The new web 2.0 landscape is focused on providing consistent, logical and easy ways for users to interact with brands, and with each other. But what the heart of web 2.0 has to offer in functionality, it may lack something very important -- feeling. How do we as brands, and agencies, accomplish the first rule of advertising, the evocation of happiness, sympathy, motivation, or inspiration in consumers, in a digital landscape?
Picture this.
You are in a dark theater. You have your soda and popcorn and your sunk low in your chair. It is pitch black, and there is no one around you. On the screen before you you see a man running across a dilapidated farm. He is breathing heavily. His clothes are tattered and he is badly bruised. He is frantically looking over his shoulder to looking to see if he is being followed. The moon is full, and unknown shadows graffiti the landscape, blacking out his path. He is approaching an old wooden fence, the last barrier to the highway. Sanctuary. Safety. You hear a strange tone, an unknown sound. The man climbs the fence. You hear the tone again, this time louder. The wood snaps and the man falls in a great thud onto the highway side of the fence, broken timber crashing down around him. The tone has turned into ominous music. He rolls over, looks up and above him he sees the masked killer above him! Music crescendos. It's only the highway sign - State Highway 37. A trick of the shadows. Relief. A little smile. The man picks himself up and walks out onto the highway. Turns around to thumb an approaching car. And the headlights illuminate his face, you see a dark hooded figure in a shadow behind our man. And with fast grab around the neck our man is pulled out of frame. Music screams. Cut to black.
Motion pictures can connect with humans like no other medium. They are life. Fake life, but close enough to fool us emotionally into feeling like we're actually there. We know we are just at the movies. We know nothing is going to jump off the screen and eat our brains. Yet we're still sucked in.
The other key to this story is environment. The director and editor have a blank framework to build this mood on. They use sound, lighting, motion, and color to engross the user with the feeling of danger, of fear, in an environment free of other distractions.
We as creatives have the power to do this online with skillful use of broadband video, and the best way to deliver video designed for emotional connections is through rich interactive experiences, designed to support the emotion. Microsites provide a theater setting for video content, and done well can form an emotional connection with consumers which are far more powerful then a logical sells. They allow us to set the mood, focus attention, and gives us ultimate fullscreen control over the experience. Nothing is more frustrating then when great creative video content, gets plopped like a bastard son in a templated page on a brand site, and buried in a sub page of a sub page. We must remember what we are trying to do with our content, and give it the right environment to accomplish it's goal.
You must have the right medium for the right messaging objective, and it's our jobs as creatives to make sure that we provide the right environments for consumers to feel. Social media and brand sites are great for providing information, but the difference is like reading a wikipedia entry on Napoleon's occupation of Spain, and seeing Goya's "The Third of May 1808."