MotionMasters Blog/News

He’s been on Oprah, written about in the New York Times and last week he testified before both houses of Congress. He is Dr. David Strayer, professor of psychology at the University of Utah and widely regarded as the country’s leading authority on distracted driving.

We interviewed Dr. Strayer recently in his Applied Cognition Lab on campus for our forthcoming educational video, “Deadly Driving Distractions.” He also provided us with an on-camera demo of the Lab’s $100, 000 PatrolSim II Driving Simulator.

Not only did Dr. Strayer scare the bejabbers out of us with findings such as “Impairments associated with using a cell phone while driving can be as profound as those associated with driving while drunk,” he also provided straightforward, easy to understand data that will resonate with the educational video’s target audience of teens and young adults.

As more Web sites add online videos, search engines are working to include them in their lists. MotionMasters is often asked how to use Web videos in a marketing plan. One way is to make sure your video shows up in a search. Optimizing video for search is easy to overlook but incredibly important. Here is an interesting article about Search Engine Optimization and ways to do it right.

The Appalachian Leadership Education Foundation will receive funding from the Nobel Prize money that was recently awarded to President Obama. Why are we excited enough to mention it on the MotionMasters blog? Well we have a lot of ties to the organization and its founder. Our president, Diana Sole Walko, is proud to sit on the board of ALEF. We manage the foundation’s Web site. And, it wasn’t too long ago that we produced a video about Robert “Doc” Foglesong when he received the “Patriot” award from the West Virginia Executive magazine. You can read about Doc and the President’s donation to ALEF on the Charleston Gazette Web site.

Did you catch Betty White’s hilarious commercial for Snickers during the Super Bowl? It’s gone viral and there’s even talk about her hosting Saturday Night Live. She’s a hot commodity in the television world and she’s also one of the many talented superstars we’ve had the pleasure to work with over the years.

From the MotionMasters video vault, here are a couple of pro bono spots that we shot on our back porch. Betty did her usual great job and her co-stars in the spots are pretty cute, too. Take a look.

Are you interested in using video as part of your e-marketing plan? You’re not alone. A lot of our clients are calling with questions about it. With recent advances in technology, it is becoming more viable, but there are still some drawbacks. We thought it would be helpful to provide an update on the where things stand.

Video email always used to mean a message with a link to a site: click on link, wait a few seconds and then see the video referenced in the email. Roundabout, but industry norm, right?

Things are changing.

There are now two categories of video email: click-to-view video (as described above) and video in email (video is embedded to play within email; no click-through).

But, neither Flash, Java or any of the other traditional video-playing technologies work with video embedded in email. There are some alternatives, however.

An animated GIF sometimes approximates a video-like experience but without sound. Animated images/videos work everywhere except Outlook 2007; are subject to image blocking and are problematic when viewed on mobile devices.

For now, animated GIFs are the only realistic choice for getting videos to “play” in email. But new options are on the way. For example:

Google just announced a new feature in which Gmail identifies YouTube links to allow users to view the video without click-through. This suggests that inboxes may eventually open up to embedded video content where either the sender or the video source is clearly identifiable and trusted.

As certification and authentication processes evolve, we might soon see wider availability of “true” video email…But maybe the important question is not how to put videos in email, but whether you should put videos in email. We’ll discuss that topic in our next entry.