Assets with Assets
Video is no longer just video. It doesn’t exist as a standalone asset that runs on TV, YouTube, Facebook feed or anywhere else. Video today needs more than single execution. It needs a strategy for how that execution can evolve from a standalone product to an asset that can be bent, molded and executed in different ways.
Creating video is rarely cheap, so it’s a good idea to think about how one shoot can turn into multiple assets. Take Nike, for example. Snowball Fight was a campaign that ran a couple years ago. They did the shoot, but they also got behind-the-scenes content to give users more to sink their teeth into after the campaign had launched.
We did the same thing for Shadow of War (Disclosure: This was a client). We had the interactive trailer that gamers could (still can) experience, but that was just the beginning. We had behind-the-scenes content to give gamers more and to continue to feed them video assets that came from the same project but offered another level of depth.
The Video is Just the Beginning
Brands can no longer think of creating video as the act of developing a single asset that lives in a single place. It’s creating a springboard for storytelling. One video can be supported by other videos (e.g., BTS content), turned into GIFs and cut-down into shorter assets.
YouTube’s making this happen algorithmically with its launch of “Director Mix,” tech that creates thousands of videos tailored to different audiences from a single creative asset.
The era of the one-off videos is over. Now, a video is just the beginning. It’s the beginning of a multi-channel communication strategy.