director and the production crew may own a portion of the copyright in the finished video and possess the legal right to determine whether and how the video can be used.

This issue can be avoided by having all persons involved in the creation of the video sign a work-for-hire agreement before production commences. These agreements are written contracts which specify that entity which commissions the video owns the entire copyright in it.

Background music is an additional copyright issue in video marketing. This issue is often overlooked. Unless the video uses only original music created by the affiliate marketer, the marketer must obtain consent to use the music. Otherwise, there is a potential infringement issue.

By employing these basic measures, you can avoid many of the legal issues raised by video marketing.

Explainer Video creates and/or purchases all aspects of the videos we create for our clients ensuring a worry free marketing video for your company.

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Is video likely to be the new real estate marketing tool?

Yes, says Tracey Green of Uchoose Property Marketing (Pty) Ltd., a statement that is backed up with the US release of the industry’s first formal report on video. According to the report the use of video by real estate professionals and companies increased by 95% from 2008 to 2009 as a means of marketing property in the US. With SA’s Internet set to improve 10-fold in the coming years, we are set to follow.

According to the same report, nine out of 10 respondents answered that “video improves the ability to win listings over competing agents/brokers”, indicating a clear trend towards using video as a differentiation tool. Real estate video has proven to be beneficial to all parties involved; buyers love visiting properties before showing up in person and homeowners clearly state that they love not having to uproot their families every time a home hunter wants to do a walk through.

It was also determined that the largest hurdle facing real estate professionals with regards to the use of video is not enough knowledge (46%), followed by cost (33%), time (14%) and demand (7%). Photos were still valued the most by consumers when searching for real estate information at 48%, but video followed closely at 41% and virtual tours/slide shows and floor plans lagged behind at a mere 9% and 2%. This shows that video is rapidly catching up to photos as the most sought after media in real estate search.

According to statistics in the US, as discussed at the mybroadband.co.za conference held on 12 November 2009, traditional advertising is in steep decline, with newspaper and magazine publications being down 18,7% and 14,8% respectively. Meanwhile, digital advertising is growing rapidly, with mobile phone and internet increasing 18,1% and 9,2% respectively. Also, according to Reshaad Sha from Cisco, one of the speakers at the same conference: “Video traffic will dominate internet usage over the next 5 years”.

“Video has countless benefits, potential, cost and time saving advantages, not to mention how it can really give a property and the estate agent or seller a real edge, which is crucial in the crowded property market,” says Tracey.

“Buyers can conveniently view the videos on the internet or watch a DVD that can display up to 100 three-minute property videos, enabling all family members to view the inside and outside of many properties in the comfort of their own home, eliminating pointless viewings and saving time.”

Video will also have a powerful impact on the way future show days will be conducted. Realtors will no longer be restricted to sitting show at the property – which has become extremely unsafe – instead, for example, a team of agents could gather at a busy road intersection whereby DVDs displaying all of their property videos could be given to interested buyers.

Other benefits of video include being able to send web links of the videos to interested buyers via email, featuring the videos on websites to increase search engine optimisation (SEO), creating a professional first impression and higher conversion rates than traditional methods.

Professional property videos are an ideal way of showcasing both commercial and residential properties globally to potential buyers.

“Mobile broadband video is the fastest growing application in the world. It is expected that 90% of all IP traffic on the internet will be video by 2013,” says Brian Seligmann, senior manager: Data Bearers, Reseller & Roaming Solutions at MTN, wrote recently in a mybroadband.co.za article.

New Guide Offers Internet Video Production Tips for Successful Online Marketing

“Online videos are essential for businesses to create brand awareness and compete in today’s Internet marketplace.”

We couldn’t agree more.  The success of our clients videos has proven to boost online marketing.

Fathom SEO, a leading Search Engine Marketing firm, offers a new guide, ‘The Dawn of a New Industry – Internet Video Production & Marketing,’ with helpful tips for businesses considering professional online digital video production services. It details why it is no longer enough to aspire for high search engine rankings using traditional search engine optimization on sites like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

For the complete story please follow this link>http://tiny.cc/5gW2H and thanks to PRWEB for this great article.

New Study Shows What Works for Online Video Advertising

It’s been a great year for Explainer Video. It seems that online video marketing is alive and well, even during these tough times. What makes online video advertising so successful? Online video advertising is affordable, up dateable, cost effective and makes you stand out from your competition. Adding video to your online campaign can significantly improve your marketing results. In the last four years, the growth of video impressions has outpaced rich media growth by 60%.

As marketers increasingly leverage online video, this new research, analyzing billions of impressions, provides insight into what, where, when and why video advertising engages users online. An examination of users’ behavior by frequency of exposure shows that campaigns with video advertising achieve better results with fewer exposures when compared to rich media campaigns without video. For example, users exposed to an ad with video twice achieve the same Dwell Rate of users exposed to a non-video ad three times.

For the full Eyeblaster story click here: http://tiny.cc/DJPwn

For a complete list of video best practices and a deeper analysis of video environments and ad performance, download the complete research report here: http://bit.ly/EB_Research_OnlineVideo