on 27 October 2009 
(No Ratings Yet)Back to professionally produced video content for third parties.
Cathy Bartrop of travelguru.tv says the days of a big budget producers – say, for example, a TV channel – coming along with a huge film crew, shooting footage for days on end, throwing a five-minute segment into a travel programme and disappearing with the copyright are over.
Nowadays – mostly because of the emergence of the web as a significant and valuable distribution channel – tour operators and tourist boards will rather pay for an independent production company to come along, hand over varying lengths of footage and do as much as they can to retain the copyright.
The attractiveness of this is twofold: firstly, securing the copyright means that DMOs et al have plenty of footage at their disposal for ads, online brochures, exhibition stand feeds, etc; and, secondly, a recording tank full of footage can be sliced and diced to create a multitude of clips for a number of parties.
For example, Travelguru spent six days in the British Virgin Islands recording for the local tourist office.
Eight hours of footage was condensed into four hours of a high quality edit. This in turn was edited into a six-minute showcase.
From the four-hour segment came two individual 30-second spots, which now run on Vimeo, featuring a sailing promo and a clip of a hotel at the destination.
From only the big TV companies winning, (almost) everyone wins.
Sugar Mill hotel promo from travelguru.tv on Vimeo.
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Thanks Kevin – 8 hours of raw footage condensed down into 4 hours of great rushes (including aerials, sailing footage and general scenics). We edited 2 programmes exclusively for travelguru.tv featuring our guru, David Wickers. The tourist board also got an 8 minute generic DVD cut plus several different hotel edits and a sailing short. And there’s more to come – the rushes are now available for new streaming and/or broadcast opportunities for tour ops/agents, indeed anyone with an interest in featuring the BVI.
The key, as you rightly allude to, is in maximising ROI for a professional shoot by being creative about the different applications now opening up for video.
Travelguru’s VTs are very nicely produced, and Cathy is right about maximising ROI – ultimately the aim of video is, of course, to increase margin. Country and area overviews are great for providing inspiration, but it is short-form individual hotel VTs that drive sales – and that still means long(ish) shoots and tactically placed video that reaches a customer without the need to search for it; by delivering video at PoS in stores and on the websites of tour operators and travel agents (as well as TV of course). Vimeo, YouTube, TripAdvisor etc are very nice for creating a PR noise, but they do very little for sales.
There are more and more companies out there offering video at cut price rates and their results are variable at best (I don’t include Travelguru amongst these). Like most things in life, you get what you pay for, and expecting to achieve huge sales for very little capital outlay is unrealistic.
Tom Lenham
Director of Programmes
Thomas Cook TV