We had a request last week from a leading advertising agency to help them to create an email campaign using an embedded video file.
We were told that their original supplier had let them down and we were asked to serve out a streaming video file to an email client. We decided to:
- create a flash movie and stream it to the email client
- back this up with a link (animated gif) to a web page for those e-mail clients that wouldn’t be able to see the video.
We were told that there were ways to sniff out whether an email client could play the embedded video. Can anyone help us with this and are there any better ways of achieving the required end result?
4 Comments
This is a tough one and there is probably a solution but the key will be the fall backs for people who can’t view the video within the email.
The only sensible solutions to this that I can see are to either a) preceed your initial target mailing with a “sensor” email, or b) simply attenuate your mailing list over time by tracking those users who are able to successfully stream the video, or ideally both.
The “sensor” email approach might work in the same manner as the transparent gif techinique for tracking open rates. You would send an initial “sensor” email out to your audience, devoting a tiny portion of the screen (say 1px by 1px) to an “invisible” video, e.g. a white movie playing on white background. The movie would be streamed from a uniquely trackable URL so that each user who can play the movie can be identified.
This would feed back to the underlying client list to identify who should be sent the video and who shouldn’t. Then next time round when you send out the real video mailer, you have much more chance of delivering the correct content to the relevant users.
You would then continue to use this method to attenuate the email list over time.
As far as a sniffer goes, I very much doubt this is possible other than by the kind of approach I just described. In order for something to be sent by email to identify whether or not a user can display video, it would need the same kind of execution access that the video itself needs, and would consequetly be just as prone to being blocked etc as the videos are. You would actually be using the sniffer to do exactly as I have already described – infer those that can’t play movies because no response is sent back by the siffer.
Of course the problem with everything I said so far is the multi-step approach – sending out testers first to determine user demographics and success rates before actually targeting those users who you know can view videos. The holy grail is obviously to be able to send out a single email crafted in such a way that users who can see video do, and users who can’t get some kind of graceful degradation.
We’re pretty much there with our current approach utilising noembed/noobject tags plus the link to the on-line version of the email. Anything cleverer than that would more than likely be blocked by the same firewalls that block the video.
I won’t hold my breath on this one until all internet terrorists have been rounded up and shot and we can then turn off our paranoid firewalls and send anything feely over email without fear of contracting a virus.
Or until everyone is using Macs.
Wichever happens sooner.
I vote for the first option
Hi Bill,
I have the same issue here in Paris. Did you find a solution ? If so, I would be pleased if you could me send an email. And I’d be glad to help if you ever need something here in France, or if you ave an isuue related to mobile marketing.
Best Regards
Mehdi
I once received an email to my yahoo account and it actually played video in the body of the email. It was a Hahn Beer commerical. You had to roll over it in order for it to play. Normally yahoo sniffs it out though. I wish I still had that email.