You might be surprised to find that even as a high-end video production company, we welcomed the launch of Promo.com, a cheap, fast-turnaround, do-it-yourself video making platform. That’s because we know that there are many scenarios in which speed and budget are the priorities when it comes to producing video content.
Here at TopLine Film, we found ourselves in one of those very scenarios recently: we needed to explain our explainer animation offering to some of the other companies in our group so that they could keep us in mind for their own clients. Now even though we have animators, producers, sound designers and editors on staff, we didn’t want to use those valuable resources for a quick piece of internal content – so we decided to give Promo.com a go.
Our managing director, Jamie, got to work off a simple script we created together.
Here’s what he liked about Promo.com:
- Offers quick turnaround videos that look impressive for the cost.
- Requires no film-making skills.
- An excellent place to produce social content and mass content – for regular, frequent campaigns.
- Enables you to produce videos when you don’t have a huge amount of inspiration or many creative ideas.
- There is plenty of stock footage to choose from.
- The search functionality for stock footage is really good, returning a wide variety of accurate results.
- Despite the frustrating user interface, the end results can be quite impressive.
- You can make a video in less than an hour.
- It’s pretty cheap for video production: £215 per month.
And here’s what he wasn’t so keen on:
- You’re very limited in terms of the style of video – the Promo.com videos all use stock with typography.
- I found the user interface clunky and not particularly intuitive – very frustrating for a Mac user.
- The captions tool is quite limited, making it difficult to be creative with the wording.
- You need to pay extra to have more than one brand template (colours and logos) for your videos.
- The music filter is unhelpful – there is no option for filtering music without lyrics.
Overall, we were impressed by Promo.com and will keep using it for our own internal videos. Here’s an example of the one that we produced to showcase our explainer animation service to our team: