Credibility and the Web - What is Video's Influence?

Well, I was discussing David Danielson of Stanford University and his upcoming talk on "web credibility" with the VP Marketing / Branding of a client company. Basically, web credibility has to do with how information is arranged on a site to make it "trusted" to the customer - something both good security and marketing people know implicitly. So what did a hot-shot marketing guy say about an academic's work on this topic? Plenty.

He noted that those studies on credibility did not properly address Internet video commercials and rapid turnover branded video, yet they're finding a dramatic change in the last two years with their 18-34 age demographic in view / use of video for the buying decision.

I actually run the datacenter that monitors the high-level metadata that is incorporated in our client's videos (plus, I did a little marketing myself in the old days), and we're in a novel area, so what he's saying doesn't surprise me. However, it seems to me I'm seeing the same credibility so to speak of customers displayed - not on the basis on web / site design, but on the basis of the actual video as compared to TV commercials - and the better produced, tighter focus, the better the customer likes it.

It's different when a marketing exec can directly handle hundreds of turns in days with responses measured in Internet video (as compared to working indirectly one turn in a months-long process through a production house in traditional commercial tuning), so perhaps what I'm seeing is different than TV in the sense that it's easy to follow / lead the mood on a daily basis when you tune / create a commercial that day. But the customers also seem very saavy about Internet movies - it's not like watching TV - shorter, faster, nolinear. But they get the message nonetheless.

I was an analyst before a technologist, so I understood Mr. Marketing's issues and thought them of merit. So I wish those credibility studies like at Stanford would start to examine the comparative of Internet commercials versus traditional TV commercials for credibility which Mr. Marketing thought made the buying decision. But we'll probably only see something on this long after it is done. After all, most academic studies on the Internet nowadays seem more history lessons than cutting-edge work. If you want that, work for an Internet startup.