These days, the types of content that we can produce ranges from short form videos for TikTok to a documentary series and everything in-between. It is typical for news agencies to pick up content that only fits into their parameters of media – a 16:9 video that isn’t too heavily branded, but that sells the point of the article that it accompanies, which will allow for a more potent form of news generation. But just how important is video? And how can we use it to benefit news generation?
Speaking more on the subject is Sam Dowson, head of production at 4media group UK:
Why is video an important medium?
News generation is typically thought of in terms of traditional media outlets such as print, online and broadcast, that cover global and regional news. This can be a means to push the values and message of your company to a wide national/international audience. In our current culture, people prefer to watch and be told something, rather than read something. The level of attention required for someone to ingest information from a video is far less than someone actually reading the attached article. In addition, a video has a far greater ability of educating and demonstrating, whatever the message it is conveying. Reading requires people to create their own vision of the information that is being displayed to them – for the equivalent of a page of text, video can feed this information to the audience in a matter of seconds via the use of visuals and audio.
How can we use video to boost news generation campaigns?
Nothing steals attention quite like a headline. However, when you tag a video onto the end of an article, or implement it within news generation content, people prefer to click on it and passively ingest it. Up until the last couple of years, video would be made for desktop users only, however, with the boost of compressed news generation sites such as Unilad and Dodo, creating vertical content to prioritise mobile phone users has become common practice – it makes for a more uniform consumption package for the average consumer. For example, scrolling through Facebook you will see that there is video content that was filmed in 16:9 (for desktop users) that has now been altered to make it more of a square shape, utilising the dead space at the top and bottom of the video. This removed the need to turn the consumer’s phone sideways, making it is easier to view this content and to keep watching it without disrupting the user’s flow.
What kinds of content could we use after the initial campaign?
When you film anything for a larger scale video that would be used for selling into a media agency for news generation, it’s easy to create chapters from it or to break it down to a molecular level to deliver the message in social media compatible forms. It’s easy to overlook the value and reach of online and social media videos, as they have become oversaturated and easy to forget, but the sheer numbers that you can reach with this kind of content adds up over time. A video doesn’t just disappear after its first ‘broadcast’ but lives on in the bowels of the internet in social media until it resurfaces to gain a continued viewership. This can lead to articles being months or even years old, but continuing to reach new audience members. However, this just doesn’t happen on your traditional new generation sites, as once the next article appears, everything else is left as old news.
To find out more about the video services 4media group offer, please contact us.