Every Internet marketing fanatic loves videos. Video ads, video tutorials, video blog posts — hey, let’s put videos all over our Web site. Why would people want to waste their time with written stuff when they could sit down, get comfortable and watch us explain the process to them, or demonstrate our product over a four-minute and thirty-six second infomercial. It’s the “wave of the future.”
That’s fine in theory — but there’s a point when a trend is a little too overdone. For example, go to YouTube. If you’re one of the chosen viewers, you will be welcomed by a large, gleaming video ad panel almost the width of the page’s content area. It wows you with an action-packed trailer for a movie, a soda, or some other interesting product, taking you by the seat of your pants as soon as you enter the site. You’re there because you crave videos, right? At least that’s the theory. My qualm with this trend is the intermittent ceasing up of my Internet juices every time one of these gargantuan ads tries to load — especially when the four banner ads next to it are trying to load their own action-packed animations, the giant header image is trying to load a monster gif, and the actual content is attempting to squeeze its way in around everything.
Remember how Yahoo’s front page used to erupt daily with some giant, page-crossing adventure ad? Usually by the time it finished loading, it was already halfway through its cycle … and that was on a top-grade machine with corporate bandwidth.
Plus, the thing about videos is … you can’t skim through them. It’s either wait patiently through the cute introductory jokes, clever transition effects and extraneous information, or skip the whole thing entirely. You gotta remember — I’m at work, not on vacation. (I’m also part of a generation of spoiled internet brats. Sorry.) I want what I’m looking for, whether it’s a microscopic piece of marketing intel, a quick copywriting technique, or a good song to play in the background, and that’s the only thing I want, about eight seconds from now. Wolverine, Bruno, wonderfully produced slideshow, you can all shove it. Text. It’s what’s for dinner.
