Two corporate announcements, but what about ROI?

by on September 18, 2006

Look at AMD’s Virtual IT Experience and compare it to the video demo Rick Brown did in his office showing off Adobe Acrobat. One took about 15 minutes of Rick’s time to do. One take. No committee meetings. No makeup. No lights. One guy to sneak into the company (I do all the video, audio, and interviewing). But the AMD one probably cost near a million dollars to produce and needed a LOT of Web design time, not to mention studio video shooting, which is very expensive.

I wish I could compare a few things about these two presentations:

1) How many people watched to the end of both? (My theory is that the Acrobat demo was watched to completion by a much higher number of people because it wasn’t so scripted and slick). I turned off the AMD one before even the intro was done. But maybe that’s just me.
2) How many people were convinced to change their minds about these two companies? (My theory is that the Acrobat demo will win here too because Rick doesn’t go into too salesy of a mode, just shows us around the tool and lets us draw our own conclusions).
3) How many recommendations will each get on the Web? Luckily this one I can actually track through Technorati. My theory is that Adobe will win here, too, because the video breaks real news and doesn’t get all slick and hypey.

What do you think? Which approach do you like better? Would you spend the million dollars? Or would you just invite me over with my camcorder for a chat? It sure would be easier to build a company if everyone wanted to spend the million bucks, that’s for sure!

Which one has a better ROI? (Return On Investment?)

Disclaimer: PodTech.net has a business relationship with Adobe, but I was not paid to do this video (I asked PR if I could interview someone on the team and get a demo). PodTech was, however, paid to do a variety of podcasts, which are located in the “Corporate” bar on the PodTech home page. I was on the Acrobat 1.0 beta team back in 1994/95 and thought that a new version of Acrobat is a news story worthy of me covering it without any financial recompense. But, even if Adobe had paid some fee wouldn’t that have still gotten a better result than the AMD effort which probably cost about a million?

  • murph
    At time of comment both links are to the AMD video...
  • murph: yikes, sorry, been doing that a lot lately. Fixed.
  • From a cost perspective, obviously the Adobe video has a better ROI... but isn't the hardware industry all about glitzy stuff?

    Its like the car shows... lights, camera, action...

    Do you think there will be a day when cars are launched on Video blogs? That would put an entire industry out of business... (Ad agencies)...
  • Vijay: I totally believe that day is coming, and coming fast. Intermediaries are gonna go fast unless they are hyper efficient.

    The more interesting question is "would they have the same ROI even if they had the same cost?"
  • Hmm. What would you have said if AMD had built their virtual experience in Second Life?

    I didn't watch either to the end. I'm not in the target market for whatever AMD was selling. (I did click through to see what Ballmer had to say, but he didn't do the monkey dance, so I left.)

    As for Rick's pitch--where I am in the target market--I heard an endless, shapeless, drone of features.
  • Michael: it wasn't the 3D world that turned me off of the AMD deal. It was the slickness of the video presentation.

    Hmmm, Christopher Coulter really liked his presentation. So there! :-)
  • Not to mention that one cost nothing for Adobe to do, but the AMD one cost about a million (maybe more, depending on how internal folks budgeted for this). So, if I'm gonna piss you off I certainly wouldn't want to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it when I could do just as good a job for free!
  • Tony
    I often see updated blog entries, and this one shows up in my Bloglines as updated, without ever being able to work out what changes have been made. Wouldn't it be nice if blogging software could show changes clearly?

    Corporate marketing culture versus skunkworks proliferation - and everyone knows that gossip travels faster than light, except corporate marketeers!
  • murph
    Regarding: "Do you think there will be a day when cars are launched on Video blogs?"

    There's a significant difference between a car and a piece of software - the latter you can test a real instance of without leaving the comfort of your preferred workspace however in the case of the former you need a physical instance to be able to form a reasonable opinion otherwise you're getting a view of the product filtered by the marketing people.
  • The AMD Virtual IT was for Partners and it cost much less then doing a conference. As with any conference AMD got their Partners to pay the bills.

    I saw three conferences on the web last week, Ziff Davis did a Security Show, very 2D, Jeff Pulver did his Von talk on 2nd Life - on his own island.

    The AMD Virtual show was an experence, everything but the beer opps, SWAG is arriving in the mail.
  • James
    The acrobat video was pretty informative. My criticism is that all the zooming and panning made me nauseous. You can do this a lot better.

    How about doing it in a slightly different way? Use Camtasia or equivalent to capture the screen and record the face to face stuff separately. Then combine them in a split screen layout. Put the guy's face in a box on the left and put the screengrab video on the right or just do some edits. Not difficult and would look so much better!
  • El Guapo
    Oh... you have a business relationship with Adobe.

    I guess that explains why you just made three consecutive posts about Acrobat with some very ho-hum boring new features.
  • I stopped watching both about 5 minutes in. The AMD one because the keynote speaker looked like "Wayne's World Meets PC Expo" and the other because the guy wasn't saying anything of interest, and just marketing the features. The panning and zooming was pretty bad too.

    Dude, what happened to him TALKING to you? Hell, what you showed was just a bad version of a screen movie demo. Both came across as equally impersonal.

    So the ROI on both is about the same.
  • Robert: Trust Coulter. I was viewing at 2:30 am.

    But why make this a binary choice between what AMD spent (surely less than a million dollars) and what you donated to Adobe? I'll bet there's a production level somewhere between the two--and much closer to Adobe's--that offers the optimal ROI.
  • brendan
    Maybe it's just me, and admittedly, I'm not the target audience for the AMD experience but there's something very off-putting, espeically when the keynote speaker insists that the presentation is a "revoultionary way to communicate." Um... did I miss the last few years of blogs, podcasts, viral marketing? A static, island of video with a 3D world interface is revolutionary? Maybe 10 years ago it would have been considered so.

    I'm sure ROI for the Acrobat video was greater, but I wonder if anyone involved with AMD cares. For it's target market, VPs, IT managers, etc, the AMD video is probably very successful. Hey, and I bet when they showed that thing to AMD's CEO, he did backflips, ROI or not. So what about ROI? Is it measurable? If not, does it matter?
  • Judy Jones
    While the two instances share a type of media, that's where the similarities end. The objectives and audiences are very different. So it's a little mistaken to value the return on investment using the same metrics.
  • Robert...you seem to be into promoting quick-n-dirty "ugly". Ugly websites, ugly videos. ;-)
    ----------
    I tend to agree with some of the previous posts, there could be a happy medium. In this case, a screencast with voice over would probably have been a better production choice. Or a split screen as James (11) suggested. Right tool for the right job kind of thingy. That way, I would have actually been able to see the menus and read things on the Acrobat screens.
    ----------
    As far as the widest circulation/recommendations on the web, of course yours will because your Scoble. If I had done it just like you, zilch.
  • I applaude AMD for thinking out of the box. However, they needed to put a little more thought into the whole "virtualization" of an exhibit.

    1) We, the real audience isn't stupid. We know that we are looking a virtualized environment.
    2) Don't do the fake clapping.
    3) Don't do the "busy" noises in the program.
    4) Look directly into the camera. The benefit about it being virtual is that everyone on the other side of the camera is your audience. We are all looking at the event from one perspective.

    Again, AMD is spending a lot of money, but at least they are trying to get the information out. Give me the million bucks and a camera, and I bet I could give you the same, if not more information to the end-users though.

    Heck, that why Robert made his mark at Microsoft.
  • At least your vid didn't have 1x1 pixel iframe tracking bug in it - that is sooooo irritating - especially when they don't even have the nous to make it match the background!! GGrrrrr We love you Scobes but pleeeeaaase don't pan and zoom quite so maddly.
  • Keith Patrick
    Call me shallow, but I can think of a million other things I'd rather do - including browser a virtual IT website - than watch a video about how cool the new version of Adobe Acrobat is. I don't care if the video is black/white or professionally-developed or if you're interviewing the head of Acrobat development or simply demo'ing the thing - it's Acrobat fer chrissakes! At the end of the day, if the topic itself doesn't interest me, I'm not going to spend time on it.
  • Ricky
    Robert,

    Can you give us a breakdown of the viewing stats for your Acrobat video?

    And update us over time?
  • Ricky: I gotta wait until tonight. We're on Akamai and get log updates once a day.

    Keith: I hear ya there. If it's not something you're interested in, you won't watch either one. But, let's say you're equally interested in both Acrobat and AMD, which approach works better for you?

    Also, the Acrobat video wasn't about why it was cool. It was a simple demo of the new stuff in it.

    Frank: I'll try to keep the zooming and panning under control. It probably would be best to shoot things like this with two cameras, but that increases the costs and production time to get video up.
  • Russ Henry
    Is it just me or are others seeing concept after concept on many of the coolies Mr. S has been presenting??
  • Russ, huh?
  • Well, yes, I'm sure the AMD presentation cost more to put together. It worked first time, flawlessly on my less than standard Linux installation too, but it also gave me alternate ways to get the information such as downloading (uh) PDF files. Maybe AMD should rent-out some of their web people to Adobe to teach them how to create robust web content.

    You would think, of course that Adobe should BE the experts at this sort of thing. Which is why a shoot-from-the-hip ad campaign might not be a total success for them.
  • Well, yes, I'm sure the AMD presentation cost more to put together. It worked first time, flawlessly on my less thatn standard Linux installation too, but it also gave me alternate ways to get the information such as downloading (uh) PDF files. Maybe AMD should rent-out some of their web people to Adobe to teach them how to create robust web content.

    You would think, of course that Adobe should BE the experts at this sort of thing. Which is why a shoot-from-the-hip ad campaign might not be a total success for them.
  • oops...Sorry for that dupe. Didn't seem to go through the first time.
  • Keith Patrick
    Robert: If I'm interested in both, I'm going to pick AMD over Adobe. AMD just makes cooler technology to me. Seriously, when I think Adobe, I think of Acrobat primarily (because it looooves to shove a splash screen over my browser) and because I do a lot of my own gfx, Photoshop and Illustrator. But none of them are really "cool" in my opinion (the latter two suffer because I'm a UI person & I think their UIs suck balls)...Acrobat is just an editor for a text format.
    Now, when I notice that AMD has a new site up, I'm thinking "this is the company that came up with Hypertransport & embedded memory controllers & 64-bit x86 & has a new CPU architecture coming out". Ergo, if they have something new, I'm more curious to see what it is.
    Really, though, that initial spark has nothing to do with how pro or amateur the presentation is; it's about (anticipated) content. I can further tie this back to an old argument you made that MySpace's success was in part due to how crappy the pages look -> I'll go at first because musicians I like have *content* there, but then I flee with profanities because seeing anything other than the first page requires me to sign up (VIRAL!). I think most of the pages are gaudy as hell, but my positives & negatives are about the meat & potatoes experience
  • Ricky
    Robert,

    Don't worry about the 'slickness' of the AMD presentation.

    It TRIED to be slick.

    But it just didn't cut it.

    You KNOW what slick looks like.

    You showed us the Ford "Bold Moves" videos for the Shelby Mustang.

    Those videos were slick enough to make Al Gore go out and secretly BUY one of those gas-guzzling, planet destroying, mega-horsepower-goodness behemoths.

    And those videos were only that slick because the Ford people had read Naked Conversations, seen Channel9, and shamelessly copied every idea, then 'slicked the whole thing up' with more slickness dollars than AMD would ever dream of spending on slickness.

    www.fordboldmoves.com

    "I know slick, and you, Mr AMD video, are no slick."

    I'm not sure we want you to be that slick.
  • Russ Henry
    Robert: 26.
    Sorry. I keep thinking everyone is on the same page. ; ). If the speed is available for the adobe products, it can produce some very interesting personal research libraries.

    With the massive amount of new technology available for application folks to look at and absorb, we will need faster tools. I scan for tools, concepts, and spin-offs, which can reduce repetitive sequence tasks. I have used the video/digital photo and PowerPoint as a tool for 8-D’s etc. for years. Today it is not good enough to be well read. You have to be well “muti-media-ed” to coin a phrase. Your content is great. However, I still find myself jumping through the video’s. Time compression and speed viewing. It keeps you from “multi-medi-andering” # ; ) Please do not shorten them.

    Applications types do not look in one area. They look everywhere. What you are doing with the video content has provided me with massive zones for application. One of the things I have been preaching for years is KISS/ 80/20 rule. RSS is a politically correct KISS principle etc.

    The vision for the computer, if I am not mistaken was to free us up to do other things.
    I always look to solve problems with the generic solutions in the back of my mind.
    “Kaizen” ... to quote a term, which was taught to Japan by an American. Generic can always be driven down to the specific solution.

    A very reputable support enterprise type vendor told me “sure we can do that in about 4 weeks for around $50K. When do you want me to start? “ I said no thanks and did it myself in less than 1 week with a little beta from a real programmer. It not your money! Right! Profit driven support base lol. Mustang 1969 less than $4000 ?? Today priceless!

    Your content is great. Sales talk = click close from an engineering standpoint.
    Good product does not require much selling. Bad software will sell once. Show me ... WOW ... check this out works so much better. Keep the fresh eye guys with the emotional cooooooools in the mix.

    I know you remember the old DOS die hard folks. Didn’t take long to sell them on windows when it became easy. I bought the 512 MAC when it came out with a programming language for the MAC. Now even the old DOS guys “get it”. Programming for programmers. Computers and programs should be intuitive and easy. How many times would you pick the milk up for the wife if you had to open 7 doors before you got to your jug. Cell phone conversation “honey I am still waiting for the last door to open.” Learning curve for more complex programs is not acceptable. Under extreme stress it can cost you your life if you forget the process sequence (DOD).

    Back to answering your 26. huh?
    The cool stuff has many applications. Tools for techs and everyone else. Keep raising the bar.

    "Knowledge is best served as a shared resource" reh 2000
  • I dunno, who's the target audience???
  • You know, I just want to make PDFs out of my MS Office documents.

    Do I have to watch a video to do that?
  • Whatever
    On the AMD site,
    try going to the AMD booth and clicking off the rollover and on to the top of the chip in the background. It's like some 'easter egg' Matrix spoof thingy. It's pretty cool, I wonder how much that cost to produce?

    I guess the better question is how much traffic will it drive?
    Whatever
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