So ibis India asked us to make a video about their new hotel in Goa. The challenge was to figure out a way to celebrate an overly celebrated destination. For the video to be share-worthy, it had to be about the users, not about Goa, or the hotel or the brand or us. So we asked ourselves.. What’s the number one problem for youngsters when they plan for Goa? Take a guess.. Parents! After few hours of brainstorming of all the things they say, we flipped it and our idea was born 🙂
Making it Share-Worthy
Mobile Native: Square videos are mobile native, and don’t need tilting for the full experience. Videos have been rectangle for long, but now we consume them vertically. Vine and Instagram started the vertical ‘square’ video trend, but Facebook is what brought it front and centre (at least in India)
Make It Easy to Understand: After much discussion, we decided to meme-ify the video and add a black strip with title on top, so when Facebook auto-plays it you know the context till the end. Even though meme videos are like the graffiti of video world, but what the hell.. it’s about storytelling and share-worthiness 🙂
Make it Sound Proof: From our data, 75% of video views are without sound on Facebook, so the video had to be sound proof and since this was a first where we had actual dialogues, subtitles are super important. And subtitles not in a different language but the same as script, so it matches the visuals.
Move Fast: First 3-6 seconds is our target, to make it compelling enough to continue. As marketers our dream is for people to stop in news-feeds, hit play, watch the whole thing, share it and then give us their kidney! lol First 3-6 are most crucial.
Execute, Execute Execute: We were really skeptical of going all in with in-house capabilities. Heck, I played a role too (my first). The only thing I told myself: Let’s follow the plan, however it looks and execute… if it doesn’t look good. we’ll figure something out. But wallah, team did a kick-ass job.. 🙂
Results: The video is off to a good start, got about 200k views on first day (On Facebook)
After our success in videos over the last few years, ixigo is taking on limited clients (Travel brands only) for videos, ibis being our first 🙂
cheers,
Aashish
PS: Remember I was writing a book? Yes I’m still on it going strong. Sign-up to get it before anyone else when it comes out 🙂 And to connect on Twitter I’m @aashishc
Anamika Joshi
Simple strong points. Thanks Aashish… you nail it every single time…. I hope to come out with Utpatang videos soon. Have been planning since I guess the first day we launched 🙂 It’s been an year now. Thanks for constant dose of inspiration!
asha chaudhry
hilarious aashish. you take content creation and virality to another level, each time, with every new video!!
Atamjeet Singh Bawa
Having met you personally Aashish, I knew you’ll look good in front of camera, so congrats on your debut. And your tips are super cool, my next video is going to be square and let’s see how that goes. Looking forward to do something kick ass with you guys for the hospitality industry 🙂
Sridhar Rajendran
Hi aashish,
It is a different idea and has a spin of humour in it but somehow it seems to fall flat. The magic in your earlier videos seems to be missing in this. Or maybe it is just me? 🙁
asha chaudhry
i think i know what the issue is sridhar – the tone and style is totally north indian – which is why the dilli kinda folks were in splits (especially all over fb!)
aashish – i think this is interesting feedback – coz your other videos don’t have actors or a north indian slant to it so perhaps the audiences from the south didn’t find it rib-tickling like we did. in the next vid, if you’re using in house actors, you might wanna keep the cultural aspect in mind!
Joginder Tanikella
Really enjoyed this video! Saw it on FB and nice to know it’s by a Rodinhooder.
And thanks for sharing your story. It’s like hearing about a movie from the star himself! 😉
“aur Nasha!” 😉