08 Feb 2013
Corporate Video, Video Marketing Permalink

Video Marketing Success for Luxury Brands: A Matter of Experience

February 8, 2013

44% of luxury marketers believe online video is more effective at driving traffic to stores than TV.

The benefits are becoming clearer: online video-marketing provides more flexibility in production, and a more targeted reach than TV production. This means rather than spending £100,000s commissioning a short 30 second prime time spot, luxury companies can achieve much more with a lot less spend.

Build your luxury video around customer dreams

Build your luxury video around customer dreams. Image by Belovdchenko Anton

Long term video campaigns, live-event streaming, video tutorials are just a few ways luxury brands can use video for lead generation, expanding customer reach and also improving retention.

Most importantly, it allows luxury brands to showcase the most critical element of their sales message:

Making the experience unforgettable

In Pamela’ Danziger’s Let Them Eat Cake: an in-depth research project into the attitudes towards luxury spending, she discovered a notable shift in the purchasing patterns of luxury buyers. In the mid 2000s, affluent customers were more motivated by experiential purchases rather than materialistic ones.

Instead of features, affluent customers were more driven by the experience of owning or using the product.

So what does this mean for a luxury brand expanding into video-marketing campaigns?

How to increase emotional attachment to a luxury product through video

With cinematic film techniques, it’s easy for us to make your product look beautiful on screen.

Whether you’re selling luxury clothing or private jet ownership, a we can reflect the quality of craftsmanship in your product and make it shine.

But this is only a fraction of the story you need to tell your customer to compel them to contact you or to make a purchase.

The real gold in your video is using cinematic techniques to take your customer on a journey of ownership.

Show them events and occasions where people wearing luxury clothing are standing out from the crowd. Show the convenience and peace of travelling for business, or as a family, without the stresses of regular air travel.

Use video to encourage an emotional attachment and anticipation to your product and it will be far more compelling than footage of what it is.

If you’re looking for a video production company in London to tell the powerful narrative of your brand, contact us today.

05 Feb 2013
Corporate Video, Video Marketing Permalink

How to Create a Customer Profile for Corporate Videos

February 5, 2013

Video marketing is an important tool for brand awareness, lead generation and sales.

But without a properly developed customer profile for your video-marketing campaign you risk investing in video production that just doesn’t make an impact with your target buyer.

At Mustard, we always carry out an in-depth customer analysis to make sure we’re including the best narrative and images to reach them. Even if you don’t hire us, answering the following questions will help you start to build create a useful customer profile for your digital-marketing.

What are their current obstacles and challenges?

You have a product or service that solves a problem for your customer and this is a rich resource of ideas for a successful video campaign.

Too many unsuccessful video campaigns focus on the product or the service, but the problem it solves is much more relevant to your customer. This can be a powerful story for a video campaign.

For a company like the Carphone Warehouse, the company understood that their customer’s problem wasn’t that they didn’t have a phone and needed one, but that they weren’t aware of all the choices available, and how to get the most out of their phones. That’s why they built in tutorials for a video-marketing campaign.

What questions do they have about solving the problem?

Another great source of video campaign ideas is the questions your customer has about solving their problem.

A consumer looking for luxury clothing online may have questions such as how to source the best possible clothes, how to choose the best luxury clothes on a budget, how to find luxury clothing for a particular event or occasion.

A successful video-marketing campaign rests on producing content that your customer actively wants to consume, AND promotes your business.

By answering their questions through video, you help move them from the prospecting phase into a potential lead and sale.

What questions do they have about doing business with your company?

An often overlooked part of a video campaign is not information about your company, but answering the questions your customer might have about doing business with you.

Many corporate videos are poorly received because the video content doesn’t answer these questions.

Left unanswered these are potential objections your prospect might have when it comes to doing business with you.

Some questions may include: what is the service like? How long is it before I see results from your company? What do you do that other companies don’t do?

Have a think about how you can tackle these issues in your own video-marketing campaign, and if you need any help, you know where we are. 🙂

29 Jan 2013
Video Marketing Permalink

Washington Post to Move into Online Videos

January 29, 2013

Traditional media outlets and publishing houses are finding answers to declining print circulation and advertising revenue by investing in video production.

Recently, another organisation using online video to increase user engagement is The Washington Post. The Post announced at the beginning of the year that investment in video-production would result in a dedicated online political video channel.

“Substantial” resources will be assigned to this venture to create more than 30 hours of programming each month.

In recent years online publications have struggled to raise revenue through advertising since content-marketing has been more successful. However, an increase in video usage provides an opportunity for publishers to increase their online audience.

If this is successful, The Post can then re-evaluate its advertising model to see whether sponsored messages attached to these videos are enough to boost advertising revenues.

For more information on creating an online video-marketing campaign for your business, call 020-3286-4570 or use our contact form to tell us about your project.

29 Jan 2013
Corporate Video, Video Marketing Permalink

3 Essential Ingredients for Video-Tutorials that Increase Sales

January 29, 2013

Smart companies now market their services “under the radar” by publishing high quality content that their prospects can use to make a decision.

And if 2012 was the year of main-stream companies blogging, creating infographics and content-downloads, 2013 is the year of the video.

Large companies are not using video-marketing to increase sales and customer engagement. Just before Christmas, the Carphone Warehouse announced plans to create more online video tutorials to provide advice to customers researching phones.

Should you be doing something similar for your business though? Would video-tutorials be the best format for your corporate videos?

Here are some questions to help you decide:

Can you help customers in the pre-purchase phase?

Carphone Warehouse know a lot of pre-purchase research done online. As much as 70% of their store purchases begin with research online.

As a result the company is actively targeting customers ahead of their purchase.

Companies often make the mistake of targeting their marketing at a much later stage, when customers know what they want and just need to pick a retailer for the purchase.

This is a missed opportunity to increase the reach of your marketing.

What is the pre-purchase phase in your business? Do customers spend time researching the solution in general before narrowing it down to a particular vendor?

In the B2B industry of software, many technology companies provide online video demonstrations because they know businesses spend time researching solutions before approaching vendors for proposals.

Creating video tutorials for this stage in the sales cycle puts your company front and centre in your prospect’s mind when picking suppliers for the short list.

Will your videos provide independent value?

Independent value means your videos have to be useful even if your customer never buys from you.

It’s what separates companies that have built large and engaged audiences, and companies that simply cannot get people to watch or share their videos.

In the Carphone Warehouse example, a video that simply sells the benefits of buying a particular model through the company will easily be detected as an advert.

Its credibility and trust in the content decreases.

Video-tutorials that focus on a range of phones suitable for international students, or the features you need if you’re interested in using the internet abroad are much more useful.

At the end of the video, you can provide a call to action to browse products on your site, but the promotion is secondary to the independent value.

Ignore the independent value rule and your prospects will ignore your marketing.

Can you disguise your advertising (for best results)?

Savvy consumers can smell advertising a mile off.

The recent uproar after media outlet The Atlantic made a huge mistake with native advertising shows what can happen if you under-estimate your audience’s awareness of what is and is not-advertising.

Some of the most famously successful advertising campaigns were based on long tutorials with no prominent offer.

The below advert looked like a regular informative article. It was used in the New York times and famously attracted 10,000 responses. The offer was buried deep in the copy.

Why did it work so well?

Well it embodies all of the above 3 points:

  • It targeted customers in the “pre-purchase” phase

  • It had independent value

  • It didn’t look like an advert

For more information on creating tutorial videos as part of your video-marketing campaign, contact us on 020-3286-4570 or email: hello (at)  flycreative.co.uk

24 Jan 2013
Video Marketing Permalink

Why Video-Marketing Increases Travel Sales for Companies like Orbitz

January 24, 2013

NY_OrbitzOriginals_hdr_120312

If you’re a hotel, leisure facility or a tourist board, your marketing has to make a compelling argument to persuade customers to choose you. And with the presence of multiple travel forums such as Trip Advisor, customers want more than just advertising.

Travel customers want an honest picture of their future holiday.

Reviews, referrals and photos are very persuasive.

But smart travel companies are using video-marketing campaigns to show travellers and tourist whet they can expect when they arrive on their holiday or business trip. With video-marketing it is much easier for your customer to imagine themselves spending time at your resort or facility.

Travel Bookings Increased 45% and 74%

Travel company Orbitz are investing in a series of videos which show off their destinations including Ireland, the Cayman Islands and most recently upstate New York.

And the investment is worth it.

Their numbers show that 45% of leisure travellers and 74% of affluent travellers book travel after viewing online videos.

Orbitz is just one company that is following the increasing trend to add video marketing into their digital content marketing campaigns.

So why does video marketing work so well for travel companies and tourism boards?

Video Marketing Brings Subtle Beauty to Life

Cinematic-quality videos (like the ones we make at fly creative 🙂 ) capture so many more subtle selling points that are harder to explain to potential customers verbally or in a brochure or leaflet.

A great sales representative might be able to describe the peace and tranquility of a visit to upstate New York, but a sweeping panoramic shot of a lake, or the dramatic qualities of a local street festival actively transports your customers there.

A Faster Emotional Connection

Within seconds a video can have a physical and emotional reaction on your viewer. That ability to capture and keep attention is why corporate companies like Orbitz (and others) are investing in video-marketing campaigns.

The corporate videos planned by Orbitz are designed so that customers are encouraged to have an emotional reaction.

These videos are not about simply providing the facts of the resort or location, they are shot to encourage travellers to feel something. For example:

  • Calm and tranquil
  • Excited by potential adventures
  • Excited about escaping the grind
  • Hope and optimistic about the upcoming trip

In brochures, copywriting and image placement are used to evoke these kinds of reactions.

But you’re counting on people to read all of your text.

With a corporate travel video you can have your audience emotionally hooked within the first second.

Repetition Reinforces and Anchors Customer Desire

Visuals are powerful motivators. People will often keep photos of a car they want to own, a holiday destination they’d like to visit, or clothes they’d like to buy.

This visual stimulation reinforces our desire for that object. It keeps us focused on what we want and reminds us of how we imagine we will feel when we own it or when we travel to that place.

Video multiplies that effect.

The best corporate videos or branded video-content, are designed so that your customer WANTS to watch the video again and again.

That’s one of the reasons video-marketing campaigns for the travel industry are so successful. Each time they watch your corporate video they are  become more emotionally attached, their desire for the experience increases and you’re more likely to experience an increase in enquiries and booking as Orbitz has found.

At Mustard, we can design, produce and deliver this style of corporate video for you. If you want to chat more about how video can help your digital-marketing campaigns, please get in touch!

16 Oct 2012
Tutorials and Training, Video Production Permalink

Anamorphic Filters

October 16, 2012

If you have been to the cinema recently you may have noticed several directors and cinematographers heavily experimenting in lights flairs and filters, a similar look normally achieved in modern music videos, to create more of a raw camera look, losing the clean, colourful 90’s glaze we all got bored with far too quickly.

Well we have! so we’re just going to tell you how these techniques are created and the best way as a film maker to produce similar effects in production and in post production without the Hollywood budgets.

DURING PRODUCTION:

Streak filters;
There seems to be an abundance of films using this effect recently.. Looper, J.J. Abrams – StarTrek (which even Abrams has quoted as calling “ridiculous“) anything by Micheal Bay. Even going back as far as Ridley Scotts dark futuristic classic BladeRunner which was shot in 1982… I KNOW!!!

J.J. Abrams achieved most of his off screen light glares and blooms by having a few selected lighting technicians point 100K lights into the lens from the side of the scene achieving the look of glare from an off frame source.

Star filters:
These were popular back in the day but you still see a lot of feature films using then to emphasise a candle or distant street lights.

Where to buy:
We are big fans of Optefex who sell these filters in most sizes and colour tints. The standard is 4X4 inches if you are using a regular sized Mattebox
They can range from 4X4 can cost £200 – £600 but also a on lens filter 72mm or 77mm if you look around.
http://www.optefex.com/

Where to hire:
We have hired from ShootBlue for approximately £70 a day before
http://www.shootblue.tv/products/streak-filter-set

How to make:
If you have a steady hand with a knife you could produce your own, there are several tutorial online.. You could cut straight lines down a piece of 4X4 plastic and hang them vertically in front of the the camera lens inside a Mattebox filter:


Or put some nylon or fishing wire in front of your lens with an elastic band.

POST PRODUCTION:
As with most things these days in film, you have the ability to makes something look as good off the camera as you do on by knowing which Plug-ins to use and how.

Red Giant’s Knoll Light Factory and Video Copilot’s Optical Flares are two great examples. They give you full control over the flares and where they will glare in relation to your subject.
It’s always worth remembering that overuse of any effect such as these flairs can also hinder the look of a great shot…

REMEMBER:
USE EFFECTS AND TECHNIQUES SPARINGLY.. NEVER OVER EGG IT!!

08 Oct 2012
Tutorials and Training, Video Production Permalink

Lynotype the film

October 8, 2012

Sometimes we forget how much has changed since the generation before us were born.. the industrial revolution changed everything but the digital generation made it easier and lighter.

As a Graphic Designer and a Film maker this is a combination of my two favourite past-times.

“Linotype: The Film is a feature-length documentary centred around the Linotype type casting machine. Called the “Eighth Wonder of the World” by Thomas Edison, it revolutionised printing and society. The film tells the charming and emotional story of the people connected to the Linotype and how it impacted the world.”

Directed by Doug Wilson who is himself a Graphic Designer who had used to work and teach typography its sure to cover every aspect of the artform.

“We have worked very hard to have the film available in as many international iTunes stores as possible, so hopefully you will be able to download from your localised store on October 16th. We also are replicating both NTSC and PAL DVDs that are region free. This means that you can watch the film no matter where you live in the world.”

Linotype was funded by kickstarter which is a funding platform for creative projects which offers pledgers a chance to get involved in the funding towards various projects.

We will be using kickstarter for a project we start next year so keep your eyes peeled.

UPDATE: Linotype – the film can be purchased here http://shop.linotypefilm.com/ and downloaded or rented on iTunes here

05 Oct 2012
Tutorials and Training, Video Marketing Permalink

Side by Side (the movie)

October 5, 2012

This looks great, It’s something every director, DOP and young film maker has been wondering for ages.. “What do talented film makers think of the digital change?”

“SIDE BY SIDE, a new documentary produced by Keanu Reeves, takes an in-depth look at this revolution. Through interviews with directors, cinematographers, film students, producers, technologists, editors, and exhibitors, SIDE BY SIDE examines all aspects of filmmaking — from capture to edit, visual effects to color correction, distribution to archive. At this moment when digital and photochemical filmmaking coexist, SIDE BY SIDE explores what has been gained, what is lost, and what the future might bring.“

Featuring:
James Cameron
David Fincher
David Lynch
Robert Rodriguez
Martin Scorsese
Steven Soderbergh

We have spoken to Duke of Yorks picture house (in Brighton) to see if they will play it, but are still waiting for a reply.

This was posted on the ‘Side by Side’ https://www.facebook.com/sidebysidethemovie facebook page:

“SIDE BY SIDE premieres in London at BFI Southbank on December 6th at 20:30. Public booking begins November 13th. Please don’t call their box office until then.”

for more information on the ‘side by side’ movie check out their site here http://sidebysidethemovie.com/

04 Oct 2012
Tutorials and Training, Video Production Permalink

Colour Subsampling – What is 4:2:2 for flip sake?

October 4, 2012

Colour Subsampling

With the release of the new Canon C100 announced recently everyone will be wondering why it is half the price as its older brother, what exactly do we lose for £5000 less?

Canon C100 Side 02

One very important feature is the codec the C100 captures in.. AVCHD at 24Mbit 4:2:0.. and its this 4:2:0 we will be looking at today to try and understand what it means and if we notice it after its been encoded for vimeo 720p.

We’ve all seen the numbers 4:2:0, 4:4:4, 3:1:1, 3:1.5:1.5, 4:1:1 and 4:2:2 but what the heck do they all mean and will it affect the films and videos we produce?

Most of todays cameras take the light coming through the lens and convert it to 3 sets of numbers, one Red, one Green and one Blue.. this is called RGB, the problem with this data is its MASIVE in size so the camera uses a technique called ‘colour sampling’ or if you cant spell correctly (American) ‘color sampling’ this splits the colours into a new set of numbers called YCbCr or YUV to reduce the size of each file, this makes it easier to stream over the internet, broadcast, record onto CF cards or back in the day.. video tapes (ask an adult)

YUV breaks down the signal into
Y = Luminance (brightness of colours)
Cb = Chroma blue (amount of blue saturation)
Cr = Chroma red (amount of red saturation)

Colour sampling works in a similar way to the human eye which uses rods and cones to sense light, the rods sense brightness, light and dark and shades of grey in-between while the cones see colour but they are fewer in number.  We find it easier to see changes in brightness than change in colour.  Back in the day video engineers used this system on the basis that “we’re not really going to notice anyway”

Where does the 4:2:2 and and 4:4:4 come in?

Have a look at the diagram below and imagine it is part of a larger image, just 4×4 matrix of pixels that are used to make up a larger image:

In the example every box has a Y value (the black square), a Cb value (blue) and a Cr value (red), so in shorthand we would call this 4:4:4 over a set of 4 pixels wide.

Not a lot of cameras shoot in 4:4:4, its normally called RAW and takes up a lot of space on a card or drive. Its also not really noticeable to the human eye when colours are taken out or added.

Most cameras shoot on 4:2:2, this is what it would look like as a diagram similar to before:

As you can see 1/2 of the pixels are missing important colour data but this isn’t incredibly noticeable when you watch it on a HD screen

Basically the higher the number the better the colour data, RED Epic RAW records the RGB data straight from the sensor which is why all the best directors are using them.. It’s as close to film as they can get at the moment to film but everything will change in the next year or so.. it always does.

POST PRODUCTION
There are a number of plugins you can get to bring colour data back into your footage and minimise the impact of low colour sampling, if you own a PC search for a ‘chroma blurring filter’ to smooth out the blocky edges, and on a Mac there is a plug-in called ‘Nattress’s G-Chroma Smoother’ which can be found here

 

03 Oct 2012
Tutorials and Training Permalink

Canon C100 (C300’s baby brother)

October 3, 2012

It seemed Canon have caught up with what consumers want and need with the release of the C300 at the end of 2011.. but now they are back with a smaller version… and cheaper.

Canon announced on the 29th August 2012 they will be releasing the budget version of the C300.. It is half the price of the C300 but has well over half of the exciting features of its older brother.

Its 15% smaller, shares the same sensor as the C300 (Super 35mm 8.3 Megapixel Canon CMOS sensor) It records as AVCHD codec at 24Mbit 4-2-0 which could be a problem, all’s not lost though as it has a clean HDMI out (WOOOHOOOO) so effectively you could put on a Blackmagic HyperDeck Shuttle and record ProRes at 4-2-2 (we think)

Canon C100 Side 02

The camera also has the 2, 4 and 6 stop ND filters built in which we think is a massive selling point.. they are manual compared to the smooth electronic system on the C300 but I’m willing to make that sacrifice to keep the ND filters.

This could be the camera that distinguishes the DSLR film makers from the small to medium video production company, such as ourselves.

We are very excited about the C100, it goes on sale at the start of November for approximately £4000 on the CVP website.. we might even consider rooting around in our deep pockets to add to our ever growing kit list.. although saying that, the 6D is out in December and has built in WIFI and full frame sensor.. we’ll see what santa brings us.