More video content is being created today than ever before, with 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every single minute. Thanks to the increasing accessibility of smartphones with high-quality video capture, virtually all people have the ability to create videos of their day-to-day lives and upload them online for the world to see.
It’s not just a natural way for people to communicate, with brands also being able to leverage this powerful channel to learn more about consumers and gain a genuine understanding of their real-life activities.
“The naturalness of video as a medium means that it’s a frictionless way of getting feedback from consumers. Even five years ago, if you asked people to video themselves in daily life, there would have been a level of resistance to it, but this has now completely changed,” says Matt Lynch, chief strategy officer of Big Sofa Technologies, a leading provider of video data analytics to global brands and tech companies. “Our experience is that people are really engaged, saying up to nine times more in a video study than they do in a traditional survey.”
While video has always existed as a way of capturing traditional market research, gaining the context of authentic, in-moment interactions and everyday language is of increasing value to brands that are used to insight from more formal settings where consumer behaviour can
be unnatural.
Our experience is that people are really engaged, saying up to nine times more in a video study than they do in a traditional survey
Another major issue with previous video collection methods, where brands recorded focus groups or one-on-one interviews, is the difficulty in managing this content and analysing the data at scale. Enabled by advanced technology and the usage of wearable tech and fixed cameras, natural video can now be obtained at scale and analysed effectively to uncover actionable insights for companies.
Countless data points can be collected through digital video, including everything from facial expressions to physical actions, and then structured to be analysed in combination with other data sources like point of sale to provide a more detailed context.
“Video data analytics, the combination of capturing video using the latest digital technology, then analysing it in a structured way, allows brands to get an extremely textured and rich consumer understanding. This provides qualitative depth, but at a quantitative scale, and therefore it is a robust method of making decisions in a way that just wasn’t possible before,” says Mr Lynch.
Big Sofa Technologies enables organisations to capitalise on these new innovations through the use of their proprietary artificial intelligence-backed analytics and hardware solutions. In practice, this allows brands to stream and analyse real life, globally, through remote cameras in the houses of volunteers, giving brands the ability to learn through observation and identify potential needs and develop solutions.
The Visual Insight System offered by Big Sofa Technologies brings together and organises a massive amount of video data, and in the process creates a space for staff in different business areas to collaborate and create solutions to real-life consumer challenges. Everyone from an engineer to marketer and designer can use this platform and the insights it generates to look at patterns within and across video data sets.
Video data analytics is only going to become a more important tool as brands begin to see the rich data that video can provide and the power of tools such as the Visual Insight System to enhance the collective decision-making and innovation process.
“Traditionally, most market research has been based on consumer recall, instead of focusing on the data directly created from real-life situations. Utilising video data analytics is vital to actually bridging this gap and accessing unconscious behaviour that consumers wouldn’t usually report, ensuring brands can identify new opportunities and develop products which truly meet consumer needs,” Mr Lynch concludes.
For more information please visit www.bigsofatech.com, or email mattlynch@bigsofatech.com
