Geoffrey Colon, Head of Brand Studio at Microsoft Advertising

I am tasked with is finding the future of advertising through experiences and technology and people, how they all intersect with one another. Yeah, so the book I wrote was titled Disruptive Marketing. I wrote it in 2015 in eight weeks and it came out about a year later. The timeline to actually publish a book is a lot longer than I think people realize. It was about 35 interviews with a number of experts on where marketing was going. I think the subtitle, which is what growth hackers, data punks, and other hybrid thinkers can teach us about navigating the new normal, the biggest issue with that subtitle is everyone thinks it's a growth hacking book. It actually is a book that's just on how growth hacking has influenced the industry, also how the democratization of data has influenced the industry, also how hybrid culture, the fact that people could be a video predator, meaning a producer editor, that's a hybrid, or a creator where they put their own video together and also script it out. I was basically trying to get to the fact that we're blending more together, we're converging more as a result of technology and it allows anyone to really learn anything quickly and then utilize that. That means the end of best practices as we know it because everybody learns best practices. To differentiate yourself, you have to be what we call uber creative. The book is really a manifesto about creativity in a world that's basically dominated by algorithms and technology. Video is disruptive in terms of how we approach it at Microsoft through storytelling. I know that's an overused phrase, but we try to concentrate on humans in our videos more than the technology and how humans use technology to solve problems, so not how technology is solving human issues. That's not really how the world works. It's humans deciding, hey, let's use this technology to figure out how to make the world a better place. We're seeing that more in our video storytelling in terms of how the cloud, something that people think is technical and boring, can actually be liberating in terms of climate change or species degradation. Those I think are important stories to tell as well because that is the state of the world we're in. There are a lot of problems we need to solve, so it's important I think to use storytelling to figure out how you're an enabler, can help empower people to actually solve some of the issues that we face as a society. Microsoft cuts through the noise mainly by telling stories that other companies probably are afraid to tell. I think going in areas that other companies don't want to tread in, so things like accessibility for all. Not a lot of other companies are talking about that. I think a discussion that's been happening quite a bit is how do all people get equal pay in society? That's an area that I think is important to discuss. Then I think also how is technology going to solve some of the crucial problems that we face right now? How are people actually going to use that technology to empower that change? I think if anything we've broken through by being a change agent after years of really just being, hey we're big Microsoft, here we are, you know what our solutions are. I think we've been an outsider the past couple of years and as an outsider that means you have to come with a challenging narrative to typical conventions. Video series, I think there's two that I started. One is called Future Boutique, the other one is Trend Studio. We see video as a way of showing research. If you think about it, research has really been dominated by utilizing the research paper, the e-book, the white paper. What we have done is we've said, wait a minute, why don't we present our findings on video because that's another way, probably the most dominant way that people are going to learn about something. How do you take something that maybe in an e-book is going to come across pretty boring in its design with a lot of stats and figures? With video you can make it much more dynamic so you have a person like an expert you're talking to but then while that person's talking you're bringing in imagery, you're bringing in stats, you're bringing in B-roll that helps tell that story. I think more and more I want to continue to do as many research video series as possible. One of the big things I'm trying to work on in 2020, and I know that's still a couple of months away, is working with LinkedIn on a study on customer loyalty. The big thing there will be the video that we actually create on that. That will actually be the leading piece and then the e-book will be the additional piece rather than the e-book being the front and center piece. Video again is becoming really the dominant way for, I think it's always been this way, but it's really the dominant way to own a category in thought leadership or research. It's a mix of two. We use some outside agencies which I think are important because they bring an outside perspective to the production. They also have probably more knowledge than in-house teams. In-house teams might say, hey, this is what we want to, this is the story we want to tell, but an external agency is like, okay, now we know what to shoot to make it look really good and they can do post-editing very well. Then we use a combination of some in-house solutions. Myself and another colleague that I work with, we have our own studio slash camera equipment that we can go out and shoot some things and actually use Adobe Premiere to edit them, but I still think that the best work is done with an external agency, external software, basically finding those solutions. Yeah, I mean, data analytics for a video has been important since, I mean, now over a decade, really, so there's a number of factors. I think the low-hanging fruit everybody looks at is views. That's good, but I think the more important thing is geographically, where are people watching this video? The reason why is if you see the given markets where you expect that to happen, great, but it's those hidden nuggets where you're like, wait a minute, how come we're getting so many views from this market? And then that's a good thing to work with sales teams to figure out what's generating all of that. Video metrics in terms of geographic targeting is really good for figuring out lead generation, but I think the bigger thing is if you're at the top of the funnel and you're telling a bigger story where you're not so concerned about lead generation, the big thing there is really how much reach have we got? And I know reach and impressions, you hear tons of people saying those are antiquated metrics. I don't think that's true at all. I think if you follow a lot of marketing studies from people like Les Binais and Peter Fields, you need to reach a lot of people and actually to have influence. So looking at those metrics in terms of reach, especially if you're putting paid media behind your video, is very important. Otherwise, you're basically producing something that is landing with a thud because no one's going to see it. It depends on what those videos are. We have done videos that, yes, we use strictly for lead generation and you try to use those to figure out how many new customers you might bring in, different systems to sort of set up to see like, hey, we're going to create this video. The video really is trying to get people to adopt something. And then you try to measure how much did that actually influence someone to adopt. But bigger thought leadership and research, the big thing there is, it goes back to basic narrative economics. How much are people paying attention to it? And if they're paying attention to it, how much are they then now reverberating or talking about that out there? That means you've actually won that battle, so to speak, because people are basically saying, hey, this is what I believe. You might say, well, where did you learn that from? Oh, well, I watched a number of different things, but Microsoft actually stated this and that gets people to pick up on it. I mean, narrative economics is nothing new, but we've never talked about it in terms of video and it's something I think we need to bring into the field more, which is if video is powerful enough to get people to think or behave or talk a certain way, then that's powerful. That's exactly why you, I think, become a communicator, is you want to be a change agent. You want to provide persuasion and influence. Otherwise, you're just making a bunch of noise. So marketing activities, we want to focus on the future. I mean, again, how do you find the intersection of certain media or mediums? How does that take effect? So big thing is shooting video and then converting it to MP3 so people can listen to it. I don't know if a lot of video creators are thinking that way because they're always thinking of the visual element, not the audio element, but we should be thinking about the fact that some videos, that's impossible to do because you have to watch the actual video. But there's others, like we're talking right now. This can easily be converted into an MP3 where people could listen to it and you get more bandwidth that way. That is something I think very interesting to me in terms of the future of marketing. I think also how do you bring augmented reality into video? We've seen that quite a bit. How will that change how video is created? And then I also am fascinated by the old school parts of mediums. So lo-fi transmission, how do you cut video on VHS so it makes it look grainy, it makes it look human, it makes it look imperfect is really, it stands out a lot when you think about the fact that what we're doing right now, someone's going to post edit this, cut it, put different interstitials into it, lower thirds. Sometimes it's actually cool to see stuff just as it is and that's actually being influenced a lot from Instagram culture now. You have a lot of people who are like, I don't want perfection, I want imperfection. I think that is actually spreading into video on the artistic side. But as we know, that actually, that will influence business video. I mean, ultimately someone in B2B will do something that looks imperfect, that will gain tons of views and everyone will try to copy that. And it'll probably be some company trying to sell some crazy solution. Heck, maybe it'll be us, Microsoft, that decides to do sort of these analog imperfect videos.