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Quality for the masses, without hefty price

PuggleFM entrepreneur Charlotte Caruso has launched a new video production company pitched at small-to-medium enterprises, start-ups and not-for-profit groups.

Curiosity Productions aims to slash the price of video production by 70 per cent without compromising quality.

Ms Caruso said she wanted to help more businesses and charities take advantage of marketing opportunities created by the popularity of online video content.

She said she had identified a gap in the market last year while looking for ways to promote her book about motivating, managing and working with younger people, Understanding Y.

“I was looking for a few videos roughly five minutes in duration each — so I was up for anywhere between $7000 and $15,000 — which was far too expensive for me at the time, and too much of a risk for me to expect a solid return on investment, ” she said.

“The reason it is so expensive is that the talented creatives needed to execute video content that creates actions or engages an audience cost money.

“They are worth every penny, but for the average SME, video made by ‘the best’ sits outside their budget.”

Curiosity is a joint venture with Lush Digital Media founder James Lush.

The company opened in Perth this month but plans are for rapid expansion, with a Melbourne office by May and a presence in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Singapore by the end of the year.

Ms Caruso said YouTube was the second-biggest search engine in the world, yet only 2 per cent of small businesses actively used it.

“Your website is 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google if it includes video, ” she said.

“We know that click-through rates (for emails) increase by 96 per cent when they include a video so recording some information that your subscribers might find useful, interesting, funny, insightful can be incredibly valuable for your brand.”

Ms Caruso found a global audience in 2012 when she launched online radio station PuggleFM — family-friendly with “no smut, scandal or sensationalism”.