Know Your Audience
Ask most clients ‘who is this content aimed at?” and the answer will be “everyone”. This is poor marketing. If you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll appeal to no-one. Your first job as the marketeer is to define your audience. Here are a few questions to help you:
Who are the people most affected by the issue addressed in your film?
Do you want your film to “preach to the converted” or to reach people who have never been exposed to the issue in your film or your point of view?
Where do they live?
How old are they?
Do they work? Where?
Where do they gather as a community? (the work canteen, community centres, bars etc.)
What language do they speak?
Do they already know a lot about the issue(s) of your film?
What other issues concern them?
Who are the people who have the most power to affect the change that you want your film to make?
Which organisations work with these types of people?
Video Treatments
If you want a punchy concise message this is a great exercise to focus your mind on what the key elements of your content are. First write a one line ‘pitch’.
The ‘Pitch’. A mild mannered vegetarian battles monstrous rubbish bins to clean up the city he lives in as “Captain Marvellous”
The next thing to do is expand your pitch into a ‘treatment’, this is just a few sentences but again helps you drill down into only the main elements of your video. A treatment should tell the story and give a flavour of it as well, it should also be appealing, if it isn’t, rewrite it until it does.
The ‘Treatment.’ In the heart of the big city we see a mild mannered, horn-rimmed bespectacled vegetarian who is always getting pushed around. In times of crisis, however, he dives into a nearby phone booth, restroom, or even behind the bushes to return as Captain Marvellous. In this video, the monster rub- bish bins are out to smother humanity in its own debris. Captain Marvellous battles with the monstrous bins. He gets hit with every kind of rubbish imaginable, but he finally triumphs over the evil bins. Captain Marvellous cleans up the city, and we see what types of rubbish can be re- used and recycled in the fight against waste dumping. As he’s walking away in victory, a child throws a crisp packet into the street, Captain Marvellous turns to scold the child and gets kicked in the shins to comic effect.
Other helpful elements to include are the title, shooting format, genre and audience/objective.
Next week; Script formatting and the language of camera