Leverage Existing Creative Assets for Video Production

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Video production doesn’t always require film crews, lighting, sound, major effort, and major expenses. Chances are that you already have assets within your organization that can be repurposed and amalgamated to produce a shareable video. At the least, you likely have existing assets that can make future creative productions better, but they must be cleared and be accessible to your creative producers.

For every five-minute video that has been shot for your organization, chances are there was dozens of minutes of footage that remained unused. There are certainly repositories of photographs somewhere in your organization too. These assets could be extremely valuable in the future as b-roll, establishing shots, and can even support a specific narrative in a new project.

Integrate Creative Assets

Larger organizations (and many smaller ones) shoot photos and/or video fairly often. Your organization may already have video assets, both completed videos and raw footage, that can be reused in other contexts, but they are currently stored within separate departments. It’s extremely beneficial to get all of these graphic resources collected under one umbrella – both video footage, and original photography.

Existing creative work is an enormous resource that was already paid for. Getting all of those shots together in one place can avoid significant duplicated expenses. I worked with a University on a video project, and I needed b-roll of the campus to complete the project. I knew there was aerial footage available (in the very early days of drone videography too, when it was still breathtaking and unique). However, we couldn’t get access to the raw footage – nobody had collected it in a manner that was shareable. The University as a whole had paid for it, not the individual department (all cheques come from the University) – which meant it theoretically should be made available to everyone on campus to use. Unfortunately, people get protective over creative assets, and the overall organization hadn’t thought to centralize their creative assets in any way, so we couldn’t access the footage. We had to reshoot b-roll at an additional (and unnecessary) cost. It was basically the same footage, at twice the price.

People in large organizations may get territorial about their creative work, so senior management must ask themselves what is more important – protecting fragile egos, or saving money? B-roll or stock photography shouldn’t be held back by individual Spielbergian aspirations – if it’s basic stuff that could benefit the organization as a whole in the future, it should be shared.

Integrating creative assets shouldn’t be difficult either – it may be as simple as creating a central series of folders in a Dropbox Pro account (if not on a central server), and having someone with authority demand that everyone with existing assets take a few hours to get those files copied and centralized.

The same goes for smaller organizations – and even or solo entrepreneurs. Every business has a collection of images or video (even if they’re just Facebook photos) that could be repurposed elsewhere. My company often produces “enhanced PowerPoint” videos for clients that are basically just collections of still images, tied together with a script and audio. These are very simple to do (and can be easily done in-house too – that’s another blog post), but you need the creative assets in-hand to build them.

Accessible Storage

Get all photos and video together in one place, date each file, and keep them accessible to anyone in your organization that produces creative communications material. Even audio may be relevant – have you ever contracted original background music or audio signatures? Get them in there. If you are a small organization and you're not crazy about the cloud, buy a dedicated 4TB hard drive (or two drives, to ensure you have a backup), and copy everything over. Regardless of the technology, your existing creative files should be collected and shared as easily as possible. Some images and videos will become dated as fashions change over time, but basic footage should have a shelf life of at least five years – and that can represent an enormous savings when avoiding duplication of effort.

Understand Your Brand

Branding is the science of understanding your brand impressions, and leveraging them to your benefit. Branding is the foundation of effective communications. You must understand the core elements of your brand so that you can accurately define and clearly communicate your brand identity. There may be thousands of elements that you can speak to about your brand, but progress is about choices - it is about eliminating other options to reveal fundamental truths through an informed, measured process.

Defining this focus, more than any other step in the marketing & communications process, will determine your communications success in a manner that is sustainable and comfortable for you. You can’t be something you are not – but in a world of choices, articulating your “best self” is the best path to achieving clarity and growth.

A logo is not a brand. A “brand” is the sum total of all impressions that an individual has about a person, a product, or an organization. This means that overall impressions of a “brand” can be shifted by staff changes, design variations, shifts in physical location, and customer service – everything matters.

Your brand is so much more than a logo – all assets that a company, product, organization, person, or an organization holds will contribute to its “brand”. A logo is the icon used to represent and sell a brand, but a brand itself is both a conglomeration of impressions, and a promise that those impressions will be accurately provided. Your brand communicates expectations.

You can't always control the impressions others have of you, but you can set the stage to manage and influence those impressions. It comes down to how accurately you communicate your best, most truthful attributes. If you wish to "spin" a message about yourself, it won't resonate truthfully against the realities that people will see in the other facets of your organization. You don't need to focus on any negatives, but sometimes it doesn't hurt to acknowledge unavoidable facts ("Buckley Cough Medicine - Tastes Awful, But It Works").

Claiming ownership of the assets that define your brand, understanding how these assets relate to each other, and accentuating the most relevant, emotionally compelling elements will strengthen your brand communications.

Introducing Kazolu

Changing a company’s name when your services remain fundamentally similar can be a tricky move, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.

I recently did this myself anyway, shutting down a six-year-old brand identity. “Sociable Communications” became “Kazolu” overnight. I didn’t make the change lightly, and once the decision was done I moved as quickly as possible to switch over all public brand identity elements to avoid confusion - I wanted to make the conversion as quickly and fully as possible.

“Sociable” began its life as a virtual full-service marketing agency, and it did pretty well in that role. In 2009, there was a market for a consultancy that could corral third-party creative talent to deliver the services that more traditional full-service agencies provide. It was a good business model for a consultancy, but it is a very difficult model to “scale” since the core service provided was fundamentally delivered by one person – me.

Since 2009, the market for marketing services has continued to fragment, and I found myself working more closely with a few core competencies that delivered strategic planning, clear message-writing, and video production.

The good news (and no big surprise) was that these elements are of greatest interest to me. This is the stuff that really motivates me – taking really complicated concepts and making clear, concise communications to support them. Effective video productions require clear communications at their core – video works best when it is focused and simple – so that also made sense as an extension of my core deliverables.

The recognition that the core offering of “Sociable Communications” had shifted gave me the opportunity to redefine my professional identity in a manner that better reflected these services, and reflected myself better too. This brought about “Kazolu” – a fabricated word that relates to nothing, other than my business. Like my services, the word is simple, concise, and straightforward. It’s easy to share verbally, and it’s easy to type into a dot-com URL. And, it is rooted in something that is central to my personal identity (which I’ll keep a little bit private), but it is independent enough that it can apply to the business venture alone.

Taking a leap into a fundamental business change is daunting, and I didn’t get everything 100% right at launch because I felt that waiting for 100% to arrive might never happen. There is something to be said for swinging the bat, recognizing that your swing may not be perfect, but understanding that lessons learned quickly will allow for relatively quick course-corrections. Also, I’m not a big business, so few people are watching me anyway – any hiccups in the transition will matter infinitely more to me than they will to anyone else.

At the end of the day, my professional identity is now Kazolu. Rather than providing comprehensive marketing plans that are strategic and tactical, I provide ideas, writing, and visuals – strategy, communications, and video – which are much easier for me to deliver, and they are simpler services to scale. There is both art and science to delivering clarity – and it is a process that can be taught and shared. This is something I have a proven track record on – a distinct competitive advantage, and a much greater value to existing and future clients.

Would I recommend that a company change its name and its entire brand identity? It depends entirely on its situation – but most importantly it depends on the business owner’s comfort with the past, vs. their willingness and comfort to embrace change. If you are comfortable with the change, then chances are your customers will be too – and you might even gain new ones that respond to the new energy you have revealed.