Creative Production

Video Production: A marketer’s guide to Briefing, Budgeting, Transparency and Sustainability

Video Production

“Pull Quote”

Transparency in my opinion is key….we wanted our clients to see our fees, communication with production companies and the budget breakdowns themselves via a centralized platform

Video Production is akin to construction in many ways, we can find it a daunting task when we have little experience in such creations. There are some factors you can lean on to make more informed decisions. Transparency must be one of them. Like having that ideal home built, you scope it out with more than one supplier, compare the quotes and different line items and you begin to understand why each element is needed – production is no different.

It’s near impossible to cover off all the possibilities but I hope to give some insight, some tips to some of the video production process.

The three main parts of production are pre-production, production and post-production. For this article I will focus on pre-production, working with production companies and budgeting considerations.

Agency model

There are standard practice ‘general’ engagement rules that most will adhere to, for example, what I would call the “creative agency” model. This is what most production companies are mainly used to when dealing with clients. Typically this would include briefing “up to” three production companies, receiving budgets, timings and a creative proposal or treatment before finally commissioning one of the three companies. The production company would also expect to be paid the 1^st 50% of the budget ahead of the shoot and the 2^nd 50% after delivery. Supporting this within the UK are unionised rates for key crew for large productions, which can vary from market to market.

Client direct

More and more clients these days have a mixture of suppliers for various content types they wish to create. Many won’t be able to afford a creative agency. Below are points and guidelines for producing smaller “online productions” where you are dealing directly with a production company and may not have an agency and it’s rigor in place.

It’s worth pointing out that the agency model is a tried and tested one and has been championed in the UK by the Advertising Producers Association (APA). Some of the points below lend themselves to that, but most ‘content’ productions won’t have the scope to be created in the full blown agency manner.

Internal discussion on your Deliverables

What is your marketing strategy and what channels are you going to utilise? Is it part of a yearly content plan, or is it for a new production or service? Before working on a brief it’s worth deciding on all requirements you may need and working backwards. Also, by ‘sweating your assets’ you can avail of economies by making more at the same time.

This is a really important point as different channels have different video formats and processes. For example, if you are making a TV commercial it will be 16:9 widescreen picture ratio and if for Instagram you may opt for a 1:1 square ratio format. You may also have varying lengths, cut-downs, teasers, images to populate your campaign.

I have seen so many clients only consider this towards the end of the video production and it adds huge stress and extra costs if left to mid process to add in these alternative formats. The variation in deliverables and formats are vital in forming your brief from the offset.

Your brief

Forming an internal document before you engage a production company will save you time and budget. Being organised up-front sets the tone of any potential relationship you have with your production company.

What is the objective? What is the background to this production, are there any insights you can share? What do you want the consumer to do, who are your target demographic? Are there mandatories to your content for example, locations, product or service features, benefits you want highlighted?

Agreeing this internally by forming a Brief document will align teams internally and help you communicate as ‘one’ voice, which reduces any differing opinions down the line.

The Script

After your brief is agreed the next step would be to formulate a script. You may decide to tackle this yourself in-house, or to employ a copywriter in your sector, or indeed you may look for your production company to create one for you. You’ll need to get most of your script agreed before a budget is fully signed off, you can of course alter some elements as you progress such as a voice over or titles over the screen.

To note; with some story telling content you don’t necessarily need a script, it may come from filming interviews, sound bites and the narrative can follow a more documentary approach. You may have some key shots, locations or themes you want to cover. With cut-downs and social versions this can be distilled and refined into your core message, call to action or brand line.

Budgeting, Timings and Treatment

Below is an outline for any video production, I would use all of this logic from shoots of £10k up to £100k+, these are generally ‘content’ shoots. Larger productions will have more rigour put in place. It’s really down to how much time you have in order to limit the risks involved in making a premium production, while keeping costs down.

Once a production company has an outline, brief, timings and script, they can formulate their approach via a creative treatment and associated budget. You need to analyse all of these elements in tandem as they are all of course linked.

Bear in mind that most marketing procurement and producers tend to look for three comparative quotes in order to find value and the best fit, so it’s good practice to follow the same rule. By having comparative quotes and understanding the approach (think that dream house again) you really get to understand where the costs are coming from.

Budget considerations

1. Profit – what profit are the production company making? Like any business production companies need to make a reasonable profit. The differnt line items you should look at are the Directors and Producers’ fees and largely their mark-up. Most will operate on a 10%-15% mark-up on all costs, but it’s also important not to purely focus on that percentage figure.
2. Shoot days – How long are the shoot days? Is there an overtime payment if your production runs over this allotment? Larger productions will have this documented in their budgets, whereas smaller video productions may be based on the deliverables themselves.
3. Usage – are there any usage items that are based on a time frame, such as music, voice overs, visual artists or anything that has an IP attached to it? Cross referencing with your deliverables of course to make sure each channel has the permission to use.
4. Insurance – do we have shoot cover, public liability, do we need terrorism cover, do we have our product insured, and what if it rains and delays my production? More recently we’ve seen the Pandemic raise major issues around travel, shoot safety and of course liability.
5. Product – If you are shooting products/packshots, ensure you have far more product, labels etc than you think you will need, plus back-ups in case something breaks or is damaged. Ensure this is delivered a week at least before the shoot.
6. Pre-production meeting – It’ s vital to have a pre-production meeting, probably via Zoom these days, running through all aspects of the video production with the aim to all agree, thus avoiding any surprises on the shoot itself. This should normally take place a few days before the shoot so post meeting adjustments can be actioned.
7. Post-production – Know how many changes you are allowed. There are some standard terms, for example, such as editing, which is usually accounted for by the number of days allocated and included in your budget.  However, for smaller content shoots, it is normally three rounds of changes for the edit and the same for the post. But be aware, what is the budget allotment for this and are the same fees payable if we run over this amount?

Transparency, sustainability and the impact of COVID-19 on travel

Transparency in my opinion is key and that is why when creating the Travlrr platform we wanted our clients to see our fees, communication with production companies and the budget breakdowns themselves via a centralized platform.

We also created Travlrr to enable clients to scale their creation abilities. Having experienced tighter budgets and tighter timings there was a real need to create bespoke foreign content in another way. We curated a small number of talented and agile local companies in over 100 countries to allow us to directly brief them via a private centralised dashboard. To enable us and our clients to shoot from single shots all the way to fully finished films.

Our purpose is to reduce carbon emissions and with the impact of a Global Pandemic we are seeing more clients adjust to this method of production now they have little choice.

By reducing the need to fly full teams to foreign locations we cemented our sustainable production solution via a tree planting programme we launched last summer with “Trees for Life” in Scotland. For each brief commissioned, we plant trees to the equivalent of 7500KG of Carbon emission or the same as the average household produces in 7 months.

With restrictions on Travel and video production itself varying from country to country this is even more risky for clients to fly crews around the world. My view would be to review your marketing department itself to see if there are new ways of working that will reduce costs, timings and help create a more sustainable world.

Below is an example of work from one of our customer’s. As an example this would sit in the under the £50k production mark.

About the author

Darren Khan is Founder & CEO at Travlrr, a sustainable remote production platform working with Brands and Agencies. Clients include Government Tourism Agencies, Brands, Publishers, Media Owners, Social Media Platforms, Post Houses and Agencies to create bespoke high quality video content & ads at scale; faster, cheaper and more sustainably.

The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Marketing Procurement iQ or imply endorsement from the publisher.