7 Principles of Video Content

“Absolutely fundamental through this recovery...is understanding what the new media is.
Internet, mobile, video content...”
Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP

Video is everywhere. Almost 90% of internet bandwidth is now taken up with streaming
video. More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month, spending more than 4
billion hours watching videos. (Source: YouTube.com) And yet more seldom necessarily
means better. So what is video for? What does it do well? Who should be making it? And
how do you know if anyone is watching? Here are some brief thoughts for those taking the
leap into ‘video content’:

1. Video is Not Good at Everything

Recently we came across an online retail site that sold boxes of screws, with the helpful
addition of a short video to show what a box of screws looks like. Video can now be
relatively inexpensive, so it is often mistaken for a good way to communicate just about
everything. It isn’t. Video is good at emotion and bad at detail. If you need to communicate a
detailed set of facts and figures, use text. If you need to capture a moment, take a photo. If
you need to show what a box of screws look like, you’ve misjudged your audience. But if
you need to engage them in your brand values, make a video. As the great communicator,
Anita Roddick once observed: “I found very early on that to tell stories, the power of the
moving image and music were major in terms of motivation of our young people - and video
images stay in your brain much longer than printed images or words.”

2. Do Tell a Story, Don’t Animate a PowerPoint

The most effective videos tell stories – that engage, motivate and remain memorable to their
audiences. Whether you’re communicating brand values or the virtues of a new product –
internally or externally – you need to think about the story that will best engage your
audience and how to tell it in a novel and engaging way. Note that this is rarely if ever the
sameo story as you, as an expert in your brand or product, would need or want to be told.
Animating a Powerpoint presentation with the addition of some logos floating in 3D space is
neither novel nor engaging.

3. Do Nudge, Don’t Lecture

Both David Cameron and George Osborne have been known to reference the trend in
behavioural economics known as ‘Nudge Theory’ which is just an elaborate way of saying
that people often respond better to peer pressure, and subtle “nudges” rather than nanny state
lecturing. This should be applied to how you deliver your messages via video - as much as to
running the country. The most successful videos tend to be those in which informal
interviews with real people form the basis of short, relatively simple stories. In other words,
the audiences’ peers telling them what they really believe, as opposed to an actor reading out
what someone else thinks they should believe. This may seem obvious, but some businesses
are still commissioning corporate videos based on staged dramas from a bygone era.
4. Technology Doesn’t Create Talent

Video filming and editing technology is now vastly more accessible and affordable than it
was even five years ago. But software enables talent, it doesn’t create it. Just as access to
word-processing software does not create a novelist, so a cheap copy of Final Cut does not
make a film-maker. We have seen enough ‘User Generated Content’ to know that we should
all, on the whole, stick to our day jobs. UGC can work - but in very controlled circumstances
and with professional editing. After all, unless you would employ a video crew to run your
business, why would you expect your staff to be good at making a film?

5. Size Isn’t Everything

Not that long ago the average length of a corporate film was around 20 minutes. Back then,
the sheer novelty of seeing the Marketing Director appearing ‘on television’ was thought
sufficiently novel to hold an audience’s attention for what now seems like an impossibly long
time. Nowadays most corporate films that we make are two to three minutes long - but don’t
believe those that tell you that this is a strict limit. Interestingly, the average length of the Top
10 most shared online ads of all time is a 4 minutes and 11 seconds (Source:
http://www.reelseo.com/length-youtube-video/) which is a great deal longer than most would
imagine. As always it is the power, quality and engagement of the storytelling, not its length,
that will persuade viewers to watch a video.

6. Produce, Distribute, Measure

Marketeers expect to measure the effectiveness of other media, but few seem to apply any
such rigour to video production. But it’s hard to justify a new video production budget when
you can’t measure who watched the last one, where, on what device and what they did next.
Many brands assume that YouTube is the only effective channel available to distribute your
video content. Certainly it can help attract a large potential audience, but there are also some
key drawbacks in terms of context and control. Luckily, online video platforms such as James
now allow you complete control over when and where your video content appears and in
what context - across all of your online and social media channels - and provide detailed
realtime analytics of who is watching, where and on what device.

7. Your Customers Know More than You

All of the above presupposes that brands control the content of video made about them. And
yet, today when anything remotely interesting happens, anywhere, bystanders (or ‘citizen
journalists’ - for which read ‘your children’) will be likely to record it on their iPhones and
distribute it globally in seconds. This means that if an interaction with your brand can be
filmed, it’ll happen, and it’ll be on YouTube long before you have time to have a coffee, let
alone devise a strategy to deal with it. A happy customer may decide to tape his favourite
shop assistant providing her with excellent service...or, just as easily, she might record her
views on bad service - and you’ll need to be ready for both....