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Writer's pictureVikas Kapil

ReFresh: repurposing old videos

Updated: Sep 25, 2020


Repurposing old videos to create new videos.

You get a professional video made; you put it on your website; you put it on YouTube, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. You launch a promotional campaign, and change or update it on the go. The video creates a buzz; it lasts for a few days, max a week. Your marketing team creates a report detailing the number of views, engagement, and other such metrics. Based on the report the video campaign is deemed as a great success, or a ‘good effort.’ The video then makes its way into the cold basket.


A new campaign is devised and the whole process is repeated.


Does that sound familiar? 


Well, normally this kind of a question in a blog is followed by an explanation on why that whole process is inefficient, and how a new way of working can help to make things a bit more streamlined. 


But in this case, I’d like to emphasise that there’s nothing wrong with the above process. In fact, it’s a really good way of executing video campaigns, almost in line with the ‘Build-Measure-Learn’ approach suggested in the book ‘Zero to One’ by Peter Theil. The point I want to put across is about what happens once the video reaches the cold basket. That cold basket, over the time, becomes a treasure trove of footage that can be repurposed into stunning new content like the one shown below.



Thanks to social media, the consumer behaviour with regards to video consumption has changed a lot in the last few years. People are more likely to watch videos with bold highlighted text. Why’s that? It all started with the muted video auto-play feature which was introduced by Facebook a few years back, and others followed. This enabled people to watch videos without sound, while they’re in bed at night, travelling by public transport, waiting at a public place, and generally anywhere they feel it's not appropriate to play sound on their phone, and are unwilling/unable to put on earphones.


This phenomenon initially resulted in content creators making video content with subtitles, and eventually with bold & highlighted text that appeared in the video in a stylised way. And eventually, subtitles stopped being an outside entity to a video, and evolved into becoming a part of the creative effort of video production. Slowly, this style of video content creation transformed into a thing on its own. Many consumers started preferring this style of video even when playing the sound wasn’t a problem.


The reason why I went into the origin of this particular style of videos with bold, highlighted, and stylised text, is that if we are able to control the purpose of a video using such text, it creates a unique opportunity when it comes to repurposing of old videos, the ones in the cold basket. We can pick great and relevant shots, perhaps mix them with a few fresh ones, and use the stylised text to create an entirely new narrative. Below's an example of one such video that docYOUmentary created for a client, using a mix of old and fresh footage-



The above video uses one of many styles that can be used to repurpose old videos/images, and as you could see, the stylised text creates an entirely new narrative. This style can even be used to create multiple videos to communicate different messages as a part of a wider campaign.


We at docYOUmentary can help you pick, mix, and create such ReFresh videos for you business. Do drop us a line if you'd like to discuss any such possibilities, or even if you'd need some advice on how you can make most of your old clips & videos.


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