Face it, people don’t want to look at the same old static content on a page anymore. It may get the job done, but your clients won’t remember you. Static, printed brochures and ads have gone out of style and out of time. It is the era for video content now!
As such, there are great ways to market your wares using moving pictures. Among them, perhaps the most useful are the LCD video brochures. Today, we will talk about what is it and how it works.
What is it
An LCD Video brochure is a small LCD screen in a card-like structure, with its own small battery, speaker, and memory chip, that plays a video content when a user opens the card. It is a very creative and modern way of marketing — and it doesn’t cost as much as most people think it might.
Honestly, people understand things much better when they “see” things, instead of just reading about them. That is why the media has become so heavy on visual content today. But people understand and relate to and remember video content even more than still images — and that is where video brochures come in.
How does it work
Taking the marketing world by storm, the LCD video brochures are a very interesting new technologically marvellous way of getting your message out there and making sure it sticks. Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in a text. And that is why you need video brochures for your campaigns.
So, how do these things work? A video brochure is a unique combination of electronic and print media usually in the form of a folding card. It has several parts that combine to provide the user with the best marketing pitch.
The screen
The LCD screen is the most important part of a video brochure that a user sees. They can be of any size from 2.4” to 10” (diagonal), depending upon where you’re embedding the thing. The resolution of these screens can be anything between legacy 320 x 240 pixels to 1024 x 600 pixels. Generally, ~5” HD IPS 16×9 displays with 480p resolutions are most preferred as they fit a very handy card.
The memory
The next most important part of an LCD video brochure is the memory chip, because it holds the actual content that will be played when the user opens up the card. The memory chips are generally microSD variety 128 GB chips, though for large video brochures up to 4 GB memory chips can be used.
Around 30 MB of the card will be blocked by the software that will run the whole system. This means, your marketing videos should be 80 MB or less in size. Good enough, we say, for general usage with good video compression technology (HEVC or x264).
The speaker
There will be a tiny speaker embedded into the card to send your message across and to retain the customer’s attention. These are generally 2 watts in power (1 watt for video business cards) and with 8 ohms of impedance value.
The battery
What electronics can work without power? The battery in the device embedded will generally be rechargeable and relatively small — 300 mAh to 1000 mAh (though large screens may require 1500-2000 mAh cells). Since they are so small and cheap, they don’t hold idle power for more than 4-5 months, and provide only an hour of playtime or so.
The charging port
Accompanying the battery will be a micro USB port that you can use to charge the battery. Nothing fancy here, just a charging port. A light cable should be included with the card.
The controls
This here is where things get complicated. Depending upon the use of the card, the kind of software it uses, the kind of screen it uses, and the content of the brochure, the card may have very different kinds of controls. They are described below:
- No controls — the card will play a single video when opened automatically, and shut up as soon as the video has finished or the card is closed.
- Simple controls — play, pause, and stop buttons. Also, if your video brochure holds more than one clip, there can be previous and next buttons.
- Per-clip controls — (only case of brochures with multiple clips) one button to play each clip of video.
- Touchscreen controls — advanced, full video/audio/image/text controls. For expensive, large screens only.
- Hybrid content controls — provided you have put both videos and images in the memory chip, there will be controls to see the video or see the slideshow, or individual images. Or text. This is used when the light device is intended to be more than just an advertising brochure and deliver technical info as well.
The cover
The card itself that holds the LCD video brochure can be of many shapes and sizes and is itself a marketing option with customized prints and info texts on the backside. Generally, a postcard seized cover is used to hold a 4.5 inch screen (and the rest of the stuff). They need to be sturdy and protective enough to cover the fragile electronics inside. Sometimes an external jacket is also provided.
