Masterclasses

Hello everyone and welcome so much to the second edition of VideoAgencyDay. I'm so excited for this session and I think a lot of you are too. This is actually the first conference in the world dedicated solely to the video agency and we've been through so much exciting content throughout the day. We've had a keynote that's really set the scene and laid the grounds for what is happening in the category and kind of the status quo of the video agency. We've had a session where we've had the pleasure of meeting lots of video agencies from around the world and you can catch all these sessions on demand. But before we talk about what has been, we are almost halfway through the day so I am very excited to dive into this little masterclass session we have lined up for you. And first up, we want to talk about the company perspective. So what do companies actually look for in a video agency? And a head of digital marketing will share how modern organizations choose to work with and also scale their work with video agencies. This head of digital marketing is none other than Michelle Williams. She has been driving the global video strategy at Bird & Bird. Bird & Bird is an international law firm. They have approximately 32 offices and over 1,700 lawyers. She now brings that expertise to Ogier where she's focused on really elevating their digital presence across different channels but also really ready to be championing the next evolution that will really drive this video-driven marketing through the legal sector. And if you've ever worked in the legal sector, I think implementing change is especially hard. So to tell you all about how she was able to convince stakeholders and really make the video sector video-driven, sorry, the legal sector video-driven, please welcome to the screen Michelle Williams. Let's see, Michelle, are you here with us? I am. Hey, everyone. How are you doing? Wonderful. We're so happy to have you here with us. Thank you so much for joining. I think people are very excited about this session. I think having the company perspective kind of spill their secrets is going to be a very special one. So the screen is all yours. I'm handing you the digital mic and just let us know if you want to show any videos or share anything. And yeah, the stage is all yours. Yeah, lovely. Can everyone see my screen okay? Okay, I think I'm going to assume. So hey, everyone, and thank you, Amelia, for introducing me. My name is Michelle Williams, and I'm the head of digital marketing at an international law firm called Ogier. And as Amelia highlighted before that, I spent 12 years at another global law firm, Bird & Bird, really scaling their video marketing journey. Kind of what's next for my... I'm sorry to hear that. I think we are having a couple of technical issues, at least for me. The internet connection seems to be a little bit off. So we're going to give Michelle a minute or two and maybe help her restart before we bring back the session. I can help give Michelle a little bit further of an introduction and maybe set her into context a bit. Oh, Michelle, you're back. I can see that your video seems to be working. I think we're having some connection issues. Wonderful. Okay, I think I got a little bird in my ear. A little whisper from a little bird. No, my production team had a great suggestion. I think we're going to try to run Tapio first, if you're ready. And then my team can help Michelle with the connection and just set up so it's a little bit smoother of the stream. Now, I hope Tapio is ready to come on screen. Let's see if Tapio, are you ready to... Yes, I'm always ready. Okay, perfect. But then you can stay on screen while I introduce you. I just wanted to check that you were actually here. So you have built a successful video agency. And this is a story that we love to tell. Because I think it shows a lot of potential and opportunity. So Tapio Haya started his video career out of MTV. For those who remember when MTV was still all about music videos. And he was part of building Videowalla into basically one of Finland's largest video agencies until it was acquired. And Tapio will share his success story from being more of the production company to really becoming this video agency. We hope you will give us some reflections on how you video enabled your team, how they partner with clients and really cater to all their video needs. So to the audience, if you have that pen and paper, I suggest you bring it out now. And Tapio, please, the digital mic is all yours. And we're very excited to follow through and to listen. Thanks, Amelia. Nice intro. A lot of pressure. Okay. But great to be here. And like Amelia said, we had this video agency called Videowalla. And the brand still exists before it was acquired by this big media corp, Sanoma Media, a couple of years ago. But I will still tell you a short story how we ended up to this stage where we are now. And let's see, a couple of short intro from me. So I have been doing video all my career, so over 20 years. And actually now I'm director of Sanoma Content Studio. So Sanoma bought our video agency Videowalla to be their video arm of Sanoma Content Studio and so on. I became director of this whole thing. But I think Amelia's intro was much better than this text here. So let's go on. So Videowalla was founded 10 years ago, and we were acquired three years ago. And like it says, we were digital first video agency. And for a few years, we were even the most profitable video agency in Finland. And a couple of numbers from us, how big we were. The numbers are not anymore public, but at least in Finland, when you're an independent company, actually all the revenue information is public. So here you go. We were like 2.4 million euros revenue four years ago when the numbers were still public. We have three offices in three biggest cities in Finland, Helsinki, Tampere, and Turku. And we were about 30 video marketing professionals. Actually 33 when we were the biggest. So this was how we argument ourselves to our clients. Why they should choose us. And remember, this was like four years ago still. And the biggest differentiator, I would say that when we were founded, there were only like really expensive ad spot companies producing TV spots. And they usually cost starting from 50,000 euros to a million euros. But the landscape was changing. Basically, all the Meta and Google and all the channels were promoting that, hey, now you should do video ads to every channels. And clients were, of course, that, okay, we don't want to pay 50,000 euros for each ad anymore. And another problem that came through it was that quickly, we started hearing that a lot of marketing directors. I was here. I have a lot of marketing directors as friends. And they were telling me that, hey, we have this great spot company, but they don't understand digital channels. They don't understand what works in digital channels. So we decided we want to be that company that understands what works in Facebook, what works in Instagram, what works in LinkedIn. Okay. And maybe I should go a little bit deeper in that. But, and another thing was that usually what was really important for us that usually production companies work through ad agencies. And we had also, we did also that. But for us, we wanted to work directly with other companies. So what we decided that we don't, in our own advertising and how we argument about ourselves was that we don't talk about video production. We don't talk about lenses. We don't talk about 4K resolution or anything. We always talk about marketing. So we talk about video marketing and how video, how video makes, makes you create things through marketing. Okay. Let's go forward. Our customers, Finland is small market and having 30 people, video agents in Finland was that we didn't have any, any specific vertical. We basically, we had B2B clients, B2C clients. They were basically, we were working with all different kinds of clients. Also in our own, own slides, our clients are saying really nice things about us. Surprising. And this was, I think this is a little bit like the core of video agency because usually video production companies are actually not that interested about marketing or they don't actually even maybe don't understand that much about marketing. And so we were always argumentating in marketing terms. So when we approach our clients, we were always talking about our video lab process, the model for effective video marketing. So of course, everything starts with customer needs. Do you need traffic to your website or some other? What's your need? So we start with strategy. Why? What? And then, then we move, move from, damn, it's small text. I can't even see what's going on. What's there anymore? Then we move to concept, of course. And then there's the production part from there, the versioning and distribution. I think this was like really important part showing it to our clients. I'm sure everyone who works in this area knows that versioning can actually be nowadays like a really big part of the project. So you might even create hundreds of different versions to different channels or the sandwich versions, et cetera, that so that putting versioning into this clients were more and more eager to pay of this versioning part. And of course the final measurement. So you have to measure what works and what doesn't. And so running this, this like model for effective video marketing and one area, we were always telling in our more own marketing, we were always saying that, Hey, we are creating very effective marketing, but to be honest, what happened most was that we created videos, gave, we transfer link to our clients and hoped they would call us someday again. So we didn't actually know if those video ads worked or not, but, and to be honest, many of our clients weren't even eager to show us the data or analytics or data and how we solved that, that actually, we hired people from media agents. We hired people who were the most video knowledgeable people from media agencies, hired those people to us. And after that, our clients felt that actually we can give their, we can give them more specific video knowledge that their current digital agencies or media agencies. So, so they were eager to share us the numbers, how, how the video actually worked, et cetera. So I would say one secret for us, how we became so successful was that we hired people from media agency. They could help with analytics numbers, booking, et cetera. So we weren't production production specific anymore. Okay. So short, short history of video. I think timing was perfect. And okay. One slide. Was also that actually, usually all the, all the video companies are founded by like video people, but in this case, it wasn't, it actually, it was this, this group of French who founded this, this Nordic venture family, and they have more technology companies there, but they, they had love towards video. And they founded video company, but I say this because it seems at least, even now that a lot of successful creative companies or video agencies in Finland, actually the founders are not like video people. And I guess this is like, maybe they have, maybe if you have like, how would I say it? Put it politely. Maybe create creative people. Doesn't have the commercial mindset always that some other people have. Okay. It was crazy in the beginning, I guess every companies, but how we started in 2015, timing was perfect. They were only like a really high quality, but really expensive film and TV at spot companies. We promised that we are just more agile and cost effective. This was the promise in the beginning of the first year. We had sales director and we weren't cost effective. Anymore. Maybe it seems so. And then, like I said before, we know this, we know this marketing, marketing directors were saying, we don't have, we don't have partners that video partners that understands digital channels. And this was like six, seven years ago. So we turned ourselves digital first video agency. So we start argumenting always that, Hey, we understand those channels. We understand what works. We understand how to make, how time stopping works. And, and then we hired people from media agency and we started argumenting that we are full service video agency. And this worked really well for us until we were acquired after this. Also, I would say that, what really differentiated us from the competitors was that we started marketing ourselves from the beginning quite heavily. And we had all our own marketing manager. Also, we had our own sales people. So even that I would say it like, and this was our biggest, like a yearly marketing event called, video marketing, video marketing is like video marketing 2024, which, which we had like a year ago. And, and I would say like, like our production capabilities were really good, but what different did it mostly us from the competitors was that we were marketing and selling more than the rest. And this was like, this was a big, big differentiator for us. And I just have to show that what was funny that after Sonoma, this big media company that has newspapers and TV channels, et cetera, acquired us, we were able to use freely the ad space from their channels. So we decided why not to advertise our video agent in the biggest newspaper here in Finland. Does it make sense? I don't know, but it was funny. We also created some other, actually we advertised also video in TV, but why not if it's free? And yeah, we have been running some really good virtual events on top of 23. So some points why I think I actually think I mentioned already while presenting, I think we have succeeded is that we, our strategy was to focus on video marketing. Instead of video production. And the decision behind this was that our, our clients were companies that our clients wasn't ad agencies in ad agencies, creative directors, art directors can usually understand better. What's good visual. Okay. You have, you have red cameras. You have that kind of studio led wall or whatever, but usually. Marketing managers, managers in traditional companies, they can't see the difference, but they understand the talk of marketing. They understand marketing. So we were always talking about marketing and how video benefits marketing and what you can achieve in marketing through video. And this, I said already, we had heavy focus to our own inbound marketing and sales. So we, we had our own marketing manager and for, for sales people. And we were, we were very sales focused. So in the beginning, actually, actually we, we had those, we put everyone to make cold calls. So even the editors where we gave them a list and you should go through every one of those clients. So we have been always like really marketing and sales focused. Also, I think most companies externalize production capabilities, but we found out that it's actually more cost, more cost effective and fits to our culture much better to have quite big in-house. So we hired those, I call them high-end journalists. So people who can actually persons, people who can shoot a record audio, make lightning, edit, et cetera. And this works really well for us. And also the culture thing is, which I find it was really bit hard after we grew to 30 people, but I would say that the culture part, like just do it culture instead of processes. So if you can keep the culture like this, it's less mid-level management and it's also more cost effective once again. But I would say with this attitude, we made quite big productions with only like with three people or something like that. So everyone was always ready to take another role in production and because they were high-end journalists, they were able to do it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tapio, for sharing your story. I think it's an amazing story to hear and equally inspiring every time. So thank you so much for taking the time to be part and sharing the details. Thank you. I do want to say, I do appreciate the printed ad. Every now and then it is fun for digital to spice it up a bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if it brought any results, but it was fun at least. And at least you have a tangible souvenir that you can also refer back to when talking about the good old days. True, true. Definitely. Thank you so much, Tapio. And with a little bit of help from our great support team, we have ironed out some technical quirks, which always is a risk when doing things live. But now we are ready to hear the company perspective from Michelle Williams. And before you get started, Michelle, I really would appreciate if I can take the time to introduce you again, just so I really make sure that you have a warm stage and that you feel confident. And energized. So you can stay here with me on panel mode. But next up, we have the company perspective. So what are companies actually looking for in a video agency? And we have head of digital marketing, Michelle Williams, with us today. She has been driving the global video strategy at Bird & Bird, an international law firm. And she now brings her expertise to Ogier to focus on elevating their digital presence. Across different channels. And I think Michelle is ready to really be part of the next evolution of video driven marketing in the legal sector. So please, Michelle, take it away. And let's see if we have the tech luck with us today. Thanks so much, Amelia. And apologies, everyone. There's a quite heavy winds and stuff and a storm in London today. So I think that might have affected my video there. So I'm going to and thanks very much for the warm intro there. I'm going to cover today a couple of different kind of chapters of using video as a B2B marketer. And, you know, what I've really benefited from the most as a marketer in partnering with agency at different stages of the journey. So I'm going to share a little bit of context in terms of the landscape that B2B marketers are operating in today. I'm going to focus a little bit on the video journey at Bird & Bird and sort of how that how that went. And then I'll look at where I am now into my first 90 days at Ogier. I'll cover some of my agency highlights from different seasons and then just some takeaways from there. So to set the scene a little bit, in a lot of B2B marketing teams, in-house marketing teams, there has been or there is what's happening is a bit of a strategic shift. So a lot of B2B marketers are really catching on to moving from broadcast methods to narrowcast methods. And for a long time now, B2B marketing teams are kind of focused on big brand awareness campaigns, but they're becoming a lot more strategic and specific in how they take their brands to market and what they need out of their video. And I'm not going to cover all of the stats on the screen just there, but a couple of the statistics that are really driving some shifts in the way that B2B marketers organize themselves. One of them is the 95-5 rule, which is a lot of marketing teams are now much more aware of the fact that if you have a total addressable market for your services at any one time, only around 5% are likely to be in market for your services and 95% are not. So a lot of teams are really trying to focus their efforts on targeting that 5% who are in market. And another one is the 47% statistic that you see there, which is, it's just a highlight around data and how B2B marketing teams are really focusing in on how to get the most insight from data to really focus their efforts on getting the most impact. Again, for context, B2B marketers, like a lot of people around the world, are pretty obsessed with AI. So both in terms of the challenges, so competing against a lot more content out there in the market, be that video or written content or infographics. So there's a sense of having to compete in a world with a lot more content. And then there are also lots of opportunities that come with that. And this is where video can play into it as well, because a lot of B2B marketing teams are really trying to hone in on how generative AI search can get them straight in front of their clients and how video plays into that as well. And video can really cut through both of those challenges. And that's a message that I give quite often to the business in terms of why video is so key. I can't remember where I read the statistic, but video is something like 73% more engaging on platforms like LinkedIn, which for any professional services firm is probably going to be their key channel that they're going to be using. So that's a little bit about the context. To kind of go back to the start of my career as a marketer who has focused a lot on video over the years, I thought it might be helpful to just frame how I started things off at Bird & Bird and the different stages that I went through there and how I leaned on agency support at each of those stages. So the first stage of the video journey was really focused on broadcast for brand. So we focused on big thought leadership campaigns and we partnered with a production agency who were ex-BBC documentary filmmakers. Then we really grappled with the rise of user-generated content or personal video. And from an agency perspective, that completely changed our needs and the different levels that we had for those needs. And then post-COVID, the world pivoted and so did Bird & Bird towards video and podcast content. And although I left Bird & Bird a few months ago, the team there was at a point where they were taking stock of the video content, podcast content, webinar content, et cetera, that they had. And really trying to hone in on quality over quantity and around alignment and really bringing the brand to life through video and through animation. So to hone in on phase one of the Bird & Bird video brand journey, which was studio and broadcast, that was back in kind of between around 2012, 2015. So not a lot of businesses were using video in that way at that time. And so it was a little bit of a struggle to get the lawyers to understand, you know, why should they use video and, you know, what could they get out of that medium? So what we were doing at the time was these two to three minute talking heads videos. And the agency I mentioned by the name of Next Shoot, they were documentary filmmakers by trade. So they brought a huge amount of knowledge there. So from my perspective as the junior marketer who was tasked with doing that, I really leaned on them for storyboarding and talent coaching and really putting these videos into context. And the way we got going with that process was by just seeking out the lawyers who were open to doing different things. We were inspired by Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point theory. So we were trying to seek out the 20% of the people in the business who would be open and who would convince the others to do it. And that worked incredibly well there. So my takeaway from that period from an agency perspective is that don't be afraid to use your superior knowledge compared to your average B2B marketing team, especially if you're working with juniors. There are very diplomatic ways that you can kind of coach people and gently guide them to thinking about using the right context for video and framing things in the right way. So and that same advice, it really applies to working with kind of C3 people and with the lawyers. As well, the agency we worked with, they were so adept at coaching really, really nervous experts. And they would speak to them really calmly and really quietly and would just kind of coach things out of them. And I think that is where as a client, I got the most value out of that agency was just by them being absolute experts, knowing exactly how to coach really nervous people and knowing how to ask the right questions. So that was my kind of main learning from that as a client. Phases two and three at Bird & Bird, this was the beginning of kind of user generated content or personal video. And this was when videos and podcasts really kind of really took over. And from a client side, this was a real race. So at Bird & Bird in particular, we had marketing teams from all over the network. So 30 different influencers who were saying to us, oh, we really need to get ahead with video. How do we do this? So as the kind of central marketing team, we raced to produce things like video toolkits. So we had this like one page crib sheet of DIY, like it was kind of like a guerrilla video marketing campaign toolkit. So we gave each team a one pager. We gave them Amazon links for how they could buy their own stuff. And our team marketing days at that point for that two to three years, we spent a whole lot of time getting agencies in, getting video experts in, getting producers in to upskill the whole marketing team on how to produce video. How could they coach the lawyers themselves? What did they need to do? How did they shoot it? Even just basic things like, you know, always shooting in a landscape of a portrait. So this was a time when our agency support network went from being this documentary level production agency to a whole network of different agencies of varying different sizes all across the whole network. So again, from a client perspective, the more agile and nimble and proactive agency partners were able to be, and the more they could kind of reach out to people that they knew within their professional networks, it was incredibly helpful to us because say, if we wanted to like, shoot something in Hong Kong, for example, and centrally, we knew nobody in that market, but we were able to lean on our agency support and say, hey, we need to do this. We don't have the budget to get you guys over there. But who do you know in the network? And again, just the more supportive and proactive our agency partners were, it just made them easy to do business with. It made things easier for us. And it meant that we would always remember them and kind of give them our higher production value. So things got very spindly around that time. Where is Burnham Burton now in its video? Like a lot of sort of mid to larger sized law firms, it's got a very healthy and thriving video webinar and podcast ecosystem, which is supported by a range of different agencies at a range of different levels. So it's everything from, you know, production and retainer support, for day to day editing, when our main video in-house person is away, through to our higher end, higher value production stuff, through to supporting bigger level events around the network. So for example, in the Nordics, we've got a kind of a network of different people that they use there now. Oops, sorry. And it's fair to say that that era of really catching up with, where are we at with marketing now? Video marketing now, where do we need to get to? As a marketing team, we were so preoccupied with how to keep up that we sort of lost that art of asking, you know, should we do this? Is this the right fit for video? Or even just asking, how can we best translate this particular topic onto video? So I would say, as an agency partner, there is, even if you're working with a really video hungry client who's keen to move, you know, at scale, there's a lot of value still to be had in kind of asking trickier questions and really encouraging people to think of things from an end to end, you know, by a journey perspective, because there's a lot that your average marketing team doesn't know about video marketing that you will know. Phase four at Badenberg, which is kind of going on now, is motion and sonic, the integration of AI, and just bringing back the question of why or making things a lot more commercially focused as far as video podcast and webinar. And on that journey, there were several different ways in which video agency partners helped me hugely on that journey and helped the entire business on that journey. So initially, it was help around storyboarding and talent coaching and gently challenging the brief just to make sure that those topics were fit for purpose. There was quite a lot of firing and delighting. So again, my favorite agency of all time, Nextute, they would bring me lovely videos that they'd worked on for other clients, just to really help us challenge ourselves, do more and do better. And I loved seeing what else they were up to and seeing the real kind of craftsmanship that can go into video. So just, you know, trying to move the needle and show what's possible was incredible. And then branching out when we needed to scale video globally, it was a huge challenge. And the agency help of pointing to different experts in different places helped us out immensely. And it made that relationship with the agency really sticky, because we were so successful across the network because of that relationship we had with them. And then finally, just moving to a point where video was so embedded, we needed a flexible retainer. So that was when we kind of had, you know, we moved to having a third agency that was anything will load, but it's, again, the beautiful risk you take when everything is live. And we've been working with Michelle Williams also a lot in her Bird and Bird studio. So if you want to have a look at, yeah, some of the things that she built in house at Bird and Bird, we have a session with her video producer, his name is George. Mole, still active at Bird and Bird and kind of running the studio from the marketing perspective. So if you're interested to have a little bit of a sneak peek, or actually a real look into the studio that Michelle Williams helped build over at Bird and Bird, you can check out the session from webinar days, which is on demand on the 23 website. And there you'll get to see a little bit of what she's talking about, what was once a kind of broadcast and streaming room that turned into a full on video studio. And I can see the Michelle has lost her stream. So I think that is the the natural ending of this session, unfortunately, but I want to give a huge thanks to both Michelle and Tapio that came on screen today to share their incredible success stories and giving us a little masterclass into, yeah, the company perspective and how to successfully build a video agency. So thank you both to Tapio and Michelle. We have one more point on the agenda today. And I'm very excited about the video agency day lounge that is coming up next. So please stay tuned in this webinar room and you will be automatically redirected