The inexorable rise in video

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By Konstantina Valsamou Intern

What guarantees a campaign’s success? What can companies do to increase brand awareness, generate “buzz” and ultimately ensure brand loyalty?

The aforementioned questions have been baffling marketers who are always on the lookout for new trends in marketing and groundbreaking ways to reach their target audience and increase sales.

While in the search for the elements that are believed to be responsible for a brand’s success, brands reinvent themselves trying to find new innovative ways to express traditional ideas. Emotions such as humour, shock, sadness etc. are being employed again but this time with the use of online video while also being distributed to the audience via new communication channels.

By 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer Internet traffic, according to Cisco (2015). Video content is not just an emerging trend, but also one of the most efficient ways of engaging with your potential customers. It has changed the way businesses are being conducted and the possibilities are endless. One can say that video ads are definitely dominating the advertising world today.

Video content plays a major role in increasing brand awareness as the rise of social networks allows for sharing interesting content across multiple devices. Video is considered a widely more interesting form of content in comparison to text and some claim that video is more persuasive. No technology has been found that better conveys human emotion than video while others believe that it builds trust and credibility more effectively. Surely enough, video content enables viewers to connect with a brand on a human level; being able to share feelings and develop a relationship with the brand are some of the factors that contribute to a brand’s success.

However, the sole use of video cannot guarantee success. All the new advancements in technology need to be taken into account by firms who want to be considered leaders in their industry.

Mobile optimisation is a key element to a successful video marketing strategy. Video is predicted to account for 72% of all mobile traffic by 2019 (Cisco, 2015); and numbers don’t lie. By ensuring that video content is responsive on all devices users get the best experience possible, which is after all the objective.

While it is essential for businesses that want to include video in their marketing strategies to consider optimising their video to be mobile responsive, it is also important to pay attention to the content and maybe even consider deleting poorly performing videos.

Researchers seem to widely agree on the fact that most popular videos share some elements of surprise and these seem to get them more reach and engagement. When viewers are shown something familiar but in a different way, they are more prone to buy a product after watching a video about it.

Essentially, innovation is the key.

However, are people so easy to “manipulate”?

There have been numerous cases where the use of emotions was responsible for videos going viral (John Lewis Christmas ad). However, it is not so simple and there isn’t one recipe that everyone can simply follow and get more reach and engagement. What most marketers fail to realise is that the use of cute babies and animals is not responsible for attracting attention but it’s how these can be incorporated and aligned with one’s brand, its purpose and essence.

Subsequently, for this Year’s Christmas Campaign for Glenfiddich here at Gravity Thinking, we wouldn’t miss out on the opportunity to use video content to better express what Glenfiddich is all about, the essence of the brand but still do it in a different way while keeping it relatable to Glenfiddich as a brand and its history. The first drop of whisky fell out of the William Grant’s stills on Christmas day while they also have a history of doing things differently.

Glenfiddich aims at differentiating itself from other whisky brands and with this piece of creative we hope it will achieve just that. Glenfiddich is moving to a more ‘maverick’ positioning as a brand and this campaign was aimed at people who might in the past have seen single malt and Glenfiddich as an older person’s drink. We wanted to grab the attention of a slightly younger audience than usual, an audience that needs to be spoken to in a different way than the same old traditional whisky advertising way; we wanted to be innovative and “break the rules”.

So we decided to go with a concept that highlighted a particular group of people who like to go for a swim in Loch Lomond rather than produce some creative or a campaign around the standard and expected Christmas traditions.

We weren’t out to encourage everyone to start swimming on Christmas Day, but to entertain and perhaps inspire people to give their traditions a shake up. We also encouraged on the site people to tell us how they do the festive period differently.

Video is changing the face of business. It is no surprise that 2015 was the year of Video Marketing for all the right reasons. Video is increasing brand awareness, generates word of mouth and ensures brand loyalty as it keeps the audience entertained and intrigued. Video will still be relevant for many years ahead and we are looking forward to see any new future developments.

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