In a crowded marketplace, how can today’s legal firms differentiate themselves from their competitors? One way is digital video, so this week’s post contains some examples of how video can be used… 

by Sam Edwards

The legal sector is an enormous industry. There are currently more than 10,000 solicitors firms in England and Wales alone, ranging from tiny sole practices to multinational partnerships with profits in the millions. Competition is intense at every level, with little to differentiate between the different organisations. As such, this industry serves as an excellent example of the point we have been making in previous blogs: digital video is the best way to stand out from the crowd.

Law firms offer a wide variety of services, so the aims of their websites will depend on the areas of law they deal with and the size of the organisation. Smaller firms tend to deal with more day-to-day personal matters. Their corporate image is built around the friendliness and approachability of their staff: they are there to help you, so when you need help they need to be the first people you think of.

There are many ways video can help with this: A short interview with one of the partners can help clients relate to them, establishing a level of trust before they’ve even met.  Another use is a series of client testimonials that demonstrate a firm’s results. Professional-quality films can help smaller organisations to attract attention within a crowded marketplace.

Larger firms need a different approach to video, as multinational firms are less likely to deal with individual clients.  They are more likely to provide legal assistance to large businesses, which means that their image needs to communicate a deeper knowledge to solve complex problems, to show that they can be trusted and depended on. The best way to do that is to take a thought leadership approach, using video to discuss the latest news and trends in the profession with the purpose of bringing their firm to the forefront of the industry. Similar to a trade magazine, some law firms produce regular videos aimed at in-house lawyers to keep them up to date with developments in the legal sector and advise them on any matters specific to that section of the industry.

Video can also be used to publicise news and developments specific to the firm. This helps to keep the organisation fresh in the public eye and remind potential clients of why the company is successful, in an entertaining and engaging way. One of the videos made by Eversheds, for example, shows some of the work the organisation has done during their successful expansion into the Middle East.

Currently the most common use of video in the larger firms of the legal sector is in recruitment advertising, Many companies have a separate website aimed at graduates, full of videos that promote them as a vibrant and supportive working environment. Clifford Chance has a good range of these films, showing examples of the work they do and offering advice on making an application to the firm. Such large and successful organisations have very competitive graduate schemes, so it is vital that they attract the best and brightest, and their use of video helps to show that they understand the popularity of new media with the younger generation.

That being said, video is by no means just for the younger generation any more. As we have said before, it is becoming more and more an integral part of online marketing, and the legal sector is no exception. Larger firms need high quality videos to compete with the other multinationals, and small firms need it to catch the eye in such a crowded market.

The post Courting Change: Digital Video in the Legal Sector appeared first on Ember Television - Video Production Birmingham.

What does crossing the line do?

• It disorientates the viewer.
• It confuses the viewer’s perception of the relationship between two shots.
• It looks very odd.

So what is it?

Crossing the line nearly always occurs with two consecutive shots of people interacting.

This line is easily explained with examples:

Example #1

Imagine a conversation between two people called Dave and Steve. Let’s imagine a wide shot – they are sitting on two chairs opposite each other.

From our wide shot we can see Dave is looking to the right, and Steve is looking to the left.

If we were going to cut to a close up of either of our characters, we would have to be filming from the same side of the line – and the line is an imaginary one from Dave’s face to Steve’s.

If we stay this side, when we cut to that close up of Steve, he is still looking to the left.

Now let’s say we cross our imaginary line and film a shot of Steve. He would now be looking to the right.

If I was to cut this with a shot from the other side of Dave, he would also be looking to the right and the cut between our two shots would disorientate the viewer. Has Steve turned round?

Example #2

Another example is a football match. Our “line” would be drawn between the two goals. Spurs are going right to left, and Arsenal from left to right. Every time the director cuts to any shot, the viewer knows the direction the players are going. If he was to suddenly cut to a shot on the other side of the pitch, the teams would be going the opposite way. Sometimes you’ll see this in replays and the caption “Reverse angle” is displayed.

Example #3

Our final example is a shot of Dave picking up an object. We have two shots: a wide of him on the left and a table with the camera on, then a close up of his hand picking up the camera.

The line is drawn between our two interacting things – James and the camera.

When we cut to the close up, we need to be on the same side, otherwise the hand that we were expecting to come in from the left, would come in from the right. The object would also have turned around.

Can you ever cross the line?

Possibly, if you go via an alternative wide.

If you cross the line with a different wide, where you can see our two characters, you can argue that a viewer is not confused by the change as they can still see the relationship.

The main point is this: if you’re ever in doubt, ask yourself “would the viewer be confused about who is looking at who?” or “is the viewer confused about the direction things are going in?” or how objects and people are related to each other in space.

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Adobe’s latest report shows a gathering momentum behind the tide of digital video

By Robin Powell

Adobe has just released its US Digital Video Benchmark for 2012 – its annual report on all-things-video. Even for those, like ourselves, who correctly predicted the exponential growth in demand some time ago, the figures are frankly eye-watering.

Digital video consumption has increased by 50% in the past two years. It went up 30% over the course of the calendar year 2012, and grew 13% from Q3 to Q4 2012 alone.

Of course, the pattern is not confined to the US. We’re seeing something very similar here in the UK, and indeed around the world. So what can companies and other organisations learn from the trends revealed in the Adobe report?

1. Target your mobile audience

Video consumption on smartphones tripled year on year, from 2011 to 2012. The increase on tablets was even slightly higher than that. Remember, tablet users tend to be early adopters, and they consume more media content and spend more money than most. Target them.

2. Schedule your content carefully

Online video consumption has peaks and troughs troughout the week. Smartphone users watch most videos on a Monday, Thursday and Sunday. Tablet users watch more videos at weekends. Release your video content at the right time to maximise the impact.

3. Combine digital video with social media

As the report says, social media and digital video are a “natural fit”. While video content drives social media engagement, carefully targeted posts – especially tweets – help to build a video audience. For best effect, you need to work on both video content and social media at the same time.

4. Advertise during – not before or after

Finally, the report presents some interesting findings for advertisers. For instance, mid-roll adverts – i.e. those shown in the middle of video content – are more likely to be viewed in full than either pre- or post-roll ads. Also, regardless of where an ad’s positioned, it’s more likely to be watched in its entirety in a video longer than two minutes.

So what’s next?

Reports, like this one, on the inexorable rise of digital video are everywhere you look on the Internet. Many, it must be said, are produced or commissioned by companies with a vested interest in it. Cisco, for example, have been predicting it for years. It’s undoubtedly happening, and if anything at a faster rate than even the likes of Cisco predicted.

The brands and publishers who saw the potential for video when others were pruning their marketing budgets are now reaping the rewards. But if you weren’t one of them, it’s not too late to start. The digital video revolution has barely begun.

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Is thought leadership the new differentiator between the professional services?

by David Mellor

We live in a world of bewildering choices. We face choices every day as a consumer. Do we shop online or in the supermarket?  If so which store? Which range? Which flavour? Which price band? Or for some, how much do we want to save the planet?

Equally, choice extends to professional services; to our selection of lawyer, accountant, consultant or surveyor. Do we prefer the scale of a multinational or the service of a regional specialist? Should we plump for global coverage or tradition?

Scratch the surface though, and our real choices may well be fewer. In the supermarket, Tesco’s supplier could well be the same as Waitrose’s and may be the only one on the market. Similarly in the professional world, our regional lawyer may now provide identical services to the company with offices in every continent.

Despite the protestations of countless marketing departments, many professional service organisations are actually providing pretty much the same thing. As service offerings broaden, uniformity beckons. Accountants become consultants, lawyers absorb accountants. Regions begin to blur. Is Edinburgh the predominant UK regional financial centre, or is Leeds, or Bristol or Birmingham? The globe shrinks and merges. Canary Wharf resembles New York, which resembles Sydney, and ever more resembles Beijing and Mumbai. Despite local legal systems, professionals increasingly come from the same stock, through standardised courses, run by cloned universities and global business schools. In our barrier-free virtual geography of the 21^st century, old-school expansion through territorial or sectorial acquisitions has become expensive, ungainly and potentially value-destroying.

So what can a professional organisation do to genuinely differ?

Try stopping and thinking.

By thinking we may solve our own puzzle. Traditional differentiators built on sectors, services and geography grow irrelevant. In their place, how you think and how you act, starts to triumph over what you do and where you do it. Thinking that bit harder, that bit cleverer, that bit more innovatively – that delivers genuine “thought leadership”, and hard-edged advantage.

Simply put, clients progressively favour advisors whose thinking enables them to outwit their challengers. Thought leadership becomes a fearsome weapon in the competition war. But success is only achieved if the difference thought leadership brings, the competitive advantage, can be pressed home. Really smart thinkers adopt innovative concepts such as online video and social media to lift their clever thoughts above the rest. Indeed nailing the right method to steer potential clients to spot your difference, your thought leadership, is arguably cutting-edge thinking in itself.

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There are many elements that make a cheesy video. Before we start, we need to establish two truths: different people find different things cheesy, and cheesy does not automatically mean bad. Some of the best film quotes of all time are intrinsically cheesy, and in the right circumstances cheese can be an expected or desirable quality. I have tried to use definitions that take into account the fact that this concept is so subjective.

• When a film tries too hard to bring out emotions

The worst culprits of this are romance films. Moments when the hero and heroine finally get together are some of the cheesiest scenes you can commit to camera, spouting clichéd lines as the music builds to a crescendo of violins, pulling out all the stops without any thought to subtlety or realism. It’s not necessarily a bad thing: this particular type of cheese is generally designed to appeal to a target audience, and so will produce the most groans from anyone outside of that group. In the above example, a man might be squirming in his seat while his girlfriend dabs her eyes. Smelliest cheese: The Notebook

• Bad puns

This is one of the most grating varieties of cheese, especially in action movies. There is a certain degree of intelligence that goes into the making of a truly terrible pun, but their complete lack of realism drags you out of the world of the film and makes the viewer want to bang their head against a brick wall. Smelliest cheese: Everything Arnold Schwarzenegger says in Batman and Robin.

• Lines that sound silly out of the context of the film

There are many examples of this in fantasy and sci-fi movies, where the film has built its own world and come up with ridiculous names for everything in it. The worst culprits are ones that combine this with the first point, trying to illicit emotion in the audience using words that most of them had never heard of 3 hours earlier. Smelliest cheese: Star Wars (especially the prequels)

• Overacting

Another one that takes a special kind of skill to pull off, overacting makes us laugh unintentionally, again distancing us from the video and making us judge what we are watching instead of enjoying it. This is usually done in action films, or by minor characters who desperately want to make a lasting impression. It’s at its most jarring when done by a lead character in a non-action context. Smelliest cheese: This incredible moment from The Room:

The common element in all these cheesy moments is that they ruin the interest in a silly way. Instead of being drawn into the moment, the audience steps back and realises how badly the film is trying to engage their attention.  The natural instinct is to laugh at it instead.

Cheese works when it’s expected in a film – if you watch something like the Muppets, you’re wanting to come out with a massive grin on your face, or if it’s a Schwarzenegger film when you’ve enjoyed any of his other roles, the cheese won’t bother you. These require a second suspension of disbelief – you are letting yourself engage within the context of the emotional purpose of the video.

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Digital is evolving at an incredible rate. Recent statistics indicate that over half of all UK consumers own a smartphone, and Ovum predicts that 6 billion iOS apps will have been downloaded by the close of 2012. So, with a nation increasingly dependent on smartphones, public venues and cultural attractions are seeing the fundamental need to incorporate digital platforms as part of their offer.

But in the museum sector, some remain dubious about digital. One key concern is that places like museums are meant for time away from smartphones – but in an age where the average UK smartphone-owner spends more than two hours on their phone daily, can cultural attractions really afford to neglect their digital element? And could digital platforms, in fact, be key to revolutionising the museum sector and pulling more visitors in?

What QR codes, digital games and smartphone apps offer is a transformation of the ‘passive’ museum experience into an interactive, elective journey. Visitors choose to uncover information rather than simply being fed it on a plate, actively acquiring knowledge in immersive ways.

So what are the best ways of implementing digital experiences in your museum?

Many museums are opting for QR codes, which allow users to scan different items or exhibition pieces using their smartphones for extra information. Take Derby Museum, for example. There, QR codes are specialised with QRpedia, a multi-language support system. Visitors scanning the QR codes are provided with Wikipedia articles, and are actually able to read that information in over a dozen different languages.

Another digital format working particularly well in the museum sector is augmented reality. Here, a real-world environment is enhanced through computer-generated input. One organisation taking particular advantage of this is The National Space Centre,who have set up a green-screen both allowing visitors to record futurist weather reports from a virtual studio. These are shared via email and social media, creating a memorable experience for the visitor but also providing the Space Centre with details and information about participants that can be used for future marketing purposes.

So digital platforms don’t simply enhance engagement levels; they also provide large volumes of relevant, instant data, allowing cultural attractions to see exactly how each individual visitor is using the space. We can monitor which installation or area was visited, how long for, and at what time. Valuable information about trends in time, demographics and popularity of different items can then be arranged into clear graphs and data sheets for analysis.

Ultimately, the implementation of digital platforms provides countless possibilities for the museum sector. Not only is there a clear opportunity to increase the number of visitors in the Under 30′s demographic, but also to create and develop original, exciting formats that can make a particular cultural attraction stand out from the crowd. What digital offers, then, is a revolutionary method of enhancing the very experience of visiting cultural attractions.

So for 2013, expect to see exciting progressions within the museum sector, as the traditional experience is steadily evolved into one of interactive, immersive knowledge-hunting.

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A recent talk at London Transmedia Fest saw Olivia Rzepczynski of Ogilvy & Mather branding viral a ‘dirty word’. Given that 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and amateur films like the notorious ‘Charlie Bit My Finger‘ can gain millions of views without any clear context or strategy, it’s understandable that many are dubious about the unpredictable nature of viral films.

But does viral film still harness unique promotional power? And how can you make yours stand out from the mass of video content available online?

At least 100 million people take a social action – likes, shares, comments – on YouTube every week. The spread of video has undoubtedly reached unprecedented heights – yet it’s still less than 4% of YouTube videos that achieve over 100,000 views. Clearly, a film still needs something special to generate that mass-traction. So what differentiates a professionally-produced campaign from the huge volume of user-generated content?

The answer? Strategy.

Strategy is the difference between getting 10,000 views from people that matter, as opposed to 100,000 from an audience that aren’t really interested in the brand or purpose behind the film. Video marketing is no longer about brands trying to get lucky with a piece of infectious content; meticulous research and planning are required to ensure that video content reaches as many of the right people as possible. Creating a viral is a precise balance of arresting content, contextual relevance and specific timing.

And every viral must have a job. Post-play interaction is a huge factor in the success of a professionally-produced campaign, and could be anything from clicks-through to a website, to an increase in product purchases. So as well as getting views from the right people, you also need to ensure you are obtaining the tangible PPI measurements you want.

So my conclusion is that ‘viral’ is not a dirty word – but it is a word that has a very different definition in the sphere of professional video marketing. Ultimately, ‘going viral’ is not an end in itself, but rather a strategically-engineered method of creating fantastic content that resonates with the audience you want.

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If you’re still skeptical about the power of high-quality video marketing, I’d invite you to consider the case of SensibleInvesting.tv.

We were approached in the summer of 2011 by a company called Barnett Ravenscroft Wealth Management, who wanted to convey the message – to as wide an audience as possible – that the fund managers that most of us use to invest for our retirement are, frankly, not very good at it. By applying such high charges, those same managers are also creaming off a large chunk of our savings over the course of our working lives – typically up to a third.

Far better, says BRWM, to invest in low-cost index funds, which track every share or bond in a particular index, and to keep the money you would have spent in charges for yourself.

We proposed making an in-depth, broadcast-quality documentary on the advantages of so-called passive investing, featuring the world’s leading experts on the subject. Production is now complete, and we’ve broken the film down into eight self-contained parts. We’re putting out two parts a week on a new web TV site we’ve called SensibleInvesting.tv. The full-length, 53-minute film is due for release on 30th November.

The response has been phenomenal. We – and the client – have had emails from all over the world, congratulating us on the project. Some are saying a film like this should have been made years ago; an Irish company expressed frustration that it was considering something similar but help back from investing in it, and now wishes it hadn’t.

The President of one of America’s biggest passive investing companies now wants us to make a documentary for his company too. And we’ve even had praise from a former winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, who’s posted links to the films on his blog.

Now, just one week after the first video was posted, the site has hundreds of visitors a day, with more and more joining the LinkedIn group, Liking the Facebook page and following on Twitter all the time. In both marketing and commercial terms, the potential for BRWM is huge.

The lesson? If the cost of high-quality video marketing is putting you off, it might well be less than you thought. And, in any case, if your rivals are stealing a march on you and investing in it before you do, that’s surely a far bigger cost than you can possibly afford.

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In a world where business visibility is increasingly based on Google rankings and social media presence, the importance of video marketing in boosting a company’s SEO is higher than ever.

Recent statistics released by E-marketer show that video is the fastest-growing ad format of 2012, boasting an awesome 55% growth-rate already. With more and more hits to YouTube every day, and interaction with creative content through social media at an all-time high, it is crucial for businesses to harness the power of film to influence and connect with their target audience.

But what makes a great film campaign? At Ember, we focus on the two most fundamental aspects of video marketing – content and distribution – to ensure that our films engage with the desired audience. We research the context and target market of every film we make to determine exactly what kind of content will connect with its viewers, and always do so in the most effective and innovative way we can. But we also take your project one step further, and apply our SEO and social media expertise to guarantee that your film is watched by the people you want. We can provide feedback on who viewed your film, their demographic and location, and even whether they have clicked-through to your website.

With the launch of our new website, we’re also consolidating our official maxim: Broadcast-Quality Content for the Web. This means that every film we create has exceptional production values, but also refers to our ability to adapt television formats to online content. From Webdocumentary to online reality-TV series, we’re bringing the most innovative broadcast formats to the world of online film. So now, at Ember, stunning visual experiences and arresting entertainment content are no longer out of financial reach.

With Forrester affirming that having video on your website increases SEO by up to 50 times, it’s no longer a question of whether you should employ video marketing, but rather who you should do so with. And with Ember’s exceptional track-record of repeat business, and its award-winning reputation for creating original, immersive content, that shouldn’t be a question either.

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