Video is the number one form of content but there is one key problem, traditional video is passive. Linear video is lean-back. Standard video still sits so far from the engagement and brand memorability you need to make an impact with your audience. 

To help you get your content in check for 2021 we’ve put together 17 of our key reasons to go interactive with your video. 

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1.  Enhanced brand memorability: Interactive is recorded to be 32% more memorable than traditional video, meaning your brand has more top of mind recall with your key consumer group. 

2. Top of mind recognition for brand recall: Building on the enhanced memorability earned from any interactive experience is the lasting recall impact within key consumer personas for your brand. Interactive video brings more depth to any video content and has the power to leave lasting impressions on its viewers.  

As put by WIREWAX Co-founder Dan Garraway to FEED Magazine, “When people touch, they remember, and that experience has a far greater impact.”

3. Performance-based on behaviour: Interactive delivers metrics based on behavioural insights portrayed directly from your audience, meaning you get to know your viewers better than you know yourself. This data exchange leverages information accessible in a zero-party data economy. WIREWAX dove into this core power of interactive in a recent presentation at Digital Marketing World Forum in NYC. 

4. Guided customer journey: Selective and targeted action points placed throughout a video is the core of interactive. Through understanding the audience in target and the end goal of any campaign is driving toward, any creator can harness interactive to craft a guided journey to more consumers closer to achieving that goal. German multinational software corporation, SAP, harnessed this strength of interactive when modernising case study delivery, using one main video to guide information exploration across global audiences. 

5. Layers of content: Interactive allows layers of diverse content to become unlockable and actionable throughout one viewing experience, creating strong contextual links between your visual and written language. Just take a dip into how National Geographic layered information, purchase opportunity, and location discovery in their branded content piece in partnership with Maine.

6. Optimised for elevated video view rates: Interactive keeps viewers watching, meaning a higher view rate for your content. WIREWAX Studio users ShopDirect successfully delivered an average of 90% view rate across their content with interactive. 

7. Distraction elimination: Through total immersion experiences, interactive eliminates distraction by glueing eyes to the content and focusing 100% of viewers attention with action points throughout a video. How does interactive achieve this? Through enlisting the power of a unique combination of hotspots and overlays to combine viewing, action, and exploration all in one single video. 

8. Action on impulse: Viewers can click immediately, no more waiting around for the post-view click (if it happens at all). The Home Depot capitalised on the immediacy of this behavioural pattern in their ‘Explore Color’ campaign, delivering content that allowed audiences to take action immediately for driving paint sale throughout a DIY audience. 

9. Engagement-primed experiences: Overlays give creators an environment encouraging prolonged engagement. Whether it’s through the utilisation of video-in-video, more visual content to help a viewer explore fine details, expanded information, or even a social integration for extended engagement beyond the parameters of that video.

 Hypebae and Nike enjoyed an engagement rate of over 70% on a recent branded content campaign, with viewers engaging almost 4 times on average throughout one single video. 

10. Longer spent with your content: As viewers watch, engage, interact, and then rewatch, they are proven to be spending 47% longer with your content. By adding interactive to video big brands are effectively extending their viewer’s experience with their content.

11. Increased purchase intent: Studies continue to show that driving purchase opportunities with interactive, most commonly utilising commerce properties, delivers a purchase intent of 9X that of traditional linear video. 

12. Content versatility and flexibility: Interactive experiences are diverse, versatile and are something most audiences have never experienced before. High impact commerce? Immersive narrative? In-depth learning? Make it happen with interactive.  Just take a look at how Football Manager leveraged WIREWAX to launch an exclusive interactive trailer of their latest instalment, FM20. 

13. Endless content customisation: When creating interactive, as with any other part of any campaign or communications content, brand essence and style curation is an absolute must for making an impact. With WIREWAX, customisation of design for every aspect of the experience is a focus as we continue to develop and expand our suite of tools. 

“We see that the branding, including flexibility in style, color and animation is one of the most important things because it’s one of the first things that clients and their viewers notice,” says ROC Group’s Communications technology Consultant Zak Risdon. “It makes the interactive content feel like it’s very much theirs.”

14. Mobile- optimised: Interactive video and mobile viewing is a match made in campaign distribution heaven. With interactive, brands can double-down on the engagement usage of mobile audiences with content layered to immerse audiences deeper and deeper into your experience. It really becomes a whole world of your content in the palm of their hands. 

With WIREWAX, we’ve done all the heavy lifting to enable distribution across core socials such as Instagram and Snapchat to bring your experiences to the viewers most likely to engage. 

15. Narrative-enhancing: Give your viewers the freedom to explore the narrative in a way that is most impactful to them. Add branching into that mix and you’ll leave viewers entangled in a narrative experience they can’t tear themselves away from. 

We asked writer from The Office and Creator of the smash-hit interactive children’s show Secret Life Of Boys, Anthony Q. Farrell, for his take on interactive meant when planning ahead for narrative development: 

16. Centric to consumer-experience: The new age of content creation is rapidly motivating a desire from viewers to experience content crafted with their experience in mind. R/GA’s Sascha Martin touched on this necessity to shift focus in relation to automakers however when you expand your lense of view it’s plain to see the necessity to apply this same notion to any vertical is growing, fast. 

“A new set of attributes has redefined progress: joy of use, simplicity, connectivity, seamless integration, cloud services, AI, AR, and a focus on user experience and customer-centricity” Martin explained. 

17. End-user experience focused: Interactive is created with the user experience at the forefront. This delivered content that has given consideration to action at every single point of the design, leading to an overall viewing experience that is a cut above the rest for your most valuable audience. We took a more in-depth look into how this shapes up planning stages even as early as the video shoot with Creative Director Jen Mah, read it here.

Whatever your driver for video, don’t get stuck fighting for views in an oversaturated content landscape in 2021.

Get in touch now to prepare your team for driven, effective video experiences for proven results with WIREWAX.