Driving the brands behind the lens

While many people are stuck at home during the coronavirus outbreak, idling and resorting to binge-watching, Nausheen Chen is determined not to waste time, and is busily shooting videos.

She and her crew are cashing in on the video business that got a shot in the arm as more people start working from home to enhance social distancing practices. Videos have become the most powerful tools for marketing, Chen said.

In 2016, Chen co-founded Zen and Zany - a video strategy and production startup helping Chinese brands create videos for Western markets. Within two years, they managed to successfully complete more than 40 projects.

A video campaign the team launched for a portable scanner brand has raked in more than HK$19 million ($2.45 million) on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo so far, while another project - a self-cleaning robot cleaner - attracted investments of more than HK$9.6 million.

Growing opportunities
Online videos are playing an increasing role in tomorrow's advertising world as the industry sees continuous user growth, fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic.
With people mostly confined indoors at the height of the outbreak, short-video platforms in China saw a sharp rise in user activity in the first two months of this year, according to a report by Quest-Mobile, a mobile internet big data company.

The report shows viewers spent an average of 105 minutes on short-video apps each day - up 35 percent from the same period last year. Tencent Video - a popular long-video content website - said its average daily usage time during the period jumped 26.8 percent, while the daily active user amount of well-known short-video content provider Kuaishou surged 40 percent.

For the global market, short-video platforms are also gaining popularity in terms of market advertising as coronavirus infections continue to spread across borders and continents.

Shani Rosenfelder, head of Content and Mobile Insights at AppsFlyer, a global leader in mobile attribution and marketing analytics, said its latest performance index released recently shows the surge in TikTok Ads continues.
TikTok Ads is now the fourth-largest media source for non-gaming apps although Google tops the universal power ranking, he said.

"With the TikTok app sweeping across the globe, the demand for advertising on the platform surged last year, and is increasing its share worldwide - from China and India to North America and Western Europe," Rosenfelder said.
Seizing the growing opportunity, Chen said she's turning Zen and Zany into a more-comprehensive visual strategy consultant rather than just a producer of videos.

"A startup now needs different kinds of videos for different parts of campaigns through different platforms to different types of audience," she said.

To mix with business
Video campaigns nowadays have developed into many categories, such as how-to videos, brand image videos, influencers doing fun testing videos, and management-team videos, she said.

China totally embraces videos as a whole, especially the new wave of short videos, but it's still entertainment for most people, while the Western world has "really figured out how to create the mix for business", Chen said.

A growing number of Chinese firms are up to the strategy when going global like their Western counterparts, she said.

The coronavirus outbreak has strengthened the resolution of some of these firms to invest more in visual strategy, but those who were hesitant have decided to step back as the virus "polarized companies", Chen said.

She's glad to see the change because it means the startup has more time to get these firms prepared for a bigger product launch in one or two months. Her team is using the stay-at-home period to do market research for these clients.

Chen said her company had planned to film for one of its major tech clients a few days after the Spring Festival holiday. They were fully prepared, but the coronavirus brought everything to a standstill. Their actors got stranded during their vacation, forcing the studio to close.

By the end of February, Chen's studio reopened and was lucky to find replacements for the shooting crew. "Everyone is very careful, wearing masks at the site and I was even wearing gloves, but we're all happy to start work again," Chen said.

As a self-funded startup whose clients are also mostly startups with limited budgets, she believes keeping the team as lean as possible will help the company ride out the crisis.
grace@chinadailyhk.com