Undercover Tourist, a travel and ticket reseller business, knows how to create great video marketing content. The company set up a YouTube channel 2 years ago and has accumulated more than 7,000 dedicated subscribers in that time. The videos on its channel have been viewed a total of 10 million times. Undercover Tourist’s video marketing efforts have been so successful that Google selected the company as an official YouTube ambassador.
This is clearly a company that knows how to make compelling video. Luckily for us, Undercover Tourist’s CEO, Ian Ford, recently gave an interview to Business 2 Community in which he described some of the methods that have enabled his business to succeed where many others have failed.
Undercover Tourist didn’t set out to make conventional videos. The company posts raw, unedited footage of tourists as they experience the rides and shows available at vacation destinations in Florida.
Undercover Tourist’s videos are shot in such a way that they look like videos everyday tourists would create. Each video looks as if it was filmed through the eyes of someone experiencing a given ride, show or event. The videos are not subjected to any special editing.
One way that Undercover Tourist makes its videos seem like they are the work of enthusiastic amateurs is by releasing videos that seem, on the surface, as if they might be long and dull. Often, the company’s videos showcase a large portion of an event. These videos are shot from the audience’s perspective and, generally, contain only a single shot of an event. Periodically, the camera is zoomed in an out of the event, but this is the only action that would give the viewer the impression there is a camera operator present at all.
Undercover Tourist’s videos have the prosaic qualities and the charming naiveté one finds in home movies.
This is exactly the feeling that Undercover Tourist wants its videos to evoke. By creating videos with a workmanlike feel, Undercover Tourist conveys authenticity. Though the company could apply the same slick editing tricks to its videos that other video marketing companies commonly employ, doing so would damage the Undercover Tourist’s brand. It would turn the company into one of any number of anonymous video marketing companies.
The lesson here isn’t necessarily that your company should adopt the Undercover Tourist aesthetic and create long videos involving minimal polishing; calculated ordinariness probably won’t work for every brand. The lesson is that you need to make videos that are both suitable for your target audience and convey your brand’s adopted identity. Undercover Tourist figured out that aspiring travelers wanted to watch informative videos that didn’t feel contrived or inauthentic. By creating videos that rejected these qualities, the company was able to forge an identity for itself that distinguished it from its competitors. The company used a savvy video marketing strategy to create a unique value proposition.