In my ebook, 60 Seconds:How to tell your company’s story & the brain science that makes it stick, I present some of the latest findings on brain science as they apply to the process of making successful videos. Now some exciting new research is shedding new light on the memory formation process, thanks to medical treatments of epilepsy. The University of California Davis recently reported breakthroughs in our understanding of memory formation.

Arne Ekstrom, assistant professor at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience has been working closely with results from Dr. Nitin Tandon, a neurosurgeon at the Memorial-Hermann hospital in Houston’s University of Texas Medical Center. Dr. Tandon uses electrodes on the surface of the brain to capture electrical patterns when an epileptic patient has seizure. Tandon explained, “Before we can even understand how we would come up with prosthetic devices that we may be able to use to supplant certain brain functions that have been lost, we have to model those and understand those at a computational level.”

That level of detail has brought new insight for Ekstrom and his team at UC Davis. “Previous work has focused on one region of the brain at a time,” said Ekstrom. “Our results show that memory recall involves simultaneous activity across brain regions.”

In a series of experiments, patients navigated a virtual city on a laptop, with Dr. Tandon’s electrodes recording brain patterns. Later the subjects were asked to recall the routes they mapped out. Their memory recall set off waves of patterns across multiple connected brain regions simultaneously, not sequentially. Unexpectedly, memories of places and times were recorded with different frequencies but at the same time. For example, “What shop is next to the donut shop?” generated a separate set of frequencies than “Where was I at 11 a.m.?”

Ekstrom summed up his findings, “Just as cell phones and wireless devices work at different radio frequencies for different information, the brain resonates at different frequencies for spatial and temporal information.”

One of the biggest contributions to this new interpretation of neuroscience data comes from graph theory, a relatively new mathematical field designed for studying how networks operate. “Previously, we didn’t have enough data from different brain regions to use graph theory. This combination of multiple readings during memory retrieval and graph theory is unique,” Ekstrom concluded.

Read more about how the brain works and Dual-coding theory in 60 Seconds, which you can download right now or have delivered to your door in a hard copy. We’ll be watching these developments closely to make sure our videos are the ones people remember.

For example:

• Retail site visitors who view video stay two minutes longer on average and are 64% more likely to purchase than other site visitors. - Comscore, August 2010

• 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in their online purchase decisions. When a video is information-intensive, 66% of consumers will watch the video two or more times. - Internet Retailer 2012

• 59% of senior executives prefer to watch video instead of reading text, if both are available on the same page. 80% of executives are watching more online video today than they were a year ago. – Forbes Insight, December 2010

Recently, we even compiled a list of the 11 Best Explainer Videos of All Time. It’s worth your time to review great examples of explainer videos, but the real question is: what does a video need to do in order to drive message retention and conversion? To fully understand what makes an effective explainer video, you really have to investigate how the brain processes information.

Infographics and great web copy can each be effective in their own way if they stimulate the imagination of the consumer. For greater effectiveness in creating lasting impressions, though, you need video.  Videos can be the best of two worlds. The auditory and the verbal processing area of the brain are activated simultaneously and this results in dual-codes and improved memory, dual-coding theory.

Dual coding theory refers to the simultaneous activation of the visual processing area and the verbal processing areas of the brain. This results in two memory traces being created in the brain.

When a video connects with the consumer along both channels acting in unison, the consumer deeply comprehends the message being delivered. Of course, everyone’s brain operates uniquely, and some people are more visual, some are more auditory learners. Putting dual-coding into practice allows each viewer to be catered to individually, in the most effective manner.

Animated videos have proven effective because they send information to both the visual and verbal processing areas of the brain creating two memory traces and, hence, memories that are stronger and more elaborated. Information presented by videos that utilize the visual and verbal processing areas of the brain are more memorable.

There’s a great deal more you can learn about putting the latest brain research to work for your own explainer video in our ebook “60 Seconds: How to tell your company’s story & the brain science that makes it stick.”

I encourage you to download a soft copy right now or have a hard copy delivered to your door for easier reading. Explainer videos should be a serious investment if you want a serious reward in terms of conversion, so make sure you delivery is as professional as your message.

When you read or listen to something, you’re stimulating the auditory sense. Studies show that if you only stimulate the auditory sense, people retain just 10% of that information. But when you stimulate both the auditory and the visual senses, you end up with a retention rate of 68%. This involves the dual-coding theory.

Dual-coding theory refers to what happens when you simultaneously receive information verbally and visually. Information you receive verbally is coded in one way and information you receive visually is coded in another. So to have both acting together allows for a person to really comprehend what he or she is being shown. If someone is a more visual learner, the images are necessary to help him or her understand information. If someone is a more auditory learner, then the words support the images. With dual coding, everyone is catered to specifically, and in the best way possible.

The verbal information is processed sequentially, so that each word has a representation for a meaning.

When you support the auditory channel with a visual, more details that can be stored away in memory because rather than being sequential, the image is more holistic.

That’s why video, and especially animated video, is so effective. (It’s important to note that having a head speaking to the camera is not necessarily dual coding, because in that case, the video would only be stimulating the auditory sense.)

So you’ve got two memory traces, with two different kinds of coding, which means there are more paths leading to the memory.

Having memories is one thing, but being able to retrieve them is actually the important part. You have to be able to go in and find where the information is stored, so the more entry points, the better.

In a 60-second story, we want to combine audio and visual metaphors to not only reduce the amount of time it takes to tell the story, but to activate more long-term memory. When people retain information longer about who you are, what you do, and what benefits you have to offer, they are more likely to visit your website, click on a link, send you an e-mail, or call you.

In this post we’ll dig into what makes video content valuable to search engines, and how to move beyond indexing videos to getting your videos listed high on SERPs (search engine result pages).

The Problem with Video Indexing

Any SEO worth their salt knows how easy it is to get videos indexed on Google, as well as a host of other related search engines and directories. The real problem is that being indexed on a search engine doesn’t give you any real advantage in search engine rankings. In fact, indexing a video or a series of videos is far from a guarantee that you’ll be listed on SERPs. This is largely because search engines like Google are more concerned with relevance than simply accessing your video from an arbitrary directory.

Getting Your Videos in Google Search Results: Focus on Relevance

We all know that relevance is at the core of the SEO game. If you think about video SEO in the terms of content marketing it starts to make a bit more sense. The content you develop for your audience is largely tied to what they search for online. Video works in a very similar fashion. The most successful videos – from an SEO perspective – are only as successful as their relevance. Optimizing videos for search engines merely means that you are developing a video that is useful to target search engine users.

Cozying up to Search Engines with Relevant Video Content

So we’ve established that relevance is key to effective video SEO, but here’s a little more about how this whole thing works:

Search engines, at their core, are in the business of delivering the most relevant content possible related to a search query. The problem with video content is that search engines like Google view search query relevance as term specific. Most search engines judge relevance primarily on a matching set of search terms. The bulk of these search terms are largely educational. These search queries usually include words like, tutorial, how-to, demo, explanation, etc. For Google, these educational queries are best served through dynamic, relevant video content.

Conclusion

While the idea of creating search-query relevant content isn’t necessarily revolutionary, it’s an important aspect of video SEO. Building your video content strategy must be completely geared towards problem solving. Essentially, video SEOs are in the business of creating valuable video content and gearing that content towards specific questions.

So when it comes to optimizing video content for search engines: focus on relevance and problem solving, and you’ll be in good shape.

Here is the email Justin Baillie from JellyFish passed onto us.

How the Explainer Video Worked for Jellyfish

JellyFish was amazed at the fast results that such a simple video provided. Their $800,000 client had never before met them or heard of the company, and was contacted through a cold calling approach, but after watching the explainer video and processing how effective and easy their services were, it pretty much sold them on the idea.

From the untrained eye, explainer videos seem to be mini-commercials trying to sell a product to the viewer, and while that’s exactly what they’re supposed to do, the success is in the execution. We took JellyFish’s concept, their services and gathered information about what they wanted to get out of the explainer video and started crafting a specialized video unique to them.

Not a format video that we just add details and graphics to. From the information we gathered, we were able to create a video that not only enticed viewers to keep watching, but one that also got results!

JellyFish wanted their concept to be understood. They wanted the viewers to understand how simple using their services could be and how easy applying their services would be. They wanted to emphasize the benefits of using their service over the competitors without sounding cliche and salesy; so, we constructed a script that addressed all of their wants and needs, while implementing some very basic marketing tactics to tie it all together. Just touching a few key points and and making sure the video is engaging and informative is what we believe contributed to their success.

We are extremely pleased for Jellyfish and look forward to making many more businesses a success using our explainer videos.