Keynote: The Future of Video

The real life Jon Mowat will be here shortly, but for now, I would just like to remind you that two years ago, in 2023, Jon wrote, The industry should keep an eye on both AI-generated content and short-form video platforms like TikTok, as they are likely to affect how we work. Well, thanks, Jon. That was a total fucking understatement. Actually, what he should have said was, the world is going to go nuts. It was mental. Hello! Always good to start with a good bit of intro. I haven't got a comfort monitor here, guys, by the way. Right, that was a hell of a year. What can we say? Well, it was a year of market disruption, wasn't it? I don't know about your market, but the UK market was certainly disrupted. We didn't really know what was going on. Certainly, I know a lot of CMOs were called into the rooms, and there was a lot of panic discussions about what we're going to do. Production budgets, there we go, we've got a screen now. Production budgets, don't know about everyone, but production budgets went like this. What was 100 became 60, what was 60 became 30, and suddenly, the landscape is very different. Also, things like in-housing, offshoring, automation, these things all really made a massive difference. I'm talking to the room of the converted, right? You know what happened this year. Also, massive impact this year, AI, not just AI generated, but AI influencers, AI creators. So, yeah, it was a real year of disruption. And I'm sad to say that also, I stopped filming quite so much on my favourite thing. That's been in the cupboard quite a lot. About 50% of our shoots are now done on these things, which is no bad thing. It's just a different thing. But I do like playing with big toys on cranes. So, what are we going to talk about today? All the software that is changing everything, right? We could sit here and we could easily go through this kind of endless reel of software that we're all desperately trying to learn as quickly as we possibly can. We could talk about generative search optimisation, GSO, which I think is becoming increasingly more important. Certainly, all my clients are like, how do we get into Google AI results? We could equally start talking about social search. We could start talking about my creators. And my particular favourite nerdy topic, open gate. Open gate filming. So, if anyone wants to talk about that, you're very welcome to come and talk about that. But I think what we really need, excuse me, is governing principles. That's kind of what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to find a thing which isn't going to change in three months, isn't going to change in six months. And we can actually have a direction of travel for the industry, for our brands, for our agencies. And that's why today I want to talk about attention reward, community, and the future of the Video. And I'm gonna do all that in 30 minutes So not sure how much detail we are gonna get in But who am I to be talking about these things I was a director of the BBC for 16 years That's me in Iraq on the bottom there looking like a child, basically I've also founded the Hurricane Group, which is four agencies so we've got media production, social media, and other things And as you heard I am an author of two very nerdy books on video marketing So, with that on the way let's get talking. The brain. Let's start with the brain. The brain is constantly bombarded by information. You get about 11,000 bits of information coming through from your senses every second. Sight, hearing, all those tastes, all those things. But the brain, it's not that good. It can deal with up to 50 bits a second. So, the question is, how do we reduce out the 10,999,950 bits of information that we cannot process? It's just too much. And the way we do it is with attention. And that's really what I want to start with today. I want to talk about this ultimate limited resource that we have. We've got 50 bytes a second. We don't want to be wasting it. It's very important. Attention defines what your life will be, how your work goes, what you build, what you grow. It's very important. So, we're going to start with a little test, first of all, because I love doing these tests. First of all, are you paying attention? So, this test is based on something which actually won a Nobel Prize in 2004 by Echavlian Simmons. And what I'm going to ask you to do is see how many times the players in white shirts in this video pass the ball. Okay? But just concentrate. I really want to count those. Don't be distracted by what else is going on. We've got white shirts. Really concentrate on that. If you've seen the test before, don't shout out because you're going to ruin it for everybody. Okay. Okay. Let's watch the test. I've also put some horrible AI music underneath it just to kind of, so it's not an awkward pause. Here we go. How many times do the players in white shirts pass the ball? Okay. That's what happens if you let AI write music. Sorry about that. Okay. How many people got 15? Pretty good. Okay. Now, the next question is going to split this room pretty much in half. Who saw the gorilla? Yeah. Because you're all like, I totally saw the gorilla, right? I'm all over that. 58% of the people saw the gorilla. 58% of you-ish, I can't see it. It's dark. But I'm imagining about 58% of you are feeling very smug because you saw the gorilla. The other 42% are like, what are you talking about? There was a gorilla. And here he is. Just sticking his head in there. Okay. This is a test of what we call working memory capacity. And if you think about memory in terms of a spotlight, if you put it very fine, you can really see what's around you. You can concentrate a lot. As you spread the spotlight to the entire extent of the stage, you can't see everything all at once. So some of you have a very tight spotlight and some of you don't. So let's have a little chat about those of you who saw less than 11 and didn't see the gorilla. Now, fundamentally, you shouldn't be in the room. If you did that, you need a Red Bull. You need to not, you know, just go home and have a sleep. So in the original results, you were, they didn't talk to you. You saw more than 11 and you saw the gorilla. Wicked. You can pay attention. You people have an above average working memory. You're good at multitasking. That's good. And nobody should drink, drive and text. But you are, you know, the kind of person that could drive and text and maybe just get away with it. But that's one of the other tests. Let's also talk about the people who saw over 11 and didn't see the gorilla. Now, you people are really interesting because you didn't see the gorilla. You did see the gorilla, right? So in a second follow-up test, they did eye tracking with people and pretty much most of you would have seen the gorilla for about a second and your brain just went, don't need that. And that is because, and don't take this personally, you have a lower working memory capacity. That's not my words. I'm not having a go at you. It also means you suffer from a thing called inattention blindness, which is basically when you're looking at something, you can't see stuff around it. But it does mean you can hyper focus on tasks. You should definitely not drive and text. You are the people definitely that should not be doing this. Okay. So there we go. That's just a little thing about attention. So we can say goodbye to the fantastic gorilla. Okay. So attention is the cognitive process of selecting, I'm going to have to go slowly on that, selectively concentrating one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. And how does it work? Okay. This is where it starts getting quite fun, bit of a, psychology in here as well. You have two systems working in your brain. Number one, we have the dam, which is the, I've got to get closer to things. I don't get it wrong. The dorsal attention network. And what that basically means is that is a combination of, we're going to, we call them the frontal eye fields, but we can just call them your eyes. And then the interparietal sulcus, which is basically responsible for voluntary orientating attention to specific stimuli. So the dam, is the part of your attention, which is the good stuff because it enables you to go, I'm going to concentrate on this because my IPS is saying we are doing this. This is where the growth comes from. This is how you can talk to people sensibly. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we have a thing called the van. And that is the ventricle attention network, ventral attention network. Sorry. This is the right hand brain. And it is the, it's kind of the brain radar. And what this does is it picks up on stimulus, picks up on things. And it says, Hey, let's pay attention to that. And you know, the van is what TikTok is all about, which we're going to be talking about in a minute, right? It's very much stimulus driven. It's bottom up. It doesn't matter what else you're doing. If the van gets stimulated, that's what you're concentrating on. And what happens is that the two flip flop between the two, the dam, the dam goes, look, you got to do this. And the van goes, look, let's go and do something else. And this is all run by the prefrontal cortex front of your brain. Before we go any further, this is what happens. If you ask AI, to make you an animation of the prefrontal cortex, can anybody spot what's wrong with that? It's in the middle. It's not even in the front. So, you know, animations aren't necessarily that medically accurate out of AI at the moment. Okay. So it's the dam and the van that enable us to filter out the 10,999,950. But how do we do it? How do we select which bits we do? Well, this is the hierarchy of need by Maslow. At the bottom, we have physiological needs. So this is easy. These are the first things that we need to pay attention to, right? Air, water, food. Quite rightly, we pay quite a lot of attention to that. Once we've got that sorted, our attention will go to safety, personal security, employment, that kind of thing. And as we move up, any attention left goes into love and belonging because we all like to be loved and we like to belong. And then if there's any attention left, we have to like to have some self-esteem. And it's only after we've paid attention to all of those things that we can get to self-actualization, which is creativity and personal growth, pursuit of meaning, which means that attention is an incredibly scarce mental resource. But the problem, as I see where we are at the moment, is short-form video. And generally, our attention is being turned into a profit machine. Okay. It's like people can make money by getting our attention. And we all know that. And that's actually what we're paid to do. So we can't be too critical. We can't be too critical of the brands that do it because it's actually what we're trying to do. And it's about you can't come to a marketing conference without a sales funnel of sorts. But this is a sales funnel that I like to think of. You know, we grab people's attention at the top of the awareness funnel. Then we have all the middle bit. And also, we need to grab their attention at the bottom so they can buy stuff. And it's because short-form video is so good at grabbing attention that I think we've become an industry obsessed with short-form, really. I mean, I know there's not that many short-form videos out there. And maybe we're all addicted to TikTok. But, I mean, I think it has really become very much focused on that short-form idea. And why is that? Well, by using influencers, by using CGI, by using all these things, we can grab people's attention. We can talk to the VAN. And we can really get people. But the good thing is that we as marketers, we're kind of immune to this stuff. So we would never go on TikTok and just buy something that we've seen on TikTok. Because we know the tricks, don't we? Now, how many of you are hoping this is going to collapse? I'll sit down very gingerly. That was about $8. But, you know, we see these ads. It gets us. And what's happening is TikTok shop, social selling, social search, it's making the journey between seeing it and buying it one click. That's the evidence, basically. But what impact is all this short-form having on us? Well, firstly, it's filling up our working memory, is I think what it's doing. It's kind of that 50 bits of information is becoming more and more rammed. Because we basically have to do a thing called cognitive triage, where all the time we're trying to decide, I've got to click. I've got to like. What am I going to do? I'm going to view it. I'm going to click it. So it's a cognitive triage of always figuring out what we're going to do with this short-form, which isn't great. A lot of short-form video, that kind of thing. It lowers academic performance. Obviously, most of us hopefully come out of school. But it does that. Impairs sleep. It's not good if you're spending your time scrolling through videos. Definitely strains relationships. Hi, honey, should we just lie in bed and watch TikTok? It weakens memory and it encourages addictive behavior. The one I really like, I'm going to put my prop over here. The one I really like is this one. So in 2020, the Oxford English Dictionary made the name of the year brain rot. I don't know if that term is... I mean, don't do something if it rots your brain. That's a thing. So brain rot is basically the mental fog and cognitive decline caused by endless scrolling. We all know it. We all do it. We all sit on the loo and TikTok or whatever. The final thing I wanted to do was highlight a really interesting study, which has been done in neuro image. And it's basically looking at the effect of short-term video on people. And it's been done by Chang Li, during Lian Wang, Hang Bang Li. Every single name on those is Chinese. Because this is a Chinese government-funded test. Why is China so interested in finding out what short-form video does to people? Over 1 billion users in China use short-form video, which means that the market penetration, the usable rate, is 95.5%. 95% of Chinese people in China are using short-form video. Therefore, quite rightly, the government's like, should we check it's not screwing everybody up? Should we just make sure it's not okay? And the study came out of this thing called the precuneus, which is the back of your brain. And it was basically they had a hypothesis that because this wasn't firing very much, maybe because more people watch phones, the less this was firing. And the prenecious was showing lower activity. and it's the part that help people reflect and consider So it really kind of helps us decide what we're going to do. Before I go into the study, I just need to help you understand a thing called loss aversion. It's gotten a bit technical now, but bear with me. Basically, loss aversion is a cognitive bias where the psychological pain of losing something is worse than buying something. So, in order to get something you have bought it spent some effort on it, you've worked hard to get it you know, all those kind of things that you've done. It takes effort to get things. Therefore, most human beings, when they've got something, they don't want to give it away. I love my chair, I love my little stool, but now I've got it, I'm not going to give it away for at least three times what I paid for it on TikTok. This loss aversion is a very sensible thing. It keeps us alive because we're hunter-gatherers. We have to go and get things. There's no point hunter-gathering and then just not caring if you lose it. So what the study did is it ranked loss aversion against short-form video consumption. And it said, well, hang on a minute, look, if people aren't, you know, up here, they've got a good, normal human level of loss aversion, they don't want to lose stuff, but the more short-form they watched, basically the less they cared, really. Because what was happening is addiction to short -form reduces our sensitivity to real consequences. In other words, the more you watch, the more dumb shit we do, basically, is the idea. Have I drilled home enough about short-form? So I think the whole kind of this thing is that short-form takes attention, but it gives no reward. And that takes me to my next part of the talk. Wouldn't it be great if, through the sales funnel, from the moment we get people through the consideration phase, through the awareness phase, through the retention, we are not just grabbing attention like this for eight seconds and giving nothing back. But we're actually giving more, right? And this is good for brands because attention isn't just about getting noticed, but also about holding focus for long enough to do some meaning. Now, there's a lot of B2B brands in here. There's a lot of people in here with sophisticated messages to tell. We can't do that in a nine-second TikTok or a 10-second TikTok. So being able to hold someone's attention through the funnel and actually be able to tell them something sensible. Oops, sorry about that. Just to distract your attention. That's how I'll get rid of that one. So what I want to do today is I want to talk about attention reward, as in you've given us your attention, which is 50 megabytes per second, 50 bytes per second of the most valuable thing you have. And our reward to you is going to be something meaningful. Okay, what I'm looking to do is flip the exchange rate of this, as in thanks for your attention. Thank you very much. Here's something. Now, what's really interesting about short-form is people who scroll a lot are actually more bored than the people who sit and watch something. They're more bored than the people who sit and watch something. So that's kind of what I'm looking to do. I'm looking to think, well, hang on. Is there a way that we can use content and video to encourage calm, maybe to boost self-worth, maybe to help people learn stuff? That would be really good. Improve resilience. You know, all that good stuff that we're trying to do rather than just like buy a stool. And I want to be able to do that across the sales funnel. So it's like, well, how are we going to do that? And the answer, I believe, and it's all kind of reflected in where we are today, is this idea of community. Because community is very positive. We're part of this kind of TwentyThree community here. It's very strong. And I think adds real value to what we're doing. It's not sort of a confectionary, just sort of disposable thing. Because afterwards, a network of people, I've got to go back. It's a network of people united by shared purpose, shared values, and mutual benefit. Like that sounds like a good, good thing to be in. So what I'm proposing is we should be focusing on communities. So where are, that's just decided to just flick through all the slides on its own. Look at that. That's interesting. I'm just going to go back on that. So let's talk about where we're going to build communities. Spaces like this, I think, are exactly where we should be building communities. It's not just about content. It's about human interaction and all those kind of things. I can tell you where it's not going to be. I can definitely tell you where it's not going to be. I don't see communities being built. TikTok, Instagram shorts, Instagram reels, or indeed YouTube. So I'm just going to have a little punch at YouTube for a couple of minutes. Because, you know, it's cool. It's all good. But I don't think it's the future of making content that's worthwhile. 2005, it started. Does anyone know how many pieces of content there are on YouTube now? I mean, it's not actually a test, but as you're there, you might as well shout it out. Anyone got any ideas? It's all right. I'll do it for you. 15 billion. That's quite a lot of videos, isn't it? Just sat on YouTube. And that is increasing by 360 hours worth of video per minute. Mind-boggling, isn't it, really, how we do that? So that's cool. So it grew to that by 2005. But if we then go back to this clicker. There we go. There we go. Go back to 2019. We got the first video. This is the first AI-generated video that was uploaded to YouTube. It's quite cool, actually. But that was only, what, six years ago? It's come a long way by then. But what's happening now is that, depending on which reports you read, between 47% and 90% of the content being uploaded to YouTube is AI-generated. And if you just extrapolate forward from that, you can see very quickly we're going to have mostly just full of AI slop. The fastest-growing channel on YouTube at the moment is Masters of Prophecy. AI-generated music with AI-generated imagery. They grew from a few hundred subscribers in February this year. Today they've got 30 million. The algorithm loves it because it's getting people to watch. It's getting people to stay online. It's getting people to watch adverts. I mean, that's just mental growth. AI-generated videos. That's quite sort of... It's not a great look, is it? So I don't think that's where communities are going to be. And while we're just here, a little tiny rant about YouTube and these algorithms generally. I think there's a real problem at the moment of wanting to... Everyone's under financial pressure. People have stopped building brand long-term. Everything comes with an asterisk. Yes, some brands are still building brand. It's bottom-of-the-funnel stuff. It's CMOs being told by the sales team, I need money now. Which is why suddenly these kind of very attention-grabbing, short-term, buy this, buy this is taking over. But fundamentally, that approach is short-term. It is a race to the bottom. The algorithm doesn't care about the well-being of the people that watches it. It just watches them to watch. And then what is also encouraged is... This is my one pet peeve at the moment. There's a thing called, you know, be authentic to yourself on these social media channels. But it isn't really authentic to who I am. Or this creator is authentic. Or this creator is authentic. It's how authentic to the platform can you be? So we've ended up with these kind of creators and micro-creators and influencers being, quote-unquote, authentic. But not to themselves, but to what the channel algorithm is going to push. So everything's becoming sort of very homogenized. And it's just... It's not real. It's not human. It's none of those kind of things. So that's a little rant there. So what is the future of video? I'll just go back on that one. What's really interesting is that, you know, TwentyThree and us, and I don't sit with Thomas and Steffen and think about, you know, what can we say is going to be the future of these things. But coming here today, I realized that where I've ended up and where TwentyThree have ended up is this idea of humans being the future of definitely the most important part of how we can build those long-term relationships. And I genuinely believe that is the direction of travel that we should all be in. For sure, we're not gonna get rid of hours and hours of AI slop. You know, there's just going to be... That's going to be out there. We've got to embrace that. That's going to happen. It's going to keep attracting our VAN, and it's going to take our attention. There's going to be room for brands. Oh, that's not supposed to have sound. Can you just knock that down? Sorry about that. Or that you could watch it. It's quite fun. But on top of that, we're going to need to have lots of real people doing real stuff. That is talking heads. That is webinars. that is keeping it human, it's all those kind of things. There's definitely gonna be space for influencer kind of marketing and just basically real people. So I think for me, the future of video, if we wanna talk in the broadest sense is, obviously AI is here to stay, obviously automation is gonna make adverts more efficient and that bottom of funnel stuff is just gonna be about squeezing the lemon, like how much turnover, how much revenue can we get out of the bottom of the funnel. But equally, in order to really grow brands, in order to really get where we're going, real people, human contact, built around a community. Which takes me to the conclusion of attention reward. Let's actually reward people for their attention, let's build communities and go to the future of video for that. So thank you very much. I will trade the stool for the clicker. 10 euros, the only one who can have it.