Video Run Around

In-banner video advertising is very hot right now. It’s the Justin Bieber of ad add-ons. And much like the Biebs, the idea of live video sounds good until you actually look at it, then you realize it’s just a mess of bad lighting, bad sound, and bad hair.

If professional videographers are an expense that the dealership doesn’t wish to add then they often make their own dealer lot videos. But as mentioned, the problem with unprofessional dealer walk-around videos is the quality and time cost per-vehicle. More often than not the video was made on an iphone outside with ambient noise, sun glares, bad sound quality, and worst of all, lots of “camera shakiness”. You have a video that is meant to showcase a vehicle but instead detracts from selling points. Now what?

The answer is still Dynamic Video crafted from still images. The enhancement might be to include short interspersed amateur walk-around video clips to help show “dimension” in between these images. If you think about it, this is what most car commercials do—they might show short professional clips of a vehicle driving down the highway and then cut to images highlighting vehicle-offer information. Beyond this, unless you’re paying for a professional videographer, amateur motion video captures almost always look worse than a slick presentation of photos assets (slideshow-style) with custom voiceover.

Most dealer-captured walk-around videos tend to exceed the one minute attention span of most video ad viewers. In fact, some walk-around can push 10 minutes! Zzzzzzzzzzz. Moreover, it takes a long time to capture and produce video on a car-by-car basis…very expensive compared to automated, data-driven dynamic video.

There’s really no good reason to capture motion video of a product that is not in motion. Motion video is intended to capture the essence of an object in motion, and if it’s not in motion, why do it? If you are going to do it, at least make sure your videos are short and sweet, because consumers aren’t likely to sit through an unprofessional 10-minute video.