How Pageviews Become Sales, or, “How funny is your online video?”

Did you know that 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute?* Scientists now expect you to entertain them with catchy, high-quality videos. Life science suppliers have no option but to deploy this new media marketing channel to reach the scientific consumer. But given the high cost of video production—and risks involved in going low-budget—the challenge lies in creating a thoughtful video marketing campaign that generates measurable results.

I wanted to let you know we’re running a February promotion on our Fall 2009 report New Media Marketing Channels, Creating Effective Online Promotional Videos. We had a lot of fun with this one; watching YouTube is not typically part of the job description over here! We even tested the waters with our own online marketing video; take a look at what we came up with, and learn more about this report at the same time.

“Interesting” and “relevant to their work” are among the top three reasons a scientist will choose to forward a video but “humor” is the strongest motivator.  Scientists do have funny-bones, so keep that in mind before creating a video that plays like a lecture.

*Advertising Age (www.adage.com)