Glenn Pingul, VP of Marketing at Mixpo, recently drew my attention to a fascinating article on nytimes.com by Kevin Kelly.
In Becoming Screen Literate, Kelly describes how text literacy is the result of a series of “innovations and techniques” that evolved over time to allow readers and writers to “parse and manipulate” text in ways that make it useful.
For example, quotation marks allow writers to borrow text from others while crediting them. Footnotes make it possible to expand a document’s content by adding tangential information. Tables of contents, page numbers, and indexes allow readers to find their way through long documents. Bibliographic citations and hyperlinks connect one text to another.
Kelly goes on to describe how far we are from having an equivalent set of innovations and techniques in support of visual literacy, or “visuality,” to quote Kelly’s term. “We can’t yet browse films,” says Kelly, “the way we browse books.”
I’ve been thinking about Kelly’s article in the context of a new feature we just added to the Mixpo platform, a feature that I believe contributes significantly to the visuality of VideoAds.
If you’ve been creating VideoAds with Mixpo, you’re already familiar with overlays, the basic and animated shapes containing text that sit on top of the visual content of your VideoAd.
I could use a basic introduction to overlays.
Basic shape overlay
As this florist VideoAd illustrates, you can use overlays to promote special offers, advertise bargains, and more.
Because you can associate overlays with URLs and lead capture forms, they function the way citations and hyperlinks do in text documents. By sending viewers to the advertiser’s website or allowing them to sign up for mailings or appointments, overlays connect viewers with additional sources of information.
With our most recent release, we expanded the types of overlays that you can include in VideoAds, and, I would argue, raised the level of VideoAd visuality. In addition to text overlays, you can now include video and image overlays in your VideoAds.
Let’s consider a couple of ways that advertisers might use these new visual overlays.
- In a VideoAd promoting custom workplace interiors, a commercial architect might include image overlays showcasing some of her more creative designs.
Image overlay in VideoAd
- In a VideoAd promoting its wines and wine tasting events, a local winery might include an overlay video of the owner describing how he became a vintner, how his wines are created, and more. The overlay provides the VideoAd voiceover.
Video overlay in a VideoAd
You can add hyperlinks to video and image overlays in the same way as you add them to text overlays. For example, the architect might associate each image overlay with a lead capture form. Viewers submit the form to request a full design portfolio.
The winery might associate the video overlay with a URL. Viewers who click the URL open a special page on the winery website that offers a “free bottle of wine” coupon to VideoAd viewers who attend a wine tasting.
But visual overlays do much more than function as hyperlinks. Because they are content in and of themselves, they function more like quotations and footnotes than simply citations.
While watching the architect’s VideoAd, viewers have the opportunity to see samples of the architect’s work. They may not need to request her full portfolio in order to make a hiring decision.
In addition to watching a VideoAd that contains images of the winery, its tasting room, and its vineyards, viewers actually meet the man behind the grapes. Because the owner’s video overlay is linked to the special VideoAd viewers’ coupon, it’s as if he personally is extending the offer.
By functioning as hyperlinks, all overlays give VideoAd viewers limited ability to “parse and manipulate” the visual information VideoAds contain. The new video and image overlays take visuality one big step further. They offer advertisers virtually unlimited opportunities to turn their VideoAds into rich, layered experiences that open conversations with customers.
I’d like more details about using image and video overlays.
