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Recent Examples Of Brands Using Annotated Interactive Video On YouTube

As we’ve discussed in the past, YouTube’s Annotation feature allows you to turn normal YouTube videos Interactive to create Choose Your Own Adventure Stories (CYOA), Trivia Games, and so on.  Over the last few months, we’ve seen major brands starting to embrace the CYOA format so we felt it might be worth listing a few recent efforts that are using annotated interactive video to great effect.  We’ve also listed one effort that needs some work.

In no particular order…

The U.K. Knife Adventure

Created as a PSA to educated youths on the dangers of knife crime in the U.K., this CYOA campaign uses Annotations to create an interactive experience showing the results of different paths you choose.  The key to this campaign working is the well done production values that make the experience very life-like.

Sony Ericsson – W995 Interactive Product Demonstration

This interactive CYOA product demonstration for the W995 is in German but it’s well produced and it’s very clear that it was created specifically for YouTube and Annotation interactivity.

Universal – Don’t Miss A Beat II Music Trivia Challenge

Using annotations on videos allows for interactive programs like Music Trivia Challenges and Universal has done a great job promoting their artists’ videos using this particular method.  You can view the Don’t Miss A Beat II Music Video Challenge on Universal / Interscope’s Main YouTube Page.

Norton Antivirus

I’m including this example in the hopes of pointing out a few things that you need to be careful of when producing Annotated Interactive Video.  For starters, you should allow enough time for the YouTube consumer to realize that they are in fact being asked to click on the video to choose a path.  It’s critical that you highlight your annotations and keep the annotations present for at least 12-15 seconds.  This will give your end viewer enough time (hopefully) to figure out that they should click on the video.  The other thing I wanted to point out about this video is that it feels as if it was shot for broadcast and then as an afterthought, put on YouTube with annotations.  It doesn’t have the feel of an actual CYOA video but at least the effort is there.  You can view the CYOA videos on Norton’s YouTube Page.

So You Want To Create A Choose Your Own Adventure Interactive Video…

CYOA (Choose Your Own Adventure) Interactive Videos are continuing to become the go-to execution when brands and agencies are trying to create more consumer engagement for their online video executions and/or campaigns.  There was a great recent effort out of the U.K. called Knife Crime where it was used as an educational vehicle to show the result of making a wrong (and life altering) decision.  You can also check out many other great examples of CYOA video on a blog post we did a few months ago called The Best Examples Of Choose Your Own Adventure Interactive Video.

We’ve been discussing doing a very in-depth blog post on our experience to date with multiple CYOA executions and I think that post will be very soon.  However, I did want to jump start things by including a pretty cool article and graphic from Flowingdata.  As you can see from the flowchart below, it’s critical in any CYOA video that you’re flowcharting out all the possible directions and results at the start of your video.  Granted most CYOA executions so far are much more simplified and often only branch out into 3-4 overall directions, but as this area of Interactive Video matures, I do think you’ll start to see much more in-depth Interactive Adventures that stay true to their current “Choose Your Own Adventure” name…