This year’s edition of the Tory’s M&A Trends publication and microsite featured something new for the firm: an animated video summary, featuring whiteboard-style animations set to the voice of M&A Practice Co-Leader Matthew Cockburn.
The online presentation of 2011 M&A Trends is clean and simple, but with fewer video offerings than last year. The publication is popular with media and the firm’s clients, so we asked Chief Marketing Officer Stuart Wood to tell us a bit about the rationale behind how the firm presents the information online.
Why does this particular publication get such a big online push from Torys? What does it represent for your online brand?
For the past few years, Torys’ M&A Trends has been our most popular publication. It gets a great response from our clients, many of whom call or email us with comments or questions, both about the content and the microsite. So we really listen to those comments and each year we try to explore new ways to engage our clients online. It’s a lot of work for the lawyers involved to put together the report, so we try to do our part to back that up with an interesting presentation of the information. We believe it’s a publication that showcases the range and expertise of Torys’ M&A lawyers, and highlighting that content is the focus of all of our online marketing efforts.
How much traffic has the 2011 version received so far? How does that compare to the 2010 version?
The number of downloads is up in 2011, though it’s too early to tell how the final numbers will compare to last year, as the microsite receives considerable traffic through February. We tried a new idea this year – an illustrated introduction video, which was narrated by Matt Cockburn and the number of views, both on the microsite and on our YouTube channel, is way up.
The site’s layout and design is essentially the same as it was last year. Was this a specific decision, or one made in the name of time and/or resources?
We were happy with the functionality of the microsite design and it received positive feedback from our clients last year. Ultimately, we want the Trends themselves to be the focus, with the design, illustrations and videos used only to highlight the content.
We love the whiteboard cartoon video — a change from last year’s “talking head” format for the video content. Why did you decide to make this change?
Thanks! We’ve produced video podcasts featuring our lawyers since 2006 and created a large set of lawyer videos for last year’s Trends microsite. However, this year we wanted to do something different. The whiteboard-look video allows us to bring the content to life a little bit. We thought it would be entertaining as well as function as an effective introduction to the publication itself. We were also able to use the same illustrations in the hard copy, which effectively and efficiently linked the microsite to the print version.
Last year, each chapter/section of the publication had its own video. This year, there appears to only be one. How come?
Each year we start with the content and then try to determine the best way to support it. The illustrated introduction was certainly a more complicated project than our earlier videos, which limits the number you can do, but we felt it would do a good job of explaining to our clients why they should spend some of their time reading this publication. We know they don’t have a lot of time, so that’s our challenge every year. We think Matt did an excellent job in partnership with our illustrator and videographers, and so far, we’ve received lots of positive feedback, which is great.
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