Free Rise

“The web is not TV.”

It sounds obvious enough, and yet how many video ads do you see online that appear to be shoveled directly from cable? The 15-second video spot has become the de facto standard.

Of course, this will change. In their formative years, television ads were basically radio ads with visible narrators. It wasn’t until viewers and marketers became comfortable with the new format that commercials became more like little movies.

Today, some brands with reputations for innovation are exploiting the interactive and creative possibilities of online advertising, especially video advertising. But those still seem to be the exceptions.

My friend Phil O’Neill, director of analytics for VideoEgg, had such a perspective in an essay he scribed for MarketingWeek UK, titled “The Golden Rules of Online Video Advert Design.” His golden rules boil down to three design principles.

1. The web is not the same as TV: Ads should be rich, interactive, and “push-pull.”
2. Clarity is key: If the UI is confusing, users won’t bother.
3. Creative content, creative delivery: If it’s not compelling, users won’t stick around and won’t remember it.

These seem obvious. So why, in these adolescent years of web video, are they so often ignored? Think about that next time you see (or place) a 15-second pre-roll.

Today is a big day for those who struggle to read.

Intel is launching a product called Reader, a new gadget that photographs text in the wild — anything from a cookbook to an interpretive sign at an art museum — and reads it to the user via a pleasant voice sim. It’s hard to believe that nobody’s ever thought to mass-market this kind of product before, given the millions of people around the world who must live and cope with learning, reading, or sight disabilities.

My good friend Ben Foss led the team that brought this to market. He himself is dyslexic and has dedicated his career to helping others who struggle with our text-dependent information economy. Most of us have a hard time imagining how difficult our lives would become if disabilities made it tough to read. Ben writes on Intel’s Healthcare blog:

It is important to remember that a central experience of a disability, and especially a learning disability, is loneliness.  It was a lonely feeling to have to leave class in third grade, and head to a special room to sound out words while the other kids had reading groups. And adults feel lonely as they worry that people might find out they do not have any books at home and that they cannot read the text off a power point slide in a meeting.

(Full disclosure now: Besides being long-time friends with Ben, I’m also recently a director of a separate not-for-profit entity that holds conditional rights to the Reader technology.)

Here’s Ben demoing the Reader. It’s really remarkable what it can do. Big congratulations to the team at Intel who, via this small technological miracle, will help create the difference between dependence and independence for million — tens of millions — of people around the world.