Instant gratification marketing campaigns will soon be discovered as the frauds that they are, if trained monkeys can fill billboards and bus shelters, when are we as Marketers going to put a stop to our own status quo. It’s time to separate sales from marketing in order for companies to reach their true potential. It’s time to add a new variable to your matrix:
In our current digital and social age, successful video content marketing campaigns will prove to be more important than sales revenue, so let’s not attach dollars to an idea that makes the most sense.
When it comes to video content marketing (VCM) you’ll find an ample source of market research to validate its importance when communicating brand awareness and engaging with your audience. The reason you don’t see it done often, and the reason why in most cases it isn’t done well, is because of those three dreaded letters: R-O-I.
When dealing with large corporate budgets that have already allocated the majority of their media budget to producing commercials or initiatives within more conventional mediums, VCM comes up against marketing collateral that has trackable data and analytical support that is able to justify the means.
So how does the avid marketing innovative mind approach the topic of ROI when presenting video content initiatives?
They don’t.
The purpose of VCM is not to generate revenue. Its true purpose is to connect with your target market on a more personal and intimate level. It is the intention of VCM to start long-term relationships and make commitments to an audience with no strings attached.
Take the recent short entitled: The Game Before The Game
A well-timed campaign from Beats by Dr. Dre, that coincided with the 2014 World Cup. The story was simple but effective, the characters were all well known and easy to affiliate with, and the music set an energetic tone that brought you into the electric atmosphere of the football phenomenon. If you thought that video was a commercial intent on an increase in sales for a particular model of headphones… technically you’d be right. But whether or not that piece had an impact on the bottom line is irrelevant, the true purpose of that video was to connect. A company intent on establishing percentages and returns on any and all productions of that magnitude would most likely deny any further productions, if they even approved one like that in the first place. The ROI would be negligible and if measured monetarily it might have even incurred a loss (probably not in Dre’s case). So if a campaign of that magnitude was a failure on the ledger, what did you get for your $250,000 production? How about A connection like that would create an impact on the market as a whole, like throwing a pebble into a pond – the results of the throw aren’t important, it’s the magnitude of the waves that we’re really after. The Beats by Dre example becomes a bit of an extreme due to Apple’s intervention and purchase of the marketing juggernaut just in time for the World Cup, so let’s look at another example. This is a short documentary film by Harman entitled: The Distortion of Sound In this case, the audience is being invited into a very intimate behind-the-scenes experience with some of the music industry’s biggest names, and nothing is for sale. So how is this a commercial and how does this generate revenue for Harman? For the answer to that you need to examine the message they are delivering, a very disturbing message that society as a whole has come to accept degraded music quality. A few years ago, within a Sony Music Entertainment boardroom somewhere, this very topic was discussed and dismissed. It’s the reason why Sony didn’t jump into the MP3 market after the success of the Walkman and the Discman. They didn’t believe that the consumer would settle for lesser quality music or non-tangible goods. They were wrong, and they have been paying for that mistake ever since. But had they taken Harman’s approach back then, taken the time to address their consumers and inform them without selling anything to them, the digital music market might look a little different today. With a VCM campaign like The Distortion of Sound you’re placing a large amount of capital into something that’s not meant to sell but meant to plant a seed. For a company like Harman that takes a lot of foresight, and for an agency like KBS+ to not put an actionable call-out to a product or service within the short film is commendable. Will consumers stop settling for streamed music? Don’t be ridiculous, that’s not the point of VCM and not the purpose of the short film. The intention of successful VCM has to be the delivery of meaningful communication and information. To connect with its audience, have a conversation, and leave it at that. In our current information age, the news is mostly made up of sensationalism instead of objectivity, and marketing is more about intrusion and distraction than appealing to the consumer. Video Content Marketing has the opportunity to be the voice of reason and become a hybrid of journalism and consumer relations. Of course that would mean providing our target markets with all of the information and letting them come to their own conclusions – people thinking for themselves. A mentality that is blasphemous to every sales department in capitalist North America. After all, what would the world be like if Marketing were to disconnect from Sales, and reconnect with humanity?
Leave A Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.