Cutting Through The BS of Corporate Video: Episode 2 – What’s the Enterprise Video Content Factory used for?

Following up on our Episode 1, “The Myth of Corporate Video”, here is Episode 2, “Cutting Through the BS”!

Again, with Jeff Sengpiehl, The Post Doctor, we’re now beginning our deeper dive into the purpose, functions and technology of the Enterprise Video Content Factory.

In this episode, we explore how the Content Factory is of critical importance, whether you have an internal creative/production team or not. In fact, it becomes even more important to have your own searchable and organized repository so you can hold on to your originals, your intellectual property, and not leave it in the hands of someone else.

We also talk about the difference between a video that engages, when a memo shouldn’t be a video, and how to get the CEO to actually sit down for a fireside chat!

Coming up, we will be continuing our exploration into the hot topic of “corporate video”, and we will also be inviting in end-users and manufacturers to offer perspectives and also do a little show-n-tell!

Follow Jeff and Varde on LinkedIn to catch it all!

Takeaways

• A content factory matters more when production is outsourced, not less. Multiple agencies over multiple years means multiple parties holding your material.
• Ownership and return of assets at the end of an engagement is a contract issue, not a technical feature. It belongs in the statement of work before the first shoot day, and legal should see it first.
• Contractors working inside your content factory hand back the raw material, not just the finished file. That makes re-cuts and reuse cheap.
• Internal video is the underrated case. Employees increasingly expect video over an email and a PDF attachment.
• The attention economy applies to employees too, and most organizations do not measure whether internal content is consumed at all.
• Produce one asset and derive the delivery formats from it. Executives will not record the vertical version.

Full transcript

Lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts removed.

Introductions (0:08)

Jeff Sengpiehl: Jeff Sengpiehl. I’ve got decades in media technology, starting back at ABC and going all the way into AI. Along the way, broadcast engineering, post-production systems integration, facilities build-out. I’ve had CTO and high-level engineering roles across post and storage: Light Iron, Chainsaw, KeyCode, Qualstar. Today I’m working as a consultant and fractional CTO as The Post Doctor. It’s vendor neutral, focused on production, post, infrastructure, live storage, asset management, expanding markets, and workflow integration. I’ve been involved with SMPTE, HPA, and SBE. I also publish and podcast under The Post Doctor.

Eivind Sandstrand: And I’m the founder and principal at Varde Media Solutions. Varde is a new, small, but growing little boutique consulting outfit. We’re also a solution reseller and a solution builder, as opposed to a traditional systems integrator. What’s unique about us is that we focus exclusively on non-broadcast clients. What we do is help our customers build the kind of media operation they truly need in order to meet the actual business objectives of creating, managing, and publishing the content, without dragging them down that rabbit hole of traditional broadcast engineering. And those of you who know what I mean by that, you know what I mean by that.

If you outsource production, do you still need a content factory? (1:32)

Eivind: Let’s switch over to the topic of external collaboration and contract production. If an organization does have its own video production team or in-house capability, can or should it still have a content factory?

Jeff: Yeah, and I think it’s more important rather than less important. If it’s internal, it’s all managed there. But if it’s external and you’re working with multiple agencies, multiple contractors over time, that’s a lot of different folks who have their hands in the pie. Having a content factory that is predetermined means you have ownership of that content when the relationship ends.

And that goes to the media supply chain, because your media supply chain isn’t finished upon broadcast or final notes on the piece. It’s going to be bringing that entire catalog of content you’ve got under your control, in house. And it lets you also figure out, okay, we want to go do this new thing and tell this new story. You may have already paid for some of that. Why would you want to reinvent the wheel when you’ve got them? You just need to figure out how you’re going to search for them and determine how you can save money.

Your media supply chain isn’t finished upon broadcast or final notes on the piece.

Jeff Sengpiehl

Eivind: Absolutely. Thinking back on it, no man is an island. No company is ever entirely an island. And thinking back to that example of the traveling hard disk, if you don’t have a content factory that can enable collaboration for both remote contribution and remote distribution, then you’re going to be running the risk of these traveling USB sticks that get lost on the subway, left behind on an airplane seat, or lost in shipping.

So a good solution, a good content factory, will among other things consist of the appropriate quality business process orchestration and automation tool that is integrated into this. A lot of stuff still needs to be done manually. Some things are going to be done by AI. But when it comes to things like sending stuff out or taking stuff in, and this ties a little bit to the AI, you always want to have quality assurance steps in your processes, keeping the human in the loop where you need to, to make sure you can do this in a safe way.

I think also, when we’re talking about external contracted parties, if they’re working inside of your content factory…

Getting your material back is a contract problem (4:17)

Jeff: You’re not just getting the finished file. You have all of the raw. And if you need to redo something later, it’s very easy to handle that, especially if you’ve got all the constituent parts archived.

And then that also goes to confirming that an agency or a contractor has removed your material from their systems at the end of the engagement. Especially if it’s something that’s got rights management attached to it for talent or music or whatever, that’s going to be critical. It’s a contract thing, not a technical feature. And it really needs to be in the statement of work before the first shoot day. And probably take that statement of work and run it by legal first, too, because they may have a few additions.

Eivind: Yeah.

Jeff: And you want it to be easy, because you don’t want to have to hunt around when an engagement is over or a project is closed, hunting around in 10 or 20 different locations. You want to be able to say, okay, this is the folder for all this stuff. All right, you no longer have access, and I’m archiving this off. One and done type of stuff.

It’s a contract thing, not a technical feature. And it needs to be in the statement of work before the first shoot day.

Jeff Sengpiehl

The internal use case is the underrated one (5:27)

Jeff: All right. So, is a content factory only useful for external-facing communications?

Eivind: No, absolutely not. It works both inward facing and outward facing, and the inward-facing case I think is underrated. It’s easy to think of corporate video, corporate communication, or non-broadcast as something that’s going out. But there are so many internal use cases. Video is known to increase both engagement and retention. So using video for internal communications can target an employee base that also is increasingly expecting video rather than an email and a PDF.

Jeff: Yeah, my kids would probably prefer to get it on a text message even.

Eivind: Desktop podcast creation tools and self-service recording tools mean almost anyone can produce content outside of a studio. This doesn’t have to always be super formal content. This can be something from a salesperson to a client where they have a good relationship. But it should be stored. It should be monitored. It should be indexed so that they know what’s going on there. The fundamental challenge is managing all that raw and completed content, getting it out to the consumers and customers, internal and external, and preserving it. That’s what makes you understand what you already have and avoid all that reproduction of stuff.

Jeff: Yep. The other thing I’ve done with corporate messaging before is, you know, you’re watching it after the fact and it’s like, oh, it’s an hour-long message. I can watch this at 1.75 speed. I’ll get it done in less time than it was going to take to watch it live.

Fireside chats and what actually gets consumed (7:17)

Jeff: So, you had a framing on this and I’d like you to say it on the air, about fireside chats and what actually does get consumed.

Eivind: A fireside chat is often the closest you’re going to get to having a CEO do something with video. Busy people. But this is something that speaks a little bit to their ego. Hey, I’m the grandpa, the grandma of the organization. I will now share my wisdom with employees.

But doing a 30-minute or 60-minute recording where they’re chattering on, and someone later watches it at double speed, maybe with an accompanying PDF document to highlight the most important points that no one’s going to open up because they didn’t even see it. Is that better than a shorter, purpose-built clip that someone has actually edited?

Well, it depends a lot on the content itself, how well it attracts and holds attention, and what needs to be retained. But at the core of it, it’s kind of like playing golf. A ball has a lot greater chance of dropping into the hole if it actually reaches the hole. Content that is never created won’t reach anybody. But content that goes out and is not consumed because it’s not attractive is also a waste of time and money.

Content that is never created won’t reach anybody. But content that goes out and isn’t consumed because it isn’t attractive is also a waste of time and money.

Eivind Sandstrand

Jeff: I think that goes to the concept of the attention economy. It’s a big thing out there with creators talking about that, but it goes to employees too. We don’t even measure it. We pretend it doesn’t exist. Oh, it’s a message from senior management. Of course everyone’s going to watch it.

Not every memo needs to be a video (8:55)

Eivind: Absolutely. And broadcasting tools used to be highly complex, bespoke, proprietary, and super expensive. That’s no longer true, and that’s what makes all of this possible. But at the same time, the difference between broadcast and corporate video has to be clear. Not every internal memo needs to be a video. There is such a thing as oversaturation, and it certainly doesn’t need to be an 8K video on a virtual set. That is complete overkill.

However, an instructional video for a key procedure for a medical team or an engineer must hold attention and deliver the content, and requires that quality of audio and video we mentioned earlier. Now, customer-facing product training. Companies like Home Depot have studios that run 24/7 producing product videos, even if it’s just a little spinning video. They need to serve the brand and avoid lawsuits. They have to be good. Simplicity matters, but quality and timeliness matter more if that message is going to be received, retained, and converted to any kind of value.

Jeff: Yep, and I think the shift on this is real. Some people have moved content to short vertical formats. If you happen to be watching this vertically right now, it was produced landscape. But producing one asset and then breaking it down to other delivery formats, rather than producing each one separately, is going to be a huge cost savings. And you’re not going to necessarily get an executive over a certain age to record two versions of the presentation. Hey, let’s shoot this one vertical. No, they’re off to the next thing.

You’re not going to get an executive over a certain age to record two versions. They’re off to the next thing.

Jeff Sengpiehl

Coming up (10:43)

Jeff: In the coming episodes, we’ll be bringing in some manufacturers and some integrators. Let’s show what we’re talking about rather than just describing it. Please hit those like and subscribe buttons. And if you’ve got questions about the concepts around this, hit us up in the comments. Both of us will have our contact information popping up shortly, and we look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for joining us here today.

Eivind: Thank you very much, everybody.