What Video Quality Says About Your Product, Service, and Brand

You’ve spent years carefully developing your product and your image. Your product is perfect, the marketing materials are brilliant, the website is gorgeous, but your marketing video looks like you handed your forklift driver a Flip camera and set him loose. While your forklift driver may be handy with a video camera and have a creative streak, communicating a quality image with your potential customers requires as much care as your product’s development.

Video production values speak volumes about your product, service, and brand. Shaky camera work, boring segments, inaudible audio, and other undesirable factors relay a not-so-subtle message to your viewers. It’s a message about quality and since the quality is poor, it’s a message that says that you don’t care about quality.

Is that the message you want to send to your customers?

Unfortunately, in the digital age of YouTube and viral online videos, production values have taken a back seat to the immediate gratification of a few laughs. This doesn’t mean that poor quality videos have become a viable replacement for marketing videos. Video production values matter as much now as they ever did. Consumers are willing to watch amateur videos if the payoff is good enough. However, today’s television viewers are used to Hollywood effects, high definition video, crisp soundtracks, and realistic, fast-paced dialogue. If you’re going to develop a marketing video lacking a well-framed, crystal clear image and audible, easy-to-understand dialogue, your marketing message will be drowned out by the message the video screams out about quality.

Video Production Values – What are they?

Just as your company newsletter conforms to a set of predefined guidelines, so too do marketing videos. With your newsletter, you expect an attractive layout, a nice use of white space, well written and error-free text, and interesting content. You wouldn’t tolerate blank columns or pages, blurry photos, smudged ink, or ripped pages. With a video production, you expect a properly framed shot, clear focus, clear audio, attractive talent, and interesting content. You wouldn’t tolerate blurry images, a lack of audio, shaky cameras, unlit subjects, or “dead air.”

There’s more involved to video production values than these examples. For example, the quality of the camera, lighting, stage direction, set, editing, and other factors all work together to create a video with strong production values.

A marketing video with strong production values actually downplays those values because they’re expected while one with weak production values draws attention to itself. If you find yourself struggling to see a product or image, straining to hear, or simply bored out of your mind while the onscreen talent babbles nonsense, you can bet that video needs work. If you find yourself questioning the quality or credibility of a product, service, brand, or company, the marketing video likely lacks one or more production values.

Excellent video quality is a must; it shows you value quality. A lack of it shows the opposite. What do you think? Share your thoughts below.