The influence of video production techniques on expert credibility with rural land owners and managers

Abstract

With decreasing barriers to entry for video communication, agricultural service agencies may be looking for new ways to employ video when addressing clients. With an increasingly crowded marketplace of ideas available to information consumers, higher production values may lend added credibility to the efforts of these agencies and allow them to stand out. This design evaluated five treatment conditions (video production techniques) against a construct of source credibility in the first section through a primary research question and four supporting research questions. With the second section, directional hypotheses were examined within individual treatment groups examining the impact of specified demographic and behavioral traits. The result of this analysis demonstrated no significant differences in treatment groups for the primary research question or any of the four supporting research questions. No significance was discovered for two of the direction hypotheses, but a significant difference was found for the final directional hypothesis. This is likely due to the high levels of engagement by the targeted audience which allowed them to evaluate the quality of the message without relying on the peripheral production value cues.