I have a friend who needs a ‘goombie’ every night before his head hits the pillow. It helps him sleep. Fortunately, for me…I always have a collection of video content to work through with the task of suggesting edits, content changes and creative ways of keeping the viewer interested. I sleep well.
We don’t need to be told (again) how important the inclusion of video in any business’s successful marketing mix is. Content plans without video columns should really belong in the archives…, or should they?
Whipping out your jumbo smart phone and thinking you can put together a valuable piece of content that will get past 5 seconds of viewership, is not going to cut the mustard. Unfortunately, with video killing the radio star and the rise of the career choice of “YouTuber”, we have replaced quality and creativity with yawn-inspiring and often contrived attempts at video marketing, from the end of selfie sticks. Sure, we don’t mind listening to tech specialist Rasheed drone on from his dorm in New Dehli, explaining how to sync the nifty i-phone with its big brother Macbook, that can be most useful; but when it comes to capturing an audience and engaging with customers, marketers and business owners have got to do better than that.
However, I understand the problem. Putting together a decent tutorial, explainer video, ‘meet the team’ or ‘about us’ is known to be very costly and complicated. Scripts, videographers, voice-over specialists, technical equipment, editors all add up to a pretty penny and your 30-second video proposes a very weak return on investment. The barriers to creating great video content are expensive, time-consuming and complicated.
So we’ve made a plan.
We’ve built our Edtech division on providing extremely successful solutions to the education sector (initially, but we’ve widened our reach) with our primary mission of making things interesting in a normally very staid environment. Video has become so important in our offering to our clients that we’ve invested heavily in the tech, expertise and software. Clearly we were made for video, because our production triumphs have resulted in us investing in our own studio, so that our team can do their magic in peace. News of our talents reached many a braai and we began to receive dozens of inquiries for assistance and shoozsh up our video requests.
At Metisware, we believe in unpacking possibilities, so naturally, we’ve taken the bait and over the last few months we’ve worked on putting together a studio offering that breaks down the barriers for businesses (especially SMMEs) to effectively produce video content. Rysiu, our creative genius and chief custodian of The Virtual Learning Studio by Metisware, has coined it the ‘Michelin-star drive-through studio’: a place where clients can book a studio session that doesn’t only sound cool and hipster, but produces very valuable video content at a realistic price. We’ve made it accessible: you can use our creative brains, our green screen, our microphones and cameras; you can ask for links, animation and edits and in a few hours produce that longed-for collateral. We’ll help you flesh it out, find the ‘thing’, bring the emotion in and turn your concept into a compelling story.
We have learnt so much about video, virtual and online engagement that we can smell a goombie when we see one. Trust me.
