April 1999
Video Redefines 'The Document'
By Liz Levy
Mercedes-Benz, Johnson Controls and the Library of Congress are among the organizations bringing digital video and animation into the content mix.
Want to bring new life to corporate communications? Digital video can be melded with electronic documents to bring an exciting element to your message. Video can be used to communicate what words alone canýt. Presentations, Web sites, training kits and sales and marketing materials can all benefit from the persuasive power of digital video.
Over the past four to five years, corporate communications have expanded to the World Wide Web, but this channel has yet to be exploited for its true multimedia capabilities. Video-enabled Web sites can be used to enhance interaction and add impact.
Video is not restricted to the Internet. CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs offer portable, high-capacity storage that is ideal for mixed content including video. Digital video can be synchronized with audio and delivered with all types of content, including animations, PowerPoint slides, still images, forms, text and more.
Besides adding extra oomph to presentations, video can be used to communicate ideas not easily expressed in text alone. Itýs great for marketing presentations that need to convey a corporate image or sales presentations that have to quickly explain complex products. Mercedes-Benz, Johnson Controls and The Library of Congress are just a few of the organizations that are bringing video into the content mix.
Video Clips Help Sell Seats
Johnson Controls Automotive Systems Group (Milwaukee, WI) is the worldýs largest independent supplier of automotive seating and interior systems, with customers including BMW, Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen. They produce overhead systems, consoles, door panels and instrument panels.
The Automotive Systems Group uses Digital Video Services of (Grand Rapids, MI) to digitize their video assets for use in sales presentations. ýWe incorporate product demonstration, commercial and promotional videos into our PowerPoint presentations to add impact to our sales message,ý says Jamie Wilkens, a graphic designer in Johnsonýs marketing department.
The digitized video is received from Digital Video Services on CD. Johnson Controls incorporates the video into PowerPoint slides and masters the presentation to CD themselves. These clips are usually one minute or less in length.
One such presentation was for a product called Play Seat, a special child seat that is built into a vehicle for use in minivans, station wagons or cars. The seat has compartments for childrenýs toys and other necessities.
ýWe created a promotional video that showed children playing in the seat in a minivan that was parked outside a childrenýs museum,ý says Wilkens. ýThe video was digitized into a PowerPoint presentation that was shown to minivan and station wagon manufacturers such as Ford, GM, Chrysler and Toyota, and it was very well received. If this video helps get just one contract, itýs a big win.ý
Wilkens says Johnson Controls currently uses AVI files (see ýChoosing Technologiesý page 76), but they are switching to MPEG for enhanced quality and compatibility. MPEG also can be displayed on large screens without losing too much resolution.
Digital Video Services often accepts video compression work from multimedia production houses. One such firm is Ethos Interactive (Cincinnati, OH www.ethos-interactive. com), which specializes in developing interactive, multimedia press kits, sales and marketing presentations, training and reference materials, and human resources tools.
ISCO Sells With Animation
ISCO Industries (Louisville, KY www.isco-pipe.com) tapped Ethos for another of its specialties, digital video animation. ISCO manufactures polyethylene piping for municipal and industrial use, and its products and applications are often quite complex.
ýDigital video and animation are perfect tools for technical manufacturing applications because they provide a way to show how very complicated products look and they illustrate their precise use,ý says Sean Brown co-owner and VP of technology and development at Ethos.
Ethos develops animations using videos, photographs, CAD/CAM files or other raw materials from the client. In ISCOýs case, vector-based animations were created for use on the companyýs Web site (www.isco-pipe.com) and in face-to-face sales demos. Ethos provided a customized presentation tool based on their Maestro presentation software. The software presents a library of ýslidesý that show the multimedia assets available. The tool brings together all of the images, animations, slides, audio and digital video used in sales and marketing situations. In addition to the animations, there are customer testimonials and product views, which were encoded to QuickTime by Digital Video Services.
The projects are credited with driving at least a 40% boost in international sales. ISCO also recently won a $400,000 project in Hong Kong solely due to the web site, according to Jimmy Kirchdorfer, VP of ISCO Industries.
ýWe find the web site and the multimedia sales and marketing materials extremely effective,ý says Kirchdorfer. ýWe have many intricate processes for installing pipes that are not easy to explain over the phone. Now we can refer people to the web site. The animations are a great asset and are used in all of our presentations.ý
The animations have become ISCOýs primary selling tool. ýOur sales people with laptop PCs use the Maestro presentation tool on a daily basis. Updates are made every 90 days, which Ethos puts to a new CD,ý explains Kirchdorfer.
ýSelling pipe is boring usually,ý he admits. ýThe animations make it more interesting and attention grabbing. Even the contractors we deal with are borrowing the materials to use for sales to their customers.ý
ýIt is an incredible success,ý says Kirchdorfer. We never dreamed the results would be this good.ý
NDL Share Moving History
The American Memory National Digital Library (NDL) was launched by The Library of Congress in Washington D.C. more than five years ago. This Web-based resource (http://memory.loc.gov) uses digital video to present historical moving images from the libraryýs extensive archives, including turn-of-the-century images of the Worldýs Fair, earthquake-ravaged San Francisco and immigrants arriving at Ellis Island.
NDL first took moving images to the Web with QuickTime, but in the last two years it has added two other digital video formats: MPEG-1 and RealVideo. According to Marc Dudley, a digital conversion specialist at the NDL, MPEG is used because it is a widely accepted, open standard that offers improved compressed video quality with faster data rates and higher resolutions than equivalent QuickTime versions.
NDL has just begun using RealVideo. The format allows video and audio files to be streamed, so you can start playing these large files without having to wait for the entire file to download. The NDL uses a third-party tool called MediaPallet for batch conversion of MPEG or QuickTime files to the RealVideo format.
Schools, universities, researchers and the general public all make use of these historical moving images, so the NDL displays archives in a variety of formats to serve as much of the public as possible.
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