Preview – Death of the Demo: Rise of Branded Tutorial

Joshua Rosenbaum, creator of the panel “Death of the Demo; Rise of Branded Tutorial,” will discuss how the 40-minute-long video demo has come and gone, and that short, interesting video tutorials keep the “socially networked audience” entertained and coming back for more short bursts of information. Rosenbaum describes the Web as a “short-attention-span theater” where people go to get the information they seek in short bits of time. In terms of implementing the branded tutorial, he says that in his case, with his company, MailChimp.com, that the mantra from the beginning was “Don’t make it boring!” The decisions that MailChimp made to create unique, short branded tutorials didn’t take rocket science but came from what the employees themselves would be willing to sit through. He says, “It makes sense to keep these things as brief as possible so that people don’t mind watching them and absorbing knowledge in small bites.”

So what does “branded” mean? What exactly is a “branded tutorial?” Rosenbaum esplains by saying that the tutorial videos “…are ‘branded’ by carrying through the humor and human-ness that characterizes the MailChimp experience. It’s not that we put any overt messaging or taglines all over them, just a tag at the end really, but it is the voice and style of the tutorials that make them ‘branded’ in our case.”

Rosenbaum says that so many bad videos are produced and put on the Web and hopes that by giving his panel more people will create better videos and better content. The web is “currently polluted with hours and hours of bad corporate video detritus (“corporus vidius detriticus” in Latin), and that is harming the minds and eyeballs of oh so many people who swim and feed in that ocean every day.”

Rosenbaum considers himself to be an environmentalist and truly wants to make the Internet a better place for people to get valuable content. He says that if he can “change ONE mind, affect ONE small business or inspire ONE VP of Marketing to choose substance, HUMANITY no less, over the alternative”, then he can feel like he has done something to try and make the Internet environment a better place.

He ends with this final comment: “Join me on this quest and we can together make this world a better place for our partially robotic grandchildren. Think of the partially robotic grandchildren…”

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