SayItVisually Say It With Animations
More and more websites are utilizing animated video and audio inclusions in the hope that this will boost sales. Like any other “interactive” additions to a website, it’s hit-or-miss. SayItVisually.com provides simple, animated videos that you can embed on your site to explain your business, a concept, or anything else in a quick and easy manner.
The site hit the news when its video “How to Explain the US Financial Crisis to your kids? (And Most Grownups)” on CNN’s iReport became an almost instant hit. The video is a short presentation (about four minutes long) that explains the current U.S. financial crisis with simple animations and a narrative overview. The video has been viewed on YouTube and other sites over 20,000 times already.
While that video on its own is great, it is also a perfect way to show you how SayItVisually can work for a business’ website. A fairly complex concept, such as Depository Banking or Investment Banking, can be explained with a short animation and simple narration.
This could be a big boon for many websites, especially those with a complex product that’s not easily explained in three paragraphs or less (the average Web reader’s attention span). Website marketing analytics have proven time and again that if you fail to grab the viewer in the first few sentences, you’re likely to lose them forever. An embedded video could change that. If implemented correctly.
The problem here is that whenever a new marketing bonanza hits the WWW (e.g. audio embeds), it tends to get way overused and quickly become worse than lame. When I visit a site, for instance, that has an audio embed and automatically starts playing, I close the browser instance. If I’m visiting the site to do a review like this one, they automatically get a negative one. Why? Because audio has been completely over-used and usually is used very badly.
I can see the same thing happening to these sorts of animations. While other sites like CommonCraft offer similar services, SayItVisually is one of the first competitors in the field that seems to have a great plan on their hands (and great implementation), proving to CommonCraft, that you can’t stay alone for long. They’ll have competition—probably lots of cheap, fly-by-night competition too. It’s only a matter of time before cookie-cutter animations start hitting sites everywhere.
As for SayItVisually, I like their site and the concept and hope that they do well. If you want to implement something like this for your business, better get on the bandwagon quick. Soon, it’ll be difficult as they start to get booked up.
It is worth noting that these will always be a great addition to visual presentations for sales, business meetings, and so forth. I can see them becoming a big hit at Web presentations as well. In that regard, these are a perfect fit. I should note that they are currently the company that VOIS has chosen to do their video.
