Event Video Production and Photography Best Practise

When you’re looking to reach, engage and build relationships with people and stakeholders, events are a large investment that play a major role. For businesses, hosting events can increase the likelihood of consumers making a purchase by up to 91%, accelerating growth.

• • 74% of customers say they have a more positive opinion about the company or product after an event.
  • 60% of business leaders believe that events are the most critical marketing channel for company success.
  • 40% of consumers feel they become more loyal to brands after engaging in brand events

This rings especially true post-COVID, as both companies and consumers alike look to fill the social vacuum that has emerged. Consequently, there is a heightened emphasis on bringing people together. This means bigger budgets being allocated to events and an increased pressure to deliver a compelling, engaging attendee experience.

The Importance of Professional Event Production Planning

Planning events requires substantial time and resources, sometimes over a year. These events can range anywhere from intimate lunch-and-learns at small coworking spaces to large-scale, multi-day happenings at venues like the Hilton Hotel, ICC and Sydney Opera House.

Costs often run from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars – dropping $300,000 to $500,000 isn’t all too uncommon, which makes maximising ROI and capturing meaningful content with assembled stakeholders a clear priority.

A study done by Imagine Events shows that nearly half of people in charge of organising corporate events plan them a year in advance, showing off how important it is to have the time to cover all possible bases well in advance.

With key stakeholders congregating for two to three days – including VIPs, CEOs, parliament members, dignitaries, sponsors, and even billionaires – events present unique opportunities to showcase and compile compelling testimonials, stakeholder perspectives, public relations materials and campaign content.

Additionally, we engaged various notable speakers to generate early buzz, spur ticket sales, and secure press coverage. During the event, we filmed all kinds of content – from highlights to sponsor reels – to amplify current and future iterations of the awards and build a catalogue of footage that can be leveraged throughout the year.

Cover Your Bases

Careful planning unlocks a myriad of opportunities to capture meaningful event content and maximise returns on investment. Such preparation proves pivotal to an event’s success. 

Because on the day of the event, you don’t want to be running around stressing out about logistics, permissions or access.

Ask these questions:

• • Who should you be interviewing / featuring at your event?
  • Have you secured signed release forms and have permission to film?
  • Do the people of interest have time to chat with you? Can you pre-organise times to interview them.
  • What is the venue like? Is the lighting good? Is there a quiet area for interviews to allow for good audio?
  • Is there quality internet access for streaming? Can you do a speed test of the internet prior?
  • Do you have a well planned run sheet and timings for your live stream? Have all approved keynote presentations delivered?
  • What will the camera positioning plans be? Will you need things like risers and power cables?

These are all things that you’ll want to coordinate early with the event audiovisual, public relation and content production teams. It’s incredibly important for you to have an idea of the schedules detailing high-level speaker appearances to enable VIP interviews during their brief windows onsite.

Locking in those discussions well in advance ensures organisers can connect global CEOs, celebrities and dignitaries attending their event with your media team. 

One specific instance was when we secured prominent press coverage by having one of our event photos of Afterpay’s Lee Hatton published in the next day’s Australian Financial Review. Comprehensive planning to maximise such media opportunities is pivotal as you can tell. It enables creating buzz-worthy event content for distribution to media partners, amplifying currency and visibility in a timely fashion. That all ads up to valueable free media exposure.

We also live streamed approximately 40 key note speeches, filmed a range of testimonials and interviews and supplied a range of video edits to help promote the event to future sponsors, attendees and partners. Thus helping maximise the ‘return on content’ (ROC) of the event.

Capture More Event Value (maximise!)

But it’s not just about leaving the work to media partners post-event. With all the valuable visual content you have from the event, you’ll be able to use them to bolster the impact and reach of the event for months afterwards.

Planners can repurpose content across channels, editing long form feature content into readily shareable assets, distributing them via LinkedIn with strategic tagging and hashtags to stimulate visibility, virality and reputational boost. Embedding assets onto winners’ websites and encouraging them to use them in their email distributions expands reach further. This is a tried-and-tested practice: 60% of marketers reuse content two to five times. They generate ‘snackable’ content from existing materials to reach more people.

Rather than have a single hour-long event video, create snippets, tag attendees with trending hashtags. Run sponsored social media posts targeted to relevant demographics and industries primed to react. 

Hit them with quality content, use pixels to identify them, and continue engagement through customised, multi-touch sales funnels. There is a myriad of channels you can distribute your cut down social video snippets to from Instagram stories and reels, to YouTube shots, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, your website, landing pages, eDMs and more. As Gary Vee says, you can make 30+ pieces of micro content from a single keynote.

So rather than capturing a narrow scope of content, broaden the focus – record keynote speeches to repurpose into long-form content or podcasts. This adds value for paid members and enables cutting short-form snippets for mass content distribution. In fact, retargeting can boost ad response up to 400%.

Post-event, these tactics are what showcases success, and that’s going to make it easier to retain existing and secure new sponsorships, drive future ticket sales and help you secure quality future keynote speakers. As you can well appreciated, sponsorship is a very competitive space, so you need every bit of edge you can get.

Pre production planning was key to success for the Finnies 2023 event coverage. The event was held across various levels of the venue from arrivals and champagne on arrival, the awards presentation held in an upper gallery to dancing and drinks back down in the main auditorium of The Forum, Melbourne.

Our team worked to a tight plan including shot lists to ensure they were capturing all of the key moments. Including arrival photos in front of the media wall, to social snaps of people mingling, motion timelapse exterior sequences, a variety of roving video snippets to capture the energy and tell the visual story of the evening and the art deco / heritage venue. Through to the awards ceremony and winner photos and video as soon as they walked off stage. It was a well oiled, moving content buffet!

We worked with the AusPayNet team to coordinate the event planning for the Sydney ICC to capture a range of content including interviews with VIP attendees, a +1,200 photo set of speakers, attendees and sponsors through to capturing the opening address by MC Juanita Phillips and the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Michelle Bullock. The content has been leveraged across a range of media from eDMs, the website, LinkedIn and more.

The Bake team also developed and produced the intro / hype video to introduce the annual Big Debate: Should Australia be cashless? which closes out the days activities. This video involved the development of a concept, look and feel / style guide, council filming permissions, canvassing public participants through to music licenses, editing, color grading and motion titles. It all came together into a fun, dynamic video package.

Go The Extra Mile

When you’re already investing hundreds of thousands of dollars on your guests and event production, you can’t afford to miss out on any opportunities. Going the extra mile, even just the proper content planning alone, is the way to go, because it’s not just about ensuring everything runs smoothly while you’re at the event, but also driving post-event success for all of your stakeholders. 

Bake has showcased expertise across planning and covering major events for iconic Australian leaders across all types of sectors – now let us leverage our years of professional event expertise to elevate your next event.