Start seeing video as an investment and treat it as such.

The value of video is not in doubt in 2015, but perhaps the industry hasn’t quite got to grips with how to use, store and curate it. We’re strong believers that to get the most out of video it needs to be managed. This comes not only from previous experience but also from talking to client after client who has similar complaints - they know the value is there, they just don’t know how to extract it!

So they end up:

  • Spending too much time wading through hours of video trying to find the evidence they know they saw somewhere
  • Dealing with video requests for others becomes a whole day chore, or they end up just ignoring them as they just don’t have the time! Meaning their colleagues don’t manage to get value from the content either.
  • Struggling to articulate findings from the mass of video collected, it’s relatively easy to get video responses from respondents, analysing them is less so. Often it involves being sat in a dark room and faffing about with a list as long as your arm full of time codes, trying to remember where exactly the points they wanted to use were.
  • Feeling overwhelmed/wasteful/mildly intimidated by the mass of video they’ve managed to collect, use once and then put somewhere/leave with the research agency or lose track of completely.

Don’t think this applies you? Think about it? How many projects have you completed over the past few years using photo’s, video, images? Add it up? One client had 150 hours of video in a cupboard in her office. She knew it had value - but had no idea how to extract any meaning from it and couldn’t enable anyone else to get value from it.

Companies who use video need a system in place to manage their content (don’t get us started on the companies who don’t do video research, but that’s another matter/rant for another post) otherwise they risk:

  • Spending 20 times longer finding specific examples
  • Video analysis taking 6 times longer
  • Doing unnecessary primary research
  • Losing out on untold value of under utilised content

Video needs curating otherwise it becomes an expensive luxury. Allow your content to start generating value by making it usable saving you time, money but most importantly allowing you to generate a more insightful type of research.