Is your content working hard enough for you? Here’s how to sweat your assets

We all love video. Brands love making it, consumers love consuming it. Those mind-boggling stats around how many hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (500), or what percentage of consumer internet traffic is video (an estimated 82% by 2022) prove just how popular and important the medium of video is.

But video can be expensive to produce, and in these unprecedented, uncertain times, brands are, understandably, hesitant to splurge.

So, what’s the solution?

One approach that we’re particularly fond of is ‘sweating the assets’.

Sweating the assets is about making the most of any content you produce. Once you’ve decided to invest in content creation, it needs to work hard for you and your budget. At distillery, we employ a number of strategies to make sure that it does.

Give us one filming day, we’ll give you a full library of content

If you’re shooting live-action, think about additional content you can generate from the same shoot day(s). As part of the pre-production stage, we plan and organise ways to create multiple assets for use across an entire campaign. From a recent two-day shoot for Arden Foods, we produced 40 assets, including hero content, cutdowns, and stills for use across YouTube, Facebook and Instagram stories.

With the crew and kit all already there, and just some additional time needed in the edit, we’ve proven time and again that this is a great way to increase the scope of a campaign without dramatically increasing budget.

We can help you find fresh new ways to use existing assets

Perhaps you don’t need to shoot at all. Perhaps you have a library of assets at your fingertips or hidden down the back of the sofa just waiting to be rediscovered. Bringing existing assets to life in a different way is a creative challenge we relish. It can also be pretty budget-friendly.

In July, we were commissioned by The Alliance to End Plastic Waste to produce a video of their annual report document. Seeing that they had lots of beautiful stock imagery already purchased for the report, we decided to bring it to life through cinemagraph effects. Essentially allowing them to buy the assets once, and use them twice.

Count on us to keep your content going and going… and going!

So you’ve filmed or edited existing content and your campaign is coming together nicely. Great stuff. Put the kettle on and grab a biscuit. But hold on, before you reach for that shortbread, what’s next? What about when this campaign finishes? At distillery, we’re passionate about giving your content longevity. That means considering how it could be used beyond your current campaign.

It’s an approach we’re currently applying to a campaign for our client Royal Parks, across Instagram and Facebook, where we’re creating content that brings recent research findings to life. (We’re also mindful of designing assets that we can easily adapt for different platforms, or update as new pieces of research come to light over the next few years.)

It’s true what they say: size doesn’t matter. No matter how many zeroes your budget has, you can (and should!) make your content work hard for you. Reach out now to find out how we can support and bring your next campaign to life.