When I was in Israel two weeks ago I sat down with the guys at SundaySky. I need you to bear with me here because the service doesn’t sound cool outright but once you realize the power for commerce sites it becomes amazing.
Here’s how it works: e-commerce sites have lots of products. Take cameras, for example. You have a few set attributes – zoom, megapixels, etc. – and the rest of the incidental information could fit in a paragraph. So SundaySky creates a video using a product image and audio from a pre-recorded pool of preset phrases (“This W camera has X and Y built-in and includes a Zx zoom lens”, where all the variables are pre-recorded as well). The rest of the info appears as text in the video. That way you could talk fairly convincingly about an Olympus camera with a set of data from a pre-recorded pool and then add the small stuff as a visual. In this way you can make video out of every single item in your store.
The service is obviously limited to the amount of information you create. The quality here is a bit bad because it’s a blown up FLV, as well.
This can work with almost any site including a banking and apparel. The prospect for e-commerce is interesting because it offers a nice way to describe gadgets in plain English quickly and easily – presumably on multiple platforms – without a lot of hard reading.
This is obviously not for everyone and, in its current form, is fairly limiting. One image, some voiceover, and a couple of slides is not a detailed, hands-on look at a device, but with a little work you could feasibly incorporate that into the service. However, it does automate the tedious process of adding multimedia to staid product pages.
There is a set contract price for e-commerce providers and the service includes creative services and video generation tools. They were funded to the tune of $8 million in January by Carmel Ventures and Globespan Capital.
this sure has big potential. what i’m asking myself though if having a ‘half baked’ video will increase my sales?
the success of this largely depends on the capabilities an advertiser has to make those sales videod interesting… remember AIDA :-)
Obviously, like you said, this is not for everyone- and IMHO this is ridiculous….too much time consumption…
I am a bit biased as I am working on an ecommerce solution at present. Although I do like this concept and the technology, I think consumers want to see real people in video, product demonstrations as well as engage the seller.
Interesting idea, there are a few companies working in this general space Sellpoint, Webcollage and a company that I sit on the advisory board of http://www.smartsymbols.com all of these companies are really trying to increase customer interaction right when the customer is in the buying mood.
In the end this is all about getting the customer to the tipping point, which is; how much information do I need to see to make me buy now!
Ed Loessi
http://www.smartsymbols.com
http://twitter.com/edloessi
Am I the only one who got scared reading ’sky’ and ‘automate’ in the same title?
Obviously, like you said
I’m familiar with a company that IMHO has taken this concept one step further:
http://treepodia.com not only create automated video content from an online vendor’s XML, they then create multiple video versions for each product and do automated split testing between them to optimize performance.
From what I’ve read they’re impact on conversion rates can be very significant (35-300%)
:)
Mike
Project Manager
http://Semantinet.com/publishers
“join the pilot”