In this age of mass content consumption, it can tricky to know where to spend those finite Marketing budgets when it comes to video content creation. Do you create lots of informative tabletop product videos? Or do you instead focus on making a higher budget, more well thought out product category commercial that gives your audience an emotional experience? This blog post will share the pros and cons of 6 different product video concepts and how they can lead to sales. The article also has Case Studies as examples and Pro Tip’s for those of you that are already leveraging this type of video content.

1. Product on Table

An easy, cost-effective way to create video around your product (you have probably already done a million of these) is the “Tabletop Product Video.” You get someone internally to jump on camera with a wireless lavalier microphone and you let them spew out the features, benefits and competitive advantages of your product. These videos are best placed on your product sales page as a way for customers to watch rather than read. You have the customer right next to that ‘Add to Cart’ Button so this video is what can help nudge customers to purchase your product.

Case Study: We worked with Leach Co Agency and FiTech EFI to make tabletop product videos more interesting by bringing in a professional host and creating an Episodic style intro. A great host can help lead the conversation and bring out the best in your company representative. The host can also add interesting points and keep viewers engaged. In this example, Courtney Hansen interviewed Jason Oberhelman about the FiTech GoStreet EFI- 400 HP System.

Pro Tip: Your on-camera talent talking about EFI Technology for 5-Minutes can be very informative but can also create some yawns. An easy way to make your tabletop product videos better is to shoot your product on a black backdrop or in a different setting to keep your audience more engaged. It also helps to be able to have cutaways to cover up your on-camera talent mistakes rather than aiming for the perfect take (unless you have a one-take wonder…in that case, you should get this person in front of the camera ALL the time).

2. All Text No Talking

Rather than getting a person in front of the camera or having a voiceover script recorded, it can be more effective to incorporate onscreen text. A pumping soundtrack, cool visuals and written features and benefits can be a great recipe for keeping your audience engaged while talking about your product. This style of video can live on your sales page but since it’s flashy and short form it can also be a great piece of content for your Instagram audience.

Case Study: Rather than going for the traditional tabletop video, BOOSTane decided to put their product features and benefits into an action-packed video series. They asked us to repurpose previously filmed lifestyle footage and stock footage to accompany the product beauty shots that we captured on black. Check out the result:

Pro Tip: If you are going to produce this style of video, dig up some footage from previously produced videos to go along with product beauty shots. These shots can include: driving shots, product being used, installation footage or lifestyle footage.

3. Product Infomercial

No we aren’t talking about the “But wait, there’s more” or “Buy today and you’ll get a second one free” infomercials that keep you company at 3 AM. There’s a reason why the informercial script works so well and why it’s made you pick up the phone for something you may or may not have needed. But what if your company could take the best of the informercial style without being cheesy or over the top? What if you could make the infomercial look more like a commercial and less like 80’s broadcast? What if you could create the product need and desire in your customer with a buy now button nearby?

Case Study: That’s what aFe POWER wanted to accomplish with their Infomercial series. They talk about results (HP and TQ gains), easy installation (a lot of times in 15 minutes or less), product quality (manufactured in California) and fast shipping (as little as one business day). At a price under $400, it seems like a time and cost-effective way to upgrade your Diesel Truck. See this example in action:

Pro Tip: Do you want to keep people engaged in your infomercial? Going for a faster pace edit style with transitions and motion graphics can keep your audience eyes glued to the screen. This style of informercial isn’t meant to give you the technical features and benefits of why this Cold Air Intake System is designed to create better X amount of better flow…it’s meant to give people an emotional experience. If they still need some convincing, they can read more on the sales page. But for a large number of consumers they want to know the high-level overview to make a purchase decision.

4. Educational Branded Content Series

Sometimes guys and gals are afraid to admit that they don’t know the difference between air intake systems or the benefits of thin ring packs versus thick ring packs. That’s why consumers love to watch Tech shows such as Hot Rod Garage or Week to Wicked. It gives them new knowledge in an entertaining and digestible way. It also gives a natural spot to integrate your specific product into one of these Series or Shows.

Case Study: We worked with eBay Motors and the MotorTrend Group to put together a series called “Parts and Performance: Your Supercharged Guide to Vehicle Mods.” We brought in TV Host Dennis Pitsengbarger to educate viewers with short 2-5 Minute videos. A great example from this series is on Pistons, Rings and Rods:

Pro Tip: Each one of these videos had a strong script behind it. Dennis utilized the script as the basis for talking about each of these topics but he didn’t read it verbatim. This gave the videos more flavor and humor, which any great host will naturally add. However, since Dennis was encouraged to steer away from script reciting we had him finish each video by reading the actual script just in case. That just in case scenario actually paid off because there were a couple instances where we needed to add in more information or reword something, and having those script reads meant we could easily match the audio environment and not have Dennis rerecord lines in his home studio.

5. Product Commercial

Cool driving shots in picturesque locations. The sound of an engine revving. Fast shots that are almost incomprehensible. These are some of the elements that come to mind when we think of car commercials. There’s a reason that these commercials cost so much to produce. They require a lot of time, thought and resources to pull off a 30-second spot. Perhaps your company doesn’t want to spend all it’s entire yearly Marketing Budget on a single piece of content but you do want to have that super polished, sexy commercial for your product. You may not have $200,000 to spend but you may have $20,000 for that product launch.

Case Study: Our team worked with Street Rodder Magazine and Ford Performance to create a video series around the Ford Performance Coyote Power Module. With a price tag of $13,000+, depending on how you configure your specs, this is a high priced item that benefited from a Commercial piece. After wrapping up the series we came up with the idea of creating a dark, ominous personality around the Coyote translated 41′ Woody. The result: ‘A New Identity’ product commercial was born. The purpose of this piece is give viewers an entertaining experience while making people imagine what the Coyote Power Module could do for their project vehicle.

Pro Tip: With commercials, and really any piece of content, it comes down to the concept. The more time and thought that can be put into the pre-planning phase of a commercial, the more likely it can produce the intended result. The Ford Performance Power Module Commercial was in pre-production for months with an evolving shot list, location scouting, script reworks, sound design discussions and much more to hopefully make this an impactful piece. Even without a huge budget and lots of resources your team can still dream up a great concept and execute it on your level.

6. TV Episode Product Integration

Getting your product on a build show like Week to Wicked or Hot Rod Garage can get you in front of a large audience with trusted and respected industry authorities. Yes, it can be an investment because you are not only going to be providing product but you’ll also be paying to get in front of the audience, but the content is created for you by a professional production team and the content is distributed for you to a large, targeted audience. As company’s like MotorTrend shift to an audience that often prefers digital content over print, product integration into shows in front of or behind paywalls will continue to grow.

Case Study: Ryan Foss Productions has produced all 23 Week to Wicked Episode’s for the MotorTrend Group. Week to Wicked is a tech focused build series that takes a vehicle with good body and paint (either restored or just a shell) and in 1 week builds it into a running and driving vehicle. This isn’t one of those reality shows where a crew comes in at night and actually builds the vehicle over months or years…the build team actually does this in a week and then proves it with a first drive and big burnout. Over the 23 Episodes, we’ve incorporated over 250 featured products into the show:

Pro Tip: When you are sending your product to a show, we recommend sending a company representative on-site (if they allow it) to make sure your product is being talked about and installed properly. It’s also important to make sure that you send in your product in pristine condition. Make sure fabric isn’t wrinkled, there aren’t smudge marks and everything is included. You are investing money into this show and you want to make sure your product appears in the best way. If you can’t make it on-site, make sure you send a detailed list of features and benefits to include. Ideally it’s more than a copy-paste of your technical sales page. On-camera talent will do their best to cover each point but when you get into the nitty-gritty technical details not only will viewers zone out but it will feel unnatural for on-camera talent to cover the points. Therefore, try to make the notes easy to regurgitate and colorful enough to be interesting. Lastly, don’t be afraid to ask for some of the footage to use for future video purposes. We have been approved to deliver raw footage to many clients over the years.

We hope this article was helpful in your pursuit of producing better aftermarket automotive product videos. If you have questions or need resources please leave them in the comments below or reach out to us via e-mail.

-Ryan Foss

Director / Producer for Ryan Foss Productions

Ryan Foss Productions works with Aftermarket Automotive companies to create product videos, branded content and documentaries.

First impressions.

Naturally, my first impression of these headphones is based off of the look of them. They have a classic over-the-ear style that is highlighted by a blue LED light that indicates the power for the noise canceling. The padding on the ear pieces seems adequate for extended usage periods.

They are wired headphones, but the 3.5mm stereo mini-plug cable is detachable. Something else I noticed right of the bat was the very nice carrying case that comes with them. It has a hard plastic exterior with a soft cloth interior that helps to protect the surface of the headphones from scratches. I never truly appreciated cases for headphones until I started carrying them from place-to-place. Now I can’t imagine not having a case.

A perfect fit.

Once I gave the headphones a thorough once-over exam, I tried them on. As I mentioned, they have a classic over-the-ear style and just looking at them, the padding on the ear pieces seem adequate and the peak of the headband seemed to be a bit lacking, but you don’t really know comfort unless you try on the product. So, I slipped the headphones on and found them to be exquisitely comfortable.

Quality.

Now that I had the headphones on my head, I was finally ready to plug and play some music. I plugged the provided cable into the jack on the headphones and then the one on my iPhone 6. Then I called up Pandora. I tend to have a very eclectic music purview and have many stations set up for different moods. From John Williams to Fallout Boy, the sound quality of these headphones was remarkable. There is an amazing depth of sound and incredible highs and lows that make listening to music a truly breathtaking experience.

It’s safe to say that because of my unique professional experiences, I’ve tested out a lot of headphones.

In order to test how voices sounded, and the overall art of sound mixing, I pulled up Netflix on my iPad Air 2 and watched a few minutes of a movie to hear all the nuances of the film. None of them were lost. In fact, I ended up hearing sounds that I hadn’t heard before. Echoes…birds chirping…wind blowing through trees…breathing of the characters…it was very impressive what the headphones ended up bringing out for me.

I would highly recommend these to any sound mixing specialist.

Just the other day I happened to wake up early. That is unusual for an engineering student. After a long time I could witness the sunrise. I could feel the sun rays falling on my body. Usual morning is followed by hustle to make it to college on time. This morning was just another morning yet seemed different.

Witnessing calm and quiet atmosphere, clear and fresh air seemed like a miracle to me. I wanted this time to last longer since I was not sure if I would be able to witness it again, knowing my habit of succumbing to schedule. There was this unusual serenity that comforted my mind. It dawned on me, how distant I had been from nature. Standing near the compound’s gate, feeling the moistness that the air carried, I thought about my life so far.

This is what has happened to us. We want the things we have been doing forcefully to fail. And then maybe people around us would let us try something else or our dreams. We are accustomed to live by everyone else’s definition of success. We punish people for the things they are passionate about, just because we were unable to do the same at some point in our life.

I was good at academics, so decisions of my life had been pretty simple and straight. Being pretty confident I would make it to the best junior college of my town in the first round itself, never made me consider any other option. I loved psychology since childhood, but engineering was the safest option. Being born in a middle class family, thinking of risking your career to make it to medical field was not sane. I grew up hearing ‘Only doctor’s children can afford that field’ and finally ended up believing it. No one around me believed in taking risks. Everyone worshiped security. I grew up doing the same.

Control fonts, background, size, parallax and overlay…

‘Being in the top will only grant you a good life’ has been the mantra of my life. But at times, I wish I was an average student. I wish decisions would have not been so straightforward. Maybe I would have played cricket- the only thing I feel passionate about. Or maybe I would have studied literature (literature drives me crazy). Isn’t that disappointing- me wishing to be bad at academics. It’s like at times I hate myself for the stuff I am good at.

I feel like these concrete buildings have sucked our desires and our dreams. We are so used to comfort that compromise seems like a taboo. We have lost faith in ourselves. If we can make through it right now, we can do the same in the days to come. You only need a desire to survive and nothing more- not money or cars or designer clothes.

Staying locked up in four walls have restricted our thinking. I feel like our limited thinking echoes through this wall. We are so used to schedules and predictable life that we have successfully suppressed our creative side.

When you step out of these four walls on a peaceful morning, you realize how much nature has to offer to you. Its boundless. Your thoughts, worries, deadlines won’t resonate here. Everything will flow away along with the wind. And you will realize every answer you had been looking for, was always known to you.

It would mean a lot to me if you recommend this article and help me improve. I would love to know your thoughts!

Talking to randos is the norm. I’ll never forget the conversation with the aquarium fisherman, forest ranger, and women at the Thai market. It’s refreshing to compare notes on life with people from vastly different backgrounds. When you are alone for days or weeks at a time, you eventually become drawn to people.

When you meet fellow travelers, you’ll find they are also filled with a similar sense of adventure and curiosity about the world. Five days of friendship on the road is like five months of friendship at home. It’s the experiences that bond you together, not the place. A rule I followed that worked well: be the first to initiate conversation. I met some incredible people by simply being the first to talk.

Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.

Travel can be affordable.

Long term travel is different than a luxury vacation. The point is to see the world, not stay in a 5-star hotel. During the trip, I stayed on a strict budget. The goal was to spend no more than $33 per day on accommodations. After a year, I was able to spend only $26.15 per day by booking through HostelWorld and Airbnb. When I wanted to meet people, I’d stay in a shared room at a hostel. When I wanted to be alone, I’d book a private room with Airbnb.

Take the cost of your rent or mortgage + food per month and divide it by 30. This is how much it costs per day to live at home. You will find that it’s possible to travel the world for roughly the same amount. Or, if you live in an expensive city like San Francisco, far less.

English is a universal language.

I was surprised how many people spoke English (apparently 1.8 billion people worldwide). Places where English was less prevalent, I made an effort to learn a handful of words and phrases in the local language. Even though it’s passable, I do desire to learn another language fluently. You can only take the conversation so far when all you can say is: “¿Esto contiene gluten?”

It’s possible to communicate a lot without saying a word. For instance, I left my phone at a restaurant in Chile. I pointed at the table where I was sitting, put my hand to my ear like a phone, then shrugged — 2 minutes later, my phone had been retrieved.

Trust your intuition.

I learned to trust that tiny voice in my head a bit more. When you are alone in a foreign country and your phone is dead, you are forced to trust your intuition. Is this neighborhood safe to walk around? Is this person someone I should interact with? Am I heading the right direction? Intuition is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. It’s feels like a sixth sense when you’re able to read between the lines of a situation.

The world is endless. The world’s a tiny neighborhood. My fav people are the ones who can hold two impossible ideas in their heads.

Witnessing calm and quiet atmosphere, clear and fresh air seemed like a miracle to me. I wanted this time to last longer since I was not sure if I would be able to witness it again, knowing my habit of succumbing to schedule. There was this unusual serenity that comforted my mind. It dawned on me, how distant I had been from nature. Standing near the compound’s gate, feeling the moistness that the air carried, I thought about my life so far.

I was good at academics, so decisions of my life had been pretty simple and straight. Being pretty confident I would make it to the best junior college of my town in the first round itself, never made me consider any other option. I loved psychology since childhood, but engineering was the safest option. Being born in a middle class family, thinking of risking your career to make it to medical field was not sane. I grew up hearing ‘Only doctor’s children can afford that field’ and finally ended up believing it. No one around me believed in taking risks. Everyone worshiped security. I grew up doing the same.

This is what has happened to us. We want the things we have been doing forcefully to fail. And then maybe people around us would let us try something else or our dreams. We are accustomed to live by everyone else’s definition of success. We punish people for the things they are passionate about, just because we were unable to do the same at some point in our life.

I feel like these concrete buildings have sucked our desires and our dreams. We are so used to comfort that compromise seems like a taboo. We have lost faith in ourselves. If we can make through it right now, we can do the same in the days to come. You only need a desire to survive and nothing more- not money or cars or designer clothes.

Staying locked up in four walls have restricted our thinking. I feel like our limited thinking echoes through this wall. We are so used to schedules and predictable life that we have successfully suppressed our creative side.

When you step out of these four walls on a peaceful morning, you realize how much nature has to offer to you. Its boundless. Your thoughts, worries, deadlines won’t resonate here. Everything will flow away along with the wind. And you will realize every answer you had been looking for, was always known to you.

It would mean a lot to me if you recommend this article and help me improve. I would love to know your thoughts!

Any time we make a change to a CSS file, we need to carefully consider the global environment in which our styles will sit. No other front end technology requires so much discipline just to keep the code at a minimum level of maintainability. But it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s time to leave the era of global style sheets behind.

It’s time for local CSS.

In other languages, it’s accepted that modifying the global environment is something to be done rarely, if ever.

In the JavaScript community, thanks to tools like Browserify, Webpack and JSPM, it’s now expected that our code will consist of small modules, each encapsulating their explicit dependencies, exporting a minimal API.

Yet, somehow, CSS still seems to be getting a free pass.

Many of us — myself included, until recently — have been working with CSS so long that we don’t see the lack of local scope as a problem that we can solve without significant help from browser vendors. Even then, we’d still need to wait for the majority of our users to be using a browser with proper Shadow DOM support.

We’ve worked around the issues of global scope with a series of naming conventions like OOCSS, SMACSS, BEM and SUIT, each providing a way for us to avoid naming collisions and emulate sane scoping rules.

We no longer need to add lengthy prefixes to all of our selectors to simulate scoping. More components could define their own foo and bar identifiers which — unlike the traditional global selector model—wouldn’t produce any naming collisions.

import styles from './MyComponent.css';
import React, { Component } from 'react';
export default class MyComponent extends Component {
 render() {
    return (
      <div>
        <div className={styles.foo}>Foo</div>
        <div className={styles.bar}>Bar</div>
      </div>
    );
  }

The benefits of global CSS — style re-use between components via utility classes, etc. — are still achievable with this model. The key difference is that, just like when we work in other technologies, we need to explicitly import the classes that we depend on. Our code can’t make many, if any, assumptions about the global environment.

Writing maintainable CSS is now encouraged, not by careful adherence to a naming convention, but by style encapsulation during development.

Once you’ve tried working with local CSS, there’s really no going back. Experiencing true local scope in our style sheets — in a way that works across all browsers— is not something to be easily ignored.

Introducing local scope has had a significant ripple effect on how we approach our CSS. Naming conventions, patterns of re-use, and the potential extraction of styles into separate packages are all directly affected by this shift, and we’re only at the beginning of this new era of local CSS.

process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development' ?
    '[name]__[local]___[hash:base64:5]' :
    '[hash:base64:5]'
)

Understanding the ramifications of this shift is something that we’re still working through. With your valuable input and experimentation, I’m hoping that this is a conversation we can have together as a larger community.

Note: Automatically optimising style re-use between components would be an amazing step forward, but it definitely requires help from people a lot smarter than me.

Keep me dancing.

Naturally, my first impression of these headphones is based off of the look of them. They have a classic over-the-ear style that is highlighted by a blue LED light that indicates the power for the noise canceling. The padding on the ear pieces seems adequate for extended usage periods.

They are wired headphones, but the 3.5mm stereo mini-plug cable is detachable. Something else I noticed right of the bat was the very nice carrying case that comes with them. It has a hard plastic exterior with a soft cloth interior that helps to protect the surface of the headphones from scratches. I never truly appreciated cases for headphones until I started carrying them from place-to-place. Now I can’t imagine not having a case.

All night long…

Once I gave the headphones a thorough once-over exam, I tried them on. As I mentioned, they have a classic over-the-ear style and just looking at them, the padding on the ear pieces seem adequate and the peak of the headband seemed to be a bit lacking, but you don’t really know comfort unless you try on the product. So, I slipped the headphones on and found them to be exquisitely comfortable.

Play me something for me and my darling, want you to make everything.

Now that I had the headphones on my head, I was finally ready to plug and play some music. I plugged the provided cable into the jack on the headphones and then the one on my iPhone 6. Then I called up Pandora. I tend to have a very eclectic music purview and have many stations set up for different moods. From John Williams to Fallout Boy, the sound quality of these headphones was remarkable. There is an amazing depth of sound and incredible highs and lows that make listening to music a truly breathtaking experience.

In order to test how voices sounded, and the overall art of sound mixing, I pulled up Netflix on my iPad Air 2 and watched a few minutes of a movie to hear all the nuances of the film. None of them were lost. In fact, I ended up hearing sounds that I hadn’t heard before. Echoes…birds chirping…wind blowing through trees…breathing of the characters…it was very impressive what the headphones ended up bringing out for me.