Video production tiers: the work that should never reach your creative team
Quick answer
Video production tiers sort requests by how much creative judgment each one needs. Tier one is brand defining work owned by your creative team. Tier two is launch and product work. Tier three is recurring, repetitive output. Tiers two and three run fine without an editor.
What are video production tiers?
A creative lead at a global professional services firm and a brand and advertising lead at a national annuities and life insurance carrier have never met. They work in different industries. Both of them described their video work in tiers, unprompted, with the same numbering.
Here is how the carrier drew the line:
They got to work on the big tier one types of projects.
And everything on the other side of it:
it's more for the kind of tier two and tier three initiatives where it's a simple thing. We've made a nice enhancement to our website and we want to broadcast that, or we have a new product, a new annuity that we're launching. We want a fun little sizzle reel for it.
Nobody handed either of them that vocabulary. It shows up on its own once a company has more video requests than editors, because the sorting has to happen somewhere.
What separates tier one, tier two and tier three video work?
The amount of original creative thinking required, and therefore who is qualified to do it. Tier one needs taste and a concept. Tier two needs a template and product knowledge. Tier three needs a text field and access to the brand.
| Tier | What it looks like | Who should own it | What it needs to be correct |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier one | Brand films, campaign hero work, anything a room of executives will review line by line | Your creative team, start to finish | Concept, direction, original design |
| Tier two | Product launches, website enhancements, a sizzle reel for a new product | The marketing owner of the launch, inside a template | Accurate product claims and brand safe motion |
| Tier three | Regional versions, event promos, social cutdowns, resizes, recurring updates | Whoever filed the request, in a browser | Locked fields and the right aspect ratio |
What happens when tier three requests sit in the tier one queue?
The tier three work gets done last and costs the most, and the tier one work slips anyway. About 30% of creative time goes to tedious tasks, so a queue with no tiers spends roughly a third of your most expensive hours on resizes and date swaps. Those hours arrive at your senior editors in the same intake form as the brand film.
A creative lead at a global professional services firm named exactly which work he wanted moved:
The level of control and flexibility the motion design systems provide could greatly benefit our team, particularly in speeding up the delivery of the frequent, repetitive requests our editors handle.
Frequent and repetitive. Those are tier three requests sitting inside a workflow built for tier one, and they are what burns a team out.
Who should own tier two and tier three video?
The person who asked for it, working inside a system your designers built. That reassignment holds up only when the template is a real motion design system rather than a text box floating over a stock animation.
- Tier one stays with your creative team, from concept to final render.
- Tier two goes to the marketing owner of the launch, filling a template your design team locked.
- Tier three goes to the requester, in a browser, with type, color, logo placement and timing fixed in advance.
The constraint does the work. A colleague in a regional office cannot move a lower third or pick a different typeface, so review turns into a copy check. You can see the product demo and explainer templates teams start with, and if you are comparing this against an editing tool, how Capsule differs from Descript covers that ground.
How do you tier your existing request queue?
Take one quarter of intake and sort every ticket into the three buckets before you change anything. Say your team logged sixty video requests last quarter, and forty of them were regional versions, event promos and social cutdowns of work that already existed. At six hours apiece, that is two hundred and forty hours of editor time on work no editor needed to touch.
Push those forty into locked templates at thirty to forty five minutes each and the same output takes about thirty hours, at 93% lower cost per video. The twenty tier one requests keep the full attention of the people who should be doing them, and none of them are queued behind a sizzle reel for a website update. Our case for keeping most video off the creative team's desk goes deeper on getting that first sort right.
FAQ
What are tier one, tier two and tier three videos?
Tier one is brand defining work that needs original creative direction. Tier two is launch and product work that fits an established format. Tier three is recurring, repetitive output such as resizes, regional versions and event promos.
Who should make repetitive marketing videos at a large company?
The person who requested the video, working in a locked template built by your design team. That keeps the creative team on work that requires judgment.
How do you keep video on brand when people outside the creative team make it?
Lock everything except the fields that are supposed to change. If type, color, motion and logo placement cannot be edited, a non designer cannot produce an off brand video.
What video work should stay with an internal creative team?
Anything that needs a concept, original design or executive review. Brand films and campaign hero assets belong to the creative team.