Rich Media for Direct Marketing: The Emergence of Intelligent Digital Sales Collateral

Transcription

1 Rich Media for Direct Marketing: The Emergence of Intelligent Digital Sales Collateral Flimp Media, Inc Hayden Rowe St. Hopkinton, Ma R I C H M E D I A M A R K E T I N G

2 Table of Contents Rich Media for Direct Marketing: The Emergence of Intelligent Digital Sales Collateral Abstract 1 The Use Of Rich Media For Direct Marketing 1 What is Rich Media? 1 How Can Rich Media Benefit Direct Marketers? 1 Why Aren t More Marketers Using Rich Media? 2 The Emergence of Intelligent Digital Collateral 3 What Intelligent Digital Collateral Is Not 3 What Intelligent Digital Collateral Is 3 Interactivity 4 Online Distribution 4 Measurability 4 Critical Components of Intelligent Digital Collateral 5 Engaging Content 5 Portability and Universal Accessibility 5 Intuitive Viewer Controls 6 Viral Capabilities 6 Ease of Use and Modification for Marketers 6 Flimp Rich Media A New Technology Platform For Audiovisual Direct Marketing 7 Flimp Solves the Rich Media Marketing Problem 7 The Fusion of Marketing, IT and Creative 7 The FLIMP Analytics Advantage 8 Your Content, and only Your Content 8 Conclusion: Transforming Direct Marketing and Sales 9 About Flimp Media Inc. 10

3 RICH MEDIA FOR DIRECT MARKETING: THE EMERGENCE OF INTELLIGENT SALES COLLATERAL 1 The Use of Rich Media for Direct Marketing THIS WHITEPAPER describes the emergence of Intelligent Digital Sales Collateral (IDC) as a valuable new web application for direct marketers and sales organizations. Specifically, the report discusses how rich media and video can be combined with web analytics to create a new kind of intelligent sales and marketing collateral that tracks and reports detailed viewer interactions, responses and behaviors by address. Finally, the Whitepaper defines Intelligent Digital Sales Collateral and outlines the critical components for its successful implementation and use. That being said, when we say rich media marketing, the natural reaction is to assume that we are discussing rich media advertising, as that is the most common application of rich media marketing. Web advertising however, is only one segment of the rich media marketing spectrum. This white paper discusses the application of rich media for direct marketing and sales prospecting. What Is Rich Media? It may be helpful here to define exactly what we mean when we say rich media. Rich media is generally defined as a broadrange of interactive digital media that exhibit dynamic motion, taking advantage of enhanced sensory features such as video, audio and animation. In most cases rich media is Flash or Flash video content. According to Wikipedia, the term derives from the Media Richness Theory devised by Richard Daft and Robert Lengel. The theory, in essence, states that the more sensory cues a method of communication involves, the more effective the communication will be. (See Fig. 2.) Because it involves dynamic audiovisual content rather than static images or text, the Abstract THIS REPORT, describes how rich media and video when combined with advanced analytics will soon transform traditional direct marketing and sales practices that rely on static print and content with limited tracking and reporting. The white paper discusses the applications and benefits of rich media for online direct marketing and sales and specifically for creating intelligent sales and marketing collateral that can track and report detailed viewer engagements, responses and viral forwarding activity by address. This report also explores how new technologies are enabling users to create, distribute and measure effective video marketing and sales campaigns without programming or advanced technical skills. After years of development, inexpensive rich media marketing and analytics solutions for direct response marketing, sales and communications are finally here. The concept of Intelligent Digital Collateral presents exciting new opportunities for marketers and salespeople who are now able to use engaging, interactive, and intelligent digital collateral in their daily communications. Rich media marketing has created a whole new ballgame for marketers and salespeople with an entirely different set of rules. This game is one that every senior marketing, communications and sales professional needs to be playing in order to drive higher engagement and response rates with instantly measurable analytics and results. More Effective Efectiveness of Communication Less Effective Fig. 2. The Media Richness Theory. Richer Mediums Leaner Mediums Face to Face Video Conferencing Telephone 2-Way Radio Written, Addressed Documents (Letters, ) Unadressed Documents (Bulk Mail, Posters)

4 2 RICH MEDIA FOR DIRECT: THE EMERGENCE OF INTELLIGENT SALES COLLATERAL Fig. 3. The Direct Marketing Trends study conducted by CRM Magazine. category of media with which we are concerned falls on the richer mediums end of the spectrum hence the term rich media. Of note here is the fact that print and are listed toward the leaner mediums end of the spectrum. From the perspective of traditional static marketing, this seems accurate. Recent developments in flash landing page technology, however, allow marketers and salespeople to incorporate richer media into their communications. This makes rich more dynamic on the Daft and Lengel scale than the above graphic would have us believe. How Can Rich Media Benefit Marketers? Static HTML marketing has seen a decline in response rates in recent years. Print brochure and collateral have become increasingly more expensive and ineffective due to high costs and the general shift to online communications. Telemarketing has been restricted by federal Do Not Call regulations. All of these factors taken together create a challenging environment for direct marketers. Let s combine this situation with the fact that marketers are seeking a more effective way to create powerful connections online. The Direct Marketing Trends study conducted by CRM Magazine (See Fig. 3 above) shows that many companies are stepping up their and Web-based direct marketing efforts to establish just that connection. The surge in web video and rich media usage and in marketers need for more engaging, responsive and measurable marketing channels, coupled with the strong trend toward database and less expensive web/ based marketing is creating the opportunity for a powerful new marketing and sales application, one which combines engaging video with tracking and reporting. There is an emerging need for on-demand technologies and solutions that enable marketers to easily create engaging digital collateral and distribute it via , use it for PPC landing pages or post it to a Web site. Technologies that would allow an organization of any size to create, distribute and track rich media collateral quickly and inexpensively would be remarkably valuable in theory, and in practice would level the playing field for smaller companies interested in deploying rich media for online direct marketing and sales. Why Aren t More Direct Marketers Using Video? Traditionally, the costs associated with video creative and marketing have been prohibitive for companies with smaller marketing budgets. This has created the perception that only large companies with big budgets and their marketing agencies could afford to develop effective video marketing content. The high cost of rich media programming, deployment and analytics solutions naturally impeded the ability of smaller companies and organizations to embrace video and rich media for their online marketing programs. In recent years however, the costs and complexity of creating video and using rich media marketing and analytics technology both financial and temporal have decreased substantially. The hardware and software needed to create and deploy rich media content is now extraordinarily affordable. Lowcost programs exist to expedite the production process. With the advent of new technologies such as Flimp Rich Media, implementing rich media content into online direct sales and marketing programs has become easier than ever. As rich media and analytics technologies continue to evolve, rich media for direct sales and marketing is becoming increasingly accessible. In other words, the only reason that more marketers aren t taking full advantage of rich media for direct sales and marketing is the perception of prohibitive-costs and complexity associated with the development, distribution and tracking/reporting video and rich media content for various marketing and sales applications.

5 RICH MEDIA FOR DIRECT MARKETING: THE EMERGENCE OF INTELLIGENT SALES COLLATERAL 3 The Emergence of Intelligent Digital Collateral T O BE SPECIFIC, what most marketing and sales professionals want is a way to quickly and easily create and distribute engaging multimedia and audio-visual collateral that can track and report detailed individual viewer interactions in a way that is both direct and actionable. Marketers want this capability without requiring expensive programming skills or IT department resources. They also do not want to sacrifice brand identity the way they would if they were hosting video content using a third party distribution site like YouTube or Vimeo. The emergence of rich media collateral will impact the way many marketers and communicators view Internet marketing. That s quite a tall order. And yet the technology already exists to create, distribute and track this new intelligent rich media collateral quickly and inexpensively without any programming, coding or IT resources. We call this new rich media marketing technology Intelligent Digital Collateral, or IDC and will discuss specific attributes, and technology platforms in more detail later in this report. What is important to point out is that rich media or more specifically Adobe Flash, together with integrated analytics tracking and reporting is likely to have a profound transformational effect on direct marketing, sales and communications and the associated collateral and messaging used to convey information from one person to another. At the heart of this transformation is the ability to track, report and measure viewer engagement, responses and sharing by individual address. What Rich Media Intelligent Digital Collateral Is Not How does rich media IDC differ from other types of rich media content? Intelligent Digital Collateral requires the ability to track and report viewer interactions by individual address of recipients. Therefore it is not rich media advertising or rich media web content since these applications can only tell you HOW viewers are interacting with your message but do not tell you WHO is interacting. Knowing WHO is critical to gathering actionable marketing, sales and communications information for follow up purposes. For Web video or rich media content to become IDC, it needs to provide an opportunity for viewers to interact with and respond to the content, and must capture and measure their specific activity and response data. In this respect, IDC has to provide an opportunity for viewer interactions and calls to action that can be measured by a built-in analytics component beyond simple traffic numbers. What Rich Media Intelligent Digital Collateral Is Flimp Media Inc. (FMI) defines rich media Intelligent Digital Collateral as: A form of digital marketing or sales collateral that uses rich multimedia content to engage viewers, incorporates interactive calls to action within the collateral, and tracks/reports viewer engagement and responses in detail and by an individual viewer identifier. Intelligent Digital Collateral can be distributed through a variety of Internet delivery channels including , weblinks, web sites, blogs and social media applications. Viewers interactions with this collateral are captured and stored in a database. Captured data may then be used by Click to Watch Flimp

6 4 RICH MEDIA FOR DIRECT: THE EMERGENCE OF INTELLIGENT SALES COLLATERAL marketers or salespeople qualifying prospects, getting viewer feedback, and for lead generation purposes. The three essential elements for successful sales and marketing with IDC are: Interactivity: An actionable, interactive message containing engaging audiovisual content and other content elements that provide a call to action. Online Distribution: The ability to easily distribute or push the digital collateral to target viewers using Internet communications methods. Measurability: The ability to collect and report viewer activity and response data in order to measure the result of the sales or marketing effort. Rich media marketing becomes Intelligent Digital Collateral only when all three of these components are combined. Let s break each of them down: Interactivity When referring to Intelligent Digital Collateral, it is important to define what is considered interactive. All too often marketers peg video as an interactive media, by which they simply mean that it is frequently emotionally engaging in a way that text and images rarely are. While this is certainly true, it does not seem to fit a more technical definition of interactivity one which involves viewers explicitly interacting with the medium. Intelligent Digital Collateral allows for physical interaction by including links, buttons, and forms each tied to a specific call to action. In essence, true interactivity gives viewers an immediate connection to the calls to action made by the rich media content in the collateral. Interactivity is fueled by video and rich media content. Audio-visual web content drives higher response rates than static text and images. According to DoubleClick studies conducted from 2004 and 2007, online viewers are 4 to 7 times more likely to engage with and respond to rich media web content than to static text and graphic content. Online Distribution Intelligent Digital Collateral allows salespeople to send (or push, if you prefer) rich media messages to a specific target audience using online channels. These channels include, but are in no way limited to the following: , weblinks, webpages, twitter, linked in, social media sites. Rich media content is typically hosted on a web site, which means viewers need to know how to get to a specific URL in order to view the video content they want. Most mainstream online video is pull based requiring marketing to attract viewers to the content. Examples of such mainstream online video providers are YouTube and Brightcove. The formats which these companies provide are not examples of rich media Intelligent Digital Collateral. Measurability The single most identifying factor of rich media Intelligent Digital Collateral is its ability to be tracked. By tracked, we do not simply mean the process of tallying hits, or even tracking the location of those hits. Instead, what we mean is tracking the specific details of user interaction such as time spent viewing, video starts, videos watched to completion, links clicked, number of s forwarded and to whom, etc. All of this data must be tracked actionably; in other words, if Jane Doe interacts with Intelligent Digital Collateral, the marketer who delivered the collateral to her must be able to determine by some fashion that it was Jane Doe who was the viewer, so that the opportunity for a dialogue exists. Measurability is what makes IDC intelligent. Marketing strategies The ability to measure a viewer s activity in detail is the holy grail for Direct Sales and Marketing. are about building relationships with customers, and marketing collateral that fails to identify a customer also fails, in some respect, to build a relationship with her. Beyond this, the ability to measure a viewer s activity in detail is the holy grail for Direct Sales and Marketing. The greater the amount of detail that a salesperson has at his disposal, the more able he will be to advance the prospect through the sales pipeline.

7 RICH MEDIA FOR DIRECT MARKETING: THE EMERGENCE OF INTELLIGENT SALES COLLATERAL 5 Critical Components of Intelligent Digital Collateral We have already discussed the various goals that a marketer must have in mind when creating Intelligent Digital Collateral. But what are the best practices involved in implementing this collateral? The following is a brief synopsis of the elements inherent to the success of using rich media for Intelligent digital collateral. Effective rich media marketing collateral need to contain engaging audiovisual content that includes interactive multimedia elements (beyond video); some level of user control during playback; meaningful measurability; easy customization; viral marketing capability; portability; and cross-platform and multiple-device compatibility. In addition to the required components of IDC interactivity, web distribution and measurability the five additional factors required to create an effective rich media digital collateral are: Engaging content Portability and universal accessibility Intuitive viewer controls Viral capabilities Ease of use and modification for marketers Engaging Content As we have discussed, video alone does not provide for viewer engagement. The creation of engaging content goes well beyond what video if any a marketer creates for an audience. Instead, the entirety of the collateral content, from video to graphics to text, must be centered on eliciting a response from an audience. Namely, that response should be answering a call to action. Any collateral, regardless of media, that does not serve to solicit a response is not very useful for sales or marketing purposes. We have spent a considerable amount of time talking about the benefits of rich media and video as an engaging medium. But by video we do not simply mean content shot with a video camera. Video, at least in terms of Web content, refers to a variety of dynamic graphic content. This includes slideshows, Flash animation, images with voiceovers, and so on. All of these are much more engaging than static images or audio alone, and can serve as the centerpiece of your rich media marketing collateral. Successful digital marketing collateral does not rely on a single media to engage viewers. Flash-based landing pages are an excellent and engaging way to feature complimentary text and graphics alongside any video that a marketer may have. Audio, too, in the form of background music or voice-over, is another useful tool to engage an audience. Using text to accompany graphics is a great way to spell out for an audience all those things which the other media imply. A marketer can also use images to increase brand awareness. As for the stats, Google and DoubleClick found that rich media with video increases brand awareness more than fourteen times the level achieved by static media. Remember, also, that rich media Intelligent Digital Collateral is trackable. This means that the more engaging the collateral is, the more a user interacts; the more a user interacts, the more data a marketer can gather from that interaction. Armed with this data, salesperson can more effectively follow up with prospects; engage qualified leads, and effect sales. Portability and Universal Accessibility When creating a outbound marketing campaigns using Intelligent Digital Collateral, it is important to understand how a user will receive that message. As we mentioned before, Intelligent Digital Collateral can be distributed through any number of channels. Whether by or social media interaction, it is important to understand that an audience will consume Intelligent Digital Collateral on screens of varying sizes and on devices of varying capabilities. Flash Player has become the most widely installed Internet video format, running on over 98% of all Internet-connected personal computers. The ubiquity of Flash Player ensures that most visitors can view Flash video without downloading additional plug-ins, so you can reach more people with lower development, testing, and support costs. Adobe Learning Center Rich media IDC does not rely on a device s ability to store data, nor does it rely on special files to open or view the content. Instead, the marketing message delivered to the viewer consists of a single compressed digital file that can exist as a stand-alone message without storage or support. Universal accessibility ensures that the message can be easily displayed and viewed by a majority of viewers without proprietary software downloads or reliance on a specific operating system. Intelligent Digital Collateral cannot require users to take additional action, such as download a special player or other software in order to view and interact with the message. Both portability and universal accessibility result in increased response rates for sales and marketing collateral. Flash provides excellent portability for web video marketing messages as it delivers them to the viewer in a single, compact SWF file. Additionally, Flash Player already exists on over 98% of the computers used to access

8 6 RICH MEDIA FOR DIRECT: THE EMERGENCE OF INTELLIGENT SALES COLLATERAL the Internet today, regardless of operating system. For the rare viewer who does not already have the Flash Player installed on his or her device, Flash files delivered to devices that do not already contain the Flash Player provide a link to easily download and install the player software. Intuitive Viewer Controls If a marketer chooses to use video collateral to increase user engagement, he or she would do well to implement user-friendly viewer controls. Interactivity is closely linked to ease of use, and nothing is more off-putting to a Web video viewer than a lack of control over the content she is to consume. Basic controls include pause and play buttons, a progress slider, and volume controls. Marketers can also implement buttons that play a video full-screen or upgrade the quality of the video (like YouTube s HD button). As is true with website navigation, easy to use controls will boost engagement and response rates. Viral Capabilities It is much easier to track viral activity for online collateral than it is for their offline counterparts. Even so, the status quo for tracking usable data from a viral user s engagement to disengagement is miles behind where it should be. This is true even for those campaigns which implement rich media. Video s viral potential is as enormous as it is indisputable. We see it every day: our boxes are flooded with letters from friends and colleagues telling us that we simply must see the latest smash hit on YouTube. Viral videos whether corporate or user generated are even receiving press coverage. Marketers and salespeople need to be able to take advantage of the viral potential of their rich media content. But just because a video goes viral does not mean the campaign is a success. When creating rich media content, a marketer or salesperson must have specific goals in mind. Rarely do these goals include Have X number of people watch my video. Obviously we do want people to view our videos, but the ostensible purpose of rich media marketing is to convert viewers to buyers, subscribers, donors, leads, etc. We use rich media to begin, enhance, or nurture relationships with our clients or customers. We do not pump out video for video s sake and hope it goes viral. That does not help us to achieve our goals. The successful implementation of rich media for Intelligent Digital Collateral allows marketers to track viral engagement, and to identify viral recipients in a way that is actionable. In other words, if John forwards an to Jane, Jerry and Jimmy, all of whom watch the video In order for rich media marketing campaigns to be successful, marketers must be put in control of their message, the distribution, and the analytics reporting. and interact with the rich media content in the collateral, marketers and salespeople need to be able to treat Jane, Jerry and Jimmy as sales leads. This means being able to know their contact information in order to follow up with them after they ve watched (and, with any luck, forwarded) your video collateral. Take a moment to think about the magnitude of this capability. We frequently hear of YouTube videos generating hundreds of thousands of viewers in a given period of time. Imagine all of those viewers as potential sales leads. Now imagine having all of their addresses. That is Intelligent Digital Collateral. Ease of Use and Modification for Marketers All of the capabilities above seem to require a lot of technical knowhow, from analytics programming to video production and formatting skills. Many marketers and salespeople lack these capabilities. What s more, many small businesses lack the creative and IT resources needed to implement these suggestions. Outsourcing these skills can be expensive, adding to the cost of what may already seem like an expensive endeavor. In order for rich media marketing to be successful, sales and marketers must be put in control of the collateral, the distribution, and the analytics reporting. They also need to be able to implement changes on a moment s notice and not have to rely on the IT department to create, execute and measure their campaigns. They must be able to do this without any prior knowledge of programming or design theory. This means that the technology used to create, edit, distribute and track rich media Intelligent Digital Collateral must be on demand and exceedingly easy to use. Furthermore, after this content is distributed, a marketer must be able to modify this collateral on the fly, again without any kind of programming knowledge or IT support. This allows marketers to fix mistakes, clarify content, and respond to client feedback without having to resend the collateral. If, for example, customers consistently ask for clarification of a point you make in your video, you should be able to edit your video, add explanatory text, or insert a contact form into your collateral that will update know immediately to help clarify the issue. The ability to adapt a message on the fly is invaluable to a B2B marketer. Instead of waiting for the campaign to cycle out before making changes, a marketer should be able to adapt his strategy and maximize engagement after the first distribution. This is a hallmark of a successful rich media direct marketing campaign.

9 RICH MEDIA FOR DIRECT MARKETING: THE EMERGENCE OF INTELLIGENT SALES COLLATERAL 7 Flimp Rich Media - An Integrated Technology Platform for Audiovisual Direct Marketing, Sales Collateral and Communications ALL OF THIS may seem exciting, but the practical aspects of utilising a rich media for marketing campaigns may seem a bit daunting for most marketers. Wouldn t it be great if there was one comprehensive solution that could do all of this for you? There is. Introducing Flimp Rich Media, an integrated Rich Media Marketing and Analytics Platform for direct sales and marketing. What is a flimp? A flimp is a hosted video microsite or lead capture page with built-in viewer activity tracking and reporting used for video marketing, communications and sales collateral. Using flimps, marketers can quickly create, distribute and track audiovisual collateral for lead generation without any programming or coding. Flimp Solves the Rich Media Marketing Problem Flimp, an acronym for Flash Interactive Marketing Platform, allows users to easily create, distribute, and track video microsites and sales collateral for direct marketing, sales and communications. With Flimp, it is possible to create Intelligent Digital Collateral, as we ve defined it above, with any combination of video, Flash animation, static graphics, slideshows, text, audio, buttons, links, and a variety of other media without any programming required. Once this smart collateral collectively referred to as a Flimp is created, it can be distributed by , embedded into a web page, incorporated into social media marketing campaigns, inserted into an RSS feed, optimized for SEO, or distributed through almost any Web channel. What s more, the Flimp platform is already integrated with Salesforce and most service providers so that you can your Flimps through your existing provider and instantly collect all related viewer engagement and response and sharing data from your Intelligent Digital Collateral by individual address. Let s put that another way:when you send out a Flimp using your existing service provider, you are able to track user data (including data for viral users) in detail by address. This drastically streamlines a salesperson s lead qualification process, making your company s sales force a whole lot more efficient and effective. The Fusion of Marketing, IT and Creative No technical know-how? No problem. Flimp s drag-and-drop user interface creates Flash-based collateral and landing pages without any programming or Web design knowledge. Flimp is so easy to use, in fact, that the company s summer interns are able to create agency-quality rich media collateral within an hour of being introduced to the platform. The user controls are remarkably intuitive. Want to create a Web data capture form? Simply drag the icon onto flimp canvas, create the form you want, and format it using a simple pop-up style box. Want to add the company logo? Easy! Drag the image icon onto the canvas, upload your image to Flimp, enter the URL you want the image to link to (if any), and resize it however you like to fit the canvas. Video, you say? No problem. You can insert, resize, and stylize a Flash video of any size or resolution into your Flimp with the click of a mouse. There s no expensive programming required to distribute your Flimps, either. Flimp Rich Media can automatically generate the HTML and flash code for embedding a Flimp directly into HTML web pages... Likewise, Flimp will automatically generate the HTML code needed to create trackable video and Flimp images for distribution through your service provider or individual address. Need a unique, trackable URL for social media purposes? Flimp can generate unlimited unique trackable URL links for blogs, press releases, PDF s, RSS or social media distributions. This way you can see if your Facebook link outperformed your Twitter link, or vice-versa. Need to search optimize your Flimp collateral or rich media content? Simply click the searchoptimize feature and copy and paste searchable text that will be hidden behind your rich media Collateral. There s probably a lot of programming involved in using Flimp s reporting and analytics features, right? Wrong. We ll talk more about analytics below, but suffice it to say that after you distribute your Flimp Intelligent Digital Collateral, Flimp takes care of the rest. Flimp s drag-anddrop user interface creates Flash-based collateral and landing pages without any programming or Web design knowledge.

10 8 RICH MEDIA FOR DIRECT: THE EMERGENCE OF INTELLIGENT SALES COLLATERAL The Flimp Analytics Advantage There are limited rich media analytics programs available to businesses today, and almost without exception they offer the same information: number of visitors, number of views, number of links clicked, etc. Not particularly useful, especially considering this info does little to help you achieve your sales or marketing goals. What good is the info on the number of viewers to your videos if you don t know who those viewers are? With Flimp, viewer data becomes actionable. When Jane Doe interacts with your rich media Intelligent Digital Collateral, you get all of the vital stats time on Flimp, time spent watching video, links clicked, who Jane forwarded the collateral to, and so on and you also get addresses (and messages) of anyone Jane shares your Flimp with. What s more, you get all of this data in real time. That means that as soon as Jane opens her browser window, Flimp starts reporting her viewer data by address. If you are a salesperson and you see that Jane has just watched your video to completion, you can shoot her an asking her if she has had time to view the material you sent her. This will reach Jane while the material is still fresh in her mind and before she s had a chance to check out your competitor s services. Large corporations spend tens of thousands of dollars on this kind of analytics software. With Flimp, it s all part of the package. Your Content, and Only Your Content By putting you in complete control over every aspect of the creation and distribution of your collateral, Flimp allows you to ensure that the only message your customer receives is your message. Contrast this with the common tactic of posting corporate videos on free video sites like YouTube. At the end of a YouTube video, the player on which your video appears refers viewers to related content. This poses two immediate problems: First, that related content might only contain a single similar word, and therefore might refer the viewer to videos that are inappropriate for the business environment. If you are in the business of selling Internet security solutions, for example, a viewer might be referred to a provocative Trojan ad which offers a totally different kind of protection. Second, a viewer could be referred to your competitor s videos. If your competition is a big company with a gigantic marketing budget, the viewer can compare your videos on production quality alone and choose accordingly. This obviously defeats the purpose of creating rich media content for marketing purposes. With Flimp, you are in control of the messages your audience or prospect receives. You do not simply create video; you create an engaging branded rich media response environment with specific and accessible calls to action. The only links your audience can click are those which you present to them. A Flimp is your space; it can be hosted on your own domain, which means even the URL is branded or Your Flimp does not compete with another advertisement for attention the way a banner ad does. Your brand is the only brand the viewer sees. Your Flimp is all about you. By putting you in complete control over every aspect of the creation and distribution of your digital collateral, Flimp allows you to ensure that the only message your customer receives is your message. Contrast this with the common tactic of posting corporate videos on free video sites like YouTube.

11 RICH MEDIA FOR DIRECT MARKETING: THE EMERGENCE OF INTELLIGENT SALES COLLATERAL 9 Conclusion: Transforming Direct Marketing and Sales Because it is so engaging and measurable, rich media collateral will continue to grow in importance for Direct marketing, sales and communications professionals. Static print and marketing are suffering from overuse, falling response rates and limited reporting capabilities, making them increasingly less effective for sales, marketing and communications. And while rich media marketing has long been exclusive to those companies with large marketing budgets, the costs and complexity associated with rich media content production, distribution and tracking have decreased dramatically, so that now rich media marketing is both affordable and accessible to most organizations. In short, there is no longer any excuse for a company not to consider rich media marketing as part of its overall marketing mix. But marketing with rich media is not enough. In order to maximize the response of your rich media marketing content, it is essential to create collateral that is interactive, immediately measurable, and can be distributed online. When all three of these criteria are met, what results is a powerful marketing medium called Intelligent Digital Collateral, or IDC. The implementation of IDC reaches its highest potential when incorporated within an effective outbound or Push marketing campaign. In order for such a campaign to be successful, it must contain engaging content, universal accessibility, intuitive viewer controls, and viral capabilities. Above all of these, effective rich media sales and marketing collateral must be able to track individual viewer activity in addition to being easy to create and modify. The proliferation of rich media marketing content and technologies has revolutionized the digital landscape for marketers. It is no longer sufficient for marketers to create static digital collateral and s for their sales and marketing efforts. This smart digital collateral must have engaging audio-visual content, be easily distributed to target viewers and audiences and must be able to collect and report actionable viewer activity data that can be used to produce a desired result. This combination of features will transform direct marketing and direct sales for most organizations.

12 About Flimp Media Inc. Flimp Media is a pioneer in the development of rich media and web video marketing and analytics technology and solutions for online direct marketing, communications and sales. FLIMP, which stands for Flash Interactive Marketing Platform, enables non-technical users to quickly create, edit, distribute, track and report Intelligent Digital Collateral using rich media and video without any programming or IT resources required. The Flimp platform offers users a simple, easy to use solution for Intelligent Digital Collateral, video , video landing pages and rich media web marketing with viewer analytics. For more information about Flimp Rich Media: Visit our website at or us at info@flimp.net or Call us at Flimp Media Inc. 2 Hayden Rowe Hopkinton, MA 01748