Two corporate announcements, but what about ROI?

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!

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!

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.

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!

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.

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?

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.
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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.
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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 1×1 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.

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.

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.

Is it just me or are others seeing concept after concept on many of the coolies Mr. S has been presenting??

Russ, huh?