The Psychology Why Video Works

Hi. The old. My wife's having a baby excuse. He started planning that nine months ago. Um, right. Hello, everybody. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. So. Yeah. First of all, thank you very much for having me here. I want to thank Thomas and Stephan for for getting me involved. The 23 family, wonderful group of people. And I always love coming here and hanging out with you guys. So it's a real privilege to to be here with you all. But I did have this challenge. It's like we've got so many different people here. We've got marketers, content creators. We've got all sorts of different people. What do I talk about? So I thought, well, what can we all. What's the one big question? I've actually heard it heard heard it twice today. And the big question is why does video work so well? You know, why does because we all love video. We're all obsessed with it. We're all tech talking and all that kind of stuff. So I wanted to sort of dig into that a little bit. And I wanted to ask, why does video work so well? Because the idea is once we understand why it works so well, we can actually then go on to to do it better. So when we're talking about why video works so well, we could talk about the fact that it moves like 1974. That's as old as me. Excuse me. We could talk about the fact it moves. And if we're talking about the fact it moves, we will be talking about things like animate monitoring bias and the fact that evolution has meant that all our relatives who couldn't detect movement got eaten by snakes and lions. We could talk about that, or we could talk about targeting the fact that we can actually segment audiences into very niche audiences. We can start reaching people very directly. Then you start talking about CPAs and CVS and all that stuff. So we're not doing that. What we are going to do is we're going to talk about something that we touched on this morning when Lars was talking, and that is emotion. Okay. The reason that video works so well is because it makes people feel. And the way it does that is to emotion, stories and behavior. And that's really what we're going to look at today. So before we go into emotion stories and behavior, let me just give you a little story to to illustrate that because all the best things start with an anecdote. So that's what I'm doing, an anecdote. This is me and my daughter. She just left for university, by the way. So it's quite an old anecdote. Um, and when they were little, I was a divorced dad, separated from their mom, and I wanted them to have the best holidays in the world. There's going to be super cool holidays, real pressure. And I had a van. I still got the van. It's a very cool van. But the problem is they're getting too big. They fought with each other. They didn't want to be on it. So I was like, how can I turn? How a trip to the south of France into the best holiday these kids have ever had. And then I got a video into my Facebook feed again, dating how old this anecdote is. And I've got a video on my Facebook feed and it was for this. It was this amazing van type. Top thing is a tent that goes on the top of your van called the Sky camp, and I instantly fell in love. I could see myself on these travels with my children. I went on their Instagram, I started looking at all these cool videos, but it was a €3,000 purchase. So before I did that, I wanted to know more about, um, who's running this firm, you know, can I do it? And I went onto YouTube and I watch videos about the founder, and I also went on to YouTube, and I watched really nerdy videos about high wind power, wind tunnel stuff like that. So I knew it wasn't going to fall to pieces. So I was on board. I could suddenly see this vision of where we wanted to go. Then I found out that it's actually a Kickstarter, and if you wanted to get in the van this summer holidays with the kids, I had to make sure I bid on Kickstarter. I needed to be in the first 500 people, so by that point, I'm sure I'm going to miss it. So midnight, I sat down because it was on sale in America. Midnight, I sat down in the UK and I was the second person in the world to buy one of these things. I was emotionally engaged. What can I say? I was just annoyed. I wasn't the first, um, but I wasn't the only one, right? Because they needed to raise for the Kickstarter $500,000. Okay, seems quite a lot, but that was to make it. They didn't do that in two days. They raised 2.4 million. Right? Nearly 2.4 million. How did they do that? Well, they did it by engaging people like me with the fantasy, the vision of where it could be. So I now have my wonderful holiday home. It's great. It's not always snowing in England, by the way. Um, but then I got an email, and the email said, hey, have you thought about buying one of these? But so anyway, I bought one of those, um, and this is what we're talking about today. We're talking about the process of video marketing, and we're talking about the emotional journey that I went on. Firstly, there was an aspirational moment and I felt I can be a good dad. Okay. Then, um, then after aspiration, I was worried because it was 3,000 pounds. But they assuaged those fears. They made me feel good about those. Then they got me with FOMO because I didn't think I was going to get it. And finally there was a sense of belonging. That's how they got me, and that's how they are solving. So there was an introduction at the beginning. Normally at this point I say, well, who am I to be talking about those things? And I give you a lovely slide about when I went to Iraq, that was a bad idea. Um, and then I can tell you this, but I'm not going to do that. I'll mention the book. Um, if you find me after, we're going to give out books and all that kind of stuff. But let's get back to why we're actually doing it. Because emotions change behavior. And to understand how emotions change behavior, we're going to talk about emotional storytelling. Okay. Um, and therefore the question is why do we care so much about emotional stories? Once we see an emotional story, why do we care so much? So we're going to divide it into two parts emotion and stories. See what I did there? They even separated for you because I'm an animator now. Um, my team could have done that. Okay, stories. Let's firstly go back right to when we started telling stories. So between 1 and 2 million years ago, the birth of speech, the reason stories became vocal or became so popular was because we would use stories to tell other people in our clan, don't eat that berry. Don't go down there. There's a tiger. And whatever else used to kill people when we were, um, young. So our ancestors, the people that could tell this story and explain the best they survived. And actually, by the time we reached the average Australian Aborigines, about 20,000 BC, storytelling had become an art. Um, the people who could tell the best stories would have the most successful clan, because you could actually keep your keep your clan alive. You could keep your tribe to help them win wars by coming together. And actually, the storytellers of the day were the rock stars of their day. They would stand in front of everybody and kind of do their thing, and they'd get to mate with the most people. So that's kind of cool if you're then um, and then so, so storytelling, the natural storytellers naturally rose to the top. Then rock art and gestures and vocals about 13,000 years ago really become a solidifying storytelling in our culture. And then again, by first print 700 BC, we're writing stories down, and by the time of Aesop's Fables, 200 BC, we've got a narrative arc. We start to have a beginning, middle and end. We start to have dramatic characters, we start to have heroes. But then nothing at all happened with storytelling until 1987, when they invented PowerPoint. You don't get a PowerPoint joke every day. Um, okay. Right. Fine. Moving on from that. So what happens when we get an emotional story? Well, firstly, chemicals that cause emotion kick in. Once we hear this story, they hijack our cortex, and we start to throw away our objectively observant skills. Um, really cool things happen in our brain. The amygdala and the hippocampus. They start to spark up because we know that we need to start hearing information. And the really interesting thing is that actually, if you look at the brainwaves of people who are telling a story and receiving a story, they start to match. Some really cool stuff happens. The language centers spark up because we're starting to see and hear a story, and we're flooded with all sorts of chemicals like vasopressin and what else we got? Uh, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, dopamine. These start to kind of, um, or someone monitoring my time. By the way, I didn't realize that I didn't stop the clock. Anyway, they start to come around all over the place. So we get these kicks. Now, what I wanted to do was I wanted just to show you an experiment, just to really sort of start to explain how deeply ingrained story is into what we do. So this is an experiment done by hydrogen Simmel in 1944. The graphics are, you know, pre end of war. So they're not exactly amazing. But it's a really interesting thing. So hydrogen Simmel showed this story to about 500 people. And they asked what's going on. Um, and you know, they can see what's going on. And can anybody who's brave enough in front of 5600 people shout out what they think is going on there? Maybe I need to let you watch longer. Well, I'll get you out of your pain. Normally people see a big, scary triangle. Sort of bullying the little circle, bullying the little triangle. And in the end, the little triangle and the circle get together. And they they kind of they fight back against the big triangle. It's really cool. Oh, I know it's nice. Did anybody just see a big triangle a little circle and a little triangle. Right. Because of the 500 people that hydrogen symbol showed this to and thousands of people, since only one person actually just saw shapes, everybody else naturally attributes a story to what's going on because it's so ingrained into us, we can't help see it. As an aside, the only person who didn't see it was late and pissed off and said they were just being argumentative. So we can we could maybe just put that as an outline. So what we can see is that story stories are core to how we understand stuff, right? We really can't help but understand the world through stories. Then we move on to the next thing, which is emotions, which is that emotions change behavior. And this is the crux. This is very much the kind of the base of what we're doing today, the brain. It's an amazing thing, right? We all know it's amazing. You don't need me to tell you that. It's got about 2.5PB of storage in the brain, which is quite a lot, but it's very power hungry. Okay, the brain is 2% of our body weight, and it's about 20% of our power consumption. Right. It's a very energy hungry thing. And the scientists among you will know that that is what the brain runs on, which is. Come on. Glucose. I knew that too. I didn't Google that, I knew that. Um, so the brain runs on glucose, and every time we make a decision, we have to use glucose. Right. And there's a couple of things about this. Firstly, human beings are a bit like lazy lions. We don't really want to use all the glucose making decisions all the time. We want to keep things quite easy and we don't want to make ourselves too tired, especially if we're making 35,000 decisions a day, which is what we do. Um, 227 decisions a day about food, depending on how foodie you are. That's why lunch was great, because you just got given a sandwich and it was like, just no need. Um, so because we're slightly lazy, because it takes a lot of glucose to make a decision, we have come up with different ways of making decisions. Firstly, conscious pondering, we think about things and all those kinds of things. We're thinking hard about decisions. That takes a lot of energy, but we've also developed how we feel because we can make decisions on based on how we feel. So we have developed two systems of thought, and anyone who's into psychology and these kind of things will be very familiar with system one. System two, system one is subconscious thinking, right. We don't really know we're doing it. We make decisions quickly with little effort, very little glucose and very little thought. So we can make decisions like that. Or we can use system two, which is very conscious. We make decisions based on data. And these aren't actual literal systems in your head. They're very much kind of like, you know, a way of thinking about it. And we as humans have evolved to allow much of our decision making to be done automatically at a low energy cost using system one. And what a system one drive on driven by emotion, right? So we can start to say, if we can start to talk to system one and there's agency. There's an agency in London called system one. If we start talking to people through content, by making them feel something emotional and using system one, we can change their behavior. And we're going to talk about that in a minute. But I did want to know, to talk to you about was how we can't even make decisions without emotion. We can even if we using this kind of logical part of our brain, the system to there's still emotion in there. I think this morning somebody mentioned that the idea of of choosing a house, you choose a house because you like it, right? And then you make all the facts around it fit into place like it's near the school and all those things. Okay. We can't think without emotion. Does anybody who did psychology at school know who that is? Because I'm afraid this is school level psychology, but it's really interesting. Um, I don't know who that is. That is a chap called Phidias. Gage. Phidias Gage was alive in 1800s. Um, he worked on the railways in America. And you can see what his job was. That is an enormous metal spike. And his job was to carry enormous metal spikes all the way. I don't know exactly what he did, but something like this. And he one day he had a really bad day at the office. Um, and he. And he stuck the spike through his head. Um, he had a really bad day at the office, but he was fine. He walked home. Hello, love. How was your day? Got a spike in my head. I don't I don't know how that happened. He had a really bad day at the office. Now what? Fun. Oh, I'm back again. Um, what was really interesting that he damaged the left prefrontal cortex. He basically put a spike all the way through his left free frontal cortex. And that, as we all know, is where we make emotions. Okay, so he completely removed the ability to have emotions. He was genuinely emotionless and one of the apart from the fact he was annoyed all the time, which is basic emotion. The other thing was he was unable to make decisions okay, because without emotion we're unable to make decisions, right? So that's that. Now we're going to do a little experiment. And this experiment is to help you understand how, um, how emotions work, how they change decisions. So the first thing I'm going to do is I ask you to think how you are all now and then what we're going to do is I'm going to do a selfie, and it's a bit dark out there. So you might have to hold it for a bit. But what I'd like everyone to do is think, how are you feeling right now? This is weird. That's what you're thinking. Um, and let's just wave at the camera and. -Hey, let's get another. -One. Great, because I'm going to ask you to remember how that felt. How do we feel now? We're at a conference. We're going to do an experiment around emotion and decision making. Okay. So all think how do we feel now? Well. It's weird. Okay, we've done the selfie. I don't need that. Then we're going to watch a video and we're going to see how we feel. How are we feeling? Should we do a selfie? But it's completely different atmosphere, right? That was 92 seconds to completely change. I've shown that so many times and it's still like that's pretty punchy film, right? Completely changes everything. It can change your motion and everything. So what happened to you? Well, you probably had some kind of feeling of distress, some kind of distress and empathy. But what is distress and empathy? Well, pretty much is a kick of all the chemicals we talked about earlier cortisol, oxytocin, dopamine, Gaba, these things start to flow through your body because you're having a human emotional response. This has been. Let's talk loudly I know, I can't guess, we'll come back on bike. It's been started by a guy called Doctor Paul Zack, who did a great study called empathy, neurochemistry and the Dramatic Arc. And what Doctor Zak did is he showed a story similar to that 1 to 1000, couple of thousand people, and he showed a story about a guy called a little boy called Ben, and Ben was dying. And it's the most harrowing video you've ever seen. We can't show it at conferences. But what he did is he tested blood chemistry before and after people watched the video. So he tested all their levels, all the Gaba levels, all that kind of stuff. He showed them a really powerful, emotive film where they became kind of this kind of emotive connection, and then he measured them again, and I'm going to let him talk to you about his findings. We began doing other studies on this story. So we took blood before and after, and we found that the brain produced two interesting chemicals. One is called cortisol, which focuses our attention on something important. So cortisol correlated with our sense of distress. So the more distress you felt, the more cortisol you released and the more you paid attention to that stimulus. The second chemical release is called oxytocin, which is associated with care and connection and empathy. And oxytocin was correlated with people's sense of empathy. And the more oxytocin they released, the more empathic they felt towards Ben and his father. Now we did something different after this experiment. We gave individuals a chance to share money with a stranger in the lab, and indeed, those who produced both cortisol and oxytocin were more likely to donate money generously to a stranger they couldn't see in a lab. In another experiment, we gave individuals a chance to donate money to charity that works with children who are ill, and indeed, those who released oxytocin or cortisol donated money to this charity. And in fact, the amount of oxytocin released predicted in both cases, how much money people would share with a stranger or with charity. What we're seeing is that this narrative is changing behavior by changing our brain chemistry. And that's the point, right? With changing behavior by changing brain chemistry. Okay. That's really what I'm getting at with this very long presentation. That's kind of that. But does it matter? Does it matter to brands? Right. Um, because, you know, we can say that it changes things. Well, it does absolutely. So if you if you notice, I'm wearing a really nerdy marketing t shirt. This is marketing effectiveness. These are all the gods of marketing effectiveness that you should all be reading. Some of them be named field. They did a great study for the IPA, which is a UK based organization, and they studied 4500 ads from the past 30 years. And they compared the long term net profit of emotional appeal versus rational persuasion campaigns. So if we look at this bar chart here, because you can't have a presentation without a bar chart on the left, we've got campaigns that are just emotional. And the percentage reporting very large profit 31. And then when you've got campaigns that are both emotional and rational, 26% large profits. And if you're just doing straight rational, let me tell you what the features benefits are a measly 16%. Right. And that's very large profit gains. That doesn't bear into mind media costs and all those kind of things. It's just turnover. So we can see that emotional campaigns work. And for any of you who are obsessed with rules, that's where we get the 6040 rule from that, we should be doing 60% of our marketing activity in brand building and emotion and connecting with people, and only 40% with direct response and making money. And I can guarantee none of you are doing that because no one does that. But that's what we should be doing. Okay. That's great. We know it works for brands. We understand how emotions work. The next question is how do we as filmmakers and creatives and marketing people, how do we start using emotional drivers and how do we start leveraging emotion? Because most of us aren't doing child welfare charities or, you know, I work with a lot of charities, but it's not always the case that there's a clear emotional driver. And an emotional driver for me is the thing that you put at the front and at the end to make people care. And this is the wheel of all human emotions. This is all you can feel. Um, pretty much. And as a brand, you might say, let's go for a positive. Let's kind of let's try and get people awed or astonished or perplexed, or you might say, a good emotional driver for us is to make people feel maybe anxious or insecure. You know, those are the kind of the FOMO kind of things. Um, so, yes, very much you've got to basically pick the emotional driver that you think are relevant. Um, I've got a couple of case studies here that I was just going to show you. The first one is just a super cool film that we did for, um, a company called Sykes Holiday Cottages in the UK. And we did this commercial just after lockdown when everybody was is or, you know, what it was like. It was a bit weird. Um, so this is very much about using the emotion of, um, spending time as a family, wanting to be connected. And actually the people who make the decisions about this tend to be feel the pressure of making a good holiday. So we came up with this idea of sharing time together. This is your time. Use it well and you can just see how we've used the emotional -driver in this campaign. -Time isn't a commodity. It's precious. No schedules or slots, meetings or school bells. Slow down. Breathe it in. Make every second together count. This is your time. -Use it well. -It's cute, right? And there's no holiday -cottages. -Holiday cottages at that one. But they made us put that in at the end. Um, but it's really interesting once you start, it's kind of true. This this is a really interesting campaign. So. -Uh. -Oh, I didn't want to click that. Basically, we did two campaigns aimed at neurosurgeons in, in in America. And neurosurgeons don't tend to like there's a thing called neuroplasticity where you replace that. Anyway. It's horrible. Um, basically we were trying to find a way of how do we emotionally connect with neurosurgeons in America, and we thought we might be able to do it two ways. One, that they might be interested, they might get emotionally connected with knowing that neurosurgery is a field was evolving and they could be part of it. Okay. And on the right, we did another one where I said, hey, you are the future of neurosurgeons. Uh, now, what do we know about surgeons? They've got maybe a bit of an ego, right? So you can see the films are exactly the same apart from once neurosurgery is evolving and the other one says you are the future of neurosurgery. Which one perform better? 220% better on the right, right? Just the opening tagline you are amazing. It turns out that was the emotional driver that they needed. And then finally, when I do conferences like this, there's always somebody who says, yeah, but I work in insert dry subject here and it's and there is always an emotional driver and you can always find something. And as proof to make, I wonder they're going to tell me off of this possibly the dullest thing ever. They make electronic invoicing software, right? And they have managed to find an emotional driver. They've had a little bit of fun along the way. Um, you know, it's a bit silly, but my point, the, the final point is takeaway from, from these examples is when you're sitting down to connect with people. We know that emotions drive behavior change. So there will be an emotion that we can -use. -When you don't invoice electronically, you spend time manually inputting your invoices. When you spend time manually inputting your invoices, you get a repetitive stress injury. When you get a repetitive stress injury, you ask for time off work. When you ask for time off work, the intern fills in. When the intern fills in, he does a better job than you. When he does a better job than you, he gets offered a job, and when he gets offered a job, he becomes your boss. Don't let the intern become your boss. Allow suppliers to submit free electronic invoices through Talya. I mean, fair play to them, right? That's pretty good. Yeah, yeah. Very good. Sorry. I'm glad you like that one. The. If you imagine the will, it's obviously it's that far right. Fear of losing a job kind of thing. There's always an emotional driver. I've obviously taught very quickly because I'm slightly ahead of schedule. But what have we taken from today? This ridiculous thing that I've odyssey that I've taken you on. What we've learned is that humans are connected to storytelling and emotional stories. We see stories everywhere that we go because of sheer evolution is how we've got to where we are. Our ancestors had survived because they could tell and understand stories, so we can't get away from it. But we've also taken the fact that emotion changes behavior if we leverage it right. And for good or for bad. Marketing is about emotion, and we tend to use it for good stuff, but it's also be used to give us not such good stuff. But you can go away, you can take it and always put emotion first. Start thinking about how you can connect emotionally and we can grow the brands that we work with. So thank you very much.