I love a good looking, well produced video. One where the colors are natural, the sound is clear, the framing interesting. But does expensive video production always lead to results? Do people watch them all the way through?
I wanted some answers so I conducted a study to generate some data so Logos Media can help our clients create content that really drives results.
Method:
We produced the same video 5 different styles ranging from “nicely polished” to “shaky portrait iphone”. We ran those videos with identical budgets to identical audiences (interested in marketing/small business in DFW) for the same period of time. The call to action was to like the Logos Media facebook page.
Results
We got some conclusive data on what worked and what did not. Here are the videos ranging from worst performing to best performing, what we know from the data and some hunches worth testing in the future.
The iPhone Portrait
The Numbers
Percent Viewed 7.70%
Cost per conversion $10
Reach engagement 26% (The percentage of those reached who watched beyond 3 seconds).
Thoughts
In a lot of ways this video was a total disaster. It looks like garbage. My hair is messed up. The orientation is “wrong” in portrait mode.
More importantly this video is a mess as it converted the fewest likes and those likes were most expensive (more than 10 bucks per like)
But here is the interesting thing… of those people the video reached, more of them watched it for longer than any of the other videos. In some ways this would be a success right? If someone took the time to watch more of the video, something must be working. That engagement is positive, but in this case more people took a closer look and almost all of them said, no thanks. Ouch. The pitch and the call to action are identical on all 5 videos, so we can surmise that people were turned off by the style even though they were drawn to see it through.
We might call this the “Dumpster Fire Effect.” People are interested, but they want no part of it. Is this an effect we can learn to leverage positively? How can we be disruptive while projecting a good image.
Up next… bad news for people with expensive cameras… polish didn’t count for much.