Virtually everything on the internet is interactive, clickable and connected — except, for some reason, video. It might be the fastest-growing medium on the web, but aside from hovering banner ads, video has remained stubbornly flat.
That’s about to change, Steve Callanan, co-founder and CEO of WIREWAX, told attendees at WIRED Retail 2015 at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in London.
Callanan belives that video will soon be as interactive as the real world — or at least as interactive as shopping in the real world.
“Things in video can be connected,” he said. “Viewers are now consumers.
WIREWAX makes it possible to augment real objects, people or locations with virtual, ‘clickable’ hotspots. The aim, Callanan said, is to connect online video to the real world of people, information and products.
The technology turns a normal video into something that is more reminiscent of an old-fashioned Flash interactive, but with vastly quicker load times, and embedded within a video player that works across mobile, tablet and desktop.
Callanan demoed examples in which Dulux made it possible to select paint shades in rooms on live video, shop for clothes directly from TV shows or adverts by brands including Farfetch and Ted Baker. In the future YouTube ‘influencers’ will feature links embedded on everything from their hair and clothes to their makeup, and every TV show might be ‘shoppable’ right from your TV.
You might instinctively shrink from another technology designed to extend advertising across your online life, but in fact “audiences respond very well to these experiences,” Callanan said. He quoted stats that claimed 67 percent of people will interact with a rich video, with a click-through rate of 16 to 48 percent — far, far in advance of traditional banner advertising.
Consumers still want to see and touch their products before purchasing them, Callanan said — hence why people still visit physical stores. “Consumers want to be sold to,” he said. But the web is still essentially static, with little ability to interact with the things you want before deciding to buy them. Interactive video is designed to bridge that gap.
“This is only the beginning of much wider adoption, I think we’re going to see connected video as part of everyday video consumption.”
“Video is a really powerful vessel, it has the power to transport us to places we would not normally go […] it has the power to elicit emotion like no other medium.”
In the future all video will be connected, shoppable and intelligent, with built-in facial and product recognition, Callanan claimed. The idea will be to turn video into a transparent portal to all forms of commerce, in a way that is welcomed and not invasive.
“An entire generation is coming up that has only known video on a very interactive device,” Callanan said. “These are the consumers of the future.”
