Letter From Venture Visuals

I always know summer is coming to a close when I hear the sounds of young chatty kids bumbling down sidewalks to greet their first day of school. I can hear them reminisce of morning cartoons and family vacations, and yet still they exude a distinct anticipation for the school year ahead. In a similar way, we at Venture Visuals find ourselves approaching a fresh season full of new challenges and opportunities.

As you may have noticed, we have undergone a rebranding of sorts. First, Venture Media Group is now simply Venture Visuals. Furthermore, in an effort to drill down on our core competencies - film and photography - we have removed graphic design from our service offering. This will allow us to better serve the visual needs of our great clients by expanding our video-and-photocentric services.

Along with a spit-shined logo and brand mark, we are eager to unveil an entirely redesigned Website! Our forthcoming online home will better communicate the beating heart of each of the films and photos we deliver. Additionally, we have completely reworked our blog into a journal format where we will be posting meaningful articles and interviews that will help our readers fully lever visual media to establish, strengthen, and extend their brands. You can look for the live site circa October 15.

As always, thank you for supporting Venture Visuals and cheers to a great fall season!

Sincerely,

Seth Cox

Executive Producer

Venture Visuals

In Production

From The Journal

Online Video: The cornerstone to cost-effective integrated marketing?

Online video is largely misunderstood by business leaders, and consequently, it is often either misused or simply ignored as a viable extension of integrated marketing efforts. Businesses can no longer afford to bat their eyes at the medium that is aggressively stealing market share from it's offline counterpart, television. With video platforms YouTube and Vimeo (along with a gamut of others) supporting HD footage, full screen viewing and embedding, the channel has earned an ever-increasing foothold in digital media.

Consider a startling study from The Kelsey Group: After watching an sample online video, 47% of viewers clicked through to a web site, 19% requested information about a product or service, and 17% proceeded to make a purchase.

With results this profound, no one is refuting the pressing opportunity to use online video for product promotion and brand building. Although online video has a direct application to various facets of a business, marketers must begin using the medium as an additional component of their marketing campaigns in concert with print, television, and social media rather than as a stand-alone feature exclusive from these other integrated efforts.

Why integrate online video into your existing campaigns? More directly, what does online video contribute to a marketing campaign that television or print isn't already providing? Of the many advantages of online video, one is its ability to pinpoint a target audience much more tightly than ever before possible. You decide where to run your videos, when to run them, and when to pull them if need be. Related to this, is the ability to calculate the overall success of a video in real-time with free video analytics services.

Perhaps the most attractive to marketers, is its affordability. Online video is by all definitions low in price when compared to television. By and large, the only associated cost is the video's production. But more than just target and price, online video offers brands a method of taking a customer from an invitation (your video) directly to check out (your website) in a matter of seconds, a feature that dramatically improves the likelihood of purchase.

Okay, so leveraging video over the Web offers significant advantages, but why would I say that most businesses are misusing the medium? Many businesses treat online video much like it's their garbage disposal for digital media. The quality of videos coming from the business sector are some of the worst on the Web. Moreover, their consistency of uploads are sporadic at best.

Marketers must change their approach. Online video must be a natural extension of the company's existing campaigns in both concept and quality. By integrating one central message across an entire campaign (including online video, print, TV, email, etc.) you are enabling greater impact of the campaign as a whole. 

*This excerpt is from our weekly Online Video series soon to be available on our Online Journal