Five steps to achieving viral reach on mobile: Step Four

Step number four: Use video

By Ryan Gandalf van Jaarsveld, MD 7Dffrnt Knds of Smke

I love video, it’s such a simple media to share and it engages so many senses. I understand why ATL, and TV specifically, has been the Biff since the 40’s. The beautiful stories told by brands in 30 seconds – just look at some of the awesome work by Allan Gray and I really enjoyed Emoticon Boy last year - Velocity you are the business!

As mentioned in my first article in this series we started Seven because we wanted to change the game in this highly technical space by merging left and right brain thinking. We wanted to start the first mobile only advertising agency and deliver sick campaigns with the kind of viral reach that would make keyboard cat fall of his chair (if he was still alive today). In order for us to do that we would have to have video as part of our service offering.

Of course lots of mobile marketing agencies have been doing video on mobile for some time now though when I say do video, I am not talking about syndicated content that’s formatted for mobile and slapped onto a mobi site for download with some nasty branded wallpapers and a ringtone of a celebrity saying, “You’re freaky but I like you a lot”. No, I am talking about the kind of stuff you see on TV, but on your phone (and more suited for viral).

So when I chat to people they often ask the same questions about video. They are either struggling with the technical side of it or they are having problems compressing it or they don’t know where to go for the production. So I would like to use this article to share some of our learnings with you.

Let’s start with Production.

Masters and Savant. Their team is awesome and they have done some excellent, award winning work (they have great biltong too!). We got them to produce a video for a Tropika MMS we did for Christmas. 

We’re also working with them on some killa stuff for Cell C, when it’s up I will share the link.

Velocity. These guys are brilliant – we are working with them on some awesome stuff for Nedbank which is still due to go live so I can’t share a link, though their ability to tell a story and create amazing viral content is outstanding.

Pollen.  Great team, very diverse, with their fingers tightly on the pulse. They handle everything from animation, design, augmented reality and shooting. They put all the animation together for us on our latest campaign with Nedbank. www.WhoIsSam.co.za

Alight Productions. Great company for shoots. Alight have worked with us on a number of mobile campaigns. Really good with stuff for sport. 

What all these guys have in common is that they take the original idea and make it fly – they push the concept and make it work.

Once you have produced the epic piece it’s time to start making it work for mobile. This can be tricky as you need to adapt the content for different handsets. You are going to want to allow consumers to stream it from a mobi site and download it. For the mobi site side of things YouTube is a really awesome tool and provides a solid API. Link this in with the current technology you are using for content adaptation and you should be a winner. One thing you have to make sure of is that you cater for Flash, HTML5, RTSP and download. RTSP stands for Real Time Streaming Protocol which means playing the video using the phone’s native video player.

Before you start embedding the video onto your site you are going to have to compress everything. This is vital as you don’t want large files (buffering sucks!). For MMS don’t produce anything longer than 20 seconds and cater for a screen size of 176 x 144. Your FPS should be set to 15 and your bitrate should be 40KB/s. Use a 3GP codec when converting. With these settings you will be able to compress a video to 250kb with crystal clear quality. When it comes to download you can have a higher resolution. Fiddle with the FPS and bitrate until your file size is around 500kb – you can go higher though always think about the download costs for the consumer.

With streaming you can upload a video of around 10mb – YouTube will handle the compression on the fly.

The one thing I obviously can’t cover in this article is how you come up with the idea for your video. Follow the steps in the first article and make sure the person conceptualising the piece is not a techie or strategist otherwise you are going to end up with something most people will consider lame and probably see as spam.

For me the main objective of using video is to increase the value proposition for the consumer, the brand and the agency. If we do not focus on ways to make campaigns more engaging they will not become more viral and mobile will continue being the ugly step child.

Remember, a mobile phone is a viral channel – if a campaign does not achieve viral reach then it’s because the campaign was not engaging. The consumer is in control – give them something cool and they will pass it on.

Five steps to achieving viral reach on mobile

Step number one: Merge left and right brain thinking

By Ryan Gandalf van Jaarsveld, MD 7Dffrnt Knds of Smke

I remember three years ago standing in my lounge chatting to a friend of mine who works at an advertising agency. She was telling me about how they build brands for Revlon. The fragrance analysts, or whatever you call them, come up with something that smells great and lives in a small glass bottle filed under some kind of laboratory name. The “P719X5”, or whatever the guys in the white coats decide to call it, is then handed over to the ad agency so they can come up with a name, CI, packaging and a campaign to launch the product into the market.

It immediately got me thinking about the amount of work the agency must go through to get this right. After many hours of research, design concepts, copywriting, reverts and focus groups, “Dark Night”, or whatever the guys in the slip slops decide to call it, is ready to hit shelves backed by an ad campaign that makes the consumer aware that anything they thought was solving their perfume problems before this moment was a total misconception and that they shouldn’t only thank their lucky stars that “Dark Night” has arrived but also get down to their nearest Clicks and buy one immediately.

It was at this point that I had to ask why.

Why does a brand that gives this much attention and perceive this much value in advertising their product, not invest the same degree of attention, love and budget when advertising on mobile?

And then it hit me, like that sinking feeling you get when you’re on the way to Durban, driving your father-in-law’s car, seeing the petrol light come on when you are at least 100km from a filling station and realising the sparks coming from behind you are from the tyre on the trailer and dad forgot to pack a spare.

Advertising agencies are successful because they merge left and right brain thinking.

I then realised why mobile agencies are not getting the same respect the traditional agencies are getting and why their results are so shoddy (and if you argue that the results aren’t shoddy then why is mobile still getting such little budget compared to traditional media?).

Concepts that are born from mobile agencies are created by people with marketing minds – a marketing mind is logical, analytical and linear – I know, because I have a marketing mind.

Even Ivan Moroke said it himself - when on the panel interview at the launch of the Annual last week (having been a strategist in his past life) – that it’s generally not a good idea for a strategist to come up with the concept for the TVC if you are expecting a creative result.

Strategists are marketers too – they think in the same way. We have to, because it’s the left hemisphere of the brain that allows us to be analytical, logical, linear and great problem solvers. And we are great problem solvers – for us it’s about pushing more feet into store, getting more bums on seats and driving sales. We get excited about the result, the numbers and, in the case of mobile, the tech, though we know a big idea when we see one.

Creatives, on the other hand, get excited about the big idea and how it will engage the senses, the emotions it will stir up, the perceptions it will change in the consumer’s mind and the lasting impression it will leave behind. Creatives don’t care about how the TV works, or where the billboard is going to be positioned or, in the case of mobile, the tech. They’re right brain thinkers.

So is the conclusion here that a mobile agency needs to incorporate a creative mind, with solid traditional experience, into a strategic team, with solid mobile marketing experience, all working towards the business goals laid out by the brand team?

Well, sort of – though it’s not so cut and dry. Everyone knows that mobile has a specific skill set – if you don’t know how the tech functions then you will deliver campaigns that don’t work on cellphones. Adversely, if the person coming up with the concept knows too much about the tech, then their thinking is automatically limited by what the cellphone can do.

So mobile calls for a new breed of creatives and strategists. We need creatives

who can build concepts based on an understanding of mobile that does not limit their thinking and strategists that can put their understanding of mobile aside and embrace the big idea (As scary as it sometimes can be when the ideas are totally left-field).

When a mobile agency achieves this and they have successfully merged left and right brain thinking then they are well on their way to creating the future of mobile advertising that incorporates everything that has made traditional advertising work up until now. And when advertising works on mobile it automatically becomes viral because mobile is a viral touch point.