"You mentioned in your article about placement of a brand logo on the video and I was wondering what you thought about watermarks. Currently, we're placing the URL of a film's website in the bottom right corner of every video we post. Some of these videos are going on to YouTube and other locations, so we want to be able to drive people back to our website.
"I was wondering if you would be willing to share with me what you thought of this idea?"
Well, sure. Happy to.
There was a point in time when such branding was intrusive, offensive, antagonistic, take your choice. Fortunately or not, things change. Placing a brand in the lower right of the screen is pretty common and therefore pretty accepted, especially if you're using a widescreen format such that the brand appears in the black space beneath the actual movie (like on cable and satellite movie channels).
Is it the best place to put the brand? That's a completely different question. Cable and satellite channels that do this run the risk of training people to ignore the brand completely. An interesting phenomenon comes from people who record video for later viewing -- the brand appearing on screen is seen (ahem) as an intrusion into the viewer's privacy.
Really? Well, yes. Frankly, this repeated anecdotal frame intrigues me. I want to ask "Did you think because you recorded it it was somehow magically yours?" I'm a little afraid of what might be the answer.
Vision research (visual cognition, visual search, visual attention, ...) indicates that there are specific cues and times when we're either culturally trained or physiologically wired to respond to certain information. This means that a brand popping up during an emotionally or psychologically demanding story segment is a distraction and causes our brain-minds to take effort out of enjoying the video and put it into deciding if this new piece of information is important (guess I'll need to write some posts on meaningful noise).Ultimately, inevitably and almost always in the case of video brands, the decision is "No, this isn't important. I've therefore been pulled out of an enjoyable experience and wasted time on an unrewarding experience."
So the moral is to brand, yes, and in this case at the beginning of the video, the end of a video, and for the selected times when the screen goes to black between scenes.
After all, do you really want your brand to compete with McSteamy, McDreamy and the rest? In certain, highly desirable audiences you're going to lose.
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I think one of the values in watermarking a brand into video is that it cannot easily be removed after 'recording' in the way a commercial could be clipped. Assuming the before, after, and 'going to black' portions could be clipped, is there an effective way to work a brand into video that will not turn off viewers (by placement, timing, or other)? Maybe during the non-contact portions of a Jackie Chan movie or the G-rated portions of a hacker flick?
Is product placement a similar turn off issue during demanding story segments?
Posted by: Tex | February 17, 2009 1:38 PM | Permalink to Comment