Designing Video that Drives Decisions

Hello everyone. Some of you might remember this. Is it going to be like, there we go. In filmmaking we call that foreshadowing. Right. Hello. Good to see you all. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. That's my face. This is a colour blue. It's not a broken snide. It's a blue. It's not just any blue. It's quite an important blue. It's the blue of the clicks in the internet. It was the blue of the clicks that you would click to go and find links. And it was all the way before the invention of the internet up until 2014. And it was, I mean, we've all clicked thousands of these, right? And then in 2014, Google said, let's test if that blue is any good. So they did a test and they did 41 blues. Because they're nerds. They did thousands of tests. What generates more performance? So they ran thousands of tests and they took this blue. Do you want to see what they did? There you go. And it seems like a really, really small tweak. But that blue is more trusted. It's more clicked. And it generates Google 200 million in extra revenue every year. Because they didn't have enough anyway. So they thought. So. So it's the same link. It's the same users. It's the same page. But a different decision. Because Google understood that if you reduce friction in decisions, you can generate decisions that go in your benefit. And that's what we're talking about today. We're going to talk about how we can reduce friction in decisions so people will make decisions in our favor. And this is the third of the trilogy. So I was out here in 2024. Looking shorter hair, I think. 2024. And we talked about emotion. And we talked about the world. And we talked about how if we can connect emotionally with people, we can change their behavior. Because of brain chemistry, changing behavior through brain chemistry. Then last year, I was out here and we were talking about attention. And we talked about, okay, emotion changes behavior. But actually, attention. You've got to get their attention first. And then we talked about how TikTok is messing with all our heads. And it was a bit of a sideline. So we talked about getting people's attention, engaging with them emotionally. But there's a third thing in that triptych. And that is decision design. And that's the third thing. And that's the kind of end of the trilogy, if you will, this decision design. And that's what we're going to talk about today. How can we design decisions? Because at the end of the day, you are amazing film producers, video producers, content producers. But what I'm proposing is that we're not producing videos, whether you're using a Camira or a sort of Venice, which I do have the joy of filming on, or you're filming on your phone, which we also get to film on. Or if you're like me, you remember the VX1000E, big up to those of you who are as old as I am. It doesn't matter what you're filming on, right? We're not producing videos. We are producing decisions. And that's kind of the premise that I want to explore today. So who am I to be talking about such things? I was at the BBC for 16 years. That's me as a filmmaker out in Iraq during the second Gulf War. That was stupid. I run an agency called Hurricane Social. We have some cool brands that we work with and we help them to help people's decisions changing. We're notably social media partner for NATO, as interesting as it sounds, and I've written some very nerdy books. You don't need to know all about that. The main thing, what is a decision? If we're talking about how do we make decisions go in your favor? How do we make people, you know, make decisions for us? We need to understand what a decision is. And it's a bit long, but a decision is a rapid psychological resolution of uncertainty under emotional and cognitive pressure. And resolution of uncertainty is the key. Resolution of uncertainty. Because when we're producing decisions, what we're looking to do is generate enough positive signals into the system, into our mind to cross the threshold of uncertainty. So we're helping people to go from uncertain to certain. But don't worry. I know everyone in here is now confused. You're as confused as these AI-generated people. They're supposed to look like they're thinking, but they just look confused. So we're going to take the eyes are much better than they used to be. They're getting better at eyes. So let's just get the idea of decision making. Let's go back a bit. It's got to start with evolution. I always love talking about evolution a bit. Our ancestors, some of them survived, some of them didn't. And evolution didn't reward the smartest decision makers. We think, obviously, the smartest decision makers are going to have survived. No. Actually, what was rewarded was our ancestors who avoided the worst mistakes. They were the ones whose gene line survived. The amygdala, just inside the brain, it's sort of an attention to danger. And if you didn't have a particular good, one of those, if you were making bad mistakes, you could be like Brian here. Brian decided to go and see what was over the edge of the cliff. That was a bad decision for Brian. And we're going to hear from Brian again in a bit. Jane, whatever you want to call her, she decided to go and see what was over there and see if the snake was friendly. These people did not survive because their decisions could not accurately predict whether the future was going to be risky or not. And actually what a decision is, it is selecting the prediction with the lowest perceived risk. So when we're looking at decisions, that sounds risky, that sounds risky, I'm not going to make that. And then you survive. And then we're all here in Denmark. So we've done that. We know that it's kind of evolutionary. We've decided that we're going to make safe decisions. But let's also talk about how decisions get made. Because that's really interesting. And I always do psychology in my talk. So what I want to do is I'm going to talk about how decisions are made in your brain on a sort of neurological level. And they are a combination of go signals and stop signals. And I will need a volunteer to come sit on the stool if anyone wants to volunteer. Just want to say I will also have to take the top of your head off and take your brain out. So any volunteers? No? Okay. Well, fortunately, Brian made the decision of volunteering recently. And I brought Brian with me. There we go. So that's what happens if you fall off a cliff. I think there's a camera somewhere. Here he is. Right. Okay. Welcome to Brian's head. Can I have the slides up in my monitor, please, guys? Right. So what we're going to do, we are going to take his head off. Come on. Come on, Brian's skull. There we go. Can I get my slides up, please, chaps? Because I'm not going to remember all the psychology on my own. There we go. Cool. Okay. We can't have both. Never mind. Okay. I have to switch from the two. So, Brian's head. The first thing that happens when we take Brian's brain out, right, is you get the decisions and it comes into your mind. You get the vision. The video comes in. The video plays to your mind. It translates it into signal. The first thing that happens is the amygdala, which is down here in the middle of the mind, the amygdala just here goes, do I need to pay attention to this? Is it dangerous? Am I going to die? Should I pay attention? Because we get hit with so much information all the time, the amygdala will be like, look, I don't know what's going on. And that happens in about 12 milliseconds, which is way, way before conscious thought. So, within 12 milliseconds, we've decided if something is important enough for us to pay attention. Okay? If it doesn't, oh, God, I've got so many buttons to do. Once the emotional, and that's called emotional tagging, right? And then once the brain has decided that is worthwhile doing, it then goes through to the hippocampus, right? And the hippocampus is sort of just behind the back of the brain stem here. And the hippocampus is there for memory matching. And the really interesting thing about when we think about if we need to know something about it, your brain will go, have I seen this before? Have I seen it before? Because then we're going to match it with memory. If you've seen it before, that's a surefire way of knowing, well, it was safe last time, so it's going to be safe this time. So, you know, that's quite a cool way of doing it. It's this reason that big brands do so well. Because your brain already knows what they are, they already know that it's safe, and that's why being a big brand is so much better than being a small brand. So, that happens in about 400 milliseconds. Now, at the same time as that says, look, I remember this, and my memory says, I recognize it, it does a little green flag, so it's passed that test. At the same time, we have the dopamine centers, which is the VTA, the ventral, never remember this, the ventral tegmental area, and that's down here, right? And the VTA is basically saying, am I going to get reward from this? Am I going to get something benefit in my future? Is it going to be good for me? If it thinks there's benefit in the future, it will do its little green flag. So, that's good. So, we've got two green flags so far. Then, the ACC, the ACC is just down here underneath the brain stem, and the ACC is saying, no, it's not, I got that wrong, the ACC is around here. See, that's my daughter who does psychology, we're very upset about that. The ACC is around the front, and that is looking for conflict and effort. Now, if it finds conflict, if it finds things disturbing, if it finds things difficult, particularly if it has a cognitive overload, if there's too much for it to do, it will waive its reward. So, we've got the red flag, and that decision doesn't go ahead. But if it does, if it's easy, it understands it, it's simple, it will do its little green flag. So, we've had all of those. We can name again, it looks cool up there, doesn't it? Okay, so all of those things together, the hippocampus, the VTA, the ACC, they then send all of their signals, their green signals, and it goes to the VMPFC, which is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, right, just up here at the front. That then goes, what's my gut feeling about this? And this takes about 500 milliseconds for you to get a gut feeling about a decision, which is way sooner than conscious thought. If it gets a gut feeling that it likes it, right, you're going to go ahead. Now, if it's watching a film and it doesn't get a good gut feeling, people are still going to watch the film, right? They're not going to watch it, but you're coming back from sort of a negative place. And then finally, all of those things, they go down to the basal ganglia, which is just, oh, Brian, I've got to take your brain to pieces. Sorry about that. Just down in here, the basal ganglia, and that then is the final sort of brain. So you can see that there's multiple times within that moment where you can get a red flag and that decision doesn't get made. So what we're looking to do as filmmakers, as marketers, as anything, is to make sure that each one of these things is a green flag so we can go ahead. Thank you, Brian. Thank you for the camera. That was cool. I enjoyed that bit. I've never practiced that, so there we go. Okay, so that's how decisions get made. I'm going to hide Brian because he looks like he's had a bad day. Okay. So we as filmmakers, what we're trying to do is we're trying to increase go signals, right? We're trying to increase emotional relevance, familiarity. All the time, we're trying to increase go signals so we can go through. And we're trying to reduce stop signals. We're trying to make sure that people get to the end of our film and they've decided what we want. Because ultimately, we're not producing videos, right? We're producing decisions if you haven't got the theme of the talk already. Okay. Done all that. That's fun. Bit of psychology. Let's talk about actual practical, how we kind of make this in the film. Because the brain is constantly asking, how risky is this decision? How risky is this decision? When they're watching our film, I think we always talk about aspiration, but I think people are always watching videos and content thinking, is there any risk involved? Even if it's subconsciously. But wouldn't it be amazing if we could all go to a conference and somebody would be able to explain to us how to reduce that sense of risk within people's thinking? What about there was an approach where we could do three simple things just to reduce the amount of risk that people see so they benefit? I'm not sure. And we get there. Well, that's lucky because that's what we're doing today. We're going to look at the three things that you can do to just, in your films, reduce that sense of risk so people are more likely to make a decision in your favor. And they are reducing uncertainty, reducing effort, and amplifying consequence. And those are quite long words, but we're going to break it down. Let's firstly look at reducing uncertainty. How can we remove uncertainty from the content that we make? And why does that make people more likely to decide what we're doing? Well, it's simply familiarity, right? If we can make our content feel familiar, we can make the brand feel familiar. What we know is that the memory matching, which is in the hippocampus, that's going to be like, ooh, cool, I already know what this is, right? So it's already there on the side, which is definitely the way we do it. I just want to talk a little bit about how memory matching works. So let's start this particular part, looking at a Porsche, right? It will make sense in the end, I promise. This isn't just any Porsche. This is slices of Porsches from 1963 to 2011 and see how similar every single slice of Porsche is. Now, obviously, there is an idea of brand recognition, but actually this is because Porsche understands that people will not buy stuff that is too different because it's not familiar. And in design, this has a thing called Maya, the Maya principle, most advanced yet acceptable. So if we go crazy and we go, oh, it's got wings on it or whatever, people don't like it. Another car example, I don't know if anyone saw the, is it Ferrari, came out yesterday. People are going nuts, right? I'm not a car man. That doesn't look like a Ferrari, right? They're not the only people that have made that sort of mistake in Maya, right? Apple Newton, when they came out, when this came out, it was way too weird. It was big. It was clunky. It had a stylus. It was connected to GSM so you could send messages. It flopped. Google Glasses? Is that what these were? Are these Google Glasses? They also flopped horribly because they made you look weird, to be honest. But people weren't ready for that advancement in technology. But both of those companies learned from that lesson to more or less effect. So, when Apple launched Apple Vision, what they did in all their communications was they didn't make it look weird. They simply said, you're doing stuff that you're doing already. Watching movies, talking to your kids, packing to go on holiday. You're doing this stuff already, just with a slight different difference, right? So they really learnt from how to make, how to apply the Maya principle to the content they were making. Although it seemed futuristic and unapproachable, it looked easy. Somebody who didn't learn, necessarily, was meta. And what they did is they put Weird Boy in the middle of some... ..sort of meta environment. And everyone saw it and was repulsed by it. It was just too different, too weird. It had Zuckerberg in it. So what we're looking to do is we're looking to say, you know, I've not seen this before, but it still feels right. Because the brain trusts what it recognises quickly. So that kind of idea of familiarity is really important in film. It's really... This is a sort of... As you can tell, I'm a marketing nerd. In marketing effectiveness, in neuromarketing, we talk a lot about this idea of mental availability. And mental availability basically is how well your brand is known on the shops, online, when people are buying. And mental availability is memory structures that increase the chance of your brand getting mentally retrieved at the buying moment. So when you're in the supermarket and there's ten different things and you know that one, most people are just going to buy the one they know, which is why being a small brand sucks and being a massive brand like Unilever is easy because double jeopardy laws and the whole fact that your advertising is more efficient because people go, I know who it is. So just having those memory structures is super important. If you are a marketing nerd and you want to read more about it, you need to read Jenni Romaniuk's book, and Byron's book, they're cool. Also buy my book, just mention that. Those are actually way better. They're like essential marketing things. Okay, so we talked about how it's important that things feel familiar. We've talked about how we need to build mental availability in the minds of the people that we're selling to so they think, yeah, I do that. But how do we make films feel familiar? How do we make films feel familiar? Because there's two things here, right? We need them to feel familiar, but also they can't look like, like everybody else's. So the way we can make them feel familiar is we can lean in on distinctive brand assets. And a distinctive brand asset are specific colors, framing styles, music, visual motifs, praises, and characters. And characters are becoming ever more important in sort of neuromarketing. And if you have a little purple rabbit or whatever, you see all these new things coming in, it's because they build mental availability. You have the purple rabbit in all the advertising. You stick it by the product. You get that. But, and I'm sorry about this horrific AI generated filmmaker on a tightrope, but it was late and I needed a slide. Um, you are walking a tightrope because on one hand we need to be instantly familiar. We need to be instantly distinctive, right? So people go, I know which brand that is. I know who they are. I'm going to buy them, but we also need to balance that on the other side by being not too weird and actually breaking the whole kind of Maya principle. So I'll do it. You walk a little tightrope. I could just have done it myself. Could have. No, um, the, that's the tightrope you're in, but literally leaning into those distinctive brand assets is really important. So what we could do is we can build our colors, we can build our brands, we can build our logos. And the key is repetition, not evolution, repetition, not reinvention. Because if you look at the brands that have really done this really well, really built mental availability over decades, the golden arches, how many billions of pounds have McDonald's spent? We can build the mental availability in our mind that we can recognize the arch just like that. Um, British airways, the whole thing where they just showing a bit of a logo, mental availability, just do it. Or from Nike, all of these things means that from a decision perspective, we're much more likely to make a decision in favor of that company because we know who they are spent all this money. We get it. The problem comes as we as filmmakers, we get into the edit. We get bored. We get bored of those framing sizes. We get bored of that. Color. We get bored of this logo. So what we do is we go, Oh, we just change it up. This is why marketing teams are always changing logos and things, which is creatively exciting. 100% keeps us on our toes, but neurologically disastrous because what we do when we change all our assets, when we change all our things, we undermine all the mental availability that we spent all the previous ads building. Somebody watches the new film. They don't know who it is. Their decision making process changes. And just to underline how serious that is. Does everyone remember Tropicana? Tropicana's distinctive brand asset was they had an orange with a straw in it because you just drink out the thing. And then one day they decided we don't want that. We're going to change the package. We're going to get rid of our distinctive brand asset because somebody got bored. They got rid of it. Cracker barrel. I can understand why they wanted to get rid of the cracker thing. So that's not necessarily the image you want, but they got rid of their cracker. So Tropicana, they over two months, they lost 30 million in sales because people walking down the aisle, mental availability wasn't working. Couldn't see Tropicana. I didn't buy it. Buy something else, right? Then that led really weird private equity firms suddenly understood make mental availability. They suddenly understood distinctive brand assets. So when cracker barrel did their thing, they lost 94 million in one day because everyone was like, oh my God, you've got rid of the distinctive brand asset. And they just fled. Right. So it's massively, massively important. There's a lot there in it. So it's very nerdy. Okay. So what we've done there is we've looked at the first way that we've done it. We can reduce uncertainty when we're making content, make it familiar, make people understand the brand assets. The next thing is people testimonials. Now you are a room full of extremely experienced professional filmmakers. The idea of me standing here and going do some testimonials. I mean, beyond patronizing, that's not why I'm saying I've done thousands. I'm sure we've probably done millions of testimonials between us, but there is a little tweak to testimonials to social proof, which is just really important. And the work. On this done was done back in 1984 by this chap, Robert Cialdini who did a great book about the psychology of persuasion? Recently, though, his main way of persuading people is he's had loads of work done on his face. But he's changed. It's really weird when you've seen him before and after. Anyway, that's a whole nother thing. He's written a really kind of good piece of work on this. He looked at the two things. He looked at experts and he looked at real people and he just like, well, how do we make these people convincing? And how it works. There's a whole nother another talk. But firstly on experts, he found and prove beyond doubt that people trust confidence before they verify competence. They trust confidence before they verify competence. And I'm not saying anything about anyone, but trusting confidence before verifying competence isn't necessarily the best thing, but it does work. Right? So that's one thing about experts. We need to make sure they are super confident. And we'll talk about that in a minute. The other thing he looked at was real people and the temptation. The temptation to generate lemmings jumping off a cliff was too much for me. I had to do it. Real people. When we see real people in a testimonial, what we're really thinking is if lots of people survive this already, if they survive the decision, I probably will too. It makes it a lower risk because often when we're doing testimonials, we're doing social proof. We think what we're doing is we're selling success, right? We think, oh, this is the vision of what you can be. But the best social proof doesn't sell success. It's removing fear. And that is the small tweak that I think we can all take about when we're doing testimonials and doing videos. Because typically we'd say something like, you know, the platform transformed our business. The team were great to work with. Cool. We've all put that in testimonials. What on a decision design basis is more effective, going to make people go over the line more, is something like, you know, honestly, our biggest concern was rollout complexity. We thought it would take months and it didn't. You can see how the difference is. One is looking positive. The other one is taking a deep psychological fear because if it fucks up, they're going to have to explain to their boss, right? Then we can do, you know, you can allay those fears. Cool. So what we've done is we've looked at how to reduce uncertainty, right? That's really good in decision design because if we can make things less uncertain, people will decide in our favor. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to look at reducing effort because if we can make decisions easy, people are more likely to make them in our benefit. And this is all done by Herbert Simon back in 1947. He hasn't had any work done. He still looks the same, I think. And he did this really interesting piece of work. Humans don't optimize decisions perfectly because we don't have time. Our brains are too small. We can't optimize the perfect decision. We do a thing called satisficing, which I think is a fantastic word. Is it good enough? Is it safe enough? Right? If we think back to Brian's brain, that's the way to say it, Brian's brain, it wasn't a case of this is a perfect decision. Go for it. It was just like I can't find anything wrong with it. Nope, it's fine. Keep going. Doesn't look scary. I remember something like it. Right? If we think back to the anterior cingulate cortex, the ACC, that push back on the cognitive load, if something is too complicated, your little brain just pushes back on it. Right? And this is really interesting because when we give more information, we stop people satisficing because we're not just giving them enough to make a decision. It creates what we call maximizing behavior. Right? Maximizing behavior is the very opposite of satisficing. Instead of going, cool, that'll do. I'll decide that. I'll buy that. I'll click that. People go, oh, shit, there's a lot of information there. You know, I need to really pay attention. I need to start opening multiple browsers. I need to start really thinking about what I'm going to do. And actually, the more that the audience feels they need the perfect choice, the less likely they are to do anything. So we can actually make it very, very difficult. And all you need to do to understand this is go to your Netflix feed and understand there's too much choice. You can't decide anything. I've got four kids. All of whom watch different things on my own account. So I'm screwed. Basically, I can never find anything. I watch anime, apparently. But anyway, we've all been there. Too much choice, we can't make a decision. Netflix aside, as marketers, very often what we can do is we push really hard. We say so much. And often the conversion dies, decisions stop getting made at the very moment that we're trying hardest to convince. So you're deep into your sales funnel. We've got a brand film. We've got a webinar. And we're doing the dancing monkey thing. And we're like, it does this and it does this. And there's a new feature and it's a new benefit. You can save money. It's too much. What that does is it triggers all the neurological, neuroses in your brain. They will fire off. We push back because it's not a simple decision. Because fundamentally, in any content that we're making where we want people to decide in our favor, less is more. Okay? Simple premise. It does this. Does that. And okay. You might not be able to get a simple premise into. One long film. You might need to break it into lots of smaller films. And that's a whole other thing about strategy. But what we want to do is have less information. There is some people in the world who figured this out. And they figured that less information in a single message is enough to make behavior change. If you look at simple statements, make America great again. From Britain, stop the boat. Let's take back control. You know, around the world we're seeing populist governments, no politics here. But they understand a simple message repeated at length. And that will drive decision making. If, you know, the let's take back control started looking at the nuances of immigration policy, suddenly people can't make an easy decision. Which is why they're not doing it. Simple messages. Less is more. Let's put less in our films. And people will decide more in your favor. Okay. Reducing effort. Let's talk about it. I'm going to talk about framing of things. I don't know why I did that as a slide. But it seemed good at the time. Anyway. What we're looking to do when we're talking to people is we're looking to frame things in a way which reduces cognitive effort in the evaluation, right? Because if we can make decision making easier, what we're doing is we're helping the brain evaluate faster, compare more easily, feel more certainty, use less energy. Because if we have a film that's all complicated and there's a lot of now having to figure it out, then naturally going to push it back a bit. Framing is also a really important thing. And what we say at the end of our film, super, super famous experiment by The Economist, and The Economist They wanted to sell more digital subscriptions and with a print. So you get print and you get digital as well, right? And they wanted to sell more. So they started advertising these subscriptions at the back of the magazine and they did a couple of options. They tried running with option one, web subscription, $59, right? Or print and web for $125. And it just wasn't, people just weren't buying it. Everyone's going for the web subscription because they're saving money. And they were annoyed about that. So what they did, they ran a test with a third option. So they had web, $59, print, $125, print and web for $125. I mean that middle layer is just bullshit, right? It just exists. But it exists as a frame. What they found was that if you look at it, when they did the option one, option two, when it was between web or print and web, 84% went print and web, 16% web only, 0% print only, right? So when there was three options, nobody went print only. And when there was two options, only 32% went to print and web. Basically what we're saying is when people have got a framing of a price, they're more likely to go for something that's high value because the brain is not a calculator. It's not a shortcut. It's not, it is a shortcut machine. It's looking for ways of shortcutting. It doesn't ask what is objectively best. It asks what looks best compared to others. And that's why framing is so important when we're making films or anything. Look, you've got this, you've got this, we represent that. In terms of videos, you know, here's a classic framing that you might get in a video. You might get, we've got an enterprise software implementation. I mean that's, we still don't know what that means. Probably most of us have made SaaS films. It sounds complex. It's technical pain, rollout stress, disruption. Sounds risky. All right, I'm not going to do that. We're going to do a much more simple framing. Get your team up and running in an afternoon. That is something I can get behind. I've got no flags. I can do it. And yes, we feel it's not accurate. And when you have a meeting with the marketing team, they'll be like, oh, well, it'd be better if you said, you need to push back. We need to say simpler things. We need to reduce effort. Because eventually they're going to get to a signup page and you can do all the details, right? Cool. We've done reducing uncertainty. We've done reducing effort. I now want to talk about amplifying consequence. And we're going to do a test here, a little experiment. It may go horribly wrong, so you have to see. Because I'm English, as you can tell, and we're obsessed with afternoon tea. And afternoon tea is based around a mug, which made me think of this very famous psychological experiment. So I have here, might need that little camera again, actually. I'm going to sell you a mug. These are William Morris mugs. They're very nice. They're bone china. I keep waiting for that stool to collapse, right? So there we go. There's a little bone china mug. I don't know what you call it. It's a bone china mug. It's got a traditional English pattern. Okay? It's cool. Now, I would like you all to think how much you would pay in a shop in euros maybe for that mug. There we go. Nice. Okay. How much would you pay for that mug? All right. Have a think about that. Now, earlier in the day, here he comes. I've got a picture of the mug. Look. Look how good it is. It's actually very nice. There we go. There's your mug. Sorry I can't get close to you. Or stretching the autofocus a bit there. Cool. Okay. Have a think. How much would I pay for that mug? Fine? Thank you. Then, what we've done, three people in the audience, I actually gave one of these mugs to earlier as a present from me. That's why it was a box full. I was so impressed that none of them broke. What I would like you to do, I'm going to ask the people who own mugs to say how much they would be willing to sell it for. And I would like people in the audience to say how much would you be willing to pay for this mug. So would anyone like to shout out some numbers that they think they would be willing to pay me for my nice mug? Okay. Be brave. It's me that's being filmed. Eight euros. Eight euros. Good start. Anyone else? Sorry? Oh, okay. In euros? I have no idea what that is. Okay. We've got eight/ten euros. Right. So, let's call that maybe, because it is a nice mug. It is a bone china mug. It's not a cheap mug. It's nine euros. Right. What I'd like to do is I gave out some mugs earlier. And I'd just like to ask you guys what you'd be willing to sell me your mug for. So, Nick, what would you sell me your mug for? It's a pretty nice mug. I'm going to say 55 euros. 55 euros. Just as well I don't want that mug back. I gave someone else a mug. Oh, how much would you sell your mug to someone for? If someone was in desperate need of a cup of tea? I would try ten euros. Ten euros. Just to sample it. Oh, you like a quick sale though, don't you? You're going ten. You're going 55. And there's somebody up there. Hello. How much would you sell me your mug for? Yes. 20 quid. 20 quid. Okay. I'll convert that to euros. That's like 22 euros. Isn't that interesting, right? What happened there is you were like, I'll buy it for ten. But the people who've already got it, they're like, that's my mug. Okay. That is called the endowment effect. Thank you for a 55. You really pushed that well for me. People will pay more for something they own, even if it's exactly what they want. It's the endowment effect. And when they ran this with a bunch of students, they found that non-owners valued a mug at $3 and typically owners valued it at $7. My mug was better than theirs. That's called the endowment effect, right? Because to own something takes time, money, effort, or luck. In the case of these, I just needed to know you were on the front row and you got a mug out of it. But when you've spent that time, money, effort, you want to own it more. This opens up all sorts of interesting psychology for us. for us as filmmakers and marketers generally. The endowment effect is why we do free trials, because if somebody's already got it, they're already linked in, they're already working on your SaaS software. Step away from that. They feel like they already don't own it, right? So we can actually make decisions. We can make films in which people feel like they own it. So the way we can do that is we can show examples of people using your product, having happy life so we make people feel like oh i'm part of that we can make sure that we include people in our film that feel like that the viewer completely emphasizes with because they feel connected we can make problems they instantly recognize that they feel connected with what we're trying to do is in all the content we make to make people feel that they're already part of it right they can see the problem they've bought into the idea they know this is solution because then they will value it more highly and if you can get them to do a small step towards signing up just like click more so they're involved in the process so that endowment effect of like we we are involved is really important can they be part of a community can you get them to join all those things so they feel that they're already part of the product and there's a really interesting thing about how if somebody sees something on their phone the endowment effect is stronger than if they see something on a device on the other side of the room simply because the phone is yours so people will naturally pay more money for products that they buy on their phone than they buy on a laptop which is weird but that's simply because these are so part connected to our life anyway that was a tangent okay bring it all together what does a decision designed video actually look like right so what i'm going to do is break this down let's use a little SaaS case study i haven't kept an eye on the time so i'll probably be very quick or very slow i don't know sorry um we're going to look at SaaS case study and we're going to break it down into like how we can use decision design through that film so firstly let's bring up a timeline everybody in this room has timelines that look like this right very neat very layers no extra bits lying around there's nothing at the end it's all layered in color correctly correct yeah took me ages to make that timeline um we've never seen one like anyway this is your timeline this is your film this is if we were to make a really well done decision designed film and it's no not that different from a film that you might make differently anyway but i just wanted to break it down what we're doing first the first thing we're going to do at the beginning of the timeline we need to interrupt the pattern right we need to kind of say not logos or a little retro we need to be a recognizable situation something like in this case slack notifications expanding a team drowning in in data you know we're saying there is a problem what that is doing is your amygdala is going this matters okay it's it's got your attention and then you're in so that's kind of the we would call it the hook or whatever but it's knowing that that's really what we're trying to do the next thing we're going to do is we're going to try and encourage memory matching because the way that we present this is going to be familiar we're going to be looking to trigger some memories with your brand assets with all these other kind of things we might sort of signal frustration or stress basically we're looking to activate that mental availability you know us this is safe this is cool that's the hippocampus going yeah i know this this is cool i know what this is and i'm going to go ahead the next part of the film we're looking to activate the dopamine system right it's a one clear single promise really simple because obviously we don't want we don't want anything to go this is too complicated but we want to be saying this could improve my life we want that dopamine system to be like yeah yeah this is cool i could see a real benefit so not something like ai powered enterprise generation right that doesn't help but instead get two hours of your day back that's just a much better sort of decision design approach then we move through the film um the acc is looking for conflict this is a key part especially in SaaS films when people start getting complicated we put in too much there's too much and it's like cognitive overload i can't keep a thing one simple premise one clear transformation simple language no jargon limited options like simple simple simple because we don't want to lose people we've already got them halfway through the film right less is more and this i think is where many brands fail because we're in these marketing meetings and you're putting up post-its of key messagings on the wall or however you choose to do it and you've got eight different departments and everyone's got three key messages and suddenly there's like 42 key messages we need to strip all that out really simplify that next we're going to control the frame you know we're going to shape comparisons like you know most workflows uh create more admin this one removes it we're kind of controlling the frame of like this is how everybody else does it it's bad it's bad it's bad this is how we do it we've built that frame around pricing or benefits because that simple framing prevents the amygdala firing there's no threat here it's simple i get it then we move through we're going to remove the fear before we're selling this is where we hit the social proof right oh it's so small i'm gonna have to read my notes like this so the hippocampus is memory matching the um the dopamine system the vta is reward prediction right and the acc is is not detecting any conflict that bit where we do social proof to remove fear is obviously the most important part of the film because that's where people sign off on what they're doing then we need to create some kind of sense of psychological ownership this is the thing about the endowment effect i was talking about so here we're going to be talking about you can have a calmer team you can get more successful outcomes you can have simpler work days people feel that they want to own this they feel that this is part of theirs because they will then naturally value it more highly then i believe we should revisit social proof because it's so important we should have some more people maybe an expert saying this is a real thing and then finally we move into the end of the film and this is where the whole film has built up to the fact you've got green lights on your decisions all the way through and then we lower the commitment threshold to something really minimal it's not sign up for a two-year thing it's like see a webinar click here to find out more we just reduce that down because the basal gangly wants to give us the green light we've watched the film yes as opposed to i've got some reservations i'm going to do it next week all the time we're looking to reduce those things so on our wonderful timeline what we've done there is we've built familiarity we've felt prediction we've done reassurance we've got um emotional relevance uh i can't remember what came next uh we're building all these things cognitive ease and and behavioral momentum so we've really built that into our film because what we're saying is we know that attention gets you seen which is what we talked about two years ago we talked about emotion drives behavior change but ultimately for me i think it's important that we understand that decision design gets you chosen because ultimately i believe that we're not just producing videos we are producing decisions cool thank you i'd just like to say thank you to TwentyThree for putting on such a good show it's a big round of applause for them thank you very much