prabhuWochit is a video creation platform for media companies and brands looking to expand audience engagement through the power of video. Dror Ginzberg (Pictured, right), co-founder and CEO of Wochit, looks at changing trends in marketing and looks to what video can do to help you build a brand.
Nothing moves audiences like moving images.
By 2020, the average person is forecast to spend 84 minutes a day watching online video, according to Zenith.
The appetite for video consumption represents a massive opportunity for marketers.
No wonder many of them are rushing to embrace the channel. Now, 87% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, with 83% of them saying video brings good ROI according to Wyzowl.
Video boosts search visibility, fuels social sharing and appeals to mobile users in particular.
But the opportunity is further buoyed by the changing role that video plays in the marketing funnel. Traditionally regarded as a “top-of-funnel” medium, good for igniting interest but not for generating quantifiable results, now video is fuelling clicks, identity collection and, on Instagram Stories, swipe up buys. In other words, video is considered to be a performance channel.
As we are seeing more brands sell directly to consumers, then, it is no surprise that we are seeing video at the epicentre of both engagement and outcomes.
As they do so, they are changing the nature of the biggest media channel there is. US TV advertising was forecast to decline by 0.5% last year, according to eMarketer, as ad agencies move some of their money from television to digital video.
But brands cannot simply change channels. Online video is a different beast from linear commercials, requiring a different approach. In fact, it is incumbent upon brands to produce video material that takes on editorial levels of quality and doesn’t just sell, sell, sell.
As if all that were not enough, one challenge has lingered behind video, more than other media. As the most engaging, multi-sensory channel, video has necessarily always been considered the most burdensome to produce.
Many will remember a past in which expensive gear and edit suites were required. That has never quite been the case in online yet, still, producing video content at the scale a modern brand requires can nevertheless be onerous.
On to this stage, however, emerges a new supporting cast member – automation.
Whether it is claimed that a net 90 million jobs will be created, that productivity will soar and that new processes will be unlocked, automation has captured everyone’s imagination in the last two years. So what can automation do for video?
The more impactful application of automation for brand video means efficiencies in the production workflow. We are not talking about giving your video production strategy over entirely to an algorithm but, rather, taking a helping hand to make consistent video-related tasks flow – tasks like using video formats, storyboards and templates, seamlessly adjusting the aspect ratio and integrating it to your existing workflow and publishing channels.
We are now starting to see the lighting-up of technology that, based on a marketer’s description of a video project and based on an understanding of the content of the current scene, can recommend library footage, mood music and even accompanying social media assets to insert next.
Little by little, this kind of technology aims to do for video what desktop publishing (DTP) software did for page layout – and go further, by proactively reducing many of the human considerations down to choices, rather than ground-up creative decisions.
What does this mean for branded video? Well, we are going to see a lot more of it. Because, in the future, a chief marketer won’t need to employ a full video team in order to take advantage of video’s benefit; they can integrate it into their team alongside existing content efforts.
In this way, video output will become as integrated and commonplace as social media strategy has become.
Given that 54% of audiences prefer to see videos over other marketing content, according to research by HubSpot, it behoves brands to lean in.
