It’s Never Just One Video
The year is 2013. You wait in your car for Miley’s new hit, “Wrecking Ball” to wrap up, then head into the office. And I do mean into the office. Video calls, Teams and Zoom are still just a twinkle in the corporate eye. WFH is nothing more than a few letters scrambled together. And Instagram, having only been acquired by Facebook the year before, remains an uncharted land populated by photos of exotic macchiatos and avocado toast.
Tasked with introducing the world to your company’s new product and all its benefits, you and the rest of your marketing team connect with your agency partners to craft up a video. Maybe it’s for a product page. Or a sell-in sizzle for a big-box retailer. Possibly broadcast. Maybe you need sophisticated 2D animation to hype up a brand launch. Or a 3D animation that digs deep into the how and why. Wherever it’s going and whatever it’s for, there’s one common theme. You need a single, solitary, lone video.
Fast forward to today and things have changed quite a bit.
Miley’s wrecking ball has long since stopped swinging. Hardly an hour goes by without a new Teams invite. And Facebook and Instagram are just two outlets in an ever-expanding, ever-evolving ecosystem of social and digital content. With that change, comes challenge . . . and opportunity.
Instead of creating a one-off video, intended for a singular use and singular place, it has become increasingly important to view your video in the framework of this new landscape. That means not only asking what the key objective of a particular video is, but also asking how else can the same video—the same visual resources, storytelling, and messages—be implemented into other spaces online and out of home.
Take a thirty-second to one-minute-long video, for example.
It’s a common ask, and for the longest time you and your partners would create it, no questions asked, and move on. But now, with budgets tightening and consumer-path-to-purchase exploding, it’s never just one video. Here at Mertz, we help our partners determine the best way to create these long form pieces and how else to use them. A :30 second PDP explainer video can be built out and adapted for :15 and :06 second cutdowns. From there the shorter durations can live as content on social, online, OTT, where they can go on to live as interstitial ads for Youtube, your favorite streaming services—even those pesky video ads that grab your eye while you’re pumping gas.
This is something we do often for our clients—like a recent ad for ZEVO. We start big, and then we fine tune and export for multiple sizes, durations, and resolutions to give you the ultimate flexibility in your marketing strategy—without a massive markup.
The key to crafting a full video package in this way comes down to messaging.
Again, Mertz can partner with you and your team to refine what you need to say and incrementally consolidate that to the core message that can fit into a :06 second spot—trust us, it’s hard, but it’s worth it. From there, you build upon the core messaging with a hierarchy of benefits and reasons why John and Jane Smith simply must purchase your widget or use your service.
So next time your product is ready to go to market and you’re ready to get that video out there and let all those consumers know about it, remember, it’s not just that video. It’s never just one video. It’s those videos. The challenge and the opportunity is working your video content into a system that can reach consumers in all the various niche ways that you can.
Casey Welling
Creative Director - Motion
