Lights, Camera, Action!

At Progressive, we’re starting to make short explainer videos to deliver key research findings to our clients. In this piece, our Research Manager and video creator-guru, Elise, shares some tips for how to make engaging and informative research videos…

5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day.

While the video with the most ever views on the platform is Baby Shark (it passed 10 billion earlier this year), user statistics suggest there is also a huge appetite for more information-based videos: learning and education-based content drives over a billion views a day.

Videos facilitate storytelling, are easy to distribute and can sum up information quickly, making them a great tool to communicate research findings; and one that Progressive is using more and more as a way to summarise key project insights. There are lots of tools out there to create your videos; we use AdobeExpress which you can sign up for here.

If you’re thinking of giving it a try, we’ve put some tips together below:

You don’t have to be Spielberg. If like me you’re more Baby Shark than Jaws there are a range of sources where you can access free images or footage so you don’t have to think about microphones, lighting, and angles unless you want to. Most video creator software will include a bank of free stock images, and if you’re not sure which one to go for, you may already have one on your desktop – PowerPoint is definitely worth a try, particularly for chart based and simple animation videos (Emmanuel Crown has some great tips for getting started).

Plan ahead. To keep the video focused and make sure you get what you want from it take time to define its purpose and goal before you make a start.

Key things to consider are:

who your audience is – how much they know about the video topic will define how much background and explanation they need.

what you want to communicate – if, like us, you are condensing detail rich information into something topline and digestible, it’s important to think about what the key messages are and not try to cram too much in (hopefully a good video will make the audience want to get that extra detail in the full report!). Whatever your video is for though, preparing what you want to say will help make it clearer and have more impact.

Keep it short. One of the key advantages of video is it captures peoples’ attention by engaging the senses, but if information is not concise and valuable your audience will lose interest.