Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 54
November 21, 2017
5 Tips to Help Make a Awesome Marketing Video
Creating a video (or video series) to help market your product or service is a no-brainer. It’s an easy, shareable way to communicate your company’s core message.
Chances are though, you don’t have the in-house resources to create a clip or much time to waste on learning video editing software yourself.
If you don’t have a ton of experience in video production, it may seem like your only options are to pay a lot of money for someone else to do it, or hack together a bad video on your own.
Good news: there’s a third option. Even with limited resources, companies launch with great video campaigns all the time. Read this post and take away five tips to create a great video to market your business.
1) Showcase Your Personality
Whatever it is you’re producing, you’re likely not the first one to do so. The number one marketing challenge you’ll face during launch is standing out from competitors in your field. What sets your productivity app or hilarious slogan t-shirt or handcrafted eco-friendly wooden rocking horse apart from the pack?
Approximately zero potential customers will likely read your thousand-word written explanation about why your wooden rocking horse is more eco-friendly than the next guy’s. Visual content is much more digestible, accessible, and shareable to the average person. Infinite bonus points if you can figure out a way to showcase the personality of your product (or your company, or just yourself) in a way that’s relatable and memorable.
Have you ever made a purchase just because you loved the personality of the brand? Chances are, it was a piece of visual content—perhaps a video—that you instantly connected with because it was just so likable. Aim to create that kind of video content. If people decide they like you, they’ll show you by becoming customers.
How to do it
Be honest with yourself about your on-camera skills. Is your business partner more charismatic? Put him or her in front of the camera, instead. Talking into a mic and speaking to an unseen audience may seem easy, but it often is not. Do several takes, upload them all, and edit out awkward pauses. Practice trimming and splitting clips until your transitions look natural.
People love to learn about the personality of a brand by getting a glimpse behind the curtain. If you’re making a physical product, some footage of the manufacturing process is an excellent way to make your product relatable. Don’t be afraid to whip out your cell phone if you’re missing a moment, be it putting the final touches on a great-looking product or your lead developer falling asleep at his desk.
2) Explain What You’re Doing
Have you ever joked about being married to your work? Like a regular marriage, you’re incredibly familiar with your “spouse”. You know things about each other that no one else knows.
You know your product better than anyone else. That’s great, but you may make the mistake of assuming everyone else knows the ins and outs of your product, too. Don’t jump right to marketing Awesome Thing About My Product #5 just because you assume Things 1 through 4 are obvious.
Take a look at your product as if you know nothing about what it is, what it does, or what kinds of problems it can solve. Tell yourself the story of your product as if you know nothing. Then, take that story and tell it to everyone else.
How to do it
If you’re marketing a digital product, it’s time to learn how to create a quality screen capture video. Demonstrate the typical use of your product, but don’t jump right into it—use screen capture to demonstrate a problem or pain point that your product solves. If the viewer can identify with the problem you’re showing them on-screen, they’ll be much more engaged when you introduce your product. Use repetition, and don’t go too fast. This is the first time they’re seeing your product in action, and you want to give the viewer the chance to experience the full effect of its genius.
If your product is physical, focus on showing them what your product does and how it can help. Think about demo videos or commercials you’ve seen for popular pieces of technology. They don’t spend two or three minutes talking about battery life and storage capacity. They use that valuable video real estate to show the product in action, being used as the average consumer wants to use it.
Be helpful in your video, and err on the side of over-explaining. Use captions or video annotations (think Pop-Up Video) to explain anything that isn’t obvious, or use them to supplement your voice over narration.
3) Add Some Value
Believe it or not, not everyone will want to sit through your video, even if it is short. Why should they? There are millions of other videos on the Internet, and some of them even have cats in them.
Figure out what value your video is going to offer to your audience. Does it tell a great story? Does it explain how to solve a problem? Does it give them an insider reward, like a discount code or a clickable link to a free trial? Or is it just three minutes of you ranting into the camera about why non-eco-friendly wooden rocking horses are the worst thing ever invented?
Add some value to your video, and watch it get shared beyond just your inner circle of friends and fellow rocking horse enthusiasts. Believe it or not, most people are altruistic—if they see a clear benefit to be gained from watching your video, they’ll want to share that benefit with their friends and connections.
How to do it
Think back to the last video you shared. Why did you share it? Chances are, if you’re like most people, you wanted to establish your authority on the topic. You wanted to be the first to present that piece of information to the people in your circle. It’s why most content is shared—for the social cred.
You can give people the social credibility they want by creating smart, informative videos for them to share. If your product solves a problem, present the solution in a way that sounds revolutionary. For example, if your product speeds up a task that your target customer must perform often, use picture-in-picture editing features to demonstrate how much quicker they can accomplish the task using your product. It’s great to tell someone that they can save 30 seconds searching for the best rate on their next flight, but if you can show the typical process side-by-side with your innovation, you can actually make them sit through those 30 seconds. It will be excruciating. They will buy your app.
If you decide to go with a more tangible benefit such as a discount code or a free trial, make it easy for the viewer to get. Put a clickable link right in your video. Don’t tell them to go to another website (or do anything else at all). They won’t do it, and you’ll lose that opportunity. Keep it simple if you want your videos to convert leads.
4) Tell A Story (That Goes Somewhere)
Think back to high school English class, when you learned about the components of a story—there’s an introduction, conflict, climax, and resolution. If you leave out any of these crucial parts, you’re left with a collection of sentences that have been smashed together for no apparent reason.
Not only should you tell a coherent story (and this will require some pre-planning, writing, and editing), but you should make sure it goes somewhere. A nice, tidy ending is great, but building suspense is better. Are you going to produce another video to continue the story? If so, why should your viewers be excited to watch it?
How to do it
You thought this would be all visuals? You’re going to have to write. If you don’t plan your story, it won’t materialize out of the ether. Make a plan for your video content, and look beyond video number one.
Rather than one explainer video, is your product suited to a series of instructional videos? Can you help people create something with your product? Break that “something” into pieces, and create a series of short videos. You can even record the entire series in one go, and use an easy editing tool to break the footage out into logical sections. Keeping your audience waiting for more (as long as it’s great content) is an excellent way to stay top-of-mind.
If you’re more of a storyteller, you can keep a video series looking cohesive (and cut down on your workload) by reusing clips. Remind your viewers of the product benefits you explored last time, and build on the story you’ve already told. Just be sure to store your edited video somewhere safe—the cloud is your best bet—so you don’t have to repeat all your hard work each time you make a new video.
Even if your story doesn’t end at the end of the video, that chapter does. Make sure you leave your viewer with something concrete to do. There should be a call-to-action at the end of every video, even if you set an expectation that another video will follow. You never know when a viewer will disengage from your content, so give them opportunities to become a customer or subscriber while you have their attention.
5) Get It Out There
You’ve created a great piece of video content that showcases your personality, explains what you’re doing, has a clear benefit, and tells a great story. What do you do next?
Okay, this one is painfully obvious—you promote the heck out of it. We don’t have to tell you why you want to do this step. We do, however, want to help you do it well.
How to do it
The best way to ensure people watch your video is to give it a great title. Regardless of how the saying goes, nearly everyone does judge a book by its cover. After Google, YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. You put a ton of research and consideration into your landing page titles—do the same for your video, or your clickthroughs will be dismal. Same goes for your description and tags. Try using hashtags in your title to ensure you’re getting found with the right keywords.
Speaking of covers, you’re going to want to put some time into selecting the right thumbnail for your video. This is all the potential viewer will see before they decide whether or not to hit the “play” button, so make that one image extra-compelling.
Export your video to more than one platform. Some people watch on YouTube, some will only watch videos on Facebook. Don’t limit yourself to one platform, or you’ll miss out on a huge number of potential viewers.
This should go without saying, but don’t put out a bad-looking video. You don’t need a huge budget and a team of professionals to make a great video anymore. Learn how to use the editing tools you have to work with and export your finished product in HD, and there’s no reason your video can’t look pro.
Source:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/make-a-marketing-video
Jason Momoa defends Justice League from critics
Justice League has quickly become one of the most divisive movies of the year, critics having lampooned the blockbuster while certain fans have adamantly defended the team-up.
When the same happened to Batman v Superman, the movie’s actors gave some varying responses when questioned about the negative reviews, spawning the famous Sadfleck meme. Jason Momoa won’t be giving any such reaction.
“I try to stay the f**k away from what people say,” the Aquaman actor told EW. “Some of my friends said, ‘Justice League isn’t doing well’ and it kind of bummed me out. But I didn’t want to look it up. I don’t want to look up the bad and the negativity. I don’t think that’s useful; it doesn’t help.”
Momoa — who plays one of the better-received characters — added how he’s seen Justice League twice and adores the movie.
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Uber adds live location sharing and more for easier pickups
Uber has added some updates to its rider app designed to make the pickup process easier in time for the busy holiday travel season. The biggest change is probably that you can now do live location sharing within the app, letting you temporarily share with your driver exactly where you are – all within your control from the main Uber screen. This should help avoid those moments when your driver isn’t sure exactly where to meet you to start the ride.
To use this feature, you simply turn on the “live location” feature via the tappable icon in the bottom right corner of the map display. A blue icon indicates it’s active, and the grey version means you’re not sharing this extra-granular info. You can tap the icon at any time to switch between the two modes.
Uber is also broadening its beacon program, which uses a hardware device in the driver’s windshield to display a corresponding door to riders to help them find the car more easily. It’s not rolling out in NYC, SF and Chicago after an initial limited pilot, so it’ll be available to more riders and drivers during the busiest ride hailing time of the year. Uber first started rolling out Beacon last year in December, beginning in Miami, Denver, Nashville and Newcastle.
Other rider changes include a streamlined process for requesting a ride for another rider (it no longer requires you to first specific a different pickup location from your own to request a ride for someone else) and a new in-app gifting flow for easily giving Uber credit to another person directly from the app itself.
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Uber adds live location sharing and more for easier pickups
November 20, 2017
Charlie Hunnam Is Still Traumatized by His Fifty Shades of Grey Experience
Those who still haven’t seen Fifty Shades of Grey can count actor Charlie Hunnam among their ranks—though he has a slightlydifferent reason for avoiding the raunchy romance franchise starring Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan. In an interview with Elle, via E!, Hunnam revealed that he still hasn’t watched the first movie because it reminds him of a chaotic time in his career.
“I developed a friendship with [director Sam Taylor-Johnson],” Hunnam explained in the interview. “But that was a somewhat traumatic experience for me. I didn’t want to open that wound.”
See, many moons ago, Hunnam was tapped to play Christian Grey, the suave billionaire who sweeps Johnson’s Anastasia off her feet. He was cast in the role in 2013, but eventually had to drop out of the project due to scheduling conflicts. So the part went to Dornan instead—but fans were still left wondering why Hunnam wouldn’t rearrange his schedule to fit in something with this kind of box-office potential.
Hunnam wouldn’t give a more detailed explanation of his rationale until a few years later, in a 2015 interview with V Man. There, Hunnam said that he was still working on Season 7 of Sons of Anarchy when he was cast in Fifty Shades and had signed on to do Guillermo Del Toro’s gothic romance Crimson Peak as well. Hunnam had given Del Toro his word that he’d star in the film, despite the fact that it was shooting around the same time as Fifty Shades. And much as a Lannister always pays his debts, a Hunnam never goes back on his word.
Source:
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/03/charlie-hunnam-fifty-shades-traumatic
Wattpad’s storytelling app, now with 60M monthly users, adds a subscription service
Wattpad, the company behind a suite of apps for reading and sharing stories – including a fairly popular “chat fiction” app Tap, a rival to Hooked – is today adding its first ever subscription plan for its flagship application. The option, called Wattpad Premium, will remove the ads from Wattpad’s otherwise free app – a feature users have been requesting for some time.
The service will cost $5.99 per month, or $60 per year, the company says, and will be available to the company’s now over 60 million monthly global users.
Today, those users spend over 15 billion minutes per month reading the app’s original stories. To date, users have also uploaded more than 400 million stories, notes Wattpad.
Members who upgrade to Wattpad Premium will have ads removed both when browsing the web and mobile web, and will see a new theme in the native mobile app. In the months ahead, the subscription will include other features, too, focused on allowing users to better control the look and feel of the Wattpad platform.
The new subscription option comes at a time when Wattpad has been rapidly expanding its business. In addition to its main Wattpad app and its chat stories in Tap, the company also operates a standalone app for romance stories and a newly launched app called Raccoon, which allows users to tell personal stories using video.
The company this month also inked a deal with Toronto-based eOne which will source fan fiction from Wattpad to develop into original TV, movie and VR projects. This is an area of Wattpad’s business it has been expanding for some time, following the launch of its Wattpad Studios division last year.
While many of Wattpad’s users skew younger – a demographic that may have an aversion to paying for services when a free option is available – the company still has a sizable enough user base to tap into for this new subscription offering.
The option to upgrade will be available via a “Go Premium” button in the app, starting today.
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Wattpad’s storytelling app, now with 60M monthly users, adds a subscription service
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Hollywood and book publishers are turning to this online platform for their next ’50 Shades of Grey’
Anna Todd was living in Fort Hood, Texas working odd jobs including a stint at a bakery, waitressing at Waffle House, working as a salesperson at Ulta and babysitting for friends. She also had an online life on storytelling platform Wattpad as user imaginator1D, the author of the One Direction fan fiction “After.”
The 300-chapter story — which imagines the members of popular band One Direction as college students — soon became Wattpad’s most popular story. To date, the chapters have been read almost 1.5 billion times — yes billion. Its success has led to seven-figure deals, including a publishing contract with Simon & Schuster and Paramount acquiring the movie rights, said Todd.
Todd is convinced that her success would not have been possible without Wattpad.
“There’s so many gatekeepers [in publishing],” Todd said. “It’s just one random person that gets to choose all the books we read.”
“Wattpad just feels like more of a community,” she said.
Wattpad, which has raised about $67 million, is has become a source for budding fiction writers to post their stories — and for publishers, producers and brands to find source material. The platform allows people to upload their own stories chapter by chapter, and users can comment as the tales progress. Its mostly female readers have quickly become a hub for fan fiction and romance stories.
To find what stories may find a second life in film, TV or books, Wattpad looks at the number of reads, likes and user comments to figure out what’s popular with readers. Writers retains story rights but Wattpad takes a split of the revenue if it facilitates a deal.
The company has helped facilitate more than 100 book deals internationally of stories which first appeared on its platform, including through HarperCollins and Macmillan. Paperback books based on Wattpad stories have more than 15 million copies in circulation and have been published in over 30 languages. It’s also helped license dozens as TV shows, digital series or films, including 76 stories that were turned into TV episodes for the “Wattpad Presents” series in the Philippines. Another story called “No Capes” will soon be a digital series on Mashable, while “FANtasies” was a 10-episode series where social media influencers starred in the Wattpad stories inspired by then. It also has a development deal with Universal Cable Productions to turn stories into TV shows.
The company also makes money off sponsored deals and web ads. A project with Coca-Cola brought back characters from its top 10 most popular stories and had them “write” a letter to Santa as a bonus side story. Meanwhile, it also worked with SyFy’s “The Magicians” for a short story contest to write material inspired by the show.
“One of the major factors that makes Wattpad Studios interesting to both Hollywood and the entertainment industry around the world is we have an audience… We know who is reading this today, how many people read it in the last 6 months and last 12 months. We can actually see that people liked this character more than that character, half the people think he’s awful,” said Aron Levitz, head of Wattpad Studios.
Valorie Darling
Todd began posting “After” in 2013 at a rate of a 3,000 to 8,000 word-chapter each day.
“I had no idea how long books were supposed to be,” Todd said. “When I was writing all this I didn’t realize it was a lot.”
Funnily enough while Todd likes One Direction’s music, she admits she isn’t a typical fangirl. The only adult fans she knows are her cousin and her husband who “kind of liked their music a little bit,” she noted. Todd first got involved in One Direction fan fiction after reading “Imagines” on Instagram, or short paragraph stories about the singers. One of her favorite “Imagines” authors said she was going to complete the story on Wattpad, which prompted Todd to check the platform out.
Soon after Todd began trying her own story. She liked imagining One Direction band members as bad boy college students living in a dorm.
Todd began getting messages from literary agents, which she thought was a prank. It wasn’t until Wattpad wrote to her directly telling her about the numerous agency requests about her story – and that it was so popular it was messing up their internal metrics – she decided to meet with them. Soon she signed a movie deal, and then after a whirlwind trip to New York City she decided to go with Simon & Schuster.
Currently, Todd is working on promoting “After” and writing a to-be-published book series, which will also have a version posted on Wattpad. She talks to “After’s” movie producer Jennifer Gibgot at least once a week. And Todd did get a chance to meet One Direction at an awards show they were both attending. She declined.
“My publisher asked, ‘Do you want me to introduce you?’ I was like don’t you dare! I just like the idea of them. I never needed to meet them. If they offered, I wouldn’t be like no I wouldn’t meet you. But especially writing fan fiction, I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.”
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After Three Decades, Anne Rice’s Mummy Sequel Is Finally Here
Good things come to those who wait and if you’re a fan of Anne Rice’s beloved book, The Mummy, the nearly 30-year wait for the sequel is over.
In Ramses The Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra, authors Anne Rice and Christopher Rice (Anne’s son and the author of 12 books) take readers on a fantastical throwback frolic through Edwardian England (circa 1914) after Ramses the Great, the former pharaoh of Egypt is awakened.
Here is an exclusive, chilling excerpt to sample from the book.
Synopsis:
From the iconic and bestselling author of The Mummy and The Vampire Chronicles, a mesmerizing, glamorous new tale of ancient feuds and modern passions.
Ramses the Great, former pharaoh of Egypt, is reawakened by the elixir of life in Edwardian England. Now immortal with his bride-to-be, he is swept up in a fierce and deadly battle of wills and psyches against the once-great Queen Cleopatra. Ramses has reawakened Cleopatra with the same perilous elixir whose unworldly force brings the dead back to life.
But as these ancient rulers defy one another in their quest to understand the powers of the strange elixir, they are haunted by a mysterious presence even older and more powerful than they, a figure drawn forth from the mists of history who possesses spectacular magical potions and tonics eight millennia old. This is a figure who ruled over an ancient kingdom stretching from the once-fertile earth of the Sahara to the far corners of the world, a queen with a supreme knowledge of the deepest origins of the elixir of life. She may be the only one who can make known to Ramses and Cleopatra the key to their immortality—and the secrets of the miraculous, unknowable, endless expanse of the universe.
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Volvo has agreed to sell 24,000 SUVs to Uber for a network of self-driving cars
Uber and Volvo are taking the next step in their self-driving relationship.
Volvo, which first began working with the ride-hail player in August 2016, has agreed to sell 24,000 SUVs to Uber between 2019 and 2021, the automaker announced on Monday.
An Uber spokesperson confirmed that Volvo has agreed to sell the ride-hail player 24,000 cars but said that it is a general framework. The company could buy fewer or more cars from Volvo.
The Volvo XC90s will have the “core” technology — like redundant processors — needed to enable autonomous driving, to which the ride-hail company will add some of its own technology after the fact.
It’s unclear whether Uber intends to work with Volvo in the future on producing these cars with the software integrated. For now, Uber and Volvo work together on some parts of the technology before it’s produced and then Uber adds its own sensor kit. We’ve asked if Uber adds its own software before or after and will update when we hear back.
So far, this is the largest number of cars that any two companies have agreed to develop that will serve in a commercial driverless fleet. Alphabet’s self-driving arm Waymo only recently announced that it would begin testing 600 Chrysler Pacificas on the road.
It’s also unclear if Uber will continue this ownership model wherein the company simply buys cars from an automaker. While self-driving cars will likely increase profitability — given Uber will take home the entire fare instead of divvying up around 75 percent of it to drivers — but the costs of owning and maintaining the cars are lofty. With autonomous vehicles, there’s also a likelihood that these cars will rack up more miles quickly since there’s little reason to stop and have to be replaced sooner.
For a company that is in the middle of cutting its losses as it prepares to go public, having tens of thousands of cars on its balance sheet isn’t exactly ideal. That’s why Uber has also struck a separate relationship with Daimler that is easier on its purse strings. Through that relationship, Daimler will simply plug its own driverless cars into Uber’s network when it’s ready.
While Uber’s U.S. rival Lyft certainly has struck more automaker relationships, Uber’s partnership with Volvo at least appears to have progressed far more.
The $69 billion ride-hail company has also been developing its own autonomous tech at least two years longer than Lyft has. That said, Uber’s self-driving tech has been slow to progress. As of March 2017, the company’s safety drivers had to take over the autonomous system once every .8 miles.
Source:
https://www.recode.net/2017/11/20/16678908/volvo-uber-self-driving-xc90
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Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire
Having gone through a prototype version of the experience in that Glendale warehouse, it’s clear that this experience does more than just deliver on those lofty expectations. For mainstream audiences, Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire may be the first time virtual reality actually delivers on the Holodeck-esque potential it’s been promising all along.
Photo: The Void / ILMxLABSecrets of the Empire starts with a briefing. Groups of up to four guests are shown a video from Rogue One’s Cassian Andor (Diego Luna). There’s a piece of Imperial cargo that’s been brought to the planet Mustafar, he says, and while he was originally going to retrieve it, he’s now under attack. It’s up to the group of guests to go undercover as stormtroopers and get the job done. From there, audience members suit up with a custom head-mounted display, lightweight backpack computer, and a haptic vest, and step into an adjoining room. Pull down the headset, and the real world melts away: where other participants were a moment ago, stormtroopers now stand.
The storyline is exactly what any Star Warsfan would hope for: the group of participants infiltrate the base, get into some skirmishes, and after a couple of lucky escapes (and a big surprise), make their way out having more or less accomplished the mission. But what The Void does well is create the illusion of truly being in a virtual world by pairing physical sets, props, and sensations with the VR visuals. Secrets of the Empire uses that combination to ground the experience right from the beginning. As I stepped into a transport, K-2S0 (Alan Tudyk, also reprising his role) suggested I sit down on the ship’s bench — and sure enough, there was a physical bench waiting for me when I did. When I waved my hands in front of my face, there they were, clad in the white-and-black gloves of a stormtrooper. Moments later, when I stood on a skiff approaching the Imperial facility, I felt the heat from the lava below, while the smoky smell of Mustafar’s atmosphere filled my nostrils. Later, when engaged in a firefight with stormtroopers, I felt a sharp haptic buzz whenever I caught a stray blaster bolt — not painful, but not exactly pleasant, either.
There’s a tremendous amount of fun just in the pure discovery of the experience: the realization that I could chatter along with the people I was playing with (“I have a bad feeling about this”), or that there was a Han Solo-esque workaround to a puzzle that I couldn’t crack. But breaking it down into those kind of singular moments seems reductive, because more than anything else, Secrets of the Empire legitimately feels like starring in a Star Wars movie or TV show of your very own. Part of that is the length. From the briefing to the moment you remove the gear at the end, the experience runs roughly 30 minutes, so there’s some heft to it. Another component is the tactile reality that The Void creates, paired with the sense of independence that comes from being able to walk around a virtual location without any perceived restrictions or limitations. The Void uses design sleight of hand and misdirection to guide guests through relatively small physical spaces that feel massive and epic in the virtual world. It’s an illusion, but an incredibly effective one that creates a compelling sense of autonomy and agency.
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Mashable reportedly selling to Ziff Davis for about $50 million
Tech site Mashable is being sold to publishing giant Ziff Davis, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. The website, which focuses on tech and tech-related stories and has been publishing since 2005, will sell to Ziff Davis for around $50 million according to the report, which is far less than its valuation of $250 million, from a funding round it raised in March last year.
The all-out sale of Mashable comes after the publisher tried to secure additional funding throughout this year, according to the WSJ’s sources. After failing to receive adequate interest in a raise, it sought instead an all-out sale starting just a few months ago.
The report also claims that while a push towards video at the site initially resulted in a rosier revenue picture, it’s now on track to post a loss for 2017, despite its millions of monthly visitors.
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Mashable reportedly selling to Ziff Davis for about $50 million
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