Video is helping drive the European online advertising market’s double-digit growth. Already most Internet traffic is video and Zenith recently estimated that online video will grow by 20% this year.
Video is also the most potent marketing medium, and the vocabulary of today’s consumer conversation. For brands to join that conversation, be relevant and help shape it, they must participate with video.
And not just with one glossy TV commercial every six months. Marketers need authentic video that engages and resonates with consumers, they need more of it, all year round, at scale, and they need it at a fraction of traditional agency cost.
One way to achieve all this is curated video crowdsourcing.
1) Authenticity
Brands realise they are now defined as much by consumers as their own marketing. They also know authentic content is more trusted, entertaining and engaging for consumers than traditional “advertising”. But achieving authenticity is tough, especially with video, which has usually been dictated and produced centrally.
One alternative is user-generated content (UGC), but this is risky and often low quality, if not unusable. Curated video crowdsourcing – asking a crowd of talented filmmakers to produce video to a given brief – is a more promising option. It keeps the quality high and remains on-message while generating grassroots storytelling, which reflects consumers’ genuine emotions and attitudes.
Real content from real people will always be more relevant and consequently, earn more traction on social media. It also avoids big mistakes like Pepsi’s desperate Kendall Jenner ad, which strained to link their brand to conflict resolution. The creative wisdom of crowds avoids such phoney storylines.
The genuine nature of the crowd emerges through its surprising, inclusive filmmaking – a rainbow of couples for a pasta brand, an unusual star for swimwear, or inspirational people living with Parkinson’s. The crowd unearths real stories, often among friends or family. This authenticity convinces and is critical with subjects where any hint of insincerity is immediately spotted.
Crowdsourcing also delivers diversity. The ASA recently criticised gender stereotyping, and with marketers looking to introduce true diversity into their content, the crowd provides a simple answer; by definition, you receive videos from all sorts of people and from all points of view. No gender stereotyping here.
2) Scale
A typical crowd brief generates dozens, maybe hundreds of films with unrivalled creativity and insight. With the crowd, you get the chance to iterate and use multiple videos in the real world to see which ones work best before purchasing.
Just one crowd call to action can populate a long-term social media editorial plan with video. Tic Tac used this approach with their crowd brief, “Tic Tac sparks refreshing moments”, to generate 370 films from 27 countries. From this creative cornucopia, they chose 50 videos for their Instagram and Facebook plans.
The sheer scale of production also gives flexibility around contextual use of content. Many brands see the value of a Christmas film for instance, but what about other days in the year? Ford harnessed the crowd to make films for Mothers Day, Valentines Day, Popcorn Day… Danish jewellery brand Trollbeads does this very cleverly - see a case study on their “viral recipe” here.
The variety of video received from a crowd brief means that you also have the advantage of publishing videos relevant to a range of customer groups. This makes the content more engaging and shareable.
3) Cost
Brand video is usually produced by agencies in a costly and complex process. But in today’s breathless social media world, long production cycles, interruptive delivery and polished TV ad styles are obsolete, intrusive and out of place.
The big budgets are simply unsustainable too. One marketer for a new dairy product explained that the crowd will give him three high-quality online ads for the same price that a Madison Avenue agency quoted him for a storyboard.
Agencies have been slow to adapt to the new video landscape. As a global FMCG marketer told Userfarm recently, “We have been waiting for years for our agency to offer solutions. They have not.”
But as demand for video increases, agency processes and high budgets are coming under scrutiny. In the UK, this is exacerbated by rising inflation and uncertainties around Brexit. In the USA, questions have even been asked of top agencies around transparency and rigging of production bids.
Working with the crowd avoids these issues and gives marketers new options. For instance, native content and social media activity, which has previously relied on text and images, can now afford to include substantial volumes of quality video as well.
Crowdsourced video is not the answer to all brand’s filmmaking needs. There is still a place for your high budget hero TV commercial, for which the crowd is not usually the best option.
But for dozens of films to support that TV campaign and develop your brand narrative in social media, engaging different groups of consumers with relevant, authentic story-telling and building emotional connections for your brand – at a sustainable budget – well, that is clearly crowd territory.
By Jeffrey Lee, chief marketing officer at Userfarm
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