360 video is connected video… or at least it can be. Imagine what you could accomplish by allowing your customers to react and explore your products in real-time.
“If you create any other digital asset that’s a dead end for consumers or for people, you’d lose your job, right?” smirked Wirewax CEO, Steve Callanan, as the audience laughed at today’s [a]list summit. “But with video it’s just acceptable. With this, you get to continue the conversation. Whether you want someone to go through and buy something or book a car for a test drive, you can do that with interactive video. You can’t do that with a plain old video.”
Wirewax is the world’s first interactive video platform, adding clickable hotspots, or “tags,” to any moving person or object in a video. This technology can be used for facial recognition, learning more about a piece of art or clicking on a video of food to get a recipe. The small company typically works with traditional video, re-purposing TV ads, for example, and breathing new, interactive life into them. As 360 videos grow in popularity, the small company has found itself going from 2-3 requests a quarter in 2015 to 2-3 requests a day.
“In the same way that we’re adding value to traditional, non-interactive video, people are looking to us to add value to 360 video, as well,” said Callanan. “360 video, as it turns out, is a bit tricky when it comes to adding interactive content.” The Wirewax team of engineers had to build their own 360 video player, reposition their Javascript from a 2D space to 3D and account for different 360 video formats, gyroscopes and accelerometers across different devices.
“About a month ago, we started working on this. We pretty much got everyone on it for a couple of weeks—we cracked it,” Callanan announced. All that hard work was for a good reason, as co-founder, Dan Garraway explained.
“We’re actually working with Ayzenberg to launch the first interactive 360 thing we’ve ever done and first in the world actually, as part of a new drama series,” announced Garraway. Although details cannot be shared at this time, the series will launch on July 1.
The Advantage Of Interactive Video
When it comes to marketing through interactive video, 65 percent of audiences will not only interact at least once, but an average of 3 times according to Wirewax. People also spend 3.5 times longer on a Wirewax video than with a video without interactivity. With a 16-48 percent click through rate and availability across all media devices, there are three main reasons why interactive video works.
- Video publishing is a noisy space: make your content stand out.
- Return on investment (ROI): Wirewax clients see five- to ten-percent return. One interactive ad for Ted Baker earned over $100 thousand in sales its first week.
- Continue the conversation: get people talking about your brand.
By putting the user in control of how they explore a video, this allows impulse to make purchases rather than rely on the usual conversion funnel (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). Now you can see it, click on it, buy it.
Doing 360 Video Right
Although impulse actions are great for allowing your customers to make purchases, creators should not create 360 video based on impulse alone.
“360 is a thing that needs to be creative,” warns Dan Garraway. “It needs to be thought about as much as [when] you’re making a normal video. A lot of the problem with technology when it applies to creative industries [is that] people get very excited about the technology but lose the creative. So one of the reasons why this 360 interactive project we’re launching with Ayzenberg is so important is that the guys have been thinking about it from concept outwards. It’s about using the narrative and actually making a point for making it 360. There is interaction which adds to the narrative of the story.”
“The big point we’re trying to make about the whole 360 thing here is… do it for a reason and then make an action with it.”
When a well-planned, interactive 360 campaign is executed, Garraway believes that brands will reach audiences in a lasting way.
“They’re going to interact, they’re going to understand, they’re going to nurture, they’re going to get the message, they’re going to get something out of it and they are going to remember your brand.”
For more information on Wirewax and their interactive video platform, visit Wirewax.com.
