The use of video for corporate marketing was once confined to TV advertising, where it was practiced by few and rarely by those who did at all. But there are now many more, much less expensive outlets for distribution of video, along with steeply falling production costs as well. So in addition to TV, companies now promote themselves with video on their own websites and other websites, through online and mobile advertising, podcast, and in location-based displays.
To fill such abundant and diverse delivery channels, marketers are finding themselves much more frequently engaged in video production efforts. These efforts can vary widely project-to-project, with each one exposing a new set of pain points.
Production seems one of the most frenetic collaborative processes that people undertake. Teams assemble and variably scale up or down depending on current needs and available resources. These teams tend to be highly diverse to achieve the right mix of expertise in relevant areas of creativity, business, and the featured subject matter. The content focus changes from stage-to-stage, each with distinctive considerations ranging from the writing format of a script in pre-production to handling the large file sizes of content edited in post-production.
In this whirlwind environment, it is a challenge for marketing video production to match the standards of other types of team collaboration. In an office, documents are drafted, reviewed, modified, and approved by large, spread-out teams emailing version-controlled documents with in-line annotations. Increasingly, teams are using online applications that allow every member to access the same up-to-date content. Sales forces use customer relationship management tools that report on calls and meetings to drive commission schedules and assure that clients aren't double-covered.
But the stability of the media and teams in those examples contrasts the dynamics of production. It's much easier to grasp the needs of people building a document that's primarily in a single medium -- writing -- from its initial contemplation to its final formatting. And sales forces tend to be fairly stable groups of people working together for long periods of time with consistent focus on a single set of issues.
Media production lacks the sort of consistency described above, making it a challenge to use the technology that enhances so many other corporate endeavors. For example, content is still frequently distributed physically by DVD and electronically by increasingly dated techniques like file transfer protocol (FTP). Once content is received, you must select a different technique for providing feedback. Often, everyone scribbles their thoughts or barks their opinions and instructions to a single coordinator who must interpret and determine whose calls carry the day.
But as technology marches on, we are now at a stage where there are many highly compelling offerings that help people work together to produce media with greater efficiency and synergy:
- Initial conceptualization can be accessed by everyone with evolving wiki tools like Google Wave.
- Project management sites such as Basecamp organize and track who's undertaking which aspects of a project.
- Scripts can get input and feedback from anyone at any time, with each person's points put together by online word processors like Zoho.
- You can share and organize all kinds of content, through multiple versions, with a communal folder tool like Dropbox.
- Vendors like YouSendIt offer accelerated, web-oriented file sharing for the large file sizes often associated with video.
Media production efforts, for marketing and other purposes, are benefiting significantly from these sorts of tools. But keeping your focus on marketing goals can be tricky if you are simultaneously mastering multiple technical tools and getting each one to conform to specific production needs.
A Google doc may be great for words, and controlled circulation of a YouTube video may be great for that sort of content. But neither option effectively integrates feedback about the video into the video itself, with specifics about when in the timeline and where on the screen the feedback is applicable.
In contrast, when you use track-changes mode while writing a brochure or press release, each person's comments and edits are visible within the content, which clarifies intentions and drives consensus. Similar capabilities are often used when building and revising websites, but these track-change characteristics are often missing in communications about video.
The tools cited in the bullets above are general purpose and offer some malleability for you to adapt them to video production. They can also be further enhanced to specifically apply to marketing-oriented video and other rich media. It's a chore to modify word processing content into a clear script layout that clarifies what's spoken dialog versus on-set instruction. And scheduling tools may be great for people, but few of these tools naturally integrate the substantial sets of assets, such as cameras or edit stations, that are often major factors in video production. Upon completion, it may be important to comparatively analyze analytics about video consumption with tags and other metadata assembled during production.
Besides these distinctive needs at each stage of video production, aggregating the entire production process is vital. Production projects are typically not long-lived, and the teams are usually composed of people who have not worked together before, such as a salesperson whose customer is featured in a case study or an engineer whose product is being technically explained.
Rather than sequentially master new applications along the way, think about how a more singular environment could solidify efforts. This could be one resource people turn to check where things stand with regard to their responsibilities and communicate with each other. Additionally, it's important to gain a consolidated view of all of the details within the production process, as opposed to the isolated perspectives on particular aspects.
We've recently reached a stage where the intelligence and scale of technology tools are useful for the specific aspects of video production within corporate marketing efforts. And we are on the cusp of another breakthrough as domain expertise concerning the unique production requirements and marketing goals factors into what's available, with integration of considerations from stage to stage throughout pre- and post-production.
Seth Kenvin is CEO of Market7.
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