Spending $111,000 to Help Business Understand the Balance of Budget vs Creativity

Wistia, a video software provider for small- and medium-sized businesses, announces the start of One, Ten, One Hundred, a unique project to gauge the impact budgets on creative ideas for video ads. To do this, Wistia commissioned Sandwich Video to come up with the creative concepts and produce three ads with a production budget of $1,000, $10,000 and $100,000 respectively. The three ads performance and the audience reaction, will then be analysed and the results made available in a report to be published in October.

To ensure that people aren’t duped as happened in other social ‘experiments,’ Wistia is running One, Ten, One Hundred on its own product – a video creation tool for SMBs called Soapbox. In addition, a unique behind the scenes documentary film One, Ten, One Hundred is being produced which will lift the curtain the experience and the challenges, budgets and otherwise, on creating commercials. This will be premiered in at an event in Boston in October.

To explore this idea of constrained creativity, Wistia partnered with the renowned Sandwich Video to produce three videos for $1,000, $10,000 and $100,000, which is where the name One, Ten, One Hundred originates.

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Wistia will then measure the impact of the three videos with consumers. Metrics will include traditional demographics and engagement data as well as a look at cost per customer acquisition and return on investment. Wistia will specifically look at the effectiveness of three innovative ad buys on Facebook – a video carousel (three videos in a single ad), sequential video advertising – where three variants of the same ad are served to users who have engaged with the first, and a straight split test between the three different ads.

Each video will be supported with identical spend across multiple sites for up to a month. Wistia will publish the results in a report in November together with advice for marketers and business leaders looking to produce their own videos.

Chris Savage, founder and CEO, Wistia: “Our production team felt that creativity was the single most important element in producing an effective video and this fits in with our vision to grow through creativity. However, they do spend their working lives producing and commissioning videos, they realized that they really didn’t have a clear idea as to the money-in-money out ratio. So they asked us if they could find out. We loved the idea and greenlit the project.”

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Video is hugely important for business because it is increasingly accessible for both users and creators. Over 50 percent of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI and 43 percent of users say they want to see more of it from marketers.

There are all sorts of advice columns that give guidance from free/low-cost do-it-yourself video blogs to Oscar-worthy budget-busting corporate overviews. What is not understood is how much a business should spend producing a video and what the impact is on the results. One of Wistia’s central tenets is that creativity is more important than budget and that smaller budgets can still match the output of big brands. One, Ten, One Hundred will help quantify this.

Chris Savage, continues: “We have produced over 1700 videos since 2011. Many businesses feel budget prohibits them from being able to utilize this form of marketing. We hope this experiment will show that even low budget videos with the right creative approach can have a huge impact. However, only time will tell us what the disparity is between low and high budget production.”

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