Vendor Profile – Executive Communication Technology

From the archives of The Influential Executive, 11/2008

How (and why) to make your leader a โ€˜virtual spokespersonโ€™

iSpeakVideo is one of a number of vendors that can transform your executives into walking, talking web site hosts.

Youโ€™ve seen a โ€œvirtual spokesperson.โ€
You go to a website and after a second or two, a pretty woman or a natty man pops up on the screen. โ€œHi. Welcome to XYZ Inc. Iโ€™m glad youโ€™re here. Let me show you around our site โ€ฆ.โ€
And youโ€™ve probably thought: annoying, or cheesy, or both. But the executive communication pro inside you thinks: It has potential.
Erik Kretschmar is the co-founder and business development VP of a company that makes these virtual spokespeople work via โ€œvideo walk-onโ€ technology. He blames the tackiness of some virtual spokespeople to amateurish vendors, unappealing actors or lousy video scriptsโ€”pitfalls he says his firm helps its clients avoid.
Though the lionโ€™s share of iSpeakVideoโ€™s work does involve actors and not real executives (the company has a stable of actors to choose from), the firm is also set up to support executives who want to hawk a new product on a website, introduce analysts or shareholders to an investor relations page, put a face on an FAQ page, or welcome new hires to an intranet employee-orientation site.
Hereโ€™s how such an experiment would work, say for one 30-second video walk-on:
Youโ€™d write a script for the executiveโ€”though iSpeakVideo people would look it over and make suggestions if itโ€™s too long or too short or otherwise not suited for video walk-on. Then the executive either flies to one of iSpeakVideoโ€™s studios, in New York and Florida, or goes to one of iSpeakVideoโ€™s local affiliate studios, where he or she reads his or her spiel from a teleprompter, in front of a green screen.
The vendor then creates a sample video for the client to see; once approved, the virtual spokesperson is walking and talking all over the websiteโ€”all in a matter of weeks, and for about $700.
Kretschmar acknowledges that using actual executives or employees for video walk-ons brings an element of risk into the pictures. โ€œSome of the best videos and some of the worst videos weโ€™ve done have involved real people,โ€ he says.
If you think one or more of your executives could warm up part of the corporate Website or the intranet, give Kretschmar a shout at [email protected].
And weโ€™d love to hear from readers who have hadโ€”or who do haveโ€”interesting experiences, good, bad or ugly, with walk-on videos. Write to [email protected].

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