Demand by your audiences for video formats is escalating precipitously. Social and mobile marketing favor video content. The high desire for video by selling organizations has never been well fulfilled. Video is a critical content format for marketers to leverage.
But video has been inherently difficult to produce. It requires expertise, time and costs that have limited when and where it could be used, as well as the volume of productions. If these factors are keeping you from pursuing an aggressive video strategy, this post will challenge your current thinking and provide an alternative perspective.
New Technology Lifecycle
When new technology arrives it has typically been applied to common use cases and methods. The technology provided value through marginal improvements.
In his classic book Brain of the Firm, Stafford Beer made the observation (paraphrasing) that the question that asks, “given my business, how can I use this new technology?” is fundamentally the wrong question. He recommended the question, “given this technology, how should I design my business?”
Early investment in PC technology followed this process from the late ’80s to the mid ’90s. And people began complaining about realizing only minimal value.
Re-engineering arrived in the mid ’90s to re-design organizations and business models around new, enabling technology. Many credit the productivity boom of the dozen years that followed to this shift.
Today we have digital video technology, a significant improvement over analog. If you look at the use cases as well as methods by which video is created, the methods and use cases today are virtually identical to those from the traditional analog video production model. Yes, we have very nice and affordable digital video editing software, and powerful computers to manipulate files previously requiring huge hardware investments. But nothing close to different business models or techniques.
Outdated Video Model
We are living with an outdated video production model. This affects how we think about what video is, when and how video is created and distributed, and how it is used — the use cases. This thinking, and the limitations it creates, will soon put you at a significant disadvantage. Playing catch up will be difficult and expensive. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s time to shift thinking and break the chains that bind you. This video examines the new video use cases that come from a shift in the way we think about video.
