Algorithms don’t unlock the secrets to making great engineering videos

If you’ve never watched the expert interviews on BeetTV, a site that covers video advertising, it’s worth a visit.

They recently aired an interesting interview with Amir Kassaei, Chief Creative Officer at the giant agency DDB.   Amir points out that there is now endless data.  He says, that while analyzing data may give you insights into how your prospects behave, you still need great creative to engage your audience. 

Amir points out that many marketing automation vendors are trying to sell marketers tools to save money by using algorithms.  His concern is that in the process you can easily sacrifice relevance – you end up repeating an increasingly short list of optimized campaigns.

With a somewhat contradictory viewpoint was Linda Crowe, head for video marketing at Oracle.  She advocated a one-best-way solution when she said, “Get away from your product features and benefits and get away from telling your company story, and tell the story about your customers.  How you are impacting their business?” 

She says that customer stories are the best way to demonstrate how a prospect might benefit from your product or service, and added, “Make the content less about yourselves and more about your customers.”

I agree that customer stories are a tried and true method for creating engaging video, but you still need creativity to tell those stories well. 

At ENGINEERING.com we create lots of video for engineers.  If you are curious about the process, download the eBook Video Marketing for Engineers.