Feeding the Beast: Producing Serial Content Effectively, Part 1: Generating Content

Delivering the Right Content to Your Audience

If you’re not into investing, the content might be all that interesting. But one of the most important things in online video--business-driven online video in particular--is knowing your audience, and our core audience is sophisticated do-it-yourself investors as well as financial advisers. They eat this stuff up; they want to know what our analysts and experts think.

Over the past six and a half years we’ve really homed in on the best way to deliver that content. Along the way we’ve tried everything. We’ve done graphic-intensive videos; we’ve done on-location shoots; we’ve done man-on-the-street interviews. We’ve tried every possible format, and we’ve hit on this style because not only does it get the information across quickly and easily, but it’s really fast for us to produce.

The clip on the previous page showed a special report of the sort we’ll do occasionally; a typical two-person interview, which is our kind of core--probably 800 of those 1,000 videos we do each year; and it also included a split-screen setup. We have a lot of analysts or experts that work remotely telecommuting, and so we’ve set up easy ways for them to dial in to us, and we can capture videos with them as well.

Covering Conferences and Events

We also generate a lot of useful content from covering conferences and other events. At Morningstar we already produce a number of our own conferences; Figure 4 (below) comes from our Morningstar investment conference in Chicago. Typically, about 3,000 industry professionals attend; it’s kind of the conference for investment managers, for financial advisers every year.

Figure 4. Morningstar’s investment conference in Chicago.

We also do an ETF investing conference, and we do a “management behind the moat conference,” which is all about our equity research. The ability to have a large number of people in one location at one time is great. You can record sessions, you can do interviews in the exhibit hall, and all of that content that you gather over the course of two or three days it can be delivered over the course of two or three months after the event. It helps to be as productive as possible, because the chances of you getting that many people together at any other time are pretty rare.

The other nice thing is that the topics to talk about are really obvious. Someone has already gone through all the trouble to curate the program, and to invite all the relevant presenters to come and speak. It’s natural to have a presentation or a panel discussion and, immediately after, take everyone from that session and do quick one-on-one interviews on what they just talked about.

The other nice thing is that the content tends to be a little bit more evergreen because conferences typically have a long lead time; most of the topics discussed, however timely, remain relevant for at least a few months after the conference. You don’t necessarily have to hit your audience with 60 conference interviews on Day 1; you can roll them out over time and develop a stockpile of content to work off of.

At our conferences, we’ll set up kind of a mini-studio space in one of the rooms and record anywhere from 40 to 60 videos--mostly interviews--in just that two-and-a-half-day period. Normally, we do about 80 videos a month, so it’s quite a boon to get 50-75% of that in 2 1/2 days.

The clip below is a quick sample of conference coverage that gives you a sense of what the content might look like on location. You’ll see three different conferences in the clip; two of them were our own, and one of them was another conference that we attended to cover.

In Part 2 of this article we'll look at the workflow part of feeding the beast, from setting up a studio, to creating an in-the-field workflow that matches your in-studio workflow, plus postproduction, syndication, and archiving.