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Using Video More Effectively as a B2B Marketing Tool: A Broadcast Producer Speaks Out

In all of its forms, video is a powerful marketing tool. There are many B2B marketing applications where there is no substitute for using video—product sales and demonstration videos on your company’s Web site, customer training and instructional videos, and corporate sales videos used by your company’s sales reps during on-site sales calls.

Jim Hood, Washington, LA-based communications consultant and owner of ConsumerAffairs.com (www.consumeraffairs.com) has an extensive background in broadcast news journalism, as former Deputy Director and General Broadcast Editor of The Associated Press, and as co-author of the AP Broadcast News Handbook. His most recent project is “& Thou Shalt Honor,” a PBS documentary.

Here are his views on selecting a video producer for a B2B video project, how TV news producers evaluate potential stories for broadcast, and the role of the marketing manager in the video production process.

On Different Kinds of Video Production Firms, and Which One is Right for Your Company:

“There are several different kinds of video production companies: First, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of companies out there that do what’s basically called industrial video—this is what most of us would think of as the ‘Army training film’ school of video production . . . fairly drab, not the best production values and not a lot of show biz.

Second would be a rapidly-growing field of people who are basically coming at it from the computer and Web side of the business, using prosumer digital cameras and doing it all on Mac-based equipment, who are not really television people; they’re sort of computer video people.

And then the third group are the high-end video production companies that are owned by someone who comes out of network television or the movie business or, generally speaking, entertainment and broadcast journalism fields. Those are the guys who really know how to put the ‘sizzle on the steak,’ who use world-class production values, and understand how to keep the viewer’s eye, and hopefully their minds, engaged."

How to Judge the Quality of a Prospective Video Producer’s Work:

“The American consumer today is highly sophisticated in what he looks for today in video. People sit in their recliners with their remotes flipping through 250 television channels and if they don’t see something in the first 1.3 seconds that catches their eye, you’ve lost them.

If they’re walking down the aisle of an exhibit hall at a trade show it may be a slightly different situation, but the same principles apply: Their eyes will go to the monitor and stay on it for a second or two and then if it doesn’t engage them, they’re gone. The easiest way to look at a video and tell something about the producer of it, is to say to yourself: How often do the scenes change? If the video doesn’t change every couple of seconds, then the person who put it together isn’t a high-end, broadcast-standard producer. The video image has to be constantly changing in order to be compelling, and that’s what the consumer has been ‘trained’ to look for.

You also want to ask yourself whether or not you are conscious of the transitions from one shot to another, and from one scene to another. If you say to yourself: ‘Gee, that’s a really interesting way they were able to make one image fade into another,’ chances are it’s an amateurish piece of work because you should never be conscious of any of the editing done in a video.

People shown on-screen should be wearing makeup. You shouldn’t see the makeup, but you should notice that if someone is bald, their bald heads don’t shine, that they don’t have bags under their eyes, etc. Also, you should never see the camera jiggle, and everything should be a professionally lit.”

Where Marketing Managers Can Find a Top-Quality Video Production Firm for a Big-Budget Project:

“If you’re doing a big-budget video project, and you’re in a major city, there are usually three or four companies that do the high-end work that everybody else knows about, and undoubtedly they’re going to be the most expensive, but they’re also the ones who’ve done the work that really stands out.

You can usually find them by asking around in advertising circles. For example, ad agencies use these guys and that’s probably the best way to find them. They might also be in the Yellow Pages, but since they’re business-to-business it’s not likely they do a lot of consumer-level advertising.”

On Video News Releases (VNRs) Sent Out by Wide Satellite Distribution:

“Sending out video news releases has been compared to dropping leaflets out of airplanes during wartime. People spend a lot of money on video news releases and most of them never get on the air, anywhere. There’s no way to guarantee that these things will be used, although there are a lot of ways you can guarantee that they will not be used.

For example, the first flaw that most video news releases display is that they’re just totally inappropriate, they’re presented as something that looks like a straight news story when in fact it’s obviously a program-length commercial. A lot of this really gets into public relations, and how to best present your company to the market.

Satellite distribution of your VNR is the equivalent of putting your news release out on PRNewswire. Chances are it’s really not going to get you very much. It’s better than doing nothing, but not much better.”

On How to Best Position and Package Your Company’s Video Projects for Coverage by TV News and Business Programs:

“You’ve got to find what it is about your company or product that is actually newsworthy, which may not be the thing that you as a marketing manager love about it, or even the thing that you’re trying to promote about it.

When reporters go out to cover something, they sort of back up and ask: ‘What’s the hook in this? What’s going to hook the viewer and make them want to find out more about it, what problems does this solve, what shocking new disclosure does it make, how does this help people live better, longer, etc.’ So that’s really what you have to ask yourself, and until you’ve answered those questions, you can’t even start to think about anything else regarding the video news release.

Another very important question to ask is: ‘Who are you trying to reach with this?’ If it’s a regional product, for example, like a product that gets ice off of windshields faster, then you know that you’re basically interested in the northern-tier states, and you can then localize it even more by saying: ‘This is something that melts ice off windshields even when it’s 30 below.’ Then you know that you should be looking into getting local coverage in places like Minnesota, North Dakota, etc.

The more local something is, by definition, the more newsworthy it is. Staying with the de-icer example, if you have something you can take to a station in Duluth and say: ‘Here’s a really good story about our new windshield de-icer,’ then maybe they’re going to take a look at it.

The second thing to consider is how you’re going to package your story. What a lot of companies pay extra for is to have the video production company take a person that they say is a ‘reporter,’ make them up like a news reporter, spray his or her hair, and put him up there, in serious tones and have them do a stand-up, with some cutaway video in it, and then send this around to news stations. Most stations that are any good won’t even dream about using this video because your ‘reporter’ is obviously a shill, and he’s not somebody who’s known to their viewers.

If they use it at all, most likely they’re going to pick out the video cutaways anyway and use those instead. Not everyone would agree with me on this, but you have more credibility if you only send the ‘B-Roll’—the actual videotape of someone using your product, and a couple of cutaways of people talking about it.

Ideally, it should be a scientist, a doctor, a high-ranking government official, or someone else who can lend some credibility saying: ‘This is something that fills a void’ in a very good way. Then the station can use it any way they want. You can also send them a transcript of everything that’s on the video, along with a suggested story they can use along with it, and a number they can call to interview someone else with your company if they want to. This has a lot of possibilities if it also meets the other news criteria we just discussed, and you can focus it with the usual things stations are looking for—news, consumer and health tips, etc. You’ll also have to persuade the news producers that this is a legitimate story, and not just someone hawking their product.

The best thing that can happen is that someone at a news station gets your tape, or your offer to send the tape, and says: ‘This is a story we’d like to do ourselves.’ It’s ironic that you can spend all this time and money doing your own video and you’re very proud of it, but what you really want to have happen is for the station, or better yet, the network to come out and shoot their own story; then they’re going to use it. They may use a couple of pieces of your tape in that story, but if they come out to shoot their own stories, then it becomes their own story and they’re much more likely to use it.”

Working Day-to-Day with a Video Producer on a Project:

“It’s probably a mistake for most marketing managers to actually try to ‘manage the production’ of a video in terms of playing a day-by-day role in the content of the video. I know they want to do that, but the fact is they’re not content producers or they’d be in that business.

Marketing managers should be able to point the producer to the contacts they need to do the show, and that’s really about it, until periodic reviews start to come back. Ideally, once a week or every couple of weeks, the marketing manager and video producer should meet, and the producer shows him/her what he shot so far to give him some feeling for how the project is shaping up, but really that’s about it. The way that big-budget video productions are made is how Fellini made movies—they go out there and shoot hours and hours of video to make a 3-minute project, and then they spend hours and hours in a production facility coming up with a final edit of the video that’s really sizzling.

It’s not going to work if the marketing manager’s going to spend a couple of weeks out in the field with the production crew, dictating the shots, etc. and what to do next. This is the way to spend an awful lot of money, especially if the producer’s working on an hourly basis as they often are, and to come up with a product that’s not as good as if the marketing manager had taken a more hands-off approach. If you have a 3-man film crew out in the field you’re spending about $1,200 an hour, and anything you do that stretches out this time is really going to bust your budget."

Using Video as a Sales Tool:

“I would never send a DVD to someone as a sales tool; you’ve got to show it to them. If it’s Fedexed or mailed, I can almost guarantee you they’ll never look at it—they’ll intend to look at it, but chances are they never will. You’ve got to get the person to sit down and look at it or they’re not ever going to look at it on their own. I think every salesperson who represents your company should have with them some device that lets them show this video—a laptop, or a small, flat-screen DVD player."

Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@businessmarketinginstitute.com

Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), a director with the Business Marketing Institute, is author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook and The CRM Field Marketing Handbook, and president of GAA ( http://www.realmarkets.net ), a marketing, sales turnaround, and product development consulting firm.