Let me tell you a story about stories. It goes something like this. Brands are starting to use video more and more to convey not only a message about their product or service, but a feeling as well. This feeling can often be a key factor in turning a consumer into a customer.
When you buy a house, car, holiday or jewellery, part of the decision comes down to the feeling the product gives you. This is something that advertisers picked up on long ago with TV commercials. TVCs were able to tap into the emotions of customers in a way that no other form of advertising could.
With online video, the opportunity for brands to enhance that emotional engagement is huge — it is like creating a supercharged TV commercial. You no longer have to worry about strict limits on time or format as video can take up the whole screen, or sit in the background, there can be interactivity in the video or data overlaid on it.
Video is the perfect medium for highly emotive or information-rich content, and the new features of the Brightcove Player help customers achieve this objective even more than before. We’ve given the new Brightcove Player the ability to expand out of the traditional player window, be borderless, and integrate deeply into websites, all while running high quality video with stunning smoothness.
There are plenty of brands using video heavily, but one in particular is Michael Hill, a leading global jewellery brand, that has been putting video at the centre of its marketing strategy for some time. Michael Hill knows how to tell a story — for a recent ad aired during the Superbowl, the company interviewed 1,200 people on the streets of New York about love and what it meant to them. The resulting video conveyed emotion in a way that text and other forms of advertising can’t do as well.
Jewellery, like many high consideration products, is an emotional purchase, which makes video a perfect medium for Michael Hill to convey its message to the consumer. Online video provides the time, and space, to exemplify that emotional message. In fact, Michael Hill is so convinced that video is the right medium that it has reconfigured its campaign landing page to feature video front and centre.
Last year, Michael Hill created a shoppable video campaign. The campaign was the perfect execution for a brand investing heavily in video. Consumers were greeted by great, engaging stories when they first landed on the Michael Hill site — the Brightcove Player allowed the consumer to play the video without distraction. Through the video they could select items on show and purchase them directly while they were still engaged with the story. This approach was so successful that Michael Hill also used it for another of their brands, Emma and Roe.
Consumers don’t want to just know about a product — they want to engage with it. By combining the latest online video technology with the age-old art of storytelling, brands like Michael Hill have discovered how to better connect with consumers, and convert potential customers, in a way that websites without video fail to do.