I’m looking at video today, it’s a great media for getting people engaged in your content but I think has a stigma attached that it’s really expensive to produce. So we’ll take a look at a variety of videos and see if that’s the case.
Check out these stats on video consumption:
- The average user watches almost 16 hours of online video a month
- Over 5 hours per person per month is spent watching YouTube, alone
- YouTube videos are watched over 3 billion (with a “B”) times a day
- The average attention span for online videos is around 60 seconds
Here’s a cross selection of videos that should give you some ideas as to what you could be using as part of your website content…
iCrossing – The office video – http://youtu.be/FsgoV6IyrYI
A nice outside of the box idea for video content, these guys are using the theme of showing us around their office (which is a very creative space) to showcase their service offerings and teams. So actually they’re selling to us very subtly and giving themselves a human and engaging face at the same time. This would have been a higher production video, they’ve got funky background music that would have had to be licensed and are using a professional camera but there’s no animation or voice-over.
Pink Ponies – The case study with a twist http://youtu.be/dRDhx8Lo37E
I love this video; it’s slightly tongue in cheek but covers how a creative agency goes through the process of running a campaign. There’s no clever animation which is what can be costly in production, this could have been videoed on a high quality phone and video software could do the rest such as transitions and slow motion effects. I think the numbers at the end are a great touch, they engage the viewer and justify the video content at the same time. Yes the voice-over would cost extra but you could go with music and have the words as text on screen instead.
Men’s Health – How to snippets http://www.menshealth.co.uk/video/#v1454954581
Lots of videos we see on YouTube are ‘how to’ videos, very easy to set up with as much or as little production as you can afford. A brand who do this well is Men’s Health – they give away teaser snippets of exercises which they use to get people interested and then they push for subscription to access fuller content.
Free hugs campaign – A viral phenomena http://www.freehugscampaign.org/
Launched in 2006 before video even became mainstream within the marketing space. There were 70m hits on original YouTube video, 845k views of his follow up thank you and a further 901k a year later with another thank you. People began recreating the video across the world so he set up a website to share their own free hug campaigns. In their forum people were still posting about it in 2008, 2 years after it started – that is truly viral campaign. And the best bit? There was no production – anyone could do this. It proves that if you have a genuinely interesting idea that people can relate to and shows us insightful human behaviour – it will spread.
