Brands put a lot of time, effort and budget into their corporate video production and they always hope they will be effective. But sometimes it all just falls, well, sort of… flat. It can happen for lots of reasons, maybe it’s the wrong plan, or maybe the creative wasn’t interesting. It can also happen to videos that aren’t that bad. Let’s not forget that thousands of brand films are uploaded every day, so competition is massive. The perceived effectiveness of marketers’ content is just 34%, which means that only 3 out of 10 marketers feel that their own content is effective.
After making videos for 14 years of promotional video production we’ve learned two things that are the sure-fire enemy of a successful brand film or corporate video. Very simply, videos that are too long or fail to make an emotional connection with the viewer are highly likely to fail. It doesn’t matter how clever your video strategy is, or how creative your corporate videos are; if you’re not communicating the right message or you are saying too much or too little your campaign isn’t going to work.
Let’s look at a simple principle. Less is more. Video is great for connecting at an emotional level, it’s also great for telling stories and communicating messages… but people are busy and they are becoming less likely to give you their attention for very long. Especially if they’re not engaged from the start. To demonstrate this, let’s take a look at a study done by Wisita. The graph below shows two films, the green line is a film that is 30 seconds long, and the blue line is a film that’s 60 seconds long. Look first at the shorter film.
We can see that there is a fairly fast drop-off once the film starts, this is the bounce rate of viewers that realise this isn’t a film they want to watch. Within 5 seconds the film has lost 25% of viewers, which isn’t alarming, and this is followed by a fairly steady drop-off until the end of the film. The completion rate is just below 50% which is a solid performance. As an assessment, this is not a bad curve at all.
Look now at the blue line for the 60-second film, we can see that the initial bounce rate is much higher than the first film. Within 5 seconds we’ve lost half the audience. And this continues to plummet down. Drop-off finally levels out around 25%, and this continues to decline until the end of the film where it ends with 23% of the initial audience.
Ok, so what. Well, the crazy thing is that the first 30 seconds of both of these films are exactly the same. They are performing differently not because of the content but because of their duration. At the end of the short version, the film has 50% of the audience left but the long version has only 25%. People are literally starting the longer film, seeing that it is 60 seconds and not bothering to stay around.
There is one simple thing to take from this…“less is more”
Now that we’ve established that every second counts, how do you start to structure the messaging in your film? Well at hurricane we’ve developed a very simple model that we call EFG!
EFG! Stands for emotion, fact and go! Effective videos open with an emotional message that’s directly linked to the emotional driver of our audience. When this is done it can cover some facts… really these need to be as few as possible to underline your point. With all that done an effective film will can drive viewers to take an action, which is normally best done by linking back to the emotional driver at the start.
Let’s just break off for a moment to note that life isn’t always simple. As will all models there are exceptions to the rule and there are many effective films that don’t contain EFG. For example, a truly emotional tv commercial may have no facts at all. But the interesting thing is that as you become more advanced it’s possible to spread EFG over a number of bits of content, not just a single film. So a brand’s tv commercial could deal with the emotion, then a piece of digital content will deal with the facts and finally, some direct paid ads will focus on the Go! It’s still EFG… It’s just across bits of content not all in one.
Applying EFG to a film structure is pretty easy, and we have a tried and tested way of doing it. The first step is to get all the stakeholders in one place for a messaging session. (if that’s just you even better)
Next, grab some post-it’s and write up three notes. One saying Emotion, One saying Fact and one saying Go. Put these up on the wall with a good couple of feet in between each on … you’re going to be adding a lot of detail so give yourself space.
So we start by thinking about all the emotional drivers that are going to make people engage with your brand and putting each one on a post-it under the Emotion heading. This is not the time for services and benefits .. this is the real things that people care about! For the sake of illustration, let’s say you are from an engineering brand with a new product. Under your Emotion label, you might list the following:
- stressed about challenges
- excited about cool technology and new things
- worried about an uncertain future
- want to make the world a better place
- insecure about keeping a job
- nervous that they don’t know what they need
Notice how these are feelings. This is exactly what a good film connects with right at the start.
Don’t worry about being too precise at this point. Just get it all up on the wall. You will come back to the specifics later
Move along the wall to your Fact title. Now, this is where things start getting busy. Everyone has a massive list of facts they want to say. You’ll have to strip them back later but for now, list the facts that might convince someone to buy your product:
- History
- Expertise
- Tech specs
- Current customers
- Costs
- Business models
- Staff
- Locations around the work
- Scale of business
- Mobile-enabled
- You can see that we already have way more to talk about than we will ever get into a film
And finally, we along to the post-it that says Go! Here we are listing what we want people to do when they’ve watched the film, but we’re also looking to tie the motivator back to the emotion from the start of the film so we could include things like
Look to the future
Save money now – sign up
Do something cool with your life now
Look great to your boss today
Imagine what you could do with us
if you would like to see a film with the EFG structure in place take a look at this corporate video that Hurricane created for Airbus Defence and Space.
Now it’s over to you, grab some posts its, find an hour in your day and see what a film for your brand might look like. This can be a super quick exercise for you if you just want to get the hang of the principle, or you can do a deep dive into your brand right now… It’s entirely up to you.
Make things easier for yourself by selecting a film for one service or feature… you may find that taking a bite of a whole brand film at the moment is more than you can chew. And if you are looking for more inspiration on EFG, why not take a look at these links and try and spot the structure?
