Brand marketers are increasingly in need of solid information on performance expectations for their next big video ad campaigns. ROI demands by management, coupled with rising production costs and
escalating media costs, require solid research before a campaign launches. Three brands (we'll keep them general for purposes of this article) have been party to the creation of a totally new
approach to satisfy this need for video research: crowdsourced video storyboards.
To set the stage, crowdsourcing involves taking a typical task that a company does in-house, and outsourcing
it to a "crowd" of talented individuals with relevant areas of interest and expertise, ultimately selecting the best work that they, the brand, want to use. The brand shares a creative brief, enables
the crowd to take a stab at a given assignment, and generally ends up with dozens of videos to review and select. The company has the luxury of examining a wide variety of work concepts, and can
easily identify which work is right for their uses.
As this applies to research, an ecommerce retailer recently had a featured product that faced strong negative sales pressure from new
devices that had appeared in their market space. In order to reposition their current product more effectively versus the competition, this retailer wanted to internally research actual video
representations of different strategic positioning statements before charging ahead with a full-scale video campaign.
The retailer deployed crowdsourcing to create video storyboards in the
form of rough video commercials based on each of ten positioning statements. The resulting work was then brought in-house and shared with the executive management team to help them see how each of
the statements might play-out if run on TV campaigns. Through this approach, the execs were able to effectively decide on the final product positioning before initiating the expense of a full-scale
video production campaign by their national agency.
A parallel example comes from a company that similarly wanted to see video examples of a new positioning concept before diving into a full
campaign. In this instance, the company screened participants from a network of crowdsourced videographers with a research questionnaire, and ultimately invited 25 of these creators to participate.
The project was launched privately, so no external audiences -- including the competition -- could see the work being developed. From the 25 submissions, the brand selected five which they
judged as the best original concepts. These video storyboards were then put into online focus group research, to determine through qualitative and quantitative analysis which video execution might
have the greatest impact.
The process saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in research and production costs, while providing them with a more thought-out foundation from which to
launch their product's video campaign.
A final example is from a restaurant chain that wanted to see how a proposed positioning statement could be portrayed, especially by videographers who
were already predisposed to the brand and product line in a competitive space.
The new statement was shared with ten videographers the brand cherry-picked from a crowd, who then proceeded to
execute their versions of a commercial based on the provided messaging. The results were varied and unique, giving the restaurant chain a solid sampling of how a video campaign might be presented.
The brand will put a handful of these videos into internal review, and then external quantitative analysis.
Once the research is completed, the top-performing video will be reshot, with some
minor enhancements to be proposed by the brand based on the research results.
At its best, research enables companies to get the information they need to make intelligent decisions without
breaking the bank. It is most fascinating that in the fast-moving world of video today, companies can actually be part of creating new forms of research to meet these needs.