Video is being reinvented as a ‘hot new communication tool’, and now everyone can do it by Andi Jepson
Video is being reinvented as a ‘hot new communication tool’, and now everyone can do it
Andi Jepson, Director at Iceni
Over the past few months there seem to be an increasing number of advertisements for courses dedicated to producing web video. This latest flyer for a short course arrived by email, targeting marketing and communications departments of large organisations. Its headline read:
A look inside the hottest new communication tool: video on the web! Yes, you can do it... And this seminar will show you how.Video is being reinvented as a ‘hot new communication tool’, and now everyone can do it.
Digital evolution has put the tools for production into the hands of everyone, and an established industry has witnessed the relative costs for producing successful and engaging video fall year after year. So for an industry built on hard earned production skills and creativity, is the reinvention of video as a hot new communication tool that everyone can use, a good thing?
The inevitable rise of video on the web isn’t going to change the fact that some programmes are more successful than others. Regardless of the subject matter, there are some constants in video production for business and industry. A project begins with a need: a message that the commissioner wants to communicate. To affect a change the commissioner invites the creative to propose ideas to fulfil that need, within the boundaries of cost, compliance and accessibility. An idea is chosen, the project then delivered to its target audience, and the effect measured.
So what has changed with the reinvention of video on the web as a ‘hot new communication tool?’ When video forms part of a webpage, its nature subtly changes. If you acknowledge the way that a viewer accesses web content, you can see that, like any of the billions of webpages out there, it must compete for attention and be packaged to draw the visitor in. The video has a few precious seconds to capture the attention of the audience. You now have visitors, not viewers and there are new opportunities for failure.
‘You can do it’
If web video helps get the message across, you should include it, but learn from some of the lessons from the last ‘hot communications tool’, the audio podcast. When produced by marketing departments, some of the first podcasts got the message right, but failed because of technical issues with codecs, compression and sampling. Often, it was seen as a technical exercise, to be produced by the IT department, and then the content sometimes failed to engage the audience.
Audio files are much bigger than the images and text in a website, so consideration is needed for storing and serving them. Video files are bigger still, and need to be stored and delivered from a specialised system. But beware the quick fix. Using YouTube for streaming video may look like a good idea, but when your video, advertising your products or featuring the CEO reaches the end, YouTube picks what to show next from its archive of millions of clips. Imagine that for a second, all streamed under your brand.
Podcasts and web video speak to the audience in a different way, so there are different styles of writing them, in the same way that there are different styles for print, email and blog. Acknowledged as a delivery method at the initial stages of the project, a ‘web version’ should be concise and direct.
But beyond these challenges are some enormous advantages over other forms of communication.
‘New communication’
When printed material is distributed, unless considerable efforts are made, it disappears into a black hole where only fragments of feedback escape to tell how it has reached the audience. It is the same for traditional film distribution methods like videotape and DVD. Measuring a project’s success takes time and effort.
If a project is delivered online, you can easily extract detailed logs which, when analysed, show how long a visitor has lingered on a page. For video on the web you can see exactly how much of the video was watched and while the visitor is there, invite them to comment about the content, rate it or forward it to colleagues. For producers and commissioners that means more chance to learn about the people we are trying to reach, and that makes them easier to reach out to.
‘Everyone can do it’
It is only a small sideways jump to a really exciting possibility. Get your audience to add their own video. The technology is there and it is easily affordable. With a small amount of training, you get an audience that can join in. Invite them to add honest, real-life stories about their job, responses to their training or development, even feedback from the last conference event they attended. Above all get them involved and it will get you talked about.
So let everyone make video. Let technology developers create tools that streamline the process from filming to encoding and delivery. We want to see what our audiences are doing, we want to spark that dialogue, so that an organisation can change and grow. The reinvention of video for everyone is another way for audiences to respond and engage, and what better way to do that than with a ‘hot new communication tool’ that everyone sees everyday and already understands.
