Producing Video Case Studies

Many organizations use video case studies to help market their products and services. I recently analyzed eleven video case studies, focusing on high level production techniques, how the video was encoded, and how the video was presented on the companies’ web pages. This article presents my findings, and should be useful to marketing professionals, video producers, compressionists and web developers.

I’ll present the findings in four sections:

Useful statistics
Good techniques to emulate
Mistakes to avoid
Best practices for case studies

As an overview, I identified the case studies by Googling “video case studies” and trolling through the results. To use the case study, I had to be able to download it, it must have been created after 1/1/2009 (to the best that I could determine) and had to be used to sell a product or service.

Ultimately, I found videos from companies like Xerox, Comcast, Panasonic, Fujitsu, Tandberg and Blackberry, just to name a few. To me, it looked like all the videos were professionally produced and edited; none appeared to be the work of an ambitious marketing director with a camcorder and no budget.

Again, when analyzing the videos for this article, I focused primarily on video encoding and web site presentation. In a future article, I’ll examine the actual content and discuss issues like the how the marketing claims were presented and proved, the use of B-roll vs A-roll, how and where background music was used and the like.

Let’s start with some useful stats about encoding and presentation.

About Jan Ozer

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I help companies train new technical hires in streaming media-related positions; I also help companies optimize their codec selections and encoding stacks and evaluate new encoders and codecs. I am a contributing editor to Streaming Media Magazine, writing about codecs and encoding tools. I have written multiple authoritative books on video encoding, including Video Encoding by the Numbers: Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video (https://amzn.to/3kV6R1j) and Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg: In Thirty Minutes or Less (https://amzn.to/3ZJih7e). I have multiple courses relating to streaming media production, all available at https://bit.ly/slc_courses. I currently work as www.netint.com as a Senior Director in Marketing.

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