Christopher Bo Shields explores why video needs to be democratised, so that everyone can quickly and easily create and distribute their own video content. Binumi Pro is a sponsor of Communicate magazine's sister awards programme, Transform Awards Europe 2020.

If there's one comms moment that has stuck in my head from the last few months of upheaval, it was that point when Boris Johnson announced that he had Coronavirus. He broke the news using some very simple video footage filmed on a smart phone.

Instinctively the Prime Minister knows, as we all do, that when there’s a difficult announcement to make, showing a human face makes the best of it.

Video provides an opportunity to be transparent, to present the face of the organisation and to communicate with humanity. But it also typically takes a lot of time and money to get video looking right: two things in short supply for many organisations.

In a survey we launched last year we found that one in four PR agency and in-house comms leaders still have not found a way of making video work as a marcomms tool.

The biggest reason for that was cost. Some 38 per cent of teams that had recently used video production companies stated that the experience was more expensive than they would have wanted.

User-generated content provides an alternative to high budget productions, but it’s one that often falls foul of amateurish output.

But there can be a middle way. The tech in smart phone cameras has improved so radically in recent years that you can now deliver footage of a quality close to that of professional video kit. But with the added opportunity of capturing the moment in a way never previously possible.

By combining those great smart phone cameras with stabilisation, better lighting and professional editing, video production can be put into the hands of the people most suited to creating that content.

That might be a comms team that need video to populate their social channels, an internal comms team creating induction videos, or a finance team introducing a new payroll system. Or simply a smaller organisation for whom existing solutions are just too expensive and slow.

The paradigm has shifted. In the old days, video was handled by a marketing department handing a brief to a production company. But now everyone across the company needs to have the means to make their own video.

Over the past months, we’ve seen many organisations making difficult announcements, just like Boris Johnson. 

Comms teams have had to bear the brunt of this, and they’ve done it by working to increasingly tight budgets and in isolated situations. User generated content is one important way that comms teams can handle these issues effectively.

When we started talking about Binumi Pro at video events, people would call us turncoats, because we’re effectively handing over the keys to the car to the user. 

We’re proud to be turncoats. Video needs to be democratised, so that everyone can quickly and easily create and distribute their own video content.

Christopher Bo Shields is the chief creative officer and co-founder of video content specialists Binumi Pro. Binumi Pro empowers organisations of all kinds to take control of their video communications in a brand-safe and scalable way. Using the cameras in smartphones, Binumi Pro enables users to shoot and deliver professional on-brand content at a fraction of the cost of traditional video production.

Binumi Pro is a sponsor of Communicate magazine's sister awards programme, Transform Awards Europe 2020.