A few weeks ago my team and I attended the Digiday Video Advertising Summit in serene Palm Springs! This conference discussed how brands and agencies can address challenges and opportunities in an ever-fragmented video marketplace.

I was fortunate enough to be able to speak at this event and share my insights as a creative Director and Co-founder who has been a part of the video digital landscape for 17 years. My presentation discussed the creative side to video; everything from storytelling, to the audience to data and to new innovations. Here are my key takeaways:

Look Beyond The Personas

In order to reach your audience at the right time and in the right place, you must look beyond personas. In the past year, there has been such a focus on personas, and while knowing and understanding the persona of your target audience is important, your targeting should not be limited to it. People are complex and change throughout the day. Let’s say a health-conscious 25-year-old fits your audience persona. She wakes up in the morning goes to yoga and drinks a green shake; however, by the evening she is going out with friends, drinking and eating junk food! That person is not the same person as she was in the morning, therefore, should not be targeted with the same ad. Advertisers need to focus more on behaviors and less on personas.

Build video stories around emotion

According to IPA, advertising campaigns with emotional content performed about twice as well as those with only rational content. When creating a video think about the emotion you want to elicit out of someone.  Think about your brand and how it automatically relates to someone.  It is in these moments that an emotionally driven video ad can stand out in all the noise.

Effectively tell your story! 

Focus on one story at a time. Take the time to properly develop and execute that one story in a clear and concise way. Create trust in the story and address the problem you are solving. 

Study your data and don’t overlook long-form! 

We all know attention spans are shorter than ever but don’t immediately discount longer forms. We’ve found that for some of our entertainment clients, longer-form video assets perform better. If you have the budget, test various lengths and think about the message and story you are trying to get across, sometimes 6 seconds is just not enough.

Test and innovate

We’re constantly on the lookout for opportunities for growth and upcoming trends. We attended Adobe Max this past month at learned about their latest updates that can save everyone a lot of time and resources; one of them being Adobe AI – a tool that auto-frames your videos and crops them to the ideal size depending on the platform. Your video team no longer needs to spend hours cropping a video for platform-specific content

Tiktok is another immense opportunity available and growing fast. Simply put, if your brand wants to reach Gen Z, they need to be on Tiktok. TikTok has surpassed Instagram in downloads with 1.5 billion. TikTok is still relatively untouched so now is the time to act. For help with Tiktok, reach out to us at [email protected] 

We help brands create effective video assets, from original productions to working with our clients existing videos to repurpose for higher engagement and conversion rates.  To learn more about our Future First creative studio, or to get a copy of my presentation, please reach out: [email protected]

– Dinesh Boaz, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Direct Agents