Marketer as Film Producer

Coming from ten years at Adobe, a company that, naturally, placed a very high premium on effective communication, I wanted to introduce to my new company some upgraded marketing techniques. The result was a short “proof of concept” video, as can be found here:

Before I get into the specifics of some of the points I was trying to make with the video, I thought it would be worthwhile to make some observations on how video (and YouTube in particular) has impacted marketers.

Video and animation as part of the marketers toolkit is nothing new. I remember back in the early 90s producing animated self-running product demos (painstakingly, frame-by-frame), as well as participating in productions displayed by VCR. But the complexity in distributing and showing video back then always limited its use.

The elimination of the technical barriers to video delivery (with YouTube and Internet streaming) presents marketers with as many challenges as it does opportunities. Although video is an extremely effective communication medium, to do it right requires skills in story development, script writing, cinematography, editing and performance. Professionals can pull this off with ease, providing you can afford them, and you can articulate your marketing messaging priorities in ways they understand. But these days (thanks in large part to YouTube), demand for video so outstrips the capacity to outsource production to professionals that marketers are inevitably going to be drawn into the process.

Many marketers respond to the requirement by trying to take easy ways out. These include posting recordings of webinars (normally simple PowerPoint presentations with voiceover) or screencast demos (sticking a “virtual camera” in front of the screen and then recording everything, while running through a demo in real-time). Sometimes this works fine. But more often than not, opportunities are missed to do something much more effective. The tools exist to track the performance of these video-based deliverables (e.g. YouTube Analytics), but not every marketer wants to dig too deeply, fearing what they would find.

With my little video project, I wanted to make a number of points. Many of these points are just good demo or presentation technique. But their importance is magnified hugely for on-demand video consumption.

• Never mystify the viewer as to what the point is. If the point of the video is to show a process to build to a certain result, show the result upfront. Think about what will motivate the viewer to watch the video to the end.
• Don’t let shyness get in the way of communicating. Use voiceover, not captions. And best of all, put yourself in front of the camera. People relate to people, and this helps ensure the messages hit home.
• Use diagrams instead of text, and animations instead diagrams, whenever it is more effective. This comes at a cost, because it is generally much more time-consuming (and difficult) to create “higher order” content in this way. But again, what you put in during production pays off in the effectiveness of the result.
• Mix up the format and edit prudently. A 40 minute demo where you just stare at the screen is not very engaging. In most cases for marketing, the purpose of the demo is to make a point (that something is feasible), not be a faithful representation of the day-to-day experience of working with a product (or be a training guide). Break up the demo with illustrations, animation, video or personal appearances to keep the audience engaged.
• At all times, be mindful of the “type” of information you are conveying. I first internalized this point when exposed to the DITA XML-based standard from the world of technical writing. At its most simplistic, the idea is that information can be categorized as one of “a task” (sequence of instructions), “a concept” (an idea that must be comprehended) or “reference material” (stuff you have to know, such as what keyboard shortcuts map to which commands). One of the theories is that people better comprehend and remember smaller, atomic nuggets of information, than they do long rambling sections that mix and intertwine different types of information.

Because of the time it takes to produce something like this, it is rarely possible to do it during the standard work day. There are just too many demands on the busy product manager or marketer. I did nearly all of this project on my own time, at weekends and nights. My wife was behind the camera for videos and still photography, and if you look carefully, you will see my kitchen in the background on some shots. It does take a degree of commitment and love of the subject to pull something like this off.

In case you were wondering, there was a follow-on project to this one. Another topic I wanted to explore was the use of models created from 3D scan data in animation. Again, I ended up producing just a crude proof of concept – learning just enough of a 3D animation package to produce a result. But for your enjoyment, I include it below.