This recap is a guest post by Triangle AMA member, Jennifer Smith.
At the January 2012 luncheon of the Triangle AMA chapter, Mike Esser with RedHat shared his expertise on video’s role in marketing. We are all familiar with popular video sharing site, YouTube. Launched in 2005, Mike says YouTube is a great opportunity to extend your brand. In the past, the barriers to entry of video production were high. There were high tech, expensive cameras that were needed to execute a video for marketing.
Today, the barrier to entry is relatively low- everyone has the opportunity to get started creating video content. Smartphones with HD video makes it easy for anyone to capture great video content. From a business perspective, big name brands are even turning to the masses to create video content for the brand (Ex: Doritos Super Bowl Ad Contest).
Mike shared a few things to consider when doing video for marketing purposes:
- Help your clients/company find their story
- Stems from mission and core values
- Reinforce the brand
- Truly understand your brand before you get started with anything
- Stay in line with guidelines
- Music
- Audio is just as important as video in retaining the audience
- Identify what music resonates with your company
- Be brief
- People can see right through it if it’s not authentic
- Avoid writing a script for someone
Mike shared two video clips from Starbucks and GE Aviation which he feels really tell a true, authentic story of the brand through an engaging video.
Both of these videos were done very well because employees were the speakers, the videos were not scripted and both did an excellent job of capturing emotion. These videos effectively communicated the brand message to the audience through a story.
Mike also shared the breakdown of the RedHat Brand Communications and Design teams on which he works:
- Content (writers, editors)
- Video (editors, producers, motion designers)
- Design (online, print)
- Account project managers
- Creative Director
RedHat uses video for several different purposes including: marketing, events, training and even recruiting. He showed the crowd several examples of different videos used for these different purposed and discussed some of the challenges and processes associated with their development.
The take-away from the event was that with today’s technology, anyone can produce engaging video. The cost and technology hurdles have been reduced, if not removed, with the advances in smart-phone technology, but running out and shooting a video of your product/service/company and posting it to YouTube is not necessarily the answer to your problems. There is a drastic difference between video and engaging video content. Telling a story that people can relate to and understand while capturing and playing off of people’s emotions will make your video stand out from the 60 hours of content posted to YouTube every minute (WOW!).
Mike’s Slides:
