734.  Together for Our Food and Planetary Health — PR Video of the JIRCAS Fifth Medium to Long-Term Plan

On March 9, 2023, we released a PR video of the JIRCAS Fifth Medium to Long-Term Plan (FY2021-2025). It consists of four parts —Promotion Video, Environment, Food, and Information, with the aim of introducing the role, research results, activities, significance of international joint research projects, and prospects of JIRCAS to people in Japan and abroad in an easy-to-understand manner. In this PickUp, we introduce the points that the staff in charge of the project kept in mind when planning and producing the PR videos.

The advantages of using video are the following:
①    High information conveyance: Video contains the elements of sound, movement, and time axis, and can convey far more information than text or images, making it possible to convey complex content in a short time and in a way that is easy to understand.
②    Easy to remember: While the retention rate of articles is 10% when reading text, it is 20% when watching videos, which is twice as memorable.
③    Information can be homogenized: When information is conveyed through a person, the content and power of appeal depends on the person, but with video, the same content and image can be delivered to the viewer.

※ From Sendenkaigi: Basic Course on Video Utilization and Direction

However, video is not a panacea. If you do not take the said course and set the 5W2H according to your objectives, there is a high possibility that your video will become a self-satisfying video. We also learned that the objective is not to produce a video, but that a good video is one that can produce "results" that contribute to sales, for example. Therefore, in the video planning stage, we set the target audience (Who) and the objectives we wanted to achieve (Why) as follows.

Target audience (Who): Young people in Japan and abroad who are mainly interested in environmental and food issues. We found that so-called Generation Z, including university and graduate students who will be responsible for future international contributions, are relatively highly motivated to solve ESG, SDGs, environmental and social issues.

※ Japan Research Institute (2020): Youth Attitudes Survey (Report) - Attitudes toward ESG, SDGs, careers, etc.

Objective to be achieved (Why): In the mid- to long-term, we want to contribute to raising the social awareness of JIRCAS, but in the short-term, we also envision that we would like to encourage outstanding young researchers, which we have set as the main target audience, to apply.

In the production phase of the video, the advantage of JIRCAS is that it is the only national research and development corporation in Japan that conducts integrated research on agriculture, forestry, and fisheries in the world. We also emphasized the fact that it conducts international joint research projects. In addition, we were conscious of conveying a sense of reality by using many of the latest images taken overseas by JIRCAS research staff. In the latter half of each program video, we inserted a message from a JIRCAS researcher.

Each video is 4 to 6 minutes long and is posted on the top page of the official website and on the JIRCAS YouTube channel. We hope you will enjoy watching the videos.
 

Promotion Video

Japanese：https://youtu.be/9HxQYAlaT-U　
English：https://youtu.be/mWUPA-Amg2s

Environment Program

Japanese：https://youtu.be/-tRFu0EmmkM
English：https://youtu.be/baRJLtG6Myw

Food Program

Japanese：https://youtu.be/vmMeDY1dIO8
English：https://youtu.be/l36D9zSm5Qk

Information Program

Japanese：https://youtu.be/sQvoT3_cUko
English：https://youtu.be/pJcKctV300Q
 

Contributor: KANAMORI Norihito (Information and Public Relations Office)