Here’s an extract from my interview at Streaming Media West about online video. September 24, 2008.
Alison van Diggelen: What is it about online video that’s making it so attractive these days? […] Can you expand a little bit on that and the kind of feedback you are getting from your customers?
Alison Jeske from drugstore.com: Definitely when people see products in action they get very excited about it. In the prestige beauty world we get to see exciting new designers like Vena Cava showcased in fashion week, we get to see Oscar Blandi doing “How can I get that second day hair look”, we have Tina Turnbow (our fabulous make-up artist that we work with) showing people how to take a day look to a night look. Those things on the prestige beauty site get our customers really excited. On the drugstore.com side, it’s very new for us. We have just been introducing some funnier videos showcasing toys and games for the holiday, so we’re definitely getting some wordings and interesting feedback from our customers on the drugstore.com side.
Alison: So you’re getting a lot of feedback from your customers?
AJ: It’s early launch, early indications are real positive but on the drugstore.com we’ve had videos for about 2 weeks now, and it’s still real early. We’re measuring impressions we’re getting from the customers and definitely some of the feedback. It’s early to tell on order impact and conversion but it looks promising.
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Alison:That’s very exciting. Can you give an idea for how long these video clips are? Are we talking like 30 seconds, or longer than that? AJ: Typically longer than that. We try to keep our clips to around 1 to 2 minutes but some of the ones we have from Fashion Week on our Beauty.com site can go between 3 and 4 minutes. You want it to be interesting enough to tell someone a story but not too long to where we lose people. So we try to balance that and that’s something we’re testing. |
Alison: Do you feel you’re really on the cutting-edge of this, taking videos to the market?
AJ: I think we’re definitely in the early adopters – I think there is a lot of people doing it really well out there – eBags is a great example, REI is doing video. The real mavericks in this that have doing it for quite a while are QVC and the Home Shopping Network , they really kind of started translating their TV shows into the different medium. We’re excited to see where this can take us.
Alison: What are your expectations for this? Do you see being your main focus getting video streaming online?
AJ: We see this as mandatory going forward. Customers are demanding it, and we want to offer all the different ways to help a customer make a choice about a product that they want. We see this as a requirement to stay in the game.
Alison: What key message are you bringing today to the Video Commerce panel (you have a panel of four talking about the big picture)?
AJ: I think some of the key messages are that we still need to measure success. We’re excited about this opportunity but we still have to measure, and we’re still near the early stages. The other thing about video is that it’s that next evolution of going from product reviews where customers can describe right how they feel about a certain product and why they like it. Video brings reviews up to another level where we’re getting to the next evolution in the product life-cycle.
To find out more about the conference, and listen to the Fresh Dialogues interview click here
