Video Strategy 

I love a good steak — thick with a good sear, a little bit of sea salt and some fresh cracked black pepper. There are few things more mouth-watering than a properly-cooked dry-aged steak. In fact I’ve yet to have a bit of beef that I’ve not enjoyed. But I’m not here to wax poetically about the flat iron or share my favorite recipes. Maybe later.  Instead, I want to share how my love of beef serves as good inspiration for my second passion in life: producing great video content.

 

Beef isn’t cheap. Raising a steer to maturity, transporting and preparation are expensive.  Only eating steaks and rib-eye would cost hundreds of dollars per pound. Luckily, we’ve found ways over the course of time to make use of nearly every part of the animal. In doing so, we’ve stretched our food supply and used our resources to the best of their abilities.

 

Video production can also be expensive. Between paying our highly-skilled media professionals, buying or renting precision equipment, travel expenses and most of all the time it takes to produce great content, the costs can add up quickly. Yet, in the same way that we wouldn’t raise a steer just for one steak dinner, we use all the assets of video production to create a variety of effective and interesting content pieces for our clients.

 

By going into the production process with this mindset, we can better plan on creating and using our content. This is important. We should be asking ourselves what other resources we could generate for our client, what other messages we could be communicating and how. This may include asking our interviewees additional questions, filming additional b-roll and in general, thinking beyond the immediate task at hand. This way of thinking builds versatile tools and assets for clients to use.

 

One 90-second testimonial can be recut into a 30-second or even a 15-second spot. Photos and audio sound bites can be combined with animation to create short GIFs or Animatics. Again, striving to use every part of raw content can lower the cost per individual piece but increase ROI. So while one steak may sound expensive, if we’re using the rest of the cow as efficiently as we can it will be one of many meals.

 

In fact we recently applied this production philosophy to a two-day shooting event held by our client Equipment Technologies. We had five team members shooting video on-site with multiple cameras.

 

While the primary focus was to capture longer 2- to 3-minute Apache Sprayer testimonials, our team is now able to re-cut hours of footage into an additional dozen short 15- to 30-second videos. We also took stills and quotes from our video production and created static display ads and social media graphics — all from one scheduled video shoot that needed to happen anyways. We’ll be using all of these stored assets for future content needs.

 

So whether it’s an excellent steak dinner (primary video production) or a set of skirt steak tacos (re-cuts), it’s all a part of our process of getting as much content for our client’s dollars as we possibly can and leave them hungry for more. Bon apetit.