Another Creative Way to Atomize Video
For years, industry articles and blogs have called “atomizing”—the breaking apart, remixing, and reusing of marketing content—a smart strategy for maximizing its ROI. Makes sense. Create content once. Cut into lots of engaging nuggets to use many times.
It’s an especially effective strategy for videos, which can be time-consuming and costly to produce. If you want to maximize your budget and amplify the impact of your videos, you can’t just tell one story or forget there’s more than one way to tell it. You have to be mindful when shooting that there are several messages you can convey and lots of places to do that beyond websites, blogs, and YouTube channels:
- Deploying short clips as Instagram stories or email teasers
- Turning screenshots into visually exciting presentations
- Stripping out the audio to create podcasts
- Weaving footage from several shoots into a new, long-form composite video
To name just a few.
Street Level Studio worked with Canon Solutions America—an industry leader in enterprise, production, and large format printing systems—on another creative way to atomize video footage and build some significant customer goodwill at the same time.
In 2018, I was dispatched to several commercial printing operations around the country to shoot one of Canon’s game-changing new large format printers in action and interview the owners and operators. The footage would be edited into five-minute video testimonials describing their experience (and impressive success) with the new printer Canon would use to educate potential buyers and help seal the deal on future purchases.
Pretty straightforward. But I knew I also was shooting footage for another purpose: to create custom corporate videos for each customer that they could use to promote their expanded capabilities with the new Canon printer. It was a great value-add for the customer as well as a strategic way for CSA to say thanks for agreeing to talk on camera and letting me disrupt their day and place of business. It also allowed me to add more layers, narratives, and depth to the tales the video would eventually tell.
The shot list included the usual scenes: the printer printing out spectacular images, executives and employees talking about their experiences with the printer and its impact on their jobs, a bit of B-roll in the offices and the print shop areas, and interactions with customers willing to tell their side of the story. But, more importantly, the footage was thoughtfully shot with a wider view of how it would eventually be turned into multiple marketing opportunities.
So, before your next video shoot, I encourage you to think beyond the primary purpose and consider all the ways it could be atomized—to generate additional content, show more sides of your story, multiply reach and engagement, and even strengthen those important relationships with customers and partners. You just have to see the possibilities. Here’s a look at what we did.
Canon Solutions America Case Study Video:
Customer Promotion Video:
Brian Fuller is Street Level Studio’s Digital Creative Director.
