Why Animation?

Video’s advantage to the marketer is its versatility. Video can:

• Live on your site
• Be emailed to your list as a link
• Be shared on sites such as YouTube
• Be played on a big screen at a trade show or kiosk
• Be shown on a laptop during client meetings
• Be pulled out of your pocket and played on devices such as iPhone or Android.

Video is portable, viral, and high-impact… the perfect utility player in your marketing mix.

It might be because your visitors just don’t like to read. For many people —actually, most people— reading is like work, while video is like play.

That’s why the use of video is exploding on the internet. Nielsen has reported that the time spent watching video on the web has increased at an astonishing 45% year-over-year rate. The expectation is growing among web visitors that when they hit a site, they will have the option to watch video.

Not only do people prefer to see video, studies show that they comprehend and retain more from an audio-visual presentation than they do from just reading.

And Google’s Double Click reports that video outperforms other rich and non-rich media in both brand-building and driving purchasing intent on business sites by overwhelming margins.

Anecdotal evidence (here and here, for instance) shows that video often increases conversions by double-digit margins.

There’s two compelling reasons why you might do better with animation than with live-action: let’s call them left and right …

The left side of the brain likes animation because it can encapsulate thoughts into icons and concepts into schematics. Complex messages are distilled into clear ideas. Animation communicates thinking in a way that blabbing heads can’t.

The right side of the brain likes animation because it is somehow more human than a real person is.

Animation touches our feelings and entertains our eye; it gets under our skin.