Betsey Scolnik – National Geographic Digital Media

Entertainment and video have become very personal in the last 10 years, especially as consumption has risen dramatically.

Everyone in the digital eco-system is consuming – tweens to baby boomers.

Handheld devices and non-TV video viewing is evolving radically right now.

National Geographic embraced the web since they were already excellent video story tellers and their talents and archives translate so well to the web.

National Geographic also has the added benefit of owning the vast majority of their rights and control their copyrights.

Their biggest costs came from implimenting the infrastructure to collect and define metadata.

They originally went from excerpts but had to evolve into more indepth legit short form content.

Mandated to “tell a story in 7 minutes”. If you can tell a story in 7 minutes, you can get it down to 3 minutes and that’s the sweet spot for them.

It is critical to stick to who they are. Don’t be influenced by what others are doing, especially if it conflicts with your values and culture. Don’t just throw stuff on YouTube or other sites because other people are doing it.

Authenticity is critical.

The speed of production for the web is much different than traditional media. it’s hard to keep up with the wave of relevance on the web.

National Geographic had to figure out what they had or did to be relevent every single day. National Geographic news helped them to be topical and meaningful.

National Geographic is giving their audience the tools to utilize their existing content in order to create personalized stories on wildlife.

Many organizations feel that video is the end goal. On the web this simply does not work and as a result, video needs to be a core cog in the system and have it backed up with other good content (words, pictures, etc.)

In order to create lots of video content quickly, National Geographic Digital had to switch over to Final Cut Pro as a creation tool due to it’s ease of use and ability to do things very quicklu. They can now create content very quickly and can keep up with the speed of user generated content.

Still seeing challenges of collecting extra, web exclusive content in the field. The digital media folks still need to consume the costs and fight the battles to use additional content online, especially when it is not seen as important by the TV production teams.

Mixing and matching quality UGC along with professionally created short form content is critical to being able to produce solid financial results.

It is critical to use accurate and meaningful web analytical data in order to justify what you are doing. You have to measure and be able to prove your successes online.

At the end of the day, stick to your Brand and super-serve your audience.