John Cecil on Video Spokespersons, Pickle Fights and Surfing in OC

This week’s DishyMix interview focuses on video with a twist. I like video spokespersons, especially for landing page conversion improvement when the product is complex, the offer is complex or the navigation is complex. There are some great places to use video spokesperson and I interviewed John Cecil, co-founder of Innovate Media after going down to Orange County for a video shoot for a new product we’ll be launching from Personal Life Media.

Click HERE to see the “Day in the Life of a Video Spokesperson” shoot on my Flickr page.

Alissa Kriteman, host of Just for Women shooting her Video Spokesperson.

Dr. Patti Taylor, host of Expanded Lovemaking shooting her Video Spokesperson.

John James Santangelo, host of Sales Magic shooting his Video Spokesperson.

Here’s an excerpt from the show that I found very informative.

Susan Bratton:  So a video spokesperson is essentially the overlay of either a character or a human being that comes onto the page after it has loaded and tells you a little bit about what you’re seeing there.  Is that right?

John Cecil:  Yes.  It’s basically the transfer of the web turning from a text-based medium to a video-based medium, and our core product is the video spokesperson that comes out on the screen and lets a company give a pitch, if you will, in real time video about kind of what they want you to do, either buy a product, click on a button or move to another page.

Susan Bratton:  Well a lot of times too, in addition to giving directions about how to work the page you’re on, I think there’s a really big opportunity in verbally explaining products that are fairly difficult or complex.  I had mentioned to you TrustedID.  That’s a product that I use for identity theft protection.  It’s a proactive service that monitors your credit card and your health insurance and your bank accounts.  They seemed like a perfect company for you because their product is kind of hard to understand and you can go onto their site and read all the stuff, but text has its limits and it strikes me that not just getting people to click on a button or make a buy, but explaining products through a video spokesperson could work well too.  Are you finding that?

John Cecil:  I think every landing page, every website in some amount of time will have video on their sites.  There’s only so much text you can put on a page

Susan Bratton:  Well you can put a lot of text on a page, but no one will read it.

John Cecil:  Absolutely.  Video allows the consumer to get a video message about the product or service.  If I walked into a retail store, someone doesn’t hand me a brochure of what they’re selling.  There’s a live person there that’s talking to me about products and the services that that person is trying to sell.  We’re able, with the use of online video and our products, to sort of match that same thing – a full motion video communicating a message is replacing text.

Susan Bratton:  So a lot of people say, “I don’t like those video people to pop up on my page.”  But in reality, I think many times the people that I hear that from are people who are pretty web-savvy, not necessarily our target customers but ourselves as marketers and experienced web users.

You gave me a piece of research from a professor at Stanford University, Byron Reeves, the Center for Study of Language and Information. He did this big piece of research on video spokespeople and what popped out for me in this were, number one, having a human on the page creates a level of trust that you can’t get in other ways.  Number two, it makes interfaces easier to use which you mentioned, and number three, that the characters are well liked.  And I think if you think about the general web that characters, if well done, can be very well liked.

John Cecil:  I am backing up everything that he says and the way I can back it up is conversion data that we have.  It’s very interesting.  I have really never seen a product that consistently increases conversions so much as far as the video spokesperson product.  So to back up with what he is saying, so I’m going to compare two units.  We have a non-user initiated and a user initiated page with the same video spokesperson.  The video spokesperson that comes out without a user having to touch a button converts better than the one that requires user initiation.  And so we get into talking about being in the web and being sort of not annoyed by video or things along those lines.  The conversion data is telling us over and over again that this person coming out on the screen converts better.  And as a marketer, we have to get out of our bubble of knowing so much about the web and really look at the conversion data and ask what tools are helping us to kind of convert the best on our sites.

Susan Bratton:  One of the things in this study struck me.  It said,

“Research shows that over 90% of people can find a character in an interactive session that they prefer over no character at all.  It only takes five choices to provide a character that is liked but even when a single character is presented, only 15% of users dislike that character and those people can usually be accommodated by allowing them to opt out of the character interactions in favor of other forms of navigation.”  It was also funny later on in that he said, “Some people just don’t like anything.” 

I thought that was funny.  Are a lot of your customers just using one character and just testing with that or do you have clients who come in and try four or five different actors? Most of the video spokespersons are done with professional actors but you can have people from the company. (I want to talk about celebrities too but I’ll come back to that.)  Are most brands using professional actors and are they testing multiples or do they just pick the one they want?

John Cecil:  What our clients do is A/B test talent against each other and find the best converting person their particular customers like.  So in one case, a client of ours shot five different actors with the exact same scripts, some male, some female, some old, some young, and those five actors were A/B tested off of the home page and pitted against each other.  They chose the best performing video spokesperson from a conversion standpoint and that person became the video that they used on an ongoing basis.  Our more savvy clients are testing different characters against each other.

Susan Bratton:  And what about celebrities?  What about William Shatner coming out on the home page of Priceline?  Have we gotten there and how well does that do or how well do you think it will do?

John Cecil:  As an organization, we have just started to kind of scratch the surface on it.  The early data that we’re seeing is that it increases the increases that we’re already seeing, so we think that a known actor or actress is going to help even more with the conversion data on a particular site or landing page.