cScore Drill-down: Use of Video Media This week we drill into the cScore element related to online video. Short, well-produced web videos are becoming more widely used than ever for one simple reason. People learn more easily and naturally by watching and listening than they do by reading. For something as technical as financial services, you still need supporting text on your site, but as an introduction to your firm, one that captures your process narrative and the personality of the principals, nothing works better than video. In this post we will focus primarily on a few production basics to help insure your videos are effective. We will share some key insights of what we have learned over scores of managing video projects. Getting video right is not easy. The long talking head videos that dominate much of the manager content will rarely be watched for more than 60 to 90 seconds. That said, using InvestCloud’s short-form approach makes good video capture painless. Before getting to those details, let’s look at a few statistics that underline why your firm should take this subject seriously. Over the next 24 hours 89 million people in the United States are going to watch 1.2 billion online videos (ComScore). By 2016, just two years from now, the total number of online video users are expected to double to 1.5 billion (Cisco). Online video now accounts for 50 percent of all mobile traffic (Bytemobile Mobile Analytics Report). Viewers will give up on an online video if it doesn’t load in two seconds (University of Massachusetts Amherst and Akamai Technologies). Mobile and tablet users are three times as likely to view a video as laptop or desktop users (NPD). Online video production will account for more than one-third of all online advertising spending within the next five years (Borrell Associates). 92 percent of mobile video viewers share videos with others (Invodo). More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month, spending more than 4 billion hours watching videos (YouTube). None of this should be surprising when you think about how we are all wired more for telling and listening to stories than we are reading. According to recent studies 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year, and 42% of college graduates report never reading another book after college. (Jenkins Group). More anecdotally, think of the last time you were effectively persuaded by a business presentation. Most likely it was watching an effective principal or sales person tell their “story”. It was not likely from reading a textual thesis. On to the practical. The first point to make is that your first video should be your highest level “evergreen” story; the story you tell to anyone considering placing new money about your firm’s history, people, and investment process that differentiate your offering. Since these stories are not focused on performance, prediction or commentary they don’t get dated and are essentially clean for compliance purposes. Because you can keep them on you site for several years in many cases, it is cost effective to use high quality video production. For larger firm’s with diverse products and business units, these same types of evergreen stories can be applied anywhere in the firm where the story you are telling is about a particular process or product structure that is likely to be
in place for the long-term. Point two is to focus on talent and not rank in selecting who you are going to shoot for your video. Those who choose to watch your videos are only going to be concerned with one thing: is the person in the video interesting. They really will not care or have any reference point for how senior the person is in your organization. Often the person you choose might be in your sales or business development areas rather than one of your principals of portfolio managers. The one exception to this are those cases where firms have branded around celebrity financial or academic talent that is well known in the industry. Point three is to lose the script. While on occasion InvestCloud has found money managers or advisors that are talented enough that they can deliver a script in a relaxed and sincere fashion, they are in fact quite rare. Even really effective communicators can become very stiff and stilted when trying to deliver a scripted message. We have found that a much more effective way to get at the most important story elements is set it up as an interview; to simply have a conversation with questions that are scripted to bring out the key things you want to get across. What we have found is that after a few minutes the conversation becomes more relaxed and the firm spokesperson starts to fall into familiar riffs that they have use many times and know well. Using this approach you get a much more natural and persuasive result, and in the end it takes far less time to produce as well. The final point, you want a “trailer� not a movie. Once you have captured the whole interview, which in most cases will be between 5 and 15 minutes in length, you want to edit out everything except the most interesting or well-spoken 2 to 3 minutes. The point of the video is not to tell your whole story, only enough of it that they get a sense of who you are. Like a trailer for a movie, your point is to get them to want to buy a ticket, not to give them the whole plot. From the many times InvestCloud has done this, we can assure you that even managers or advisors with little or no media experience can be made to look compelling. Given how effective this sort of tool can be, and now much more likely prospective clients are to watch video content, we believe any manager doing a new website design or upgrade really should add video production to their list of requirements. Next week will conclude this series on cScore with a look at our final scoring element: Mobility. The growth of tablet use generally, in iPads particularly, has changed the place and viewing format that many of your clients now bring to their reporting expectations. Adapting your report offering to these new form factors is becoming a significant competitive differentiator. If you would like more information on InvestCloud’s website design, or our video production capabilities, visit us at www.investcloud.com.