Social Media Video ads; Getting data to help with ROI
We’ve recently been contracted by a firm in Yorkshire to create some social media video advertising. We are currently at the ‘pre-production’ stage and I thought it would be good to document the process for anyone interested in creating their own advertising videos. I do use AI to create blogs sometimes, but this isn’t one. For that reason I’m going to keep it brief!
As always, asking the right questions from the outset is really important. The initial enquiry made was to create a ‘business video’ – which is pretty standard stuff here at Radar Film. However, on chatting with the client it transpired that what they wanted to actually do was create some advertising to attract customers to a selection of 3 physical sites using social media.
The client wanted videos to use as PPC advertising
This changed everything:
- It changes the content – B2B advertising is generally quite sober, whereas B2C advertising tends to need to be more ‘engaging’ – i.e funny or raunchy or something like that. This means that speaking with the digital marketers responsible for deploying the social media videos as adverts would be essential – do they have data available to tell us what has worked already? Therefore the first place to start is to speak to the marketers and get an understanding of the audience for the business to find out some data on what has worked in the past.
- It changes the way the video is shot, because most social media videos are consumed on phones. This means that the best aspect ratio is 9:16, not 16:9 (vertical video)
- This potentially impacts the resolution of the shots taken; If the client intends want to ‘dual use the video’, for both desktop and mobile feeds, then we’d choose to shoot in 4k and use the auto reframe tool in Premiere Pro to create video that would work in ‘normal’ landscape orientation, but could also be adjusted in the edit to work in vertical orientation too. So there are technical considerations which understanding the marketing data can help resolve as well.
The reason we might choose to shoot in 4K is the physical size of the image is big, meaning that we can re-adjust the size of the screen without compromising quality. You don’t want your video to look like minecraft.
The reframe tool does have drawbacks – it uses AI to figure out where to crop the view to keep the action centre-shot, but it isn’t that great at doing so in complex scenes. It can lead to a lot of faffing with key-frames which is sub-optimal for the editor.
It also means we’d probably have to shoot in 4K as 4K video is twice the size of HD video. This means you can zoom in and chop half the image out without it looking pixelated and rubbish. 4K doesn’t necessarily mean that the image quality is better; video makers use it for practical purposes as much as anything. 4K video is data intensive in both storage and editing terms so we avoid it where we can!
Thinking and planning forward then, we’re already starting to consider how to create the shots. Understanding the tech specs for social media video is important and a good starting place. If the intention is for mobile only ads, then we would probably choose to shoot vertically in the first place using the DJI Ronin RS4. The RS4 has the capability of producing stabilised shots in portrait orientation and it could impact cost for the client, because using a gimbal with a mirrorless camera is a lot easier than rigging a Sony Fx9 and carrying that around. It potentially reduces the staff requirement and therefore the cost or deliverable for the client.
So there is a lot to think about from the outset! It usually starts out with ‘why’ are you wanting this film, and from there all the other answers flow.
