Consumers have an increasingly wide variety of options available to entertain themselves. This poses a challenge for content aggregators who want to effectively promote their video content online through original trailers of movies, sitcoms, and video games. Marketers are now trying to produce much shorter video clips to promote their content on a variety of digital channels. This research is the first to propose an approach to produce such clips and to study their effectiveness, focusing on comedy movies as an application. Web-based facial-expression tracking is used to study viewers’ real-time emotional responses when watching comedy movie trailers online. These data are used to predict both viewers’ intentions to watch the movie and the movie’s box office success. The authors then propose an optimization procedure for cutting scenes from trailers to produce clips and test it in an online experiment and in a field experiment. The results provide evidence that the production of short clips using the proposed methodology can be an effective tool to market movies and other online content.
Navigating Global Markets and Strategies for Success
Video Content Marketing: The Making of Clips
1. From: Liu, Shi, Teixeira & Wedel (2018)
To entice viewers to watch entire
video. This could be an ad, a TV show,
or a movie—any piece of video.
Most platforms preview content with
the first 5-30 seconds of the content.
Key research finding: Viewership can
be increased if the preview shows the
most emotional scenes in a logical
narrative order.
Why make a preview “clip” of a
longer video?
2. From: Liu, Shi, Teixeira & Wedel (2018)
Facial tracking software is used to identify the most
emotional clips to be extracted.
How to make a preview
“clip” of a longer video?
Best clip Good clipBad clip
An algorithm is then used to create the clip of the desired length by eliminating scenes that
reduce watching intention the most (i.e., are lowest in happiness).
3. From: Liu, Shi, Teixeira & Wedel (2018)
Results: What clips get viewers to watch
the entire video?
Higher
Watching
Higher
moment-to-
moment
happiness
Higher peak
and end
happiness
Increasing
trend in
happiness
Longer scene
at the end,
increasing
video volume
4. From: Liu, Shi, Teixeira & Wedel (2018)From:
Lab Experiment
Watching full video: +11% for optimized clip
Intention to watch full movie: 32% higher for optimized clip
Expected increase in box-office revenues: +3.2%
Field Experiment with Netflix
Promotional emails were sent to Netflix customers just before launch of one of
Netflix’s original romantic comedy movies.
40,000 Netflix customers from non-U.S. were exposed to an optimized clip, a
benchmark clip (more typical of Netflix), or a static image (non-video).
Results: several streaming measures improve by 10-13%.
Findings
Editor's Notes
(most of them less than 30 seconds) to advertise the available content; the original trailers of movie, sitcom and video-game are not always useful.
Effective movie trailers capture viewers' interest and convince them to watch the movie. This is accomplished by selecting and editing scenes from the movie, and by adding music and sound effects.
Little is currently known about how the design of trailers affects emotions and how that impacts viewers’ intentions to watch the movie. Consequently, it is not known how to best select scenes from the trailer to produce clips that have a similar impact on emotions, intentions, and ultimately, box office success.
(most of them less than 30 seconds) to advertise the available content; the original trailers of movie, sitcom and video-game are not always useful.
Effective movie trailers capture viewers' interest and convince them to watch the movie. This is accomplished by selecting and editing scenes from the movie, and by adding music and sound effects.
Little is currently known about how the design of trailers affects emotions and how that impacts viewers’ intentions to watch the movie. Consequently, it is not known how to best select scenes from the trailer to produce clips that have a similar impact on emotions, intentions, and ultimately, box office success.
Higher moment-to-moment happiness
Higher peak and end happiness
Increasing trend in happiness
Higher Watch Intention