Tag: depicting technology in video

 

“Delightfully nerdy” storytelling styles for high-tech marketing videos

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Lots of techies consider themselves "delightfully nerdy." It's a good style to help your high-tech marketing videos connect.

In the twelve years we’ve been making high-tech marketing videos, we’ve occasionally mediated disputes between marketers and product managers over the question of what makes a video “too technical.” We like featuring as many technology differentiators as possible — probably not more than three or four in a short video — because we believe that buyers are looking for insight. Who better than a technology buyer to appreciate your technology solution’s technical achievements?

The delightfully nerdy style

It's ok for high-tech marketing videos to bring up complex topics like storage problems in virtual infrastructure without really "explaining" them. They are familiar to the audience.

The ‘noisy neighbor’ and ‘blender effect’ are two problems of virtual infrastructure depicted in this ‘delightfully nerdy’ Quantum video. The animation actually depicts the problem with a fair degree of accuracy.

If your offering overcomes well-known technical problems, a “delightfully nerdy” style is effective. Quantum’s QXS hybrid storage addresses several well-known problems that often arise in virtual infrastructure, including the “blender effect.” In the video example here, we assume that many viewers will be familiar with the problem.

The animation depicts the effect with enough technical accuracy to be credible to viewers who are familiar the problem. For those who are not, the animation is just delightfully nerdy — something you can appreciate without fully getting on board.

Here’s how it works

Link to high-tech marketing video explainer about how slow-drain devices affect storage area networks.

How “slow drain” develops — and what Brocade technology can do about it. “Here’s how it works” is a great approach for high tech marketing videos designed to satisfy buyers who want insight.

I love this expression. Hearing it makes me happy that I’m about to learn something.

 

Communicating insight in a technology video

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Communicating insight in a technology videoIn videos that explain technology solutions, the on-screen action is never action-movie quality. Nevertheless, thinking through the sequence of images that will meet the viewer’s eye is arguably much more important than coming up with the words to accompany them in communicating insight into a technology in a video.

When we introduced Flash explainer videos in 2004, they filled a need for sales and marketing people who were having trouble bringing prospects up to speed on new technology solutions. Our videos still do.

Razzle-dazzle vs. insight

These days, however, video product and solution overviews are ubiquitous, and animation software allows for a lot more visual razzle-dazzle than was possible a decade ago. But razzle-dazzle by itself doesn’t communicate insight. Low-end explainer video companies offer a complete video “from your script” for a few hundred dollars. Some even throw in the script writing.

But if you want your viewer to take away insight into what makes your solution different, you need to present meaningful visuals more than anything else. And these meaningful visuals must be considered in the script from the outset — and modified along with the dialog as the script develops.

Writing for the eye, as well as the ear

I like to start with a script that reads somewhat like a screenplay, except that it is divided into more scenes (or shots) than a classic screenplay. As the script makes its way through subject matter experts, sales engineers, and others in the approval process, they are very apt to edit the spoken words with little or no regard to the images that the words are supposed to accompany. And people who are not accustomed to writing for video have a perverse tendency to use fluffy words like holistic that can’t be illustrated.