How to Make Your Online Video as Interactive as the Web Itself

Pharma ISI Compliance

B2C video marketing of prescription drugs is a multi-billion-dollar sector where creators must convey Important Safety Information (ISI) about risks per FDA mandate, just as print/online ads must do. Interactive platforms contain templates that allow pharma marketers to automatically require the viewer to watch view ISI information (Figure 4, below) for a pre-determined amount of time before a gate is released and they can navigate to other portions of the video.

Figure 4. These two screenshots come from a typical pharmaceutical video marketing campaign with Important Safety Information (ISI) presented for a predetermined amount of time before a gate is released and viewers can navigate to other parts of the video.

The ability to instantly add/modify annotations, branching, links etc. in the entire video catalog saves re-cutting videos for every geography and language.

Employee Communications

HR executives know that employee engagement is key to retaining top-notch talent and delivers a measurable impact on company performance. LinkedIn uses interactive video to help engage employees as a key first step in fostering lasting behavior change. In its award-winning “Breaking Bias” online learning series—part of its Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIBs) program—live-action scenarios make culture-building come alive and build the critical thinking skills required to cultivate a culture of belonging and connect across differences. Branching or “choose your own adventure” options allow participants to go back and remake the decision if they didn’t like what they saw as its consequences played out.

LinkedIn also used HapYak’s interactive video features to help measure behavior change instead of using a dry and boring form to document participant sentiment. LinkedIn placed interactive “Check-In” and “Check out” videos using hotspots at the beginning and the end of the program to ask questions about behaviors that align to program objectives. Participants can use this as a gauge to see how they’ve grown, and the LinkedIn team can track effectiveness of the program to drive behavior change.

Making Video Do More

Professional video remains a relatively expensive to create and deliver, and simple counts of the number of times a video is played on YouTube fall short of the kind of ROI data executives expect to cost-justify a project. With interactive video, just about anyone can make video more like the Web: engaging, clickable, relevant, and data-rich.

See more examples of interactive video in the HapYak gallery.