When I think about the most successful online videos, it is not usually the flashy ones that win out. Instead, it is the intelligent, simply designed videos that engage the audience and present a clear message. After watching, I walk away understanding what they were talking about.

Many complex products and services can be edited down to achieve simplicity. Some companies have even started using the good’ole “stick man” to tell their story. It is an image we all recognize, so why complicate things. Give me a word, image, or phrase that I can remember and I will tell everyone. At the same time, make sure the video makes sense. Sometimes I have to wonder what the big HOWDY Pepsi billboard near my apartment really has to do with the soft drink. Make the correlation as clear as the imagery you are utilizing.

CGI has designed a Flash video for Oracle in a simple and clean style. The outcome, a memorable solution overview that communicates Oracle’s CRM objectives.

What videos do you think work most effectively?

Adage recently wrote an article about how with more and more people opting to watch online videos instead of standard television, advertisers are faced with a predicament. Their consumers are changing and so must the ways in which they are being advertised to. “Interruption advertising” has long been the standard for television, consumers have to watch commercials in order to watch their favorite programs. However, with NBC, ABC, CBS, Hulu, and numerous other platforms offering on-demand television experiences, advertisers are revising their plans to be more “on-demand” as well.

Hulu offers viewers a choice to either watch a longer movie trailer or several shorter commercials through out the show. An interesting feature is an audience rating system on whether a commercial was liked. Car companies are creating experience driven ads in order to allow viewers to interact, choosing which feature they would like to see or different videos to watch. These are just a couple of examples of how advertising is changing. Check out the Adage article to read more examples.

So what does this mean for your marketing plan?

Go where you audience is: Consumers are relying more heavily on Internet hubs where information is gathered for them. So consider distributing your content to different online platforms in order to increase its visibility and reach. Think outside the box about where people might find you. What you find may be surprising.

Think Interactive: If you don’t want consumers to tune you out after a few seconds, you need to give them something to stick around for. Consumers are not as engaged by online static video. If you are producing a product demo, you can use a tool such as Adobe Flash to program in choices, allowing audiences the ability to view the product the way they want. It will personalize the experience for the potential customer and give them a better idea of how your product will help their needs.

Although online advertising models can be considered work-in-progress, new formats of online advertising are flexible enough to quickly adapt to changing consumer habits. By being prepared, you can ensure that your customers are creating conversations about your brand and the unique way you engaged them.

Why would I use an htaccess file?

Developing our client’s online presence is a big part of what we do here at CGI Interactive.  Besides keeping me gainfully employed, a professional and easy to use website keeps you looking good to your current and future clients.  Arguably, nothing is more important than fresh content.  Last I checked it was 2009.  No more animated GIFs with a letter going into a mailbox or frame based navigation with awkward double scroll bars.  No, these days everything is slick and content managed, dynamic and free; for computers and technology, it’s like the 60’s.  But with Woodstock days away your homegrown content management page URLs are looking totally square, man.  Who wants to look at something like this:

Personally, I don’t care.  I’m a developer and I know the world can be cruel to a newbie trying to get their feet wet in the “variable passing through the url” pool.  But any marketing person can tell you with all the zeal of a red carpet reporter that your style is just not going to cut it in Hollywood.  People want to look at this:

Maybe your marketing team has a great idea for a microsite, but you’re running short on budget to get hosting for it.  Sure seems like a waste to pay $10 a month for a whole server just to host a few small pages.  With htaccess you can host the files on an existing webserver and map requests for a specific domain to that folder only.

Maybe you’ve got a blog and you’re tired of providing free advertisments for miracle diets but don’t want to shut down comments completely.  If you’ve got the IP address of the offenders you can block em’ out for good.

Htaccess is a truely versatile tool but getting into it can be intimidating.  First things first:

Configure Your Server

The easiest way to do this is to just call your hosting company and ask if htaccess is enabled.  For those unfortunate developers, like myself, who are responsible for their own server the process is a little more challenging.

-For an Apache Server-

1. Open http.conf in your favorite text editor.

2. Find this line:

;LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

3. Remove the comma so it looks like this:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

4. Find this:

<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Satisfy all
</Directory>

5. Change it to this:

<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Satisfy all
</Directory>

6. RESTART APACHE!!!

-For an IIS Server-

1. Cry deeply because you do not have an apache server.

2. Apply for stimulus money and purchase this product: http://www.micronovae.com/ModRewrite/Purchase.html

3. Alternatively, convert to Apache.

Okay, so now you’ve got apache restarted and it should be ready to do your bidding.  Test this by creating a file called .htaccess in the root directory and typing some nonsense into it.  This should throw an ugly configuration error when you try to access the server.  This means apache is looking for and responding to the .htaccess file.  It bears mentioning that errors in your .htaccess file will cause your server to be inaccessable, so if you’ve got live sites and slow fingers you might want to play around on a test server first.  You may have to set a preference on your FTP client or server to show hidden files, as the “.” in front of the filename will generally cause the file to be hidden.

Attractive URLs

Now if you want to address our first example from above and make your totally square URL hip, you should have this in your htaccess file:

Now, for each URL you want to beautify the directive looks like this:

This says, if someone is asking for the page home.html, Apache will display the contents of index.php with the query string variable page equal to the value of home.  This means you would direct people to home.html in links you are sending out.

Multiple Sites on One Server

Now, our second example involves having multiple websites on one server.  To accomplish this you should have the separate folders or directories for each site.  To make sure the right domain name goes to the right folder you’d put this in the htaccess file:

This says, if someone comes here looking for yourOTHERsite.com, and they are not requesting a file that is already in the otherSite folder, you should direct their request for files to the otherSite folder.

Stay Out

Take back the web!  Use the following line to exclude unfriendly IP addresses from your server (yes that’s a real spammer IP address):

To add more IP addresses just add another “deny from” line under the existing one.

So that’s a quick and dirty intro to .htaccess.  I glossed over some things like the regular expression syntax used to match page URLs (all the ^, $, !, (.*) business) but that’s a whole other lesson entirely.  If you need help bringing your site to a new level you can always contact sales@cgiinteractive.com

Anymore brain busters?

We do a lot of Flash work for our clients: online banner ads, sales tools, virtual product demos, branded website elements, and tradeshow presentations just to name a few.  Sometimes the work is a simple design with quick animation coming together to showcase a message. Other times we end up creating full fledged interactive applications that need to play nice with large back end data structures and other items on a users computer.

A major request we get, especially for a project like a Flash ROI calculator is the ability to save the data collected with the tool into a format the user and the company can keep for reference, like a PDF.  For a strict Flash application, this isn’t possible.  Flash will not allow a developer to write files to the local system.  It’s a security feature designed to protect users from unscrupulous developers, we’re talking no scruples at all.

Thankfully, MDM Zinc came along and allowed us to accomplish all of these things that Flash doesn’t feel comfortable with.  Using Zinc we were able to connect to databases, write files to disc, create screensaver and projector files, check if a computer is connected to a network, the list goes on and on.  Zinc has been on the scene a while, allowing Flash developers a broad range of functions and APIs to do what their clients needed, but only recently has Adobe stepped up to the plate to try and offer this same functionality through Adobe AIR.

Now AIR is the new thing and lots of companies are giving it a go.  Companies who never even gave Zinc a thought.  The reasons for this could be many, but the fact that AIR is a “certified” Adobe product is probably the one that stands out in front.  People don’t generally look around for third party support, if it’s not built in, it can make people feel uneasy.  At CGI, we’ve produced a few AIR applications for our clients, and LOTS of Zinc applications.  There are some clear pros and cons to each.

Adobe AIR Pros:

• It’s free
• It’s from Adobe and integrated into Flash
• The code is signed and secure
• Installs with the built in AIR installer

Zinc Pros:

• Everything is customizable, including the installer
• It can produce a “normal” native program (exe or equivalent)
• You do not need to “program for zinc” you can use an existing SWF to generate an application
• Users to do not need to install a framework for the applications to run.

Adobe AIR Cons:

• Publishing certificates must be purchased in order for the installer to recognize you as a publisher
• Code changes will often be required to convert an application to AIR
• Users must download and install the AIR framework in order to run or install AIR applications.
• You can not produce a standalone version or native application (like an exe)
• You must use the AIR installer, it can not be customized

Zinc Cons:

• Despite having easy to use APIs /plug-ins it’s not exactly “integrated”
• It’s a third party product (this isn’t a real con, but it can sway people)
• It’s not free (it’s about $349 for the newest version at the time of this writing)

It’s a close call, for sure.  Being that AIR is relatively new it’s possible that this competition will drive the price of Zinc down, which would be nice.  We’ve been using Zinc much longer and will probably continue to favor it simply because producing a standalone program is generally something that’s very important to our clients.

Often times these applications require deployment to the entire sales force of a company and the prospect of trying to get all those people to download and install the Adobe AIR framework is not as simple as it sounds.  In these scenarios the value of being able to generate standalone applications for several different operating systems without having to change the original SWF code is immeasurable.

What say you?