Last month, Twitter introduced a new application for its Smartpad/Smartphone audience entitled “Vine” (vine.co).
What is Vine? It can be best described as life in motion for 6 seconds – then looped. Sure, it sounds moderately interesting but what doesn’t translate in the written word is just how mesmerizing it is. Anyone who’s watched James Van Der Beek’s crying binge looped over and over again can understand its potential for quickly burning an image into the mind of viewers. What’s unique about this new app is how creative some of the users have been (by using stop-motion animation) and how touching a few stolen moments can sometimes be (a little boy and girl holding hands on a children’s train).
As always, the question arises as to how something like this can be utilized for marketing purposes. While it’s yet to be fully taken advantage of given its recent rollout, here are a few ways in which marketers in the future might find Vine useful for their marketing needs:
1. Product Demonstration
Can your product or service be broken down into a 6-second bite? Even if it can’t, the challenge of fitting such a task into 6 seconds might produce an interesting and strange little video that could amplify the process you are able to encompass within the short timeframe. Much like a Philip Glass composition, individual and sometimes forgettable notes become more memorable when heard in quick succession.
2. Promotion
Even if you don’t have John Moschitta from the old Fedex commercials as your spokesperson, you should be able to tweet a quick promo message through either images or spoken word. As with any marketing message, you’ll need to find a way to break through the clutter memorably to get a potential customer’s attention.
3. Brand Reinforcement
While it’s difficult to do anything of substance, this would be the perfect platform to reinforce a brand personality or character should your company have one. Companies such as Toyota, Dove and Malibu Rum have already begun experimenting with this.
4. Modular videos
Whether as a short-form webinar or a quick bite-sized run of different features or services, Vine allows you to create a series of videos that become your own short-form “channel.” As with any modular video strategy, one video tends to take off in popularity, allowing the others to attract traffic by way of piggybacking.
5. Participation
Canon’s Project Imagin8tion and their earlier promotion, The Story Beyond The Still were clever and successful attempts to engage users in the process of supplying images and video for the purposes of producing a much larger, community-built promotion. Vine also lends itself to this kind of marketing as the video created is far more immediate and requires less planning on the technology scale (as your smart phone or smart pad will inevitably be your camera for entry).
Time will tell whether Vine will catch on for marketers. It is, after all, only a few weeks old. Nonetheless, early adopters to this kind of creative technology gain the upper edge by fine-tuning their skills and affording the trials and errors that tend to go hand in hand with this type of application.