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Let’s face it – most marketing and informational videos suck. Big time. From an SEO point of view they may be great to spam backlinks from the likes of YouTube and tons of other overhyped “Web 2.0″ platforms, but as for actually watching all the drivel being churned out by the ton these days – no thanks!

Seems that every man and his dog in Internet Marketing (IM) are into video production now: no major product launch without a slew or videos being rolled out to promote what – you guessed it: further videos explaining this, that and the other. And let’s not forget the bonuses: yet another boatload of videos about this, that and the other. And the upsell One Time Offers: yippie, even more videos! And the “forced continuity” membership sites – yep, lots of vids being offered there, too.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m anything but a video basher per se. In fact, videos can be fantastic tools of education, e.g. for demonstrating how to use a fairly complex piece of software or to illustrate some sophisticated workflow – this sure beats the crap out of having to plod through fifty pages of badly written manuals full of grammatical and spelling mistakes. doing their best to avoid explaining the very same thing – you know, the stuff so many people mistake for an ebook (aka “information product”) these days.

Granted that in these times of collective ADS it’s too darn easy to get blinded by greed and ignore the issue of quality i.e. value. This is akin to getting traffic from social network sites (SNS) – unless your business models fits their demographics to a dot, chances are it’ll never convert or even make you enough money to merely break even.

Marketing how-to videos (and that’s our concern here) is quite similar in more respects than allow for comfort: Unless your clientele is utterly unsophisticated and inexperienced (such as – assumedly – those droves of Internet Marketing wannabes and newbies presently hitting the Net – i.e. the typical guru fodder), you’d better devote some attention, technology, expertise and human resources to making a good job of it. Because if you don’t, guess how long you’ll be able to sustain your business model if all it really screams is “shoddy crap!”, once the big boys and the pros get serious about coming on board…

Now while there are those who would claim that hemming and hawing your way through endless minutes of turgid text will lend your stuff that little extra bit of “real life” flavor, this one grumpy critic here will simply advise you to forget it, ok? For what it’s worth, that is.

It always beats me where those countless “For-only-$97-I’ll-reveal-to-YOU-for-the-FIRST-TIME-EVER-how-I-made-a-million-bucks-overnight-with-a-simple-Clickbank-trick”-retards derive their unlimited chutzpah from: making them claim even more of our attention (i.e. time) by throwing up some vids that can’t even follow a logical script. Vids that are conspicuous only by their dire lack of professional recording quality, and, worse, even the most perfunctory preparation.

Case in point: the number of failed attempts to demonstrate even the most basic features of some app they are flogging that just wouldn’t pan out are legion. While I refuse to name any specific products here (which I may, however, do at some later point in a different, more appropriate environment), here’s a typical white label scenario (and I’ve sat through countless of these in the course of project research):

So let me, um, just show you, um, how very easy it is to use this, um, software to find tons of money pulling, um, keywords, um. Simply type in your keyword here [types in keyword, gets it all wrong, retypes it - another typo, another merry-go-round of typing...], um, yes, hit the Enter key [waits for results to appear - unfortunately, said "results" are nothing but a popup window saying "No results matching your query found"], um, very sorry about that, seems this wasn’t a good example after all, um, so let’s type in “dog training” instead [gets it right after another three tries, when some results do begin to appear], ah, here we are. Now…[rep. ad lib....]

You would have thought that someone trying to sell us on the Secret Map to Virtual Treasure Island, the Midas touch and the Golden Fleece combined, claiming to make a seven figure income at only four hours of work a week or less would be well stuffed enough to afford a decent, professionally made vid production, not? No such luck. (Compare this with the super quality – and hilariously funny – stuff featured on sites like Despair to see the difference.)

Guys – even the free trial version of Camtasia which you seem to be using half the time anyway offers what’s called “editing”. Ever heard of it? Or guessed what it may actually be for? Ah, didn’t think so…

And neither, it seems, are you familiar with the concept that it may actually constitute an insult (you read right: a blatant i-n-s-u-l-t) to all your viewers (leads, prospects and buyers alike) forcing them to waste their time on your drivel simply because you can’t be assed to do your most fundamental homework.

I mean, if you write up some text, e.g. a press release or a sales letter, you’ll generally at least run it through a spell checker before going public. So what makes you think you can forego this type of remediation process when producing a video?

It’s definitely time for some of the super duper marketing research agencies to come up with a nice horrifying quote stating how many billions of dollars of productive time are annually being wasted on viewing badly made, repetitive, redundant and essentially pointless vids. The economic damage this causes must be devastating. So who will pick up the tab? Maybe a universal video tax would help? (Hardly, I know – I mean, it’s not as if those slick promo vids produced by corporations with entirely too deep pockets are of any greater redeeming value.)

Again: Do deploy well made videos where they will actually help improve user experience. If used with discretion and produced meticulously, they’re great didactic instruments of illustration, period.

But if you’re still blindly following those dumbasses who keep clamoring that “a picture is worth a thousand words”, go ahead and try conveying even the most everyday mundane concepts such as “love”, “hate”, “truth”, “scam”, or even “ROI” and “product launch” in pix. (Hold it, I implore you: pleeeeeze don’t! Ever!)

If you’re one of the culprits who have been pumping and pimping the Internet community with these endless time wasters, read these words aloud several times very slowly:

Just because you can’t write doesn’t mean you won’t suck on a video!

Because that’s actually what most of these vidiots seem to thrive on – the (entirely mistaken) conceit that if you can’t say it writing, you’ve still got plenty of scope pestering and dumbing us down with your brain dead umms.

But guess what: The days of videocracy are numbered, that’s for sure. Web video’s rapidly beginning to lose its novelty cachet and so will that ephemeral We-know-no-better bonus you’re relentlessly leeching.

Nor am I entirely alone in seeing it this way (if you’ll excuse the obvious pun). To give but a single example – recently, a commentator on Eric Holmlund’s blog put it this way:

At 2008.12.10 10:50, Kenneth Washington http://www.listvalet.com/ said:
I’m sick of sitting in front of my monitor, watching someone who doesn’t speak English well try to explain to me how to do things. Too many marketers rely solely on video to teach. That’s got to stop. If you’re going to release a product of this magnitude, please put your teachings down in written word.

And claiming that “the market demands it” is about the dumbest excuse you can concoct. So what kind of “market” are you catering to – illiterates? Have you ever tried looking something up in a 10 hour collection of digital videos? So how useful is that?

At the very least: if you’re really as filthy rich as you claim to be, revealing all your “ultra secret” money making IM strategies out of the goodness of your heart, merely because you “want to give back” (oh yeah, fat chance we’ll buy into that, bozo – why not look up “hypocrisy” in Wikipedia unless that prime resource of modern day intellectuality isn’t way beyond you as well), next time you hit my eyeballs, the first thing I’ll check out is whether you’re either too strapped for cash or plain too stingy to deliver proper transcripts along with your vids. Giving people a choice, you know. (By the way, you can actually outsource those for a song, in case you can’t even afford some decently paid native speakers…)

And if you don’t, just get out of my life, will you? A man’s got work to do, most of which involves reading and writing, not viewing another ugly hemming mug going all frantic commenting some irrelevant PowerPoint slides and wasting half an hour’s rambling on some explanation that would just as easily fit on half a page of paper I can ingest in a minute or less.

Like it or not, time is still money, you know? So if you set out to thoughtlessly waste mine, don’t expect me to throw even more of the same at you in future.

P.S.: If you feel you must go for producing some videos anyway because everyone keeps telling you you should, please feel properly discouraged now!

P.P.S.: If feeling properly discouraged regrettably still won’t make you change your mind, at any rate let some people who know their trade show you how to do it. Like in these videos (ha!) here and here. There may be better and more comprehensive courses, I don’t know, but this is one resource I’ve recently come across and do happen to find recommendable. And yes, it’s free.

P.P.P.S.: In spite of what many self-declared video “gurus” may claim, audio tracks and podcasts are an entirely different animal – and much less of a time waster if only because you can listen to them while driving or pursuing some other mentally less sophisticated activity. They’re just as popular if not more so and may actually make you look much more like a pro than some sloppy vid you may cook up. For a pretty good free webinar on the topic that was recently conducted by Jim Edwards and Mike Stewart  try here . (Site says it will be pulled soon, so hurry up. And yes, of course it’s followed up by a sales pitch – I mean, how “free” is “free” these days anyway? But it does offer excellent advice as far as primers go.)

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