We all know Animoto can be used for some pretty awesome business purposes, such as selling baby clothes, giving advice, or mailing monkeys. Recently, we got to talk with Jeremy Heffner of Azavea, “a geospatial analysis (GIS) firm specializing in location-based web and mobile application development,” and how he used Animoto to show off the rebranding of Azavea’s new site.

What made you decide to rebrand your website?

We were faced with changing our company name following a trademark dispute and decided that it was a perfect time to reimagine the language we use to talk about what we do. Rebranding the website and transitioning our brand name over the course of a year was part of this process.

How did you hear about Animoto and what made you choose it?

Was there a time before Animoto? I can’t honestly remember how I discovered Animoto. We’re pretty geeky folks at Azavea and we tend to read about new services as they come online, so we likely discovered it on a tech blog.

Which features of Animoto have been the most useful/received the best feedback?

We’re a small business focused on building advanced geographic software for the web so most of our staff are fairly technical. We wanted to be able to introduce video content into our outreach without having to spend a lot on video production. The custom animation styles are enabling us to generate video content that looks unique and impactful. We use one style for videos we make for our crime analysis software (HunchLab), another we use for humanities-related projects, and so forth.

Have you been able to use Animoto in marketing vehicles other than your website?

Yes, we’ll often take PowerPoint slides and save them as images to make videos for conferences. Being able to easily create a new video for a particular conference let’s us better target our message. The new highdef video option really looks slick on a projector or HDTV and we’re excited for more styles to become available in HD.