Friday, March 29, 2024 | Ramadan 18, 1445 H
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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

The importance of context in today’s businesses

Stefano Virgilli
Stefano Virgilli
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Stefano Virgilli  -


stefano@virgilli.com -


Recently I was leading a revamping exercise for a company that was operating in Asia for the past 10 years.


Although the company was still profitable at the time I was contacted for the project, it had somehow reached a plateau level over the past 3 years.


I was hired to bring numbers up and among the various assessment criteria, I was tasked to bring up the reach and the engagement towards existing media tools, such as videos and digital content.


I assessed the business over three weeks and soon after begun implementing my recommendations. One of which was to entirely redesign the websites and to re-engineer the navigation. The task took me a good 2 months, given the fact that the amount of content built in a decade reached well over 600 pages.


One of the metrics assessed was a true revelation, because against all odds, the numbers grew phenomenally beyond expectations. I then connected dots between the results obtained and other similar circumstances where comparable actions can be taken in other business situations.


The former websites was featuring an engaging animated presentation featuring an automatically played video at the very top of the landing. After an initial scrolling action, a static image of a playable video over a white background dominated the entirety of the screen, with an oversized thumbnail of the Youtube poster frame. Then the website featured a series of navigation steps in storytelling mode, followed by other modules until the footer.


I planned to move that Youtube video further down in the page. I also made it much smaller. Instead of 100 per cent width of the page, it was shrank down to 30 per cent. Next to it I placed 2 more videos sized 15 per cent each. Lastly I changed the background to black for the 3 items and placed the thumbnails into colourful frames, in line with the overall colours of the website. Lastly, I added a title above the video and a small description below the video, stating the duration and the source (ie Youtube).


What would be the chances of a video, 3 times smaller, 5 times further down in a web page, placed on a black background to increase the number of views? If we go by the book, close to zero chances. But against all odds, the video scored an incredible increase of 500 per cent in daily views.


At the moment when I took the decision to move the video, I did not immediately thought of doing so with the intention of specifically increasing viewership, but I just relocated and re-sized it because I thought it just looked better that way. With hindsight, I started thinking what made the number of views jump so high in such a short period of time. The more I applied reasoning power to the results, the more I came to draw conclusions.


I started from the end. Having a black background gave the video a cinematographic context. It was no longer perceived as a “regular banner”, but it was seen as an actual playable video.


Next adding a colourful frame with title and a description stating the video length, gave the viewers the assurance that they would have watched a 3 minutes video. No surprises. No long boring narration of the history of the company. Simply a quick glance at what the company does.


Lastly, associating two more videos to the first one, although smaller, contextualised the first video into a cluster of other similar content. Hence it made it more likely to be played, as recognised as an actual video, not as an ad banner. The herd approach.


It was time for me to draw a final conclusion and I summarised it as: Contextualisation.


Each of the steps above made the video feel and look more like a video. The same can be done in many other aspects of visual communication and in business. I thought that a boot selling jewels at an ice cream conference, although would sound like the outstanding piece in the lot, would probably look and feel odd or awkward.


Conformity is sometimes the best way to gain trust from the audience. Although conformity brings us to deal with competition. But at least we would be perceived as part of the same lot.


For instance, the two other videos next to the main one, did not increase their own visibility compared to earlier on. First of all neither of the two were available in the previous version of the website, so no increment meant nothing much overall. Secondly they were placed there just to inform users that the first — more predominant — video was now the “super star” to click on.


It worked like marvel.


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