If you want your customer to think, put your ad in the upper left of the screen. Want the customer to feel? Try the middle. NextStage's CRO explains.

I listed several elements for increasing the "demand" aspect of online video in my last column. To recap:

• Entertainment value (harking back to the Meskauskas-Carrabis Effect)
• Color usage and placement in the video and on the page
• Where is the video placed on the screen?
• What else is on the screen while the video is active?
• What is the video's "message"?
• What is the page's "message" and how well does it synch with the video's?
• What is the video's run length and does it repeat?
• Does the video match the target audience's ability to become motivationally aware of the "message" in the video and on the page?
• Reinforcement (branding elements on the page reinforcing branding elements in the video and vice versa)

That entire discussion came out of the recent iMedia Agency Summit. A question I was asked often was if it was possible to determine where an ad needed to be on a webpage in order to maximize ROI. Great question, that. It's also an answerable question that ties closely with, "Where does a video need to be on a page in order to maximize ROI?"

You may or may not agree that several of the above bullets also apply when answering the Agency Summit question about ad placement. Fortunately, this is something NextStage has been actively researching for several years now. In "I Trust You Therefore You Can Trust Me" (chapter nine of my book, "Reading Virtual Minds"), I deal with the issue of placement in detail and specifically creating trust via placement. It's a rich topic and for the purposes of this article I'm going to focus on two of the easier elements in that list: branding and placement.

Branding
It should be obvious that a company's online ad -- whether animated, video, flash or whatever -- must actively promote that company's brand. The reverse is also true: the company's brand must actively promote the online ad.

I don't mean "drive eyeballs to the ad." Instead, I mean "the brand must become associated with the online ad" because what's online now is going to be the new Jolly Green Giant, Mr. Clean, Madge, the perpetually exhausted "It's time to make the donuts" guy, the Maytag repairman, Tony the Tiger, et cetera.
 
Brands and logos will be in the online ad, yes, but now people will be able to interact (become reafferent) with that brand simply because it is online.

This "branding the branding" hearkens back to my first iMedia column, "Usability Studies 101: Brand Loyalty." I may be wearing a "Harley" or "NASCAR" jacket; I may be drinking from a "Dunkin' Donuts" or "KrispyKreme" mug, but it's a different thing when I have a branded video on my cellphone, PDA or notebook and am watching it, chuckling or otherwise engaged -- reafferent -- while I'm on the commuter train to work or in the lunchroom or with some other parents at my child's game.

Can we all say "viral marketing"?

Placement
You may be surprised to know that branding has a great deal to do with where something should be on the page. NextStage's concept of branding may sound different than marketing's definition, but it has pretty much the same intent: "How does something become a positive long term memory?" Placement also is a little different in NextStage's lexicon. It has to do with "Where does something need to be in the visual field to be positively acknowledged and referenced by the viewer?"

These redefinitions are useful for several reasons, one of which is that these redefined topics have a rich research history and have been answered many times before under many situations and constraints.

I mentioned in the summary to "Branding in Online Video" that it doesn't matter where something is placed, what matters is "What response do you want from the viewer?"

That answer is trivial to state but not trivial to execute.

Next: Touching hearts or minds