WordPress.com Publishes First Ever Video Ad Entitled “Welcome Home”

WordPress.com released a new video on its YouTube account entitled Welcome Home. In the 15 second video, featuring music from Childish Gambino, photos are taken with a iPhone in various locations. Near the end of the video, the WordPress app is opened displaying a post with one of the images captured by the phone. The central theme of the video is to create your home on the web at WordPress.com.

http://youtu.be/MfW2UJMIQvQ

My initial reaction to the video is that it puts too much emphasis on photos. It makes it seem like the WordPress app is only capable of sharing photos similar to Flickr or Instagram. A home on the web has more than just photos, something that doesn’t come across in the 15 second message.

Something else I find odd is the choice to highlight the app versus WordPress.com. There’s no mention or video of the WordPress.com user interface or other aspects of the site. As WordPress.com likes to do, this video is likely an experiment but in my opinion, fails to deliver on their central message. It’s aimed at too narrow of an audience and doesn’t adequately show off what WordPress.com is truly capable of. Granted, we’re talking about 15 seconds of video which is why I’d like see what the team creates if given one minute to get the point across.

Just for the sake of comparison, watch this SquareSpace ad. It’s a minute long, more to the point, and delivers on the message of creating a home on the web or in this case, creating your own space. The ad also does a good job of showing how the service can be used on various devices. When I watch this ad, I feel like people from all walks of life are able to easily create a site through SquareSpace.

Jon Burke Provides Context For The Video

In an effort not to cloud my judgement and reaction to the video, I reached out to Jon Burke, who works for Automattic, after publishing this post and received more information concerning the video.

Is the video actually a commercial or more or less an experiment?

WordPress.com has a freemium model and we run house ads. We have been running this video as a promotion on free sites. This video is part of a series. This video focuses on the utility of photos and the mobile apps. Other videos we are producing will focus on other aspects of WordPress.com.

The video is brief for a couple of reasons. We don’t want to interrupt the site viewers’ experience for too long and we wanted it to be viewable by our visitors where English is not the primary language.

So it is a commercial, but we are also experimenting with different videos about WordPress.com to see how we can best get our message out in a way that is organic with the culture of Automattic and the WordPress community.

Is it aimed towards raising awareness of the WordPress mobile app or WordPress.com?

This video is focused on our mobile apps. The comparison to the SquareSpace video is a fair one but our ambition is to get our message across better in a dozen videos rather than in a single, longer video. We create a lot of products and have a number of services and don’t think we can cover it all well in a single short video.

Now It Makes Sense

The explanation provided by Burke provides the missing context surrounding the video. The video now makes perfect sense in that it’s part of a series with plans to produce more like it focusing on other areas of WordPress.com. This information completely changes my tune. Instead of failing to deliver the message, it’s on point.