As usual I am late, I make a run for it and catch the train on the fly. The doors close behind me, the boy with the beard who got on a moment earlier fogs up his glasses, the morning air is still fresh.
The train is running, and I think back to one thing that particularly struck me about London at this time, the amount of trees in bloom-there are so many beautiful cherry trees and also many magnolias that give excitement.
It was Monday, the first day of spring and at the same timeAdvertising Week also began. For those who are not familiar with it,Advertising week is a traveling event that currently touches four cities-London, New York, Tokyo, and Mexico City; where the topics covered are those of advertising (of course). It is such a big event that they do not have an event brochure but a 296-page magazine.
You'd imagine that reporting on an event like this would need an article for every single talk.
Instead, I decided to quickly "talk" to you just about Virtual Reality, and then instead report on some very useful tips we received at a workshop held by the Facebook Blueprint team, tips for your video projects.
I finally got to try out the commercial versions of the Oculus and HTC VR visors, and also, I had never seen them before, the Microsoft's Hololens.
I don't know about you, but when I was growing up, my mother used to tell me not to stand too close to the television, lo and behold, now with these viewers we put a "monitor" about two inches from our retinas.
What can I say? WOW!
The acronyms for those who have not yet approached this world are:
-VR, Virtual Reality, Virtual Reality.
-AR, Augmented Reality, Augmented Reality.
With a VR viewer, you will be totally immersed in a virtual world, the uses that can be made are varied and certainly not only gaming, in fact, I was thinking that if you have a real estate agency you could welcome your client into your agency and show him some proposals that you think are interesting.
Your client will be able to safely move around inside the home, whether it already exists or is still a project; he will be able to turn the lights on or off and he can, if he wants, even change the color of the walls or the interior decoration. This is to give just one of many examples.
With the VR viewers, I've tried both drawing in 3D and it's a great experience because you feel like you're "building" something, and I've watched a video spot shot with classic 360 cameras, and the beauty of these videos is that you would tend to be able to watch them many more times, because each time you could decide to look in a different direction.
As for Microsoft's HoloLens? I think this video makes more than a thousand words.
The video begins with the word "GameChanger," and indeed, you will feel like you are in the future just by having them on. But let's go back to a more widespread present and regular videos.
Why did I prefer to dwell on practical video tips? Because of one very important fact:
"In 2020, 75% of data traffic on mobile will be generated by Video"
By now everyone says it: Video, Video, Video. Okay, but how? By now we know, if we have to develop a website it's always "Mobile First," but do we have the same approach for video or advertising?
"Are we using a strategy and/or content generation with a mobile first approach?"
If you are about to start strategic work, you usually start with an analysis. So again we try to do a quick analysis of how people usually use smartphones. Paying special attention to the video context, we will find some recurring characteristics:
-Frequent (we look at the smartphone more and more frequently).
-Fast (we have developed a thumb that scrolls at unthinkable speeds).
-Sound Off (usually videos start without music and only afterwards do we decide to turn it on).
-Vertical (our smartphone "spends" most of its time in our hands in an upright position).
Having said that therefore we have to change the paradigm and we cannot think in the same way television videos were made. Let's take an example watch this video: before you press play turn on the sound.
Funny isn't it? Now if you have time try watching it again without sound, and imagine that you have encountered this video in your Facebook stream, you probably won't get halfway through the video you will have already moved on.
So what do we need to do to get the most out of our videos?
Capture attention quickly! This advice actually applies in so many cases, whether for a website, for a book, for a movie... But for a video in the Facebook stream, you have even less time.
Think of your video without sound (Design for sound OFF).
Play more, always try and experiment with new things.
An excellent example of capturing attention is:
Effectively seeing a unicorn doing its business, in a moment it captures your attention and "stimulates" you to watch it to the end. Use text to tell a story:
Horizontal or vertical?
If you talk to any video maker, he will probably laugh in your face at the mere fact that you are asking him the question, but in reality almost always our cell phone is in the upright position, there is no magic solution here, but don't take anything for granted, videos are not only horizontal, you can choose between:
16:9 (Horizontal) 1:1 (Square) or 9:16 (Vertical)
But Facebook and Instagram lately are also offering us other tools, for example Live Videos. Live videos, are very interesting because they allow greater involvement of your audience with whom you can if you want to "dialogue" in real time.
An interesting example is that of Mr. Robot.
Very interesting is the choice to start with a countdown of about three minutes that serves to create the base of connected users.
Mr. Robot makes skillful use of Social Networks and also the latest available technologies, for example by making a 360-degree video.
You will also be able to insert videos within "canvases," remember how earlier we said a "mobile first" strategy?
Here, it is no coincidence that Facebook's Canvas works exclusively on mobile.
The main advantages of using the canvas are:
-reduced loading times: content loads faster than on a web page (if the web page doesn't load fast we are losing users!)
-Storytelling: in the canvas we can insert, videos, photographs, sliders, text, call to action
Another example we saw during the workshop, was Sonic, a brand that had very few users on Instagram, and then what did they decide to do?
When the product fits the media!
To recap:
1. Capture attention in the blink of an eye!
2. Audio if it comes, it will only come later.
3. Horizontal, Square or Vertical, find your way.
4. Experiment with new tools: Live, Canvas, 360 Video...
5. Be inspired by those who have made successes.
And to conclude, I leave you with one last piece of advice and one sentence:
Tip: Use Facebook's Creative Hub to take inspiration of work done by other professionals and to present your work to your clients.
Go to Facebook's Creative Hub https://www.facebook.com/ads/creativehub/
A sentence that I really liked:
"The Internet brings out the best and worst in each of us!"
Here we try to amplify only the best things. Good work!
Emanuele Ciccone
@emaposh