The incredible power of interactive video

Interactive technology has the potential to transform the way brands use content and make a very real difference in people’s lives.

The statistics around video consumption are pretty mind-boggling. Walk into any Australian home and you’re likely to find, on average, 6.6 screens primed for consuming video, according to Nielsen. Little wonder, then, that brands are racing to clog those screens with content. The most recent figures from IAB Australia put video advertising spend at $1.4B in 2018, up from $1.1B a year earlier.

With millions upon millions of hours of content foisted upon consumers, brands are in a battle for cut-through and interactive video is the newest weapon in the war for attention spans. As pioneers in the interactive video space, Vudoo’s research shows how the technology amplifies the power of video-and further studies exploring interactivity beyond marketing give hope that it could even have an impact on healthcare education.

A US study commissioned by Vudoo compared responses to conventional and interactive marketing videos. The results were illuminating-viewers of interactive video were better able to retain the key message 48 hours later and exhibited significantly higher recall of the features they were shown. This audience cohort also tended to come away with more positive sentiments about the brand compared to those who saw the non-interactive version.

The study, conducted by market research specialists, The Interpreters, concluded that consumers were “genuinely excited by the technology”.

“The improvements we saw point to interactive video upping the ante on viewer engagement,” says The Interpreters’ managing director, Paul Dixon. Importantly, people who experienced video interactivity found it to be unobtrusive and helped them better connect with the content. This is particularly salient at a time when brands increasingly resort to pop-ups and screen takeovers for attention-there is now a way to be memorable without disrupting the viewing experience.

Vudoo is further exploring the potential of interactive video, by collaborating on an upcoming qualitative study at Monash University to assess the effectiveness of interactive video to deliver dementia training to nurses in the aged care sector.

“There are currently 50 million people worldwide who are living with dementia and that figure is set to increase to 152 million by 2050. Now more than ever, we need to ensure that we’re equipping our healthcare teams with effective tools to provide good dementia care,” says Corinne Maunder, Executive Producer at Fire Films, a health and science video production company, and physiology student at Monash University, who will undertake the research as part of her studies. “Interactive video training offers an exciting new way to personalize the user experience and allow learners to explore the content more deeply they’re most interested in and concepts they need further instruction on to consolidate their learning. This research is important because it will evaluate the effectiveness and acceptability of this method of training nurses in aged care.”

We already know interactivity makes video content more effective. And we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of the technology’s full potential.

Want to learn more about interactive video but not sure where to start? Get in touch with the team today, we love to chat anything interactive video!