Whiteboard Animation Videos: An Elevator Pitch on Steroids

The Power of Whiteboard Animation Videos

By Justin | blog | 0 comment | 28 April, 2015 | 0

See How Whiteboard Animations Can Simplify Your Story Today

Whiteboard animations are the intersection of words and video, offering the best of both worlds: the detail and clarity of copy with the magnetism and power of video. Many businesses are finding whiteboard animations to be an incredibly effective, simple, and shareable way to market their brand and inform their customers. Still many in the marketing industry have yet to even explore it as an option—so together we’ll ask the questions, What is whiteboard animation and Do whiteboard animations really work?

The answers just may amaze you.

There’s something remarkably assuring about an idea that is so simple, it can be drawn right before your eyes. Peter Lynch, one of the most successful and renowned investors who ever lived, put the idea succinctly: “Never invest in any plan you can’t illustrate with a crayon.” If an idea is good, worth knowing, worth buying, it should be easy to illustrate simply.

But not all great ideas are all that simple, especially if you’re a company like, say, UPS, whose mission is to handle some of the most complex logistical challenges in business. As it turns out, their single most effective marketing tactic came in the form of their whiteboard campaign. Remember the UPS whiteboard guy? [1] The casual viewer was wowed by his ability to draw, erase, and modify pictures on a whiteboard while talking as relaxed and casually as if he were twiddling his thumbs.

But to the marketer, it wasn’t the long-haired fellow’s ability to draw nimbly that was so impressive, but rather his ability to transform seemingly complex (and boring) concepts into captivating drawings that were as easy to understand as they were interesting.

That’s because a whiteboard presentation has to be as simple as the medium is. A board, a marker, a narrator, an artist. Those simple elements work together to communicate great ideas, great stories, and great products. A Whiteboard presentation is like an elevator pitch on steroids. It gets a big idea across in a small amount of time, and the drawings grab people’s attention.

Not everyone has a UPS guy prototype at their disposal to stand in front of a camera and record dynamic presentations, however, so we need the miracle of technology a bit more modern than dry-erase markers to help us out. Through some combination of art, stop-motion video, or software that can recreate the effect, presenters can create whiteboard animations that render the same effect as a live whiteboard presentation.

One of the most well known examples is the recent work of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) out of Britain. Their series of whiteboard animation videos, RSA Animates, were an Internet phenomenon that took YouTube by storm, drawing millions of views. [2] The videos expressed in-depth, complex political and social commentary in a way that captured viewers’ attention like no amount of copy could ever do alone.

When you consider the power and reach of those examples, it’s easy to see how whiteboard animations could do an excellent job communicating your stories, your products, and your information to your customers in a way they would love and share. (Keep in mind, over one billion videos are watched on Facebook every single day.) What’s not so easy is to imagine how to go about doing it.

That’s where IGW (Infographic World) comes in. We turn our client’s most powerful data (even the most complex) into visually stunning yet powerfully simple whiteboard animation video every day. Here are a few samples of our work: