NB: This is a guest article by Tamara Lohan, chief technology officer and founder of Mr and Mrs Smith.
Mr and Mrs Smith has spent the last six months creating high-quality online videos of our boutique hotels – 10 to start with, 790 to go.
Daunting, but we’ll get there.
We were determined to produce something more engaging and in tune with our values than the usual jerky video show-arounds, so we took a slightly different approach, including interviews with chefs, designers, owners and concierges, so we could offer both an informative, usable overview of the hotel to viewers and a personality-led insight into the machinery behind the scenes.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-6dIoQhF_Q
Done well, video can be the best online experience you can have – as long as the content you provide is rich, engaging and smoothly delivered.
For us, it was a great way to build on our brand credibility and enhance consumer trust, with the ultimate aim, of course, of driving conversion.
The advantages of having video content are pretty clear now, but there’s also the future to consider. One of the biggest advances in video is Smart/Connected TV, whereby video content is plucked straight from the internet to the set-top box.
All the big beasts (Samsung, LG, Google and others) are investing in this technology, and it makes sense to be prepared for the moment when you have the opportunity to send timely, seasonal, interesting and targeted video content directly into people’s homes – without the middleman interference of a TV channel or the costs and limitations of a production company.
Budgets
- Although costs are coming down, video is not cheap. You need to budget for:
- Production
- Equipment
- Crew
- Hosting and streaming
- V/O actors (if using)
- Scripting (if outsourcing)
The quotes that came in from external companies were prohibitively expensive, so we did what we always do, and brought the whole project in-house.
Our editorial team produced the scripts, we hired a three-man crew – director, producer and cameraman – and sent them off to 10 of our London hotels – with a camera, a tripod and a trackway, all of which fitted into a small case.
Filming
Pre-production was a headache; most of the videos were planned without site visits because we already knew the hotels – or thought we did. In hindsight, it would have been better to visit first and make sure the rooms we could get access to were the right ones.
As it happened, we had a single day to film all of the footage we could possibly require at each hotel; we had to plan scripting to match the shoot; we had to make sure we could find the right personality to interview, and that they were available on the day.
Then, of course, there are guests checking in and out, maids cleaning, lobbies abuzz with staff and visitors – all of whom needed to be avoided or presented with a release form if they stray into shot.
Post-production brought its own hurdles. To ensure variety, we had to choose two voices, one female and one male, who would complement each other and give the right tone to both the hotel and the Smith brand – not an easy task.
Voiceovers are tricky to get right as they tend to elicit a stronger emotional reaction in viewers – if they react badly to the voice, they can react badly to the hotels that voice is describing. We found two husband-and-wife actors – a real-life Mr & Mrs Smith – who fit the bill.
We had to match and license the music: thanks to a partnership with Ninja Tunes, this wasn’t as hard as it could have been, but beware of licensing yourself – it can be a lengthy, convoluted process.
Then we were into editing: selecting shots, cuts, speeds and overlay graphics. If you haven’t logged each of your shots and don’t know exactly which room is which, this can be a real nightmare.
Ten things we wish we’d been told beforehand:
- Research every site you want to get your videos on.
- Shoot in HD.
- In the voice over, don’t mention years, months, etc – it’ll date rapidly.
- Make sure your script allows for natural speech rhythms – the more read-throughs, the better.
- Log everything you film so you can find things when you come to post-production.
- Create HTML5 versions for iPhones and iPads.
- Embed your branding on the videos so if others embed them they remain easily recognisable.
- Make sure you can share them easily.
- Set up a YouTube channel.  You can personalise it – see the Smith YouTube Channel.
- Get them on Facebook.
How to raise/make money
- Find a sponsor and offer them something original. We partnered with Appleton Estate Jamaica Rum and decided that, rather than bunging on a pre-roll advert, we’d properly engage the brand and shoot each hotel bar’s mixologist shaking up a rum-based cocktail as an extra. The result is some engaging short films, which represent both Appleton Estate and Smith perfectly.
- Get the hotels to contribute – offer joint ownership of the videos with the hotels if they help towards the costs.
- Bring the production in-house – you have far more control over the end product (although perhaps a few more hiccups along the way) and you protect yourself against the endlessly spiralling costs of external providers.
- Run advertising on video pages – this can be done for you via an advertising agency or find an advertiser yourself.
- Share in revenues from content syndication.
And, of course, conversion should go up, and eventually video will have paid for itself. Smith’s videos have only just launched, so it’s early to tell whether they really do drive conversion. Time will tell…
NB: This is a guest article by Tamara Lohan, chief technology officer and founder of Mr & Mrs Smith.
About Special Nodes
Great video.. From a consumer perspective though, it still looks like a corporate production. Sure, it gives great views and information about the hotel but will consumers implicitly trust it? I’m all in favor of more video and these tips are fantastic but many consumers will not trust something that comes directly from the brand as much as an unbiased video. We’ve seen that play out in recent years with TripAdvisor among others.
I hope these do take off and more properties become aware of the huge benefit video can provide but I think there has to be a “real” feeling to them for consumers to have trust that what they are seeing isn’t edited, airbrushed and over produced.
Excellent post and insight into the complexities of producing great video content. Quality and creativity of content will be key once Internet enabled TV is commonplace (predicted by 2013)
Mr & Mrs Smith have done a fine creative job, helped obviously by having considerable in house talent and production knowledge. However, I would disagree that pro production is always going to be prohibitively expensive – don’t tar us all with the same brush! The whole point of using a pro team is to take full advantage of their experience /skills and eliminate the kind of issues/headaches Tamara outlines. Pro crew demand pro rates but creative thinking – including partnerships/sponsorship – can go a long way to offset costs.
We know from our own efforts at travelguru.tv that great video content does create sales
opportunities (our average booking value is £2200pp). Look forward to reading about
Mr&Mrs Smith sales surge as a result of video soon!
Like those above, I agree that this is a terrific post, and I agree that you can get get good results for an awful lot less than the old, prohibitive pricing model. But to advise people to make the video themselves is just plain wrong I’m afraid. I recall James saying a few important things at BVE this year; firstly that he auditioned about 500 voiceovers – a decent production company will trim that down to a manageable amount on your behalf. Secondly, partnering with Ninja Tunes is nice if you like hanging out in recording studios, but frankly the music you’ve ended up with is no better then the muzak you were trying to avoid. To get access to decent quality music that will really lift a piece, you need an agreement with a specialist supplier who can deliver cheap soundtrack at a competitive price. Voiceover and soundtrack is important, sure, and you’re dead right to include interviews with key players, but you’ve missed some important aspects too. Most important is the human element – if you see an empty restaurant you get no feel for what it’s actually like to eat there. It is difficult to fill a hotel with life for all the reasons you’ve suggested in the article, but a pro crew like ours or Cathy’s will know how to make the most of the situation and imbue a hotel video with life, vibrancy and fun – which, after all, is what really inspires conversion. By the way, you should see an uplift of at least 25%, if our experience running Thomas Cook TV is anything to go by. The most important element of all, as mentioned by Bran, is unbiased opinion. Statistically, 14% of people trust an advert, while 78% trust a recommendation. The best, most powerful tool you can include in a hotel video is an interview with a guest saying something along the lines of “it’s really lovely here, I’m having a great time, well worth the money.” One final point – six months for 10 videos? You would have had 10 times that amount in the same time frame if you’d hired a specialist company like Juggernaut.tv, and as for costs – James was right at BVE to say you shouldn’t be paying £10-15k per video, you should be paying more like £2-2.5k (as I think he mentioned you did), and you’ll find that most specialists charge around that price – you also don’t have any issues with finding crews, setting up shoots and dealing with clearance issues and complicated technical delivery requirements. In fact, if you commission a large amount (say 10 or more hotels in the same country), you should see that price drop, and you won’t have to do it all yourself. In short, make the videos yourself, but only if you’re prepared and able to dedicate yourself to it full time at the expense of your other commitments.
addendum – of course, James was speaking at TTE, not BVE – I’ve got trade show overload!
All good points, and some really valuable feedback here – thank you.
We had two main reasons for not include people shots: the release-forms headache and the fact that unless you catch people ‘au naturel’, it can look very cheesy indeed. We came very close to incorporating more food footage, but menus change and chefs move on, so it’s touch to keep current. We kept most of the foodie stuff to the behind-the-scenes films, where there are more people and food bits than you can shake a stick at.
We tried to counterbalance the ‘polishedness’ of the overviews with the more rough-and-ready behind-the-scenes interviews – one set showcasing the style of the place, the other its heartbeat – but we are thinking about incorporating actual guest feedback in future.
Music is always a matter of taste, so all I’ll say, Tom, is if you’d call our overview tracks ‘muzak’ then you must have been in some pretty cool lifts.
The six-months figure was not just the physical filming but the whole project: honing the idea, style, content, learning how best to stream and market them, etc. To be clear, each shoot took just one day. Our next set of films will take far less long.
We’ve still some way to go to get them perfect, but we’re really proud of the result and think they stand up well against what we’ve found online. And a 25% conversion boost? Fingers crossed…
Hello Tamara, we understand perfectly when you say “voiceovers are tricky to get right”, that’s why we would like to share with you a link to our talent search feature, http://bit.ly/dze9mP , through which you can search for the perfect voice talent for your future videos, filling in the descriptions of the exact voice you want, and hiring the voice over talent online.