Vermont-based video production company tells the story of one of Vermont’s “best places to work”

SOUTH BURLINGTON, (5/2/09) -- Hen House Media, LLC, an award-winning video production company based in South Burlington, is helping one of Vermont’s “best places to work” tell their story through video.

BioTek Instruments, which received Vermont Business Magazine’s top honor in April as the best place to work among Vermont’s large employers, first hired Hen House Media almost a year ago to “capture the essence of their brand” for the company’s 40th anniversary last August.

No small task, particularly when the client is a large, international company with offices on three continents. But, according to Johnny Mendez, who co-owns Hen House Media along with Bryan Agran, the challenging project was an ideal fit for video.

“The story they wanted to tell was unique and emotional, and impossible to convey in print or in text on a website,” explains Mendez. “They needed video.”

The 14-minute anniversary piece drew from 20 separate interviews with BioTek customers, partners and employees, as well as hours of background footage. All in all, the project took nearly three months to complete, taking the Hen House crew from BioTek’s Winooski headquarters to Washington, DC, and back again.

The final product served as a rousing introduction for the company’s anniversary celebration in Burlington and around the world, and was just the start of a long-term marketing partnership between BioTek and Hen House.

“Hen House instantly understood our message, felt our culture and became a part of our team,” says Julie Murray, Marketing Communications Manager at BioTek. “Their enthusiasm and commitment to our projects has resulted in high quality videos that have become prime marketing tools for conveying the BioTek brand.”

After the August celebration, the anniversary video continued to work hard for BioTek, getting a lot of play on the company website and in sales meetings. In one case, it even helped BioTek recruit a top employee from a competitor. As that employee put it: “Who wouldn’t want to work at BioTek, after seeing that video?”

Mendez and Agran heartily agree, but not by way of self-promotion.

Says Agran: “In the process of making this video, we completely understand why BioTek was voted the best place to work in Vermont.” Mendez adds: “It was easy for us to believe in their company, because everyone we talked to – whether it was someone inside or outside the company – used the same words to describe their experience with BioTek.”

At the end of 2008, BioTek came back to Hen House and asked for a sequel, in the form of a more technical sales piece, which, they assumed, would require several more interviews. But in fact, Hen House only had to shoot one more conversation – with the new employee BioTek had recruited through their anniversary video. The rest of the material came from the original shoots, in which the Hen House crew had thought ahead for just such a contingency.

As Agran explains, “We try to anticipate our clients’ needs by learning as much as we can and asking the questions they aren’t even thinking about yet. This is where our broadcast background, and our experience working with all types of businesses, comes in really useful.”

So from that same original footage, Hen House created a sales package made up of three separate, four-minute videos, focusing on BioTek’s background, customer service, and R&D. Each individual video was designed to exist on its own, but the three parts could also play seamlessly back-to-back.

The design of the piece in three parts allowed BioTek to take full advantage of all avenues of distribution. The separate pieces played well on the web, Mendez explains, where attention spans are shorter and where content is categorized by theme. The video focusing on R&D, for example, was integrated into a website page with more information on that topic.

In addition to formatting the videos for the web and for sales presentations, Hen House also exported them for the iPhone, so that BioTek management could always be prepared for an impromptu sales meeting. As Mendez put it, “This allows the director of business development to carry his brand in his pocket. So if he meets a key prospect at a conference, or even in the hotel bar, he’s ready to market his company.”

That is where Hen House excels, say Mendez and Agran.

“We’re digital media specialists, so of course we can cover all of those distribution channels,” says Mendez. “But it takes more than a familiarity with digital formats to communicate effectively across all of those media,” he contends. “Whether it’s played on the iPhone, on the Web, or forwarded around the world in an e-mail, it takes a well-produced video to elevate a company’s brand. And that’s what we do.”