How to use video at your next conference
Video is a great way to enhance your live presentations. Get it right and the audience will be eating out of your hands. Get it wrong and it may be all your audience remembers. At The Media Group, our video and events teams have seen first-hand how best to use videos at events. We’ve learned a lot and have some thoughts on how you can get the most from it.
Why include video?
Video is a powerful way to show a story and provoke an emotional response. Presentations can be long-winded. Video is an opportunity to engage the audience and keep the energy high in the room.
From the presenter’s point of view, it’s a useful way to break up your presentation. It will give you a chance to breathe and remind yourself what’s coming up next.
What type of video?
Video needs to be relevant to your message. It should support your content and doesn’t need to be the main event.
The general advice is: keep it short. Too long and you risk losing your audience’s attention. Keep your content moving and you’ll keep the audience on your side. We ignored our own rules when we played a 19 minute film at the SportMinds conference. But, the content was powerful and relevant to the audience.
Video can, for example, show people telling their own stories first hand. In the corporate world this could mean testimonies delivered by influencers. Or it could be emotional experiences which prove why something matters.
Tricks of the trade
Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. We’ve all sat through awkward silences where the presenter struggles to play a video, or there isn’t any sound.
Don’t rely on the venue’s Wi-Fi. Download your video files in advance and ask the event organisers for their technical advice.
Give it some context. Introduce your video. Make it clear to your audience what the content is about and why you are showing it.
And too often presenters don’t allow the value of the video to resonate with their audience. It’s worth pausing after showing a video and saying something such as, “That explains what we do and why we do it better than anything I can say.”
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