Project Title: #people stories
BACKGROUND
In-feed video has been the biggest innovation in online video since YouTube. Facebook, Instagram and now LinkedIn self-playing videos without audio have changed the way we not only consumer video but the way we make it too.
It has created whole new genres such as Buzzfeed’s Tasty videos. Text on the screen has become incredibly important as most people watch with the audio off. Video has become as much part of the feed as memes.
BRIEF
In a commercial sense we believe that people buy from people, and the best way to express your personality online quickly is with in-feed video.
RESPONSE
The Instagram series, Humans of New York, inspired us initially to create #people video stories for one of our clients, Mediacorp. We have subsequently made one for inner-city bar and restaurant Club Street Social and we’re rolling it out in a more B2B setting for another client.
Here’s one in the series we created for Mediacorp, Singapore’s national broadcaster, for use on Instagram.
The format is unscripted so the turnaround times are faster. By unscripted, we mean we task a broadcast journalist to interview the subject of the #people story to draw out the most interesting lines. That journalist then directs the editing into a 60-second cut. This cuts down on production and post-production time. More importantly, it draws out authentic answers from the interviewee.
The films can be about an employee, as above, or a founder, as per below. They can work as customer testimonials or case studies. We’ve limited each to 60 seconds as that is the limit for Instagram videos, but it also encourages better retention until the end of the film.
Here’s our film on Min at Club Street Social.
#people stories can be adapted for different formats. Increasingly, for instance, we’ve making films in a square format as this works best on Facebook and Instagram. This #people story below, about our business development manager Artur Akhmetzyanov, who sidelines as Singapore’s favourite (and only) Russian stand-up comic, is shot square with subtitles for use on Facebook and Instagram.
