Avnil Media

If you’ve spent money organising an event that attracts 600 people, what is it worth to engage many more people online?

One of our long-time clients, Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), recently took to the road with a series of events to build understanding of one of its key programs among cattle and sheep.

Key staff from the company visited each state of Australia throughout March and April to present up-to-date information on the Meat Standards Australia (MSA) meat grading system. The whole event series attracted around 600 livestock producers, as well as some livestock agents and meat processors.

Fairly late in the event planning phase, MLA approached us with an idea to film the MSA Roadshow, to extend the message beyond those people who could attend a face-to-face seminar.

“We were thinking about filming the forums ourselves but to his credit, Darryl [Anderson] showed us how well it could be done professionally. Correct lighting and no background noise. He assured us that it could be organised in time,” said Sarah Strachan, MSA Operations Manager.

“Our original plan was to film the presentations and create short highlights videos from each one. But Darryl suggested that we interview each presenter at the event. We would use the interview to give each video structure, with excerpts from the presentation providing the detail.”

“We also felt confident that Anvil Media had a good understanding our audience and what we were trying to achieve. Anvil has worked with MLA on many video projects, like the meat industry projections video series and FeedbackTV.”

While we knew we could deliver what MLA needed, the job came with its own complications.

“We had not much more than an hour to do seven interviews,” said Anvil Media’s Darryl Anderson, “and we needed to film them before I had seen the presentations.”

“Preparation was critical. Sarah had sent me the slideshows for each presentation and I had a late night at the motel picking through them to frame the interviews and plan our video content.”

One of the challenges of filming staff in corporate videos and training videos is that they don’t always present well onscreen.

“We only have a certain number of media-trained people working at MLA so using staff as video talent can be tricky,” said Sarah.

“But fortunately Anvil’s video production crew was very conversational, which helped us to relax in front of the camera so it wasn’t such a big issue after the first few takes.”

Our client was happy with the outcome.

“For the whole event, media pickup has been quite favourable, and the videos are helping to extend the impact even further,” said Sarah.

“Darryl has been very helpful in advising us how to optimise delivery of the videos to livestock producers, to make the most of our investment. By implementing Anvil Media’s video content marketing advice, we hope to extend the shelf life of the roadshow by about 6 months.”

“We’ve hosted the videos on our YouTube channel and published them on our website and social media channels (Facebook, Twitter). We’re also building a weekly email newsletter around each topic, and pushing out the videos, one per week, to our 22,000 members.”