Top Scientists Optimized Trailers with Spot Trender to Promote Research

Top international scientists used Spot Trender to develop an effective video promotion for their advanced noctilucent cloud research.

Background

Project PoSSUM has partnered with NASA to use imaging and remote sensing techniques from commercial, reusable suborbital space vehicles to study noctilucent clouds, which can answer critical questions about our climate. In a nutshell, scientists fly rockets to the upper atmosphere to study rare clouds. Through Spot Trender, they produced this trailer to raise awareness and support from other top scientists, investors, and the general public:

Challenges

• Engagement: Aside from a small segment of the population, people don’t generally care about noctilucent clouds. The team need high engagement to promote research.
• Awareness: Noctilucent clouds are rare, so most folks aren’t aware of them.
• Likelihood to act: With low engagement and awareness, likelihood to act is low. We set out to change it. We designed a scientific method to continuously improve how their trailer engages the general public.

Solution
We set out to change it. We designed scientific method to continuously improve and test the trailer to perfection.
Step 1: Use Agile Methodologies to continuously test and improve your initial spots.
Project PoSSUM’s scientists needed to convey as much data as quickly as possible. With iMovie, they put together the first version based on the original story board and tested it.
Step 2: Edit existing message and retest
Project POSSUM’s scientists do not rely on guts, they want real, duplicatable data. They prefer to predict viewers responses with scientific sampling methods instead of flipping the coin. Spot Trender provided the solution. For the next five versions, the team continuously tested to optimize engagement and likelihood to act. Spot Trender provided many valuable insights, such as:

•  The word Mission is better than Adventure: To the scientific community, an adventure to the upper atmosphere sounds like “a bunch of astronauts looking for excuses to have a good time fly cutting-edge equipments.” It detracts from the scientific credibility. Mission is credible, serious, yet still contains a sense of purposeful adventure. We learned this through in-video comments.
• Learning how humanity affects our climate scored much higher in engagement than studying clouds. In response, the team talked less about clouds and more about its relevance to the world we live in.
• Test audiences responded much more positively to the spacecraft than to the scientific equipments and payloads it carries. Learning this, the PoSSUM team obtained authorization from the spacecraft provider (XCOR Aerospace) to use their promotional graphics, which added excitement to the promotional video.

“Spot Trender provides excellent, actionable insights for our videos.”
– Dr. Jason Reimuller. Principal Investigator | Project POSSUm

Step 3: Push the limit of your work with good data.
The team continues to test, optimize, and push out the final version which generates curiosity, excitement and press.
How Spot Trender can help you:
Promote your research. Imagine your Super Bowl spot. You want to make an ad that’s memorable. You want to push the envelope and make art. Most importantly, you want to make a spot that sells product. Traditionally, you get data during concepting phase and after final release. It is either too early or too late. There was no room for incremental improvement which produces excellence. Now you can. You can continuously test and improve your spot throughout the process, and blow your competition out of the water with the results.

“The time has come when advertising in some hands has reached the status of a science.”
– Claude Hopkins, data-driven advertising legend.

To learn more on how to promote your important research with amazing videos, contact us. We are scientists ourselves and we would love to help promote your research.