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.