2024 is just around the corner and a perfect time to take stock of the past year and look ahead at the year to come.
Video has stayed the powerhouse of marketing campaigns for businesses all over the world and only continues to grow. Though, like most things, aspects of video are continuously changing.
Stay ahead of the curve with our top 5 predictions for the upcoming years’ video trends based on our 30+ years of experience in the industry.
Let’s start with the trend that’s on everyone’s mind…
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial Intelligence has been in development for years, but it really has made its way into the public consciousness now (metaphorically, not literally of course).
It’s becoming hard to think of an aspect of video that has not been touched by AI.
It’s in cameras, helping with features such as auto-exposure and auto-focus, it’s in editing software, helping speed up workflows by auto-selecting sound effects and auto-colour-grading. We are even beginning to see it create entire videos solely from text prompts.
This is not an exhaustive list, but believe us when we say, it is beginning to be used a lot!
This is not going to slow down anytime soon either, as the technology gets better, so will its uses.
We are not scared of AI though (yet!) and just see it as another tool to make your videos better, and do things that wouldn’t have been possible even 2 years ago.
2. Social Media Optimised Video Content
Social media has been on the rise for a long time now, platforms come and go, but social media in general continues to go from strength to strength.
Social media marketing is the cornerstone of most companies marketing campaigns these days and is the place you go if you want the biggest audience to see what you are offering.
This is why it is extremely important that the content you put up has been thoroughly thought through, and is specifically optimised for the platform it will be posted on.
Another example is the fact that phone based social media users often watch videos without sound, as they might be on the bus, in the library or… you know… the toilet. By adding subtitles to your video, it doesn’t matter if people watch it with sound or not, not to mention this has accessibility benefits.
Basically, all we are saying is this, you’ve gone to the trouble to have a video made, make sure you get the most out of it by creating many different versions, all specifically optimised for the platform they will end up on.
3.Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)
You probably know what these are already, but just in case you don’t, VR or Virtual Reality, is technology that puts a user inside a virtual world, and AR or Augmented Reality, is technology that adds virtual aspects to enhance the real world.
These have been leveraged by companies for years now, but similar to AI, the technology is getting better at a rate of knots, and so are its use cases.
So, we will be seeing more and more companies use these immersive experiences to provide training, allow customers to virtually try on new clothes, test a new hair style, see how a new piece of furniture could look in their house, create virtual showrooms, virtual art galleries, you name it and it is happening!
The fact that end users interact with this type of video is its biggest strength and provides excellent conversion rates and low cost alternatives for big areas such as education and sales.
4. Authentic And Inclusive Visuals
This can be a point of contention with a lot of people when done wrong, but when done correctly is exactly what people want to see!
So, what do we mean by correctly?
Authentic and inclusive visuals are a must and allow viewers to see and relate to people similar to themselves in a video – this can only be a good thing!
But, the audience is also intelligent, and can tell when something is not 100% genuine or tokenistic and a lot of companies have fallen into this trap in the past.
So, authentic and inclusive visuals does what it says on the tin, it is about having the inclusivity in videos we all want, in an authentic way.
We film a lot of ‘real world’ videos inside corporate companies and because of this we can only film the people that are there, and if you fake inclusivity people will know straight away.
This means it is up to the company to make sure that they are hiring an inclusive and diverse workforce – not as a checkbox exercise either, but because it has scientifically proven benefits.
We have a lot of great clients that are doing this and believe us, it pays off in many ways!
This has been in our list before and it is not going away anytime soon!
Self-shooting your own video has stuck around and is increasingly popular for a number of our clients.
Actually, a good percentage of our projects are taking our clients’ self-shot video and tweaking, editing and mastering them, into a professional video.
Once you’ve shot it, send it to us and let us do our magic. This could take the form of professional editing, cleaning up your audio, grading, adding music, slides, captions & graphics, animations and much more.
If you wanted to have a chat about anything in this blog or any other elements of video production, contact us today. We love chatting through ideas and we also will happily provide you with free, no obligation quotes.
