June 2019

Charity, Insight, Portfolio, Released

How to get more bang for your video buck…

We all know that video is the current king of content, but producing video content that is worth sharing takes time and effort, if not money. If you’re putting valuable resources into video content, there are a number of ways to make it work harder to generate a higher return on your investment.

It’s all in the planning

Think of your video as the starting point from which you can create a whole series of additional assets, giving you valuable extra content that can be used across all of your channels, designed specifically to reach different audiences. This will ensure you gather much more meaningful, coordinated material, resulting in far greater impact and value for money or… a bigger bang for your buck!

Case Study: The Royal British Legion

The Royal British Legion are concerned that, because far fewer people have any direct or family experience of the forces, we don’t generally understand the true role of serving personnel – and they are worried that support for the charity’s vital work will diminish as a result.

So Hound Dog Films were commissioned to make a number of films, as part of an on-going campaign, that illustrate the extent and diversity of work that serving military personnel undertake within the civilian world. And our challenge was to reach the widest possible audience with these films.

Our approach

We leveraged the power of truthful and emotional storytelling to create a series of films to deliver a number of key, strategic content messages.

These are the stories of three serving military personnel – Katie, Tony and Ben – who use their skills to support civilian communities in non-combative roles in vital and often surprising ways: Surgeon Lieutenant Katie Newlands, Royal Navy works as a doctor at Queen Alexandra Hospital, Portsmouth; Captain Tony Viney of the 1st (UK) Division, York, set up a team of army personnel to help train counter-poaching units in Malawi; and Chief Technician Ben Wood, RAF Valley is a Team Leader of the RAF Mountain Rescue Service, based on Anglesey covering the wider Snowdonia area.

By focusing on human-interest stories, we were able to create audience-first content that connects directly with and engages the target audience.

The results

The films were designed and produced in such a way that we could more readily version and tailor them in a variety of formats for a number of different channels and audiences.

We created 3 x 90-second films, plus one-minute short-cuts and 15-second teasers for each film, with and without subtitles, specifically versioned in a variety of formats for different social media channels (e.g. widescreen, 16:9 and 1:1 for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter):

Watch the films: Katie’s story – Serving in the Navy and the NHS; Tony’s story – helping save endangered animals in Africa; Ben’s story – How the RAF Mountain Rescue saves lives

In all, we produced 30 versions of the films, delivered within budget and within the same production schedule. Additionally, transcripts from the interviews, together with stills photography taken on location and images exported from the final films, were used to create supporting online editorial content.

The films are proving highly effective, generating in excess of 400,000 views in the few weeks since they were released, delivering great return on investment for our client.