Stop Asking Non-Video People to Critique Your Videos

If you tell somebody to critique a video, they will critique it.

If you showed them the exact same video and didn't give them the power to critique it, they would just watch it, and they'd probably like it the way it is.

There is something about asking people to do revisions that makes them feel obligated to contribute. It makes them want to make a difference in the outcome of the project, even if the video was perfectly fine the way it was.

As a business owner, you have to understand this dynamic. I see people literally just asking anybody their opinion about a commercial or a mini-doc they made. They ask people who have absolutely no expertise on the matter. And the feedback they get is always biased by what that person consumes.

If they watch a lot of reality TV, they're inclined to make reality TV-style suggestions. If they like horror, they'll make horror-style revisions. If they like romance, that's what they'll push for.

You are letting unqualified opinions steer your creative output. And it will cost you.

The 7-Second Disaster

I'll give you a real-world example.

I was creating a video and partnered with a high-level marketing executive out of New York. I had already made a cut of the video. I made it the way I, as the filmmaker, knew it should go based on years of experience.

This executive came in and made a bunch of suggestions that fundamentally changed the entire cut—especially the opening sequence.

When the video went live, we looked at the performance data. The retention rate dropped off a cliff after the first seven seconds.

Seven seconds. That was the exact moment that the high-level marketing exec had changed the front end of the video. Right after his "improved" sequence played, there was a massive engagement drought. People dropped all the way off the board and didn't watch the rest of the video.

That guy was a marketing expert. But what people don't understand is: I'm a video guy. I make good videos.

Your job as the client or the marketer is to tell me: "He needs to speak to these people. It needs to have this information in it. It needs to have this kind of tone and feel."

My job is to take that recipe and make a good video out of it.

The Expertise Gap

What we are not supposed to do is take people who are not video people and ask them to make a better video than the video guy.

When you do that, you are going to run into severe disappointment in performance. Because at the end of the day, the audience is watching a video. They are evaluating it as a piece of visual media, not as a marketing strategy document.

If you haven't made hundreds of videos, if you haven't sat in the editing bay and watched how one frame change affects the emotional pacing of a scene, you are in no position to challenge the expertise of the production team you hired.

When you solicit feedback from non-video people, you aren't improving the video. You are just making their shitty ideas more palatable to fit into a format they don't understand. And the result is a compromised, suboptimal version of the story you could have told.

Stop crowdsourcing your creative decisions. Let the experts do their job.