The RA&A Lab is the idea generator and content incubator for Richard Attias & Associates (RA&A), a global strategic communication firm specializing in high-profile live experiences that drive impact. In addition to creating programming for top-tier summits such as the Hegra Conference of Nobel Laureates and PRIORITY, the RA&A Lab regularly produces reports for advisory clients in the public and private sectors. The RA&A Lab is a hub of knowledge across a variety of topics – sustainability, energy, crypto, education, health technology, climate change and more – and we knew that we needed to find a way to share the RA&A Lab’s analysis with a broader audience while also shining a spotlight on an entity that’s all too often only behind-the-scenes with clients. Hence the RA&A Lab Briefing was launched as an e-newsletter, featuring three to four research-intensive articles that break down complex issues while navigating the subtleties.
After publishing a few editions of the RA&A Lab Briefing, we realized that we needed an additional way to present the information to our busy readership of top-tier executives. The RA&A Lab’s articles are data-heavy think pieces – and we didn’t want to change the structure because that’s what the Lab is all about. So as a way to provide an overview of the insights (and hopefully entice people to read the articles), we decided to create a 90-second RA&A Lab–branded “Top Takeaways” video series that summarized the most important elements from every article the brief in just one video.
Since 2019, RA&A has published its “Global Issues” video series on social media – these are 90-second text-on-screen videos that are optimized for sound-off users. We decided to take our time-tested format and give it a makeover for the “Top Takeaways” series to match the branding of the RA&A Lab Briefing with its distinct logo, color scheme, font, and outro “RA&A Lab: Where ideas are born.”
We wrote the scripts to appeal to our highly educated and accomplished international audience (Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia), with the goal that these easily digestible videos would entertain as they informed, incorporating the most relevant data points from each article. We used as much editorial imagery as possible, sourced from Getty.
Each video was placed at the top of each newsletter, above the articles so that readers could get the overview – a TLDR, if you will. Each video was also posted on RA&A’s YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn channels with a link that went to the full RA&A Lab Briefing. In order to extend the reach of the content, we would often divide up the video into the different story segments and then post those videos with a link to the corresponding story.
The RA&A Lab’s “Top Takeaways” branded series has been a great success on several levels. We produced six videos for six editions of the RA&A Lab Briefing in 2022, and we plan to continue the series in 2023. Across RA&A’s YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn channels, the “Top Takeaway” series had more than 400,000 views. The most successful platform has been YouTube, where the video series has had over 290,000 views and, perhaps even more importantly, more than 5,120 watch hours.
This series showcased the RA&A Lab’s expertise and shared its analysis on timely topics such as the Crypto Winter, ESG in a bear market, “revenge travel” in a time of inflation, climate adaptation and more. These videos brought more far awareness to the RA&A Lab Briefing than simple graphics would have. These videos also helped promote the RA&A Lab as its own entity within Richard Attias & Associates.
