1. Pooyan Amiri
Unit 4, 5 and 62 Assignment 1
Task 1 – Proposal
I have been asked to produce a promotional video for a department within my college. The first
work that I’ve been asked to do is to produce a proposal on how digital video technology could be
used to help promote and advertise the college promotional video required for me to produce.
Advertising
Video advertisement has been tremendously growing over the past couple of years; studies have
continued to show how people consume more and more contents such as videos and other forms of
media when online.Therefore, it would make sense to birth into the online video promotion scene
more and use the internet as a promotional tool. Video advertising is not only more effective and
one of the easiest methods to market, but may also end up costing you less money in the long run.
Just like any other sort of advertising methods, you will need to reach your target audience with
online video advertisement. In this case, it is students/parents looking for colleges and education
related searches/websites. This brings us to the next topic at hand, which are professional
advertising agencies that advertise online for you, Such as Google or Microsoft. The amazing feature
about using professional services is that they’ll know where to advertise your video in order to reach
your target audience by advertising on the right websites. The costs for video advertising using
advertising agencies depends on how long your videos is, what type of websites it is used on, and
how often you want it to be used.
Viral Marketing
Viral marketing in brief is a marketing technique that encourages people to pass along and share a
marketing message, in order to actually make the product/advertisement go viral across the internet
(have a large amount of views). Viral marketing revolves around the concept that an idea can go viral
just by a number of people sharing it at first, and then if that idea has a high pass-along from person
to person then that idea can go viral. Viral marketing works kind of like a snowball effect and if the
pass-along rate slows down then the overall growth will quickly die down. There are two different
types of viral marketing; viral memes and viral platforms. Viral memes are advertisements that get
spread across the internet because they capture the viewer’s interest; they have something unique
to them that make them stand out, something that makes the viewer smile. Viral platforms on the
other hand are unique as in the marketing is the product; they have their own individual platforms,
think websites like Hotmail, PayPal, YouTube, Facebook. Viral platforms work in a way that if more
1

2. Pooyan Amiri
people use them, the more people see them. A major difference between viral memes and viral
platforms is that when viral platforms get more and more popular, the functionality of the website
increases as well. Therefore, since the utility of the website increases as more people join in on the
website, the growth leads to staying power. This growth effect creates a perfect viral approach and
provides long term utility and fast adoption.
Examples for viral memes:
Microsoft unveils new look (2, 443,501 Million views on YouTube) –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzkZWvAJUr0&feature=player_embedded
M&M super bowl commercial (22,112,288 Million views on YouTube) –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q33drZUXSzY
Examples for viral platforms:
http://www.hotmail.com
http://paypal.com
Short Films
When film production was originally starting up, all films were short. The audience was not
particularly really bothered or aware of this as they were stunned at man’s latest technological
achievement. The early motion pictures of technology used to be usually 40 minutes or less.
However, in today’s age and time short films still have a purpose and a category of their own. For
instance, Pixar has screened a short along each of its feature films during its initial theatrical run
since 1995. Disney has also produced animated shorts since 2007 with a series of live action ones
featuring The Muppets for viewing on YouTube as viral videos to promote the 2011 movie of the
same name. Short films are ideal to be used for advertising campaigns and are perfect for viral
marketing due to the clip being short so therefore grabbing the short attention span of internet
viewers but at the same time long enough to tell a story and produce a gimmick that could catch
along and make the video go viral.
2

3. Pooyan Amiri
Technology:
Digital Video Capture
Video’s captured that is done by a video camera or a DVD Player and the signal of the video
produced by these devices have an analog video signal. Digital video capture is the process of
converting that analog video signal into a digital video. The resulting digital data are computer files
referred to as a digital video stream, or more often, simply video stream. This is different
fromscreencasting, in which previously digitized video is captured while displayed on a digital
monitor.
Lossy and Loseless compression
Lossless compression, as the name implies, means that after compressing the video, and then
decompressing it, you wind up with the exact same data as you put in. This is comparable to
something like ZIP or RAR. Lossless has the advantage that no matter how many times you compress
it, you still haven't lost any video data. The bad part is that most often you don't save nearly as much
space as you would with other lossy compression algorithms. There are many different lossless
codecs these days.
Lossy compression is the form of video compression most people are familiar with. 95% of all video
codecs out there are lossy, meaning that when you compress the video and then decompress it, you
do not get back what you put it. Now, this isn't as bad as it may sound. Obviously if you're
compressing something like a text document, you don't want to lose any of the data, but with
something like a picture, even if a few bits and pieces aren't quite right, you can still make out the
generally gist of the image.
Different video file formats
File extensions- Videos are designed, created and finally stored by using many different file
types and extensions. A few common video file types with their extensions are:
3

4. Pooyan Amiri
File File type Description
Extension
.avi audio video The AVI format stores data that can be encoded in a number of different
interleave codec’s and can contain both audio and video data. The AVI format usually
uses less compression than some similar formats and is a very popular
format amongst internet users.
.swf SWF An Adobe Flash file format used for multimedia, vector graphics and Action
Script. It originates from FutureWave Software, and then transferred to
Macromedia. SWF files contain animations or applets of varying degrees of
interactivity and function.
.mov Movie The QuickTime format was developed by Apple and is a very common one.
It is often used on the internet, and for saving movie and video files.
.mp4 MPEG-4 This format is mostly used to store audio and visual streams online, most
commonly those defined by MPEG. It Expands MPEG-1 to support
video/audio "objects", 3D content, low bit rate encoding and support for
Digital Rights Management.
.wmv Windows It was originally designed for internet streaming applications, and can now
Media File cater to more specialized content. Windows Media is a common format on
Format the Internet, but Windows Media movies cannot be played on non-
Windows computer without an extra (free) component installed.
4

5. Pooyan Amiri
Media Players
Flash: The Adobe Flash Player is made by Macromedia, it is
essential to run any sort of .swf files in a web browser. It is
basically a flash player that plays the files that are created by
flash. The Adobe flash player is free of charge and is a cross-
platform browser plug-in.
QuickTime: QuickTime can play a different variety of formats
such as; digital video, media clips, animation, text, music and etc.
It is available for Mac and Windows operating systems. Quick
time is produced and distributed by Apple.
Windows Media Player:Produced by Microsoft to originally
support .wmv files but then later was mass produced for
windows and is available for free with every copy of windows.
It is available only for Windows OS but can be used on Mac OS
with free plugins that are available.
5