8 Brain Branding Website Techniques Part I

According to eMarketer August 2008 video ad spending will increase a thousand percent over the next five years. This means Web video is on the way to becoming the must-have Web presentation tool.

Some may see video as merely the next trendy marketing tactic that you should have because everyone else has it, but that would be a misreading of the trend. Discounting the importance of video presentation as just a fad misses the underlying human motivational impact of engaging an audience's neural network, a far more important network than the social media network that seems to occupy Web-marketers time, and consume large portions of marketing budgets.

The real reason Web video will dominate website presentations over the coming years is that it is the most effective presentation technique that engages the brain and embeds information as memory; it is the most complete Web presentation method available for establishing positioning: the brand ownership of an audience's consciousness.

Over the years we have come across numerous psychological and cognitive concepts that support the significance of using multi-sensory inputs as a way to engage interest, embed information, and enhance memory retention - the true measure of an effective, meaningful marketing campaign.

1. The McGurk Effect

Harry McGurk and John MacDonald first described the McGurk Effect in their paper published in "Nature", entitled 'Hearing lips and seeing voices.'

As described in Wikipedia: "The McGurk effect is a perceptual phenomenon which demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. It suggests that speech perception is multimodal, that is, it involves information from more than one sensory modality."

What this means is that multiple senses stimulated together work in tandem to delivery a message to the brain and encode it an audience's memory. The significance to Web marketing professionals is clear: the combination of audio and video working together with a professional onscreen presenter is the most effective way to deliver a marketing message that engages an audience and embeds information in their collective memory.

2. The 10-Minute Attention Span Rule

John Medina, Developmental Molecular Biologist and Director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning at Seattle Pacific University has written a book called "Brain Rules" and has a website called brainrules.net. It is not only an interesting and insightful look at how the brain works, it is also a great example of how to use video to promote a marketing initiative.

Medina's Rule #4 states: "We don't pay attention to boring things." That seems pretty obvious, but have you seen some of the corporate videos that are being produced. Just because someone knows how to shoot a competent video doesn't mean they know how to develop a dynamic, memorable marketing presentation.

According to Medina what people pay attention to is emotional content. In fact a brain-imaging study done by Benedetto De Martino, University College London Institute of Neurology, confirmed that decision-making depends on emotion, not rationality, despite what some would like to believe. So if your video presentation doesn't elicit an emotional response, it is not going to register in the brain as important enough to remember, nor is it going to influence decision-making.

There is a misconception as to how long people can remain engaged in a presentation. There is no reason why Web presentations should follow TV commercial time constraints; the whole 15-, 30-second spot is based on a 'cost + interruption + repetition' model; one that doesn't hold any meaning on a website visited on purpose by an interested audience.

According to Medina, a presentation that engages an audience on an emotional level can hold an audience's attention for about ten minutes. To keep an audience's interest beyond that, you have to stimulate them again with another emotional hit.

This is why our preferred video presentation structure consists of six two-minute videos for a total of about twelve minutes (6-2-12 Technique), a structure that allows us to re-stimulate the audience every two minutes, retaining their interest and attention so they won't get bored.

3. Chunking

No, Chunking is not a Chinese restaurant, it's a term coined by George A. Miller in his 1956 paper 'The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information."

Chunking refers to the fact that we process and remember information better when we group it into manageable units or chunks, hence the notion of seven as the optimal number of things we can retain in memory.

A misinterpretation of this effect has led to an epidemic of boring bulleted-point presentations that have become the plague of business meetings, conferences, and website presentations.

When we read, we are actually chunking: we do not process a word as individual letters but as a group of letters that are recognizable as an image that relates to its sound and meaning. In other words, by grouping a set of letters into a unified structure called a word with an associated sound and meaning, we can easily retain it as a useful method of preserving and communicating information.

It is important to understand that the viewer's ability to retain your message depends on the skillful use of words, the quality of performance, and the artful use of timbre, tone and cadence. These conceptual, visual, and auditory elements combine to form a memory chunk in an emotional context.

4. Uni-Tasking

Today we hear a lot about multi-tasking. Job descriptions are full of things like, "must be able to multi-task," and we are all so proud of our ability to surf the Web, write an email, and talk on the phone, all at the same time. The reality is we are not doing any of these tasks justice. Multi-tasking is in fact a fallacy.

John Medina, the author of "Brain Rules" points to the area of the brain called Brodmann area 10 that is believed to be responsible for ordering tasks in some kind of orderly, hierarchical sequence.

It's a bit like how a computer works: the speed of the calculations is so fast that it appears that many things are happening at once, but in fact the computer is just processing things one at a time but at a very high speed, giving the illusion of multi-tasking. People unlike computers aren't quite so efficient, and the result of so-called multi-tasking is just poor overall performance.

The point is a properly crafted and performed Web video engages the audience and focus's attention on the presentation. The job of a website presentation is not to be quick so visitors can move-on to your competition's website, but rather to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, get them to put down the cell phone, coffee, and Game Boy, and focus on your message. If your home page does not hold your audience's attention for the time it takes to deliver your core marketing-message, then it is not doing its job.

In Search of Oz

"The Wizard of Oz" may only be a children's story but its message has universal appeal and time-tested meaning. The story is really an allegory for life, both personal and business.

In today's turbulent economic climate, businesses often feel lost (think Dorothy), desperately searching for The Answer from The Man (think Wizard), but lack the courage (think cowardly Lion), brains (think Scarecrow) and heart (think Tin Man) to what it takes to succeed.

As much as we want to believe business is all about rational, bottom-line decision-making, the truth is, it is not. The more we understand how the brain works, the more we know decisions are emotionally based.

For the next four brain-branding concepts see "8 Brain-Branding Web Presentation Concepts, Part II."