How Meagan Cignoli Became the Queen of Branded Vines

November 13th, 2014

How do you go from freelance photographer to the founder of a fast-growing creative agency in less than two years?

For Meagan Cignoli, the secret was when she discovered Vine in early 2013.

Within a month, she’d find herself as the creative force behind the Lowe’s “Fix in Six” campaign, which provided consumers with bite-sized bits of home improvement advice. The campaign was acclaimed for both its mastery of the young social platform, as well as the way Lowe’s provided consumers with practical advice instead of pushing products.

Since then, her phone hasn’t stop ringing with brands asking her to produce short-form video content. She now finds herself as the founder and partner of her own agency, Visual Country, which has grown to a 12-person company that works with some of the biggest brands such as MGM, Mercedes-Benz, eBay, and Coca-Cola, with budgets ranging from $10,000 to $250,000.

Meagan’s account was one of the first ones I followed on Vine. Her videos differ starkly from comedians’ that populate the platform’s popular section. I was instantly captured by the beauty of her stop-motion videos. They look simple, but as anyone who has tried stop-motion knows, these videos take hours to produce.

I interviewed Meagan on a rainy day. I had seen her face through my iPhone many times, and felt excited to meet her in person. First thing she told me was that she had decided to walk from her office in the Financial District to Nolita to meet me instead of taking the subway. Her umbrella wasn’t enough to shield her—she’s as quirky in person as she is in six-second bites.

With her soft voice and calm demeanor, she began telling me about her life.

Cignoli was born at a small town in Long Island and moved to the New York City in 1999 to study fashion at the Fashion Institute of Technology. After two weeks at FIT, she knew she didn’t want to be designer, but finished her degree nonetheless. Her education didn’t stop there. She studied Photography at the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography, then studied Fine Arts at Polimoda in Italy, and Spanish at the University of Havana in Cuba.

When Meagan downloaded Vine, she hadn’t done any photography in six months. “I had no interest anymore in it, so, I was playing around in Vine and I started moving objects to style them,” she said. Cignoli hadn’t previously done much video work, but stop-motion combined the need of a photographer’s eye with the dynamic movement of video.

For Cignoli, part of that learning involved explaining to clients how a new medium they barely understood worked. “Normally we’re dealing with someone that has five people above them who have an idea of what marketing is and what a commercial is and they don’t care about the engagement. They want a commercial, and if it’s not gonna look like a commercial, they’re not gonna be happy.”

Although some of her clients initially just want to sell their product, Cignoli tries to explain to them that social media is about joining the conversation. “What we always try to tell the client is we just want to make you part of the community, we want to give you content like a normal person would have and give you a cool factor so it’s more humanizing.”

That is what she found authentic about the Lowe’s campaign. “We weren’t showing product and we weren’t showing the logo. It wasn’t a campaign to buy something. It was very seasonal—during the summer we were doing how to clean your BBQ with aluminum foil, or how to clean your shower with lemons. These are things that you don’t even sell at Lowe’s.”

Her advice to brands that want to create high-quality short-form video content is to hire someone and let them be creative without concern for the product. She also advises brands to cut out excess content and focus on the essentials of storytelling. “That’s the beauty of six seconds—you’re cutting out the stuff you don’t need.”

Cignoli appreciates when more corporate companies such as MGM or GE give her team creative freedom, describing the content they make for GE as “creative content sponsored by GE.”

(Full disclosure: GE is a Contently client, but Contently is not involved in GE’s efforts on Vine.)

Cignoli is committed to doing great work, particularly because she’s confident that short-form digital video isn’t going anywhere. She curates her personal accounts carefully, producing one creative video a week and only promoting 10 percent of her branded work.

“Social media is just media,” she says. “[Saying that Vine is a fad] is like saying that Fox News is a fad or The New York Times is a fad.”

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This Technology Makes It Possible to A/B Test Brick and Mortar Stores

November 14th, 2014

Imagine how many video cameras there are in retail stores around the world. Now imagine the usefulness of turning those cameras’ millions of hours of video—of shoppers’ in-store interactions and activity—into simple, optimizable, visual data.

Steve Russell has long seen the potential to turn that retailers’ dream into a reality. After studying computer science and economics at Stanford, Russell founded a company, eScene Networks, that was effectively YouTube for businesses—six years before YouTube even existed. Later, in the wake of 9/11, he founded 3VR, an intelligence company that utilizes video search technology to, in his words, “catch bad guys.” 3VR is now used by law enforcement across the country.

“I’d just become fascinated with video as a source of information,” Russell explained. “I realized that there are tens of millions of video cameras in the world, and if we could use computer vision and search technologies to suss out the interesting information held by those cameras, it would be beneficial for many different businesses.”

With that in mind, and with his background in video-based analytics, Russell founded Prism Skylabs in September 2011—an attempt, he said, “to build a cloud-based SaaS business around unique physical infrastructures already out there.” The most crucial of those unique physical infrastructures: retailers’ video cameras.

As the San Francisco-based company explains on its website:

Prism helps make sense of a visual world. Our unique cloud service transforms any video camera into a business intelligence tool that can be accessed from any device. Retailers large and small, as well as other customers, use Prism’s platform to remotely audit, manage, and optimize their real-world businesses.

I spoke to Russell about the Internet of Things, how Prism is addressing privacy concerns, and the future of real-world optimization.

NEGATING PRIVACY CONCERNS

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the practice of bringing everyday, otherwise inanimate objects to life, as it were, by connecting them to the Internet. Examples include a smart thermostat that learns your temperature preferences; a fitness tracking device with built-in sensors, paradigmatic of the “quantified self” movement; and, in Prism’s case, a technology that optimizes offline commerce by putting visual data online. While the IoT’s evolution means increased convenience—Cisco says there will be 50 billion IoT devices by 2015—it also means more pervasive privacy concerns.

Some of Prism’s competitors, whose goals are likewise to help retailers analyze customers’ in-store activity, “deliver information about shopper behavior by identifying phones’ unique MAC addresses and [using] them to track movement,” writes Gigaom. Because this tracking is “often done surreptitiously and on an opt-out basis,” it has been met with widespread criticism, including from senator Al Franken.

Apple attempted to boost customers’ privacy and negate companies’ abilities to track people by including a feature in iOS 8 that sends random, fake MAC addresses to Wi-Fi networks, though its effectiveness is questionable. Even some pockets of the government—the very entity notorious for its invasion of privacy—are attempting to get on board, Russell said, with pending privacy regulations coming from Congress and the FTC.

Russell said he anticipated these concerns. “I thought it would be important to get ahead of that and invent the technology that might become standardized in years to come,” he said. He has thus positioned Prism as an analytics company with privacy built into its technology engine.

“All our data is anonymized in the aggregate, so you end up with something in the form of ‘500 people walked into your storefront today,’” he said. Unlike Google, which only blurs people’s faces in Street View, Prism’s technology can remove people completely from the visual landscape.

“We have a more privacy-centric product that retailers and others can confidently employ without fear of a law coming down the pipeline that will make it illegal,” Russell said. “We’re an answer to privacy concerns—a good actor, a white knight with a real privacy solution and a way to get businesses to take this massive investment they’ve made in video infrastructure in their stores and put it to productive business use.”

It would be imprudent, however, to completely discount Prism’s competition. Some startups are finding that opt-in tracking, in which consumers fork over their personal data in exchange for a small sum of money, is feasible. Still others are aiming to be personal data brokers between consumers and data-hungry companies.

PRISM VS. THE COMPETITION

Beyond its privacy-protection software, Prism is different in other ways. For one, Prism doesn’t require retailers retailers to install expensive new devices to generate optimizable data. Prism’s data—not hard numbers but visually comprehensible heat maps—is overlaid on existing video-camera imagery of actual stores.

Prism’s heat-map technology allow retailers to see, for example, which products, and how their placement and layout, are engaging customers. If Prism’s heat map shows that a certain product display is consistently red—meaning it’s getting a lot of attention—a retailer would know to put that display in a more prominent, accessible part of the store. Conversely, a retailer might want to scale back its in-store advertising of a product that is blue or green, which signals that consumers aren’t giving it much consideration. It’s A/B split-testing real life.

What’s more, Prism’s high-quality imagery is created at a very low bandwidth, “about one percent of what a competitor with streaming video, like a Dropcam, might require,” explained Russell. That allows for an easier implementation of Prism across retail markets.

Since Prism’s inception, Russell has had no trouble finding retail clients, most of whom have issues “managing hundreds of stores around the globe. They began using us to look at their stores,” he said, “and effectively turn all the cameras into sensors that can analyze customer behavior.” Prism—whose team includes former employees of NASA, Google, Apple, and Microsoft—now has north of 300 customers, is deployed in 63 countries on five continents, and has analyzed more than 300 million customer movements and customer–product interactions.

A LAUNCH INTO THE FUTURE

“Since the beginning of Prism,” Russell told me, “we’ve been conscious of the ton of information that’s hidden within cameras and certain sensors all around us. The big challenge is finding ways to use technology to unlock that and make it useful.”

Now, it’s Prism’s technology that’s being unlocked: On November 3, the company launched Prism Connect, opening up Prism’s software platform to device manufacturers, who will be able to embed the technology “on a host of next-generation devices, from cameras to routers to sensors,” Russell said. By opening its technology, Prism is smartly making its native integration into consumer devices even easier, with out-of-the-box cloud connectivity. “There have been a ton of entrants to the IoT video analytics space in the past year, from Dropcam to companies like Samsung, so it just seemed sensible to open up the software to these devices,” Russell said. “It’ll mean a greater payoff for our customers to have a more turnkey value-driven solution.”

Connect is launching with more than 10 brand partners, including Samsung, Sony, Intel, and Cisco, with whom Prism’s platform will have easy integration.

At the same time, Prism announced the forthcoming release of the first camera powered by Prism. The device will be manufactured by a boutique company called ISD. “It’ll be the first device of its class with Prism on board,” Russell said, “with a tiny, low-cost sensor that does everything Prism is known for, and with the kind of ease of installation you’d expect from a consumer IoT device.” Prism also announced its updated mobile app, “the fastest, sleekest, and most searchable way to interact with cameras and sensor networks,” the company said a press release.

Prism Connect is noteworthy on multiple levels, Russell boasted. “It’s news for Prism’s core retailer customer base, which is getting a better, faster, cheaper, easier device. It’s news for many other customer-facing verticals, from restaurants to hotels to college campuses, that will now have a better video-based analytics solution. And it’s just relevant to the ongoing disco of the IoT space more generally.”

Time will tell where that “ongoing disco”—a corporate dance of innovation and takeovers, such as Google-owned Nest’s $555 million acquisition of Dropcam—goes. In the next year or so, Russell predicted, Prism and its ilk will be “embedded or installed in more cameras natively, and you’ll see price points come down on those devices, and retailers will be able to deploy the service more broadly and more quickly at lower costs.”

Retailers may soon be able to optimize the real world like never before.

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By ANDREAS PANAYI published JUNE 25, 2014

4 Steps to Take Video Content Beyond Ads

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Go ahead. Do your own research and see if you can find meaningful insights and data on measuring, benchmarking, tracking, and optimizing online video content. No doubt, you’ll end up as frustrated as I was. And you’ll find that most of the information out there is focused specifically on online videoadvertising.

I am still hopeful that one of these days marketers will wake up to the fact that online video content is not just about advertising. The real evolution is the huge shift to video for almost every other form of content and communication: employee communications, product videos, how-to tips, customer reviews, brand stories… you get the point.

There is an interesting prediction that two-thirds of the world’s data will be video by 2017. I think that stat warrants repeating: Two-thirds of the information we consume — research, news, entertainment, you name it — will be in video form. Even if this forecast ends up being only partially accurate, are brands remotely prepared to measure, track, benchmark, and optimize engagement for these types of video content? 

You don’t have time to hit snooze

Here are just a few alarms that should be shaking content marketers from their sleepy approach to video content strategy:

• Ninety-six percent of U.S. adults who have watched a video on their computers, tablets, or mobile phones at least once over the past 6 months find video helpful when making purchase decisions, according to a recent survey by Animoto. And 73 percent say they are more likely to make a purchase after watching an online video that explains the product or service. 

• Another recent study by Invodo found that half of consumers claimed YouTube videos influenced their purchase decisions. Some 57 percent of online shoppers said they are less likely to return a product bought after watching it explained via video. 

In light of this, it’s important to keep online video advertising in perspective, and remember that ads are merely a subset of a bigger shift to using video content to better engage with consumers.

Some marketers are starting to stir

As marketers and communicators, it’s time we spend our energy, resources, and funds to better understand, measure and capitalize on this bigger shift to online video content. We’re already seeing some signs of this:

For example, two-thirds of marketing and sales professionals will increase their video spending as a means to increase brand awareness (47 percent), lead generation (40 percent), or online engagement (40 percent), per a new report from Ascend2. Interestingly, they consider video email their most effective distribution channel, followed closely by video platforms such as YouTube and company or brand websites.

These are promising numbers, but when I look at the magnitude of the opportunity and the avalanche of video content that will transform the web from a text to a visual network, I find myself frustrated with how far behind marketers fall every day. The only way to capitalize on the opportunity is for marketers to take ownership and embrace an enterprise video content strategy today — one that includes strategic measurement, testing, benchmarking, and optimization, just like every other aspect of their marketing and communications programs.

Why the slow start?

There’s no contesting that video content is quickly becoming the new order on the web. But just like any monumental shift, there are hurdles that we ignore or approach reluctantly when it comes to optimizing video content, such as:

• Content ownership: Naturally, the consumer marketing professionals own online video advertising. The rest of the video content can fall under the purview of a wide range of verticals, including PR, product development, corporate communications, internal communications, investor relations, executive offices… the list goes on. Without centralized ownership, there’s no standard for measurement and optimization — and often no clear understanding of what needle to try to move and when. 

• Measurement: Current advertising measurement is relatively generic and, although standards are evolving, gross rating points, clicks, and views are still acceptable success metrics. But, measuring longer-form video content (1–5 minutes) is a bit more complex, and there is no standard for creating a relationship between variables that will help quantify content engagement and success. 

• Content production: I am oversimplifying this to make a point, but in a traditional advertising structure, all I need to do is call my creative agency and ask them to produce a couple of great commercials a year that work both online and on TV. Fast forward to a new world where fresh cross-department video content needs to be created and distributed according to a strategic editorial calendar. That requires a publisher mentality and the involvement of many teams working together — not just marketing departments. With this comes a multitude of process and production challenges, including determining what part of the organization will be responsible for paying for the necessary shifts in resources. 

• Distribution: Advertising — whether on TV or online — offers plenty of evolved processes, and there are plenty of companies whose raison d’etre is to target the right video ad content to the right people at the right time. Meanwhile, the rest of the video content distribution typically relies on the marketers and their video strategy in creating an integrated distribution platform. They must effectively and efficiently tie together all of the company’s content access gateways without forgetting about mobile platforms that are leading the way in video consumption.

How we can avoid the video graveyard

We need to look beyond online video advertising and embrace the video content revolution as something much bigger and broader. Unless we focus on how we measure, benchmark, and track all video engagement, our expensive video content will end up in what I call “video graveyards” (i.e., most of the branded channels on YouTube).

At a relatively high level, here are four steps I would suggest to get content marketing on the right path:

1. Define your overall video content strategy, including metrics and benchmarks:Not unlike other marketing tactics, the makeup of your video content and distribution structure should be driven by business goals and the profile of your target audience. Establish measurement metrics and create benchmarks, before tracking, reporting, and optimizing. 

I believe that measuring your videos’ engagement levels must be at the core of your KPIs. I wish I could tell you that it’s as easy as looking at the number of views or “likes” from your YouTube analytics dashboard, but it is a bit more complex than that. Video engagement is not a single event but rather a relationship between multiple weighted attributes in three key factors: exposure, action, and social amplification. So, when you look at setting up your video engagement KPIs, you need to look at tracking attributes — such as channel subscribers, percent of videos viewed to completion, socially embedded vs. on-channel views, etc.

2. Think and act differently: Try structuring your marketing team like a content publisher. To be a bit more specific, typically marketing departments produce content that speaks to the interests of the company (i.e., it focuses on the company’s products and services). By injecting publisher-centric resources and methods, you can start creating and delivering content with a better balance between your brand’s needs and those of your consumers. 

A publisher mentality will help not only with the way your content is created but also with how it gets organized, targeted, created, vetted for relevancy, delivered, and archived. The easiest example I can think of is incorporating an editorial calendar into your content processes to help you plan out the creation of thoughtful, timely, and relevant content. Taking a page from a publisher’s playbook can help marketers figure out what parts of their company’s content plan would work best in a video format, as well as how to integrate their internal content resources to reflect the needs of the enterprise at-large — not just certain department silos.

3. Be creative with your resource usage: Find the right balance between developing content internally and using third-party production resources. Keeping both your brand’s business objectives and your consumers’ needs top-of-mind will also help you strike that balance: Third-party content sources can often help validate the authenticity of a brand’s messages and provide added value without the bias of internally generated content. Third-party content can also help address the need to sustain a healthy stream of new content, while keeping internal costs in check and realizing quicker turnarounds.

4. Mind your company’s technological infrastructure: Make sure the technology and development resources of your company are factored into your strategy development. Otherwise, you may build a great content-producing machine with no functioning mechanism for proper distribution — which means your content will, ultimately, go nowhere. How many of us have created great content that never really reached its ROI potential? I am sure we are all familiar with “the moment is gone” scenario — situations where the time between coming up with the idea and being able to deploy it became too long. Having the right technology in place to keep the process moving forward can help alleviate the potential for your video content to fall into the graveyard of great ideas that died on the vine.

None of the above is a walk in the park, but they are steps all marketers need to start taking. Start with measuring what you’ve done to date, and then create benchmarks and quantitative goals for where you want to go. As for that part — the vision — the best advice I have is to look beyond the obvious.

For more great ideas, insights, and examples for advancing your content marketing, read Epic Content Marketing, by Joe Pulizzi. 

7 Ecommerce Design Trends for 2014

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JANUARY 14, 2014 • ARMANDO ROGGIO

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As more online retailers seek to provide a good mobile shopping experience, expect to see a significant number of site redesigns in 2014. These redesigned sites are likely to follow many popular design trends that are currently impacting entertainment sites, publishing sites, and mobile applications.

Ecommerce platforms like Magento, Shopify, or even WooCommerce (on WordPress) can have a strong influence on how online shops are designed. This can make it more difficult for online merchants to simply redesign a site to keep up with the latest fad. But in 2014, even those sellers that take an “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” approach to website design may be forced to do some remodeling thanks to the continued growth in mobile Internet traffic. In fact, some predict that in 2014 mobile Internet usage will pass desktop Internet usage, and mobile-based ecommerce might account for 30 percent of Internet retail sales.

Given that ecommerce business are likely to be resigning to support mobile, these sites may also follow other important web design trends.

1. Responsive Design

Mobile is going to be the primary driver for ecommerce web design in 2014, but don’t expect Internet retailers to abandon desktop users. Rather, responsive design, which has already been a trend in ecommerce site design, will to continue to grow in popularity, allowing online sellers to provide a good shopping experience regardless of the device a shopper is using.

Solved by Flexbox.

As a subset, if you will, of responsive design, you may see more site designers using the CSS Flexible Box Layout Module. This is a proposed World Wide Web Consortium standard that is enjoying relatively good support across browsers, including at least partial support in Chrome 31, Firefox 25, Internet Explorer 10, Safari 7, Opera 18, iOS Safari 7, Android Browser 2.1, Blackberry Browser 10, and IE Mobile 10.

Three resources will help those unfamiliar with the Flexible Box Layout Module. These include CSS-Tricks’ “A Complete Guide to Flexbox,” the Mozilla Developer Network’s “Using CSS Flexible Boxes,” and Philip Walton’s“Solved by Flexbox.”

2. Finger Friendly Interfaces

The focus on mobile and what many call mobile-first site design is also likely to lead to more finger-friendly interfaces in 2014, since on tablets and smartphones most users are interacting with the web page using fingertips or, perhaps, a stylus.

In the context of ecommerce website design there are perhaps two impacts of the trend toward finger friendliness.

First, expect to see fewer content sliders. These sliders have long been popular on websites since they allow merchants to show a lot of information in a relatively small amount of screen space, but they tended to have relatively small next buttons that can make them a bit more difficult to manage on a smartphone.

Next, be on the lookout for larger navigation buttons and links, as site designers try to make it easier for shoppers to browse site hierarchies or click links.

3. Flat Design

Flat design can be seen in the Windows 8 interface, in Apple’s iOS 7, and in dozens of popular websites. This aesthetic tends to avoid drop shadows or similar — focusing on strong colors, and interesting fonts.

This design trend has a few advantages at present. It often leads to simple user interfaces that are relatively easy to make responsive. It tends to use graphics in a way that leads to relatively smaller file sizes and, therefore, faster loading pages, and it can be a differentiator for sites.

Sites like Canopy, which allows users to find and share products available on Amazon, offers a good example of how flat design is likely to be applied in ecommerce site design.

Canopy

4. More Content on One Page

In 2014, expect to see site designers and developers adding more content to individual pages in at least two ways.

Quick views, which allow shoppers to get additional product information without leaving a product category page, are likely to continue to grow in popularity since that makes it particularly easy for mobile shoppers to learn more about products without having to load additional pages.

Also look for pages to become longer, perhaps, even scrolling “infinitely” like Tumblr or Pinterest.

5. Interesting Fonts

Online typography has been exploding, if you will, in the past few years, and this trend is not going to slow down in 2014.

Expect to see sites using distinctive, brand supporting fonts to convey an online store’s feel. To see examples of typography in action on an ecommerce site, visit Free People, Design by Humans, Afends, or the Yellow Bird Project.

Free People.

6. Great Big Graphics

This particular trend may seem counterintuitive in the context of mobile Internet use and the overall design to provide a better mobile experience. But it turns out that big graphics really is relative to screen size, and with a bit of good site development, designers can deliver big graphics appropriate for a user’s device.

Relatively larger graphics that link to products, also tend to make for finger-friendly user interfaces, which is another reason this trend will grow.

Sites like Born, Hagger, and Tommy Bahama serve as examples.

7. Video and Other Rich Content

Mobile video consumption is on the rise, more than doubling last year, so it is clear that consumers don’t mind watching videos on tablets or even on smartphones.

In this context, video gives online retailers an excellent medium for providing useful content and detailed product information. Look for more retailers to begin including video or other rich media content in content marketing and in product descriptions.