In spite of the grim economic outlook, online video ad spending is projected to grow during 2009.

Obviously a number of factors, including the ever increasing availability of broadband, contribute to this trend.

But a significant part of the reason advertisers are turning to video ads is because they’re effective. The “lean forward” nature of the medium results in more brand exposure and higher levels of viewer engagement.

The Mixpo platform includes a number of tools designed specifically to increase VideoAd engagement. To keep your current advertising clients happy and attract more, you’ll want to take advantage of all of these tools.

One powerful tool you may have overlooked is the INFO menu.

In this post you’ll discover:

• What the INFO menu is.
• How you can make it work harder for advertisers.
• What the sharing options are and when to turn them off.
• How you can increase the likelihood that viewers will notice and expand the menu.

What the INFO menu is

The INFO menu is an action menu that is built in to the Mixpo VideoAd Player.

Viewers of a VideoAd can click an INFO menu option to open a webpage, send an email message to the advertiser, or share the VideoAd with others.

While a VideoAd is playing, INFO is visible in the upper left corner of the ad.

When the VideoAd finishes playing, the INFO menu expands automatically.

In addition, at any time while the VideoAd plays, viewers can pause their cursors over INFO to expand the menu.

Make the menu work harder for advertisers

The options in the expanded INFO menu shown above are the default options. You don’t have to live with these defaults.

We’ll talk more about the three sharing options in the next section. In this section, we’ll focus on the website link and email options.

Let’s face it. The labels More Info and Inquire are hardly inspiring. They’re placeholders, really, designed to communicate the functions of the options and meant to be changed.

By customizing the labels, you can tailor them to a specific advertiser and increase the likelihood that viewers will click.

For example, here is how you might customize the options for a pizza restaurant.

On the other hand, this is how the options for a home building contractor might look.

Tip Choose the INFO option labels in the context of the entire VideoAd. For example, if the VideoAd includes an overlay that encourages viewers to Request a Free Quote, you might want to use a different call to action in the INFO menu.

Tell more more about overlays

To customize the options, in the Dashboard, locate the VideoAd you want to customize. Click Publishing, and then click the Customize tab.

When you customize the website link and email option labels, you also specify the URL and email address you want to associate with the options.

I’d like more details about customizing the INFO menu

The sharing options

By default, the INFO menu includes three sharing options:

• Send to a Friend Allows viewers to specify the email addresses of up to 10 friends. These friends receive an email message that contains a link to the VideoAd’s landing page.
• Copy Link Automatically copies the URL to the VideoAd’s landing page. Viewers can paste the URL into a webpage to provide access to the VideoAd from their own websites.
• Embed Video Allows viewers to copy the embed code for the VideoAd so they can embed it into their own websites.

What is a VideoAd landing page?

The sharing options make sense for advertisers who publish VideoAds on their own websites or on directory profile pages. It’s in these advertisers’ interest to see their VideoAds distributed as widely as possible.

On the other hand, when advertisers buy banner ad space through online publishers, the sharing options may not make sense.

To turn off the sharing options, in the Dashboard, locate the VideoAd you want to customize. Click Publishing, and then click the Customize tab.

In the Sharing section of the Customize tab, clear the check boxes for the sharing options you want to turn off.

With the sharing options turned off, the expanded INFO menu contains only the website link and email options.

Bring the INFO menu to viewers’ attention

After you customize the INFO menu, you want to make sure that viewers of a VideoAd notice that the menu is there.

We provide you with a couple of alternatives for attracting viewers’ attention:

• Point to INFO with a banner.
• Highlight INFO with a glow.

You can customize the text in the banner and set the frequency with which it appears.

The text in this banner corresponds to one of the options viewers will find when they expand the INFO menu.

You can customize the color of the glow to match or contrast with the colors of the Player controls.

The glow automatically pulses on and off throughout the VideoAd.

You set the banner and glow options in the Publisher on the same Customize tab where you customize the INFO menu options.

I’d like more details about customizing the INFO menu

Tags: lead capture, Mixpo, optimize, Player

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 9:54 am and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.