Meet the Video Agency

Hello everyone! So great to see you again. And if you've just tuned in for this session, then welcome. We're so excited to be together with all of you today and welcome so much to the second edition of Video Agency Day. This is the world's first conference on the video agency and here at TwentyThree we have a huge passion for agencies. So we've developed this event especially for our agency people. If you were not part of our previous session, hello, my name is Amelia. Welcome so much. In this session we're going to be learning from some of, well, actually the pioneers at the world's leading video agencies. They'll give us a very special treat because they are going to be introducing themselves and their companies, of course, but also give us a little sneak peek into their clients and some of the competences that they have developed to really bring value and help their companies and customers thrive in this video first world. So we're very excited to get started with this session. We're going to meet a lot of interesting speakers in this session. So please buckle down and stay tuned and try to keep up with me because I think this is going to be very fun, very dynamic and filled with energy. So I'm excited to welcome our first speaker who is James Hilditch. He is founder of Bear Jam and he has probably spent the past, I would say, decade on building an award-winning company that's created strategic and really stand out videos for brands like Netflix, Red Bull Racing and even McDonald's. Definitely some household brands there. And he really focuses on or says that he's driven by by clarity and creativity, but also impact that really helps these brands tell their stories and cut through the noise. So please welcome James to the screen. Let me see. Hi, James. How are you doing? Hi, I'm good. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for the kind words and the intro. You have to be worried about what you put on LinkedIn because it might get dug up at something like this. And yeah, well, thanks for the intro. That's me. It's good to be here. Excited to get into it. Cool. The screen is all yours, so you can just take it away and then send it back to me once you're done with your introduction. Sounds great. Hi, everyone. So before we start, I just thought it'd be interesting for me to hear who we've got in the room, who's listening, where you're dialing in from and if you're kind of production company side or agency side or brand side. And then I can maybe slightly tailor what I talk about to make sure it's like really, really interesting to everyone and as relevant as possible. So feel free to just drop in the chat where you're from geographically and kind of professionally. So as Amelia said, I'm James. I'm the ECD and founder of Bear Jam. So I set Bear Jam up 13 years ago, just kind of classic founder story. It was just me in a bedroom. I've grown the business over that time through some ups and downs, but we're about 12 or 13 people now, full time staff. And obviously we've got lots of trusted freelancers that we work with all the time. But I might as well just play our reel and let the reel do the talking. And then I'll get into kind of a bit more about what the business is doing now. Here comes the reel. Here comes the reel. I'll do it. I'll do it for Burger. We've got, we've got like, as I'm sure some of you production company side will have, we've got a couple of different versions of the reel and I can never remember which one it is. There's one that after that final logo, there's like another bit and I always talk over it. So I'm pleased I didn't include that one today. So when, when I was invited to join the session today, I was kind of reading the information about the event and I saw the stat that I've got the one on screen now. Most production companies are now back at 2019 revenue. Revenue levels. And that's obviously pretty scary and it's not great to hear. I mean, you do hear of production companies that have, you know, closed down and then, you know, it's, it's, it is tough out there. I guess a bit of a beacon of hope. We've, we've had a really good year. We've grown our revenue this year. Now I can't promise I've got all the answers. We've worked incredibly hard and we've tried all sorts of different things. It feels like, you know, some, some of those things are now working. So I kind of just want to share a little bit. With you all today about, about kind of what, what we've seen has worked for us. I've only got a short slot, so I won't be able to do everything. But I hope you'll be around for questions later as well. So the way we see our clients is you've got your kind of short term ones, which are kind of one and done. They, you know, they may come and you do a project. Hopefully it's great. And you never see them again. You've got your kind of more medium term clients and that's, you know, semi-regular. They might come back. Months or hopefully even more ugly than that. Then you've got your kind of longer term clients and it's, it's kind of focusing on these, which is, I think have really helped our growth over the few years. Now you can't, what we've seen is you can't just kind of necessarily get brand new clients and assume they're going to be long-term clients. Often you have to nurture and grow your short term to medium. And then beyond that, sometimes they never go beyond short. Sometimes they're always stuck in medium. Very, very, very rarely. We haven't told us once they might jump straight to long-term, but the majority of our clients, we've kind of built a relationship with over time. And I think the real kind of secret source for that. And it's, I guess it's not really much of a secret. It's just making sure as a kind of production company, as a supplier, however you want to look at it, that you're just as valuable as possible to your client. It's not just about how good was that like piece of video content you produce for them. I'm sure everyone in this room can do absolutely amazing work, but it's what else can you do to your client and trying to changing your mindset of how can I be more valuable to this individual or to this company? So if you're speaking to a brand and it's a marketing team, you want to try and understand what you think about, what can you do to make sure that they kind of can't live without you and that you're really helping them achieve their objectives. And those objectives might not be, Oh, we just want something that looks amazing with, you know, all the latest gadgets and toys on. We kind of break that down. I think I did see a little chart similar to this on the, on the TwentyThree material that they've prepared. So I think, you know, we used to always obsess around like the creative, which obviously is hugely important for creating work and making sure that the content you're creating for clients is brilliant. But also there's the kind of production side that goes hand in hand with the creative. Then only recently we started to add the kind of the strategy piece to that puzzle, knowing that a lot of the clients we work with, they know they needed video content, but they were a little bit lost with the type of video content they should be producing and where it sat within that kind of wider marketing or even video content strategies. So for us really focusing on these three areas has, has been quite revolutionary. We still do those short term projects and those one and dones, but it's really focusing on trying to like put that strategy, strategic hat on and, and build a longer term relationships with your client. Because the prize there is potentially a year's worth of content rather than just one project in isolation, which, you know, it's good for a huge, it's obviously good for the business from our side, but it's really great for the client as well that you can advise them and build that relationship and kind of all the other benefits that go along with it. So when I say strategy, the kind of stuff that I'm talking about is really helping your clients understand and get under the skin of like how video is going to help them achieve their business goals. And when you're, I'm not going to go into a kind of a lesson on how you do your strategy. I don't think we've got time for that, but the type of things that it covers is obviously understanding your client's goals, where they're trying to get to understanding their audience, who they're trying to communicate with or sell to, or whatever it might be figuring out the messaging, like what are we trying to communicate to those different audience groups? And then obviously looking at their competitors, we then can kind of look at building out video content pillars, like storytelling architecture, defining format systems, different types of series that they might be able to do and mapping out their channels, distribution paths. So it's a lot of work to do this and do it right. You can definitely do kind of lighter versions, but to do the real deep dive work, it's, you know, it does become a whole kind of piece of work in itself. Something that you can charge your clients with, clients for, because, you know, it's, it's of value and you need to remember that. But the prize for getting it right is what we call, well, what we call in Bear Jam is the jam plan. So the jam plan kind of allows you to map out a year's worth of video content for your clients and match them to the different audiences, the different business objectives, the different messaging, business messages, your content pillars. So once you've done your video strategy, which we do with our clients, we can then start to map out all the content that they could create over the, over the coming year. It might not all be for us to create. It might be for them to work with other production partners or for them to produce in-house. But by having these types of conversations with your clients and getting to this level of detail gives you and your clients visibility over the whole year. And that's where you're really adding value to it. So we've mapped out their content pillars and all that kind of content themes, built it into the jam plan. And over the course of, I think it's about 18 months, there was 20 different video campaigns, over a hundred different video assets. The whole process got really slick by the end of it because we knew everything that we had coming up and we could just plan really efficiently. The producers really, and obviously producers love a spreadsheet. They loved all this type of stuff. The client had like much better visibility over their budgets. And could get sign off from their kind of senior stakeholders much more easily. So I definitely recommend trying to get into some more strategic work. Now I know that's easier said than done. So I've kind of just put a few tips in here of, you know, how to maybe get started if it's not something you're already doing. I think it will probably need a little bit of homework from your side. If you're new to this and you're coming from a kind of production side, it was definitely a steep learning curve for me. But very quickly you start to understand, you know, the language and the types of questions you should be asking your clients. Like what are their business objectives? Who's their audience? If you've got a brief for a video, just start asking these questions beyond, well, what camera should we shoot it on? And how many days of post have we got? I think, yes, all that's important. And that's the stuff we love. But if you're trying to build these longer term relationships, you need to kind of dig into the business objectives and marketing objectives a little bit more. The other thing I'd really recommend is just finding a strategy. Strategist, you know, chat GPT can take you so far, but a great strategist that you can work with and bring into your client conversations and perhaps even start to map out that strategy will kind of be worth its weight in gold. I think a little bit of homework, it's probably worth just doing a bit of research on Hero Hub and Help, which is a kind of strategic content model that helps brands kind of just understand where they should be creating video content and what sort of cadence. And understanding, I think, and the other thing is just understanding kind of awareness, consideration and conversion. So when someone's looking to buy a product, and you guys probably all do it yourselves, you know, there's a sort of top of the funnel awareness, which is just kind of big brand, like seeing a logo and understanding what that brand is. And then right at the bottom of the sales funnel, you need a different type of video content. And I think understanding that and talking to your clients about that type of language and those types of having different types of video content at different stages of their sales funnel just really helps kind of align the type of creative that you want to be producing for them. Right, I've got no idea how long that was. I was talking quite quickly. But if I've got time, I'm happy to jump into any questions. If that was good. That was great. I think we have to save the questions to the end of the entire session just so I can keep on track with the with the upcoming ones. But have a little look in the chat because I could definitely see people tuning in from some different places around the world. So super cool with a little bit of engagement. Thanks very much. Nice. Thank you so much, James. Great. So first one down only five more to go. I'm very excited. Now we have CEO Anoush Matsakania. Who helps tech companies really gain trust and she helps them try to simplify their product communication through her work at Burnwee. And Burnwee is a video marketing agency that she has co founded and that she runs out of Spain. So please welcome Anoush to the screen. Hi, Anoush. Not in my always like fancy mic mode. I'm outside of the city. I'm really sorry for that. No worries. I think it just goes to prove that webinars can happen from anywhere in the world. Everywhere. Thank you. But the screen is yours. So please take it away, Anoush. Okay, I'll just share my screen and get started. Hopefully it's good to go. And one more time. Hi, everyone. I'm Anoush Matsakania. I'm a founder and CEO at Burnwee. So my background, I will just give you a short information about myself. My background is in business development and marketing. But I started this business, a video agency business with my co founder, who is also my husband at this moment. And we started it because he was in video production and I was in marketing. So we wanted to combine our skills for this wonderful initiative. So let me say what is Burnwee. So Burnwee is a 100% tech focused video marketing agency. And actually, we are the very first one in the world. We started back in 2018. So why a tech actually love Burnwee? Why we're the favorite one for them, because they are not just connecting with us because they need a nice video, but they are looking for someone who can understand their complex products, create a clear message for them, simplified or better engagement and elevate their online presence. So that's all about the Burnwee. So why we started Burnwee and this is important point because it will help everyone else who are just getting started to understand from where to start what to focus on. So we saw a gap and the gap was that tech companies were building brilliant products, but they are struggling to explain them. And the industry was on the other hand, full of video production teams that creating beautiful visuals, but their message and the story was often missing. So kind of like tech companies were just coming with their story and saying, Can you make it visual, and there was missing some kind of points like missing the expertise. So between this, we decided to not just build another production studio, but we built a video marketing agency. So what we did, actually, we gathered all the experts in one team who were genuinely excellent and what they do. So starting from building the right message, creating the most engaging storyline, finishing up with premium quality visuals, and all of that together, brought us to create the videos that are not just look good, but they are producing high ROI. That was the goal for us. So who we are today, let's quickly just talk about that. So eight years after we are now at less than the blog's global community of 400 plus tech clients across 38 countries, and our main domain of cooperation are AI and SaaS companies from cybersecurity, FinTech, enterprise tags, and so much more. And our success was comes from focusing on one niche only. So it's only tech, and one product, only videos and only marketing videos. And this really helped us to actually make a difference in the industry. We worked with famous tech companies like Vacuum, Round, Clevo, Chris, which are so known in tech industry, and also even produce videos for HubSpot, Zoom, and Procore platforms. This is the time I will show you our, let's say, flamer video and the showreel, which will explain in 60-70 seconds who we are and what we do. With text, image, audio. With all respect, a combination of these three is what makes the difference. Video is the king of all content and an important part of how we receive information nowadays. Creating an effective video is not that easy. And that's when comes BurnWe, a video marketing agency. We at BurnWe believe that correctly strategized video is a game changer. How so? Imagine. Just like you custom tell your suit for an important meeting, the same way we custom tell all our digital videos. Creating unique visual content using the latest marketing tips to explain your most complicated ideas, target your client group, and bring back your vision to you. Check out our digital videos for leading tech companies and startups from animated explainers to platform demos, app tutorials, and social media promo videos. And some of them are award winning. Here at BurnWe, we know how to go from good to great. Be our awesome partner. Contact us today and let us bring your vision to your customer in a matter of minutes. Back to me. Yeah, my mic is working. So let's talk a bit. So about success, why we're bringing we had a success because that would be, I think, interesting for new starters. So I think one of the first thing that helped us to success is like thinking like product teams, because like a lot of people can create videos. But if you want to create video for tech, you have to first of all understand technology. So our job wasn't just animate screens, but actually stand between the company and their target audience and highlighting what really matters like from client perspective. And another thing that was important that noticing details that teams may have missed, like the tech teams, I have seen bugs. So we can see bugs that like even team tab and like fix everything. The second thing I would say that we build the right content, not just like a video. So every company needs different content, content, depending on their goals and campaigns. So it's not like there is just a one video type and you have to create only that. I'm really sorry if there is a bit of background noise on myself. So we first understand the goal of the company, understand why they need a video, and then we decide a video type and decide like what we have to create, be it like a product explainers, feature based videos, sales walkthroughs, investor pitch videos, like all of that we decide like only after understanding their goals, and like a strategy. So let's talk a bit the evaluation of the video industry, because it's very important to understand where we are at this moment. So first, like before, I would say there was TV commercials, our main, let's say, audience. And yeah, there were TV commercials, like big commercials, big gadgets. And then they've started the social media era where digital world actually come together. So this is the place actually when we entered into market. And now I think everything is changing a bit because, you know, like AI entering in a space, production became really fast. So like everyone can create videos. I think now the video agency focus should be on the product, like whichever product it is. So product first approach would be our goal to actually create videos. So we will not be replaceable in the world. Let's talk about the future of the videos a bit like how we imagine it's going. So I think AI will speed up the production, but strategy and human creativity will remain the crucial part. Video will become a core business tool, not just the marketing assets anymore. The production understanding is now a mess, but not an add zone anymore. One time videos are out of the market and replacing, I think, more strategic content video, constant video content. And I see that founders will become content creators. So everyone should have their personal branding. So in this case, agencies will be more like their strategic partners. Just shortly, I want to like sum up what's Burn We. So at Burn We, I think we believe that tech teams deserve videos that actually help people understand what they have built. So if we can make that journey clearer and easier, that means I think we have done our job. So thank you everyone for having me. In case of any questions, feel free to write me on LinkedIn because I'm very active there. And just follow me because I'm building my personal brand using video content there. Thank you. Insights, Anoush. And I love that the proof is in the pudding. Definitely walking your own talk on everything video. And I can attest to, yes, you are very active on LinkedIn because that's also where I found you. But thank you so much for being a part of today's session. Moving on to another video agency based out of the UK. So a little colder temperatures than what they're dealing with in Spain for Anoush there. But we have Lev Crib, who is the founder of Made2See, a leading British video agency working with global B2B brands to really build out their strategic but also their tactical videos and webinar capabilities to make sure that they have this holistic approach. I like to say that on top of that or in his spare time, he also works as a podcast host and is the author of the webinar Excellence Manifesto. But I don't know, Lev, if you would define that as in your spare time or if it's also part of business hours or exactly how you divide the cake. It's all the same. It's all the same. However you want to slice it. Exactly. A living, breathing video pioneer. So the screen is all yours and just roll with it. I'm excited to see what you have for us. Wonderful. Thank you very much. And thanks for having me. And thanks for joining us for the session. Yeah, I want to share a few thoughts around how we think, why that matters, and then I'll show you some examples at the end as well of the kind of work we do. And maybe that'll inspire you to do something similar or perhaps develop it even further, which is always great. Developing things on is always great. So I've got a few slides prepared for you. We are Made2See. We specialize in video, live streaming, webinars, and podcasting. I'll talk you through how that splits in terms of strategy and the execution side. But there's four key principles that we think about when we talk to our customers at all times. The first one is audience value. It's very clear. If we don't create value for the audience, and I think one of our previous speakers said that as well, if there's no value in it for the audience, then why are we even doing it? That's the core thing. So how do we create audience value? That's what we think about as one of the four key things. The second one is why should the audience care? If we create something and it's not with audience value in mind and it's not with the audience in mind, they even care about what we have to say. We've got it all wrong if they don't care. So we have to think about the audience first and put them first into everything that we do. The third thing we then look at is the format. In today's world, there are so many different ways to consume content, whether it's live or on demand, short form or long form, in video and writing, different channels, different requirements, different vertical, horizontal formats. It is so complex and everybody has a different preference. So we have to think about how are we going to land the content that we produce in video in the right format at the right time for the right audience. And if we get that wrong alongside the why should they care and what is the audience value, again, we're just doing something wrong. And the fourth thing we think about is how do we measure impact? We may have done all the three things I said before right, and then we can't measure the impact. And that is impact on our audience. It's impact on our pipeline. It's impact in the world, impact on even our team's satisfaction with what we do. There has to be impact and there has to be a way to measure it. And I think when we get to thinking about video and measuring impact, I think that's often where things fall short. So those are four things that we look at. Moving on to the next bit, Amelia said a little bit about us. We've been around for 10 years. We specialize in B2B. We're UK headquartered. And in that time, we've done thousands of videos and webinars, live streams and podcasts. So we do that for tech clients. We do that for pharmaceutical clients. Typically, it's larger organizations, but it's a great opportunity for us to put all that we preach into practice as well. So when we run webinars, and this is where we came from, we used to be called webinar experts. Now we're called made to see. We changed earlier in the year because we don't just do webinars and haven't just done webinars for a long time. But when we run webinars, we must show results. And when I say we, I mean us as a company, but I'll say that we for everybody is on this webinar today because webinars have such a lot of data. Not only can we see who registered, we can see who attended, how long they were there for, what they downloaded or clicked on, questions they asked, poll answers they gave. There is a wealth of data. And we cannot just run webinars without showing results. And that is, I think, widely understood. Now, when we get to video, often that consideration goes away. And really, if you think about it, the only difference is the registration form. Videos don't necessarily have registration forms. But why would we not measure impact? Why wouldn't we look at what are the results? Why wouldn't that drive us? So that's where I think we're in today's world with so much video around that often that falls a little bit short. So there are a few things that I think set us apart in that space. Because we came from the webinar side, we've always been very, very strategic. But we always combined it with the execution side as well. So when we think about projects, whether it's video or live streaming or whatever else it is, we think about what is the pipeline impact? What is the audience journey like? What are we thinking about in terms of creating value for the audience that really makes a difference, that engages the audience? And once we've done that side of things, that's when we get to execution and we look at which lenses we're going to use and how many cases we're going to use. The hundreds of cables we've got that we need to take. But combine those two together, and that's where you've got a really strong case to actually say, we're not a production company. We are effectively a video strategy agency that has a strategic first mindset where we can bring and plug in the execution into it as well. But ultimately, always with the audience in mind, what the value is to them, why they should care, that we deliver it in the right format, and ultimately we measure the impact at the end. So that's the crucial thinking about all of that. So here's a slide on AI, because everybody talks about AI. Of course we use AI. Of course it's human-led and it doesn't lead us. And that's all I say about it, because it's not an AI workshop. But yes, of course, AI is part of all of this. So there are four things that we typically see in conversations with our clients, four challenges, tactical challenges. Let's bring it back to tactics. The first one is typically around audience growth and audience reach, struggling to achieve that. There's also the trouble with finding content. We have content available. We know what we want to talk about, but we don't really know who's going to speak on it. We haven't really got anything ready for it, nothing as a foundation for a script. And that can be a challenge as well. We also find often that we simply don't have enough time. There's issues with team size, especially over the last perhaps few years, that's been reduced and things are just too admin heavy. And that can be a challenge for our customers. And the other one is conflicting priorities. Again, especially over the last couple of years, there are just so many things that our clients, marketing teams, comms teams are juggling that they struggle with. And as a result, they don't serve any of those things well that they need to do. And out of all those four challenges, we can find ways to serve that and help support that. So I want to give you three examples of how we do that strategically and then help with that execution. So ServiceNow, we started working with in 2017. They asked us to, from a more or less standing start, they were running a few webinars here or there, but create a webinar program and a webinar infrastructure that would fit into a webinar centric campaign activity. They had a model that they wanted to run as a campaign engine, but they needed webinars to be at the very center of that. So we created the infrastructure, we created the strategy around it, we created the processes, designed the program overall, looked at all the different aspects of that and started rolling that out. And that was coming from a strategic thought perspective with a view to executing at excellent levels. And ServiceNow is a hyper growth company. It was in 2017, it is still now. And as we see, there's a lot of text on the slide, but as we saw at the first year of completely running that, a 61% increase year over year in pipeline, just by putting a place, a strategic process of doing that. By year two, year over year, 87% pipeline increase. By year three, and this is the headline number of the slide, 236% year over year pipeline increase. And that was driven by webinars based on the strategic process we didn't put in place. And obviously that was a big collaboration with a lot of people on the team from ServiceNow as well as ours. But the focus on strategy laid the foundation for that real growth to follow the hyper growth of the company as well. Second example I want to give you is the brand ambassadors program. So this is, we all see the kind of employee generated or user generated content, somebody walking the dog or walking in the forest or sitting in the car, talking passionately about what they do at work. And that is a great format. It's authentic. It is informative. It is engaging because it's human to human. And often companies struggle to make that a strategic piece. It's often almost decentralized individual employees deciding to do that. We created a process by which we can enable them through workshops to think about strategically how to script, how to get the format right, how to talk on camera, how to record it in their own setting without needing a professional team behind it. Then hand it over to us to be able to professionally edit, help them with the planning and scheduling, and then ultimately create a program that is strategic with a tactical execution. And the third example I wanted to share with you is what we call conversation in a box. This is marketing led sales enablement where we ultimately look at a webinar and the beneficiary of the webinar in terms of within the company is the sales team. They get the leads from that. Often sales teams are very short on time. They don't necessarily have the time to watch a webinar for an hour, then take notes about what was said within it and how they can use that in their sales conversations. So what we do is we digest the webinar content, create a summary that actually summarizes what happened in the webinar rather than what the description said would take place. We then look at, okay, which parts were really important, which capture the content in a short period of time. So we generate several video clips that the sales team can use both for their own information, but also sharing with their prospects. And then from that, we generate talking points. So we could generate three or five conversation starters, questions that they can talk to their prospects about. And we also actually give them the answer according to what happened in the webinar. So these are all things that the sales teams can take to their prospects, to their customers, engage them in a really rich and valuable conversation with, and then always point back to the webinar content. But it saves time, enables the sales team, and ultimately provides additional insights like the accounts that were there, the questions that were asked by the audience, and ultimately provide that value to the audience, which is the internal audience, in this case, the sales team. So those were three examples. I hope these were helpful and inspire some thought. But obviously, if we have a chance later, we'd love to answer any questions you might have. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your insights. I would encourage everyone in the audience to just continuously drop your questions in the chat. We'll see if we get time for it at the end of this session. If not, you might be able to get them answered in the lounge session at the end of today's program. Thank you very much, Lev. And next up, we have yet another video pioneer. His name is none other than John Mowat. He is a video marketing pioneer and co -founder of the British video agency, Hurricane. And he is at this point a global speaker that travels the world and explores the question, or actually the reasons, of why psychology, or the psychology of why video works. He's also written a book, Video Marketing, and it is currently translated to seven different languages. John Mowat, you are the author, the speaker, and the video marketing pioneer that is going to give us some insights on how you have built and run Hurricane. How are you doing? I'm good. Yeah. Thank you. Lovely to meet everyone. Thanks for having me. How long do I get, by the way? Is it like 15 minutes? 10 minutes. 10 minutes. You only get 10 minutes. I get 10 minutes. It's fine. Don't you worry. Don't you worry. I'm going to sneak back on screen in panel mode whenever you're running short for time. So don't worry. You will feel the pressure. Over to you. Hello, everybody. Thanks for very kind introductions. Yes. So my name is John Mowat. I'm just going to dive into some slides. It's a really interesting conversation we're having today, which is about where does the video agency sit in the marketplace? How do we compete against marketing agencies? How do we add value to customers? So it's like, I thought what I would do is very much like just talk about the journey that we've been on and how I found that that has helped solve some of the problems that our customers have, how we've maybe solved some of the how we sell ourselves problems, who our competition is, all those kind of things. So I'm going to endeavor to share my slides now. And I'm sure somebody will tell me if it doesn't work. So I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that. There we go. So we should be sharing slides now. Yeah. So the Hurricane Group, I'll tell you about that in a minute. So before that, I was at the BBC for 16 years. I was a TV documentary maker. There's me in the bottom right in Iraq doing the thing that you do when you're early 20s. Yeah. So I was a documentary maker. I've written two books now, in fact. And I was reflecting on this earlier that when I wrote the first edition of Video Marketing Strategy, all the things that we're talking about today, like video strategy and video marketing strategy, these things didn't really exist. So at the time, the reason that we called the book Video Marketing Strategy was because we didn't really have a name for it. And now it's kind of become video marketing and video strategy. But it's interesting how these concepts have become very much sort of ingrained in what we do. Hurricane Group, why do we have a group, firstly? Because it's three companies or four companies, in fact. Why do we have a group? So this is a really badly laid out slide because I put it together sort of this morning. But when I was looking at everything that video is involved in today, it isn't just, you know, I mean, it is the classics that we're talking about, brand films, webinars, streaming, on sites. It is TV commercials. But it's like it's every part of marketing from marketing effectiveness, which is this whole kind of like Byron and Shaw. Sort of like Benet and Field type area of like how to become more effective as marketers. It's got that whole strategic thing to it. It's got very much about how we become experts in verticals. So it's like specific verticals have different requirements. But it is also TikTok, social selling, content creators, affiliate selling. And when you map out everything that video agencies do, suddenly you realize that we're not just a new type of production company. We are actually in direct competition with marketing agencies. We are in direct competition with a lot of these other agencies. And we are taking our seat at the table. And I think that's a really interesting thing for us to think about. And it's why when we've divided up our company into the ways that we have, we have a few different ways of doing it. So without going too much into like, you know, this is all the amazing work we've done. We've got Hurricane Media, which is a classic what you might call video marketing agency, if there is such a thing as a classic video marketing agency. We're only going like eight years. But what we're doing here is we're making beautiful emotive. This is a film for Sykes Holiday Cottages. It's on TV. It's done all the social cutdowns. It's got paid media behind it. It's very, you know, that's what Hurricane Media does. It does these big emotive things. And when we're talking about it, we're talking about emotion, which is what we talked about. And the earlier Amelia mentioned sort of like why video works, why it changes behavior. And that whole kind of like using video to drive behavior change. Because it makes us feel something. That's what Hurricane Media does. And it's really powerful when you get into it. But what we realized over time was, you know, video isn't just about this stuff. It's not just about making emotional connections. Which is why we found ourselves needing what we call Hurricane Social, which is a separate agency, which also does video. But it's very, very different, right? It's doing things like this, which is for Avanti. It's very TikTok-y. It's finding collaborators that can do reviews for us. And yes, these things are both video. But they're fundamentally different things. The skill sets and the team that you need, we found that we need for a team where, you know, for example, this one for Beauty Kitchen. The team that you need to find influencers to do a video is very, very different from the kind of people that you need to go and make a beautiful emotive brand film. But they're both video. They both have a relevance. For both, you can do both for a brand. So, for example, at the moment, we're working with brands where we're doing their social content, which is influencer-driven. But we're also doing their kind of big brand films. So I think it's really important that we as video agencies realize just how broad-spectrum video is. But also, if you're selling really big brand films for like 80,000 euros, 100,000 euros, it's very difficult to sell somebody a retainer of 3 ,000 euros a month to do their influencer marketing. The separation into different agencies for us has been really good because they're different skill sets, they're different teams, they're different approaches. And sometimes we come together and sometimes we don't. So that's been a really interesting journey for us was to bolt in social media. And then because of that, we actually started bolting in other things that are still related to video, but which are much more like a classic marketing agency should do. So, for example, we're working with Fresh Student Living at the moment, and we're doing the AI search because actually when you're talking about AI search, a lot of that is directed by what you're putting out on video. We're doing their social search because social search is a search on TikTok and it's a search on Meta and it's a search on Instagram Reels. So it actually makes sense to go to a content agency who are video specialists in order to do your GSO and your sort of AI search. And because of that, we started branching into tools like this, which is where we can start looking at where people are appearing in AI search. We can start comparing them to how people are doing. And it's really mental that a video agency, I suppose it's the ultimate evolution of where a video agency would go because suddenly we're talking about SEO here. You know, we're talking about AI SEO, but actually all of these things are driven by content. And we know that all of these things are driven by video content. So in a way, it does make complete sense. That we would be doing these things. Yeah, so it's a very nerdy tool that we're doing at the moment. The other thing that we're doing really successfully, I think, is we're bolting in paid media to the offering. And I think this really changes the conversation. So this is something we've done for Jackson's Art. They give us £60,000 in media spend. We've made them £1.3 million in purchase. That's a ROAS of 16. Again, this is what a media agency would be doing. You know, traditionally, we as video production companies, hand over our beautiful, emotive film to a media agency who then immediately take all the credit and put some media behind it and get all the performance reviews. We as an agency now offer that service. We've got in-house media buying. And it means that you own the conversation. So it's been a real journey to sort of bolt those in. Again, another thing we've been doing is UGC and sort of like getting people to sort of send in things which, again, have got paid media behind it. So that's kind of like the second company, Hurricane Social. And then the third company I want to talk about was Hurricane Medical. And I think the reason for Hurricane Medical is there is some verticals that just want you to know, want to know that you're a specialist in this area. And over the last 20 years, we've made hundreds and hundreds of medical films. So we've separated that out into an entirely different vertical, again, with a different team. And this works really, really well, because when you're talking to Sanofi or Pfizer or GSK, they want to know that you're a medical specialist. So I think that the journey that production companies are on are typically production company becomes video marketing agency. Video marketing agency starts to shred on the toes of traditional marketing agencies like influencer marketing or whatever. And I think after that, the ultimate evolution is then to start adding in specific verticals. And I wouldn't say that we've cracked it. But what I'm saying is I think by separating out into these areas, whether you do it, you know, within a company or you set up separate companies, you know, I think that's all very much. Sort of similar. So that's us. I did it in about eight and a half minutes. I think the key for us is realizing that video production, it's marketing, right? It's like speaking the language of marketing people, learning how to talk about marketing effectiveness, moving it beyond simple models to like actual kind of proper, you know, how do we grow brands by having excess share of voice? Okay, that is how marketing agencies talk. And as soon as you start doing that, as soon as you start having those higher level conversations, which go beyond just like a video strategy to like a proper marketing strategy with video at its core, that's where things have really changed for us. So I think I did that in about nine minutes, Amelia. So there you go. Right on time. Thank you so much, John, for sharing your perspectives. I think there's a lot of interesting things to be said. And I see a little bit of similarity between you and Anush. How she also tried to kind of make her agency attractive for the tech industry specifically, rather than focusing too much on making, you know, a niche service or positioning herself as something, you know, out there. She kind of just decided to say, okay, let's cater to the tech company specifically. Yeah, it's a very strong approach. Yeah. They know that they get an expertise. You become an expert in those areas. Yeah, it's solid. Interesting. It's a, yeah, sounds like a win-win situation. Which one? Yeah. Can't wait to hear more about it later for the lounge session today. But before we move on to that, we have yet another video agency that we're going to be hearing from. And we have Anna Hellman with us today. She is the founder of Hellman St. Clair and a former Production House CEO. And she has brought her competences around building strategic brand videos with kind of the creative video expertise that really helps these brands both scale, but also create that very impactful visual storytelling. And to join her on screen, we have Felicity Willits. And she is a very charismatic British video producer who's based out of Stockholm. She's worked across, yeah, video formats and types from, you know, documentaries, future films and commercial and everything video marketing. So please welcome Anna Hellman. Welcome Anna and Felicity to the screen. And I'm just going to let you guys dive into Hellman St. Clair. And I can't wait to listen along. Oh, thanks so much. That's a great introduction. And we're so happy to be here today, guys. Thank you so much for having us. I think that you might be going to share our slides there on screen. Great. Thank you so much. So I think just to dive in, I think we're going to reflect and try and place a little context around some of the conversations that have happened already. I think, you know, obviously, like so many industries right now, the creative production world is shifting under our feet. And clients need to reach an increasing number of diverse target groups, adjusting their communication to each. And as producers, we're being asked to make more content faster, work across multiple platforms, whilst budgets tighten and client and stakeholder priorities seem to change by the week. We know that technology is opening up new opportunities, both in how we produce and how we serve our clients. And it's in this context that the old project by project model favoured by clients and that sort of has supposedly supported our industry for so long, but it's not really rolled up anymore. So we're really happy that TwentyThree has invited us here today to explore these shifts within the context of the video agency model and to share a little of how we are working and working with our clients in an evolving landscape. So hello, I'm Anna Hellman and you just heard Felicity Willits. So we are both co-founders of Hellman Sinclair. So we are an agency, video production company, and a consultancy based in Stockholm. And between us, we spent over two decades working in the public and private sectors across film, television and advertising, both international in the UK and here in the Nordics. So we work across all touch points with clients that appreciate our editorial angles on storytelling, using formats such as documentaries, live shows, brand films, internal comms and social. And we have worked with TV channels such as Swedish public service TV channels, DR, Arte and many more, along with foundations as Avicii Foundation, cultural organisations such as the Royal Dramatic Theatre and the Royal Opera in Stockholm, we also work with commercial brands like Adidas, IKEA, Spotify. We will show you our reel in a few minutes. But first, let's move to the next slide and back to Felicity, please. Thanks. Okay, so thanks Anna. So yeah, throughout our media careers in London, Copenhagen and Stockholm, Anna and I have collaborated with a plethora of artists. But through Hellman Sinclair, we try to bring that creative sensibility into the B2B world, where creativity in the ways, at least that we are discussing today, from a visual and linguistic perspective, is often underused. And we see a new interest from B2B companies seeking the kind of skills that we are offering and many of the speakers this afternoon are shifting to as well. Our clients range widely from Sweden's manufacturing sector to organisations in life sciences, AI, environmental sustainability and the broader knowledge economy. These are clients who have extremely complex and specialist knowledge and they have an increased demand to reach a more diverse target. They need to reach more diverse target groups and they need to reach them with clear storytelling. And then I think we're going to maybe move to the next slide. Thank you so much. So yeah, we are drawn to the places where academia, the arts, industry and the public intersect. The places where ideas move and cultural shifts begin. A significant part of our work now involves helping institutions working with cutting edge research to communicate their ideas to wider audiences. Here, creativity becomes the mechanism for helping ideas to reach beyond their academic world to industry and the wider public. We aim to juxtapose academic work with creative formats. For example, a collaboration we had with SVT, the Swedish public service broadcaster and dramaten and the Nobel Prize Museum brought the climate scientist Johan Rockström into the stage of Sweden's National Theatre for Performance lecture on the climate crisis. So these are the kind of spaces that we enjoy working in where creative storytelling can meaningfully influence the public conversation. And then I think you can see a little bit maybe of our work on the next clip here. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. So I think as producers, we all need to remain really curious to new formats, new value propositions and new technologies to be able to serve our clients fully today. These are challenging times, as I think our first speaker alluded to. But I think there are many exciting opportunities now. And I think lots of lots of us are now adapting to these this new this new landscape. We're facing an increasingly complex communication landscape where the traditional sort of project by project model is, I think, outdated. The old model creates volatility both for production partners and uncertainty for clients. And most importantly, it undermines the creative continuity in a world where organizations have an increasingly complex and diverse demand for video content. As some TwentyThree are highlighting today, what many in our industry are recognizing is that retainer based partnerships offer a more sustainable, strategic and creatively coherent way of working with visual visual content. The more we understand the client's world, the more value we can create. The video agency model describes much of the adaptation that's going on for us within our business model. And we feel that our strength is in building context amongst relevant partners to be able to service our clients. Retainer based relationships allow us to work not just as producers, but across the narrative strategy, tone of voice and communication planning. And I think that's something that many of the previous speakers had also referred to this idea that you take the strategy piece and take it all across the whole delivery. Organizations need a steady rhythm now of content. They don't need the one-offs and video works best, we think, within the kind of inside and ongoing relationship that you have with the client where creative teams already know the brand, understand the audience and can move quickly without sacrificing craft. It's a model that brings continuity, strategy and stability for clients and producers in a space that has become so fragmented and demanding. So our model is unapologetically end to end strategy, development, production, delivery. Right now, it's a wild moment to be in the game with many new angles opening up and opportunities to be creative. Anna and I and our team here in Stockholm are chomping at the bit and we need TwentyThree to help power this momentum, pulling the market together around the video agency model in Europe, strengthening the whole ecosystem and pushing real change forward. So thank you so much to you all for inviting us to join you today. And we look forward to developing and continuing this conversation in the panel a little bit later in the afternoon. Thank you so much. Yes, definitely. Thank you both so much for joining us. To the co-founders of Heilman, St. Clair, Anna and Felicity. Thank you both. Like Felicity said, you can catch her for the video day, video agency day lounge session and starting around five. So keep that in mind if you have any questions for Heilman and St. Clair. So we have one more speaker intro, but we save the best for last. He is absolutely a force of nature and a force of energy. None other than Nick Della Force. He started his career producing videos and evangelizing for brands like Apple and Microsoft. Then he consulted global clients at Shootstuff before he co-founded VidZero, a video agency that's running out of the UK, from the UK all the way to Australia and back again to the UK. Welcome Nick to the stage as he gives us a little insight into everything at VidZero. Thank you so much, Amelia. And I think, look, the name does a bit of heavy lifting for me and puts me in an awkward spot, doesn't it? I'm never going to escape the Force jokes and Star Wars jokes either, am I? So thank you for not making a Star Wars joke. Hey, everybody, how you doing? I've been really enjoying hearing from everybody today. And before I sort of jump into some of the slides I'm going to share, it's this sort of fascinating sort of world that we're working in at the moment as people working in the video space. And particularly over the last year for me, and then over as an extension of that over the last couple of years, since we started VidZero, I really feel like we are an agency that's been sort of forged in the fire of this change. And we've navigated in such an interesting way. I'll give you a little more of the backstory. But what I thought I'd do is quickly just show you, this is how we build ourselves, consulting and training and content production. And the reason I want to front foot that isn't to do a sales pitch, but more just to sort of contextualize some of what I'm going to talk about. Here's a little bit of a video. This doesn't actually have any sound. That's why it's not playing off the TwentyThree platform. But this is now an outdated reel that we put together a couple of years ago when we were first starting out. It's the very typical upstart production company kind of slash creative agency reel, showing lots of little disparate bits of work we had done for different clients at the time. And it was interesting sort of when looking at the content, we're currently working on a replacement for this at the moment. And when I was looking at the content in this today, I was umming and ahhing about actually sharing it on here. But I think looking at this and then looking at where we are now is an incredible reflection of some of the stuff some of the other speakers have been talking about. That change our industry has been impacted by with things like AI, with things like companies in housing video, all those sorts of things. It's just been such a fascinating thing. We're a young agency. We're only really two or three years old. And so this has all really shaped us as we've grown. We came from a background. Here's some of the companies we've worked with. We came from a background of this is Adrian and Zach in Australia. These guys, we all worked at an agency called Shootster that Amelia just mentioned. And at a specific period in time, a few years ago now, then we all moved on from that company thinking that we could do something better, that we had this vision for how video and the industry was moving, that perhaps they hadn't picked up on at Shootster. Not throwing shade on them. They're a wonderful company, did amazing things. But we're together from Sydney with these guys and then the UK for Alex and I. I don't actually have a picture of them. We're a bunch of Alex and I together. So this is a hastily photoshopped picture of her and I. That's Alex and me. But we decided from across the pond and he's the original. That is Jeff Goldblum. I had a bet with somebody I could get that into almost every webinar I've done this year and I've succeeded so far. So there's me and Jeff. But what we did is we started off with VidZero with this incredibly sort of hyper local focus almost. We're almost like two separate agencies. One in Sydney with a very, very strong community focus and charity focus. And one in the UK with a very strong corporate focus. And we started doing very traditional video production. Very traditional, as I mentioned, finding individual clients that would come along, need a video, and we would produce it. And it's something that I've alluded to before. That's not a very sustainable model. And as I'm sure many of you can imagine, it's a roller coaster fraught with incredible highs when you get incredibly cool jobs that you can do and incredible lows when there's this gap where you can't find somebody who needs a mini social campaign or a hero video for their company, big or small. And it's a fascinating space to be in. And over the last few years, I think the problem that we've been really trying to solve, regardless of our different focuses over the years, in Australia with Zach and Adrian and Alex and I in this country, is this bringing video to companies in a way that is easily accessible for the people within those organizations who are not necessarily video experts. And this is perhaps one of, I think, the biggest challenges for all of the production companies, agencies, however you want to label yourself out there, is introducing the concept of just how important and just how intrinsically valuable and interwoven into our culture video is for businesses right now. And people get this on a really surface level. People really understand, I think, now that every video has to do business, that every company even has to do business. Every business has to be on social media. And that there is a sort of a minimum output that they need to create using video. But a lot of organizations do not know how to start with this. They do not know how to even begin to strategize. And it's great that there are so many of us out there, so many agencies now who offer these things. But one of the challenges I think we saw that a lot of businesses were facing is that because this was also new to them, because they are subject matter experts in what they do. If you make cups, you're a cup expert. And it's great that there are so many video experts out there, but they don't know where to turn. They don't know who to go to. And in this world where everybody is an expert online, this is one of the other huge challenges I think we all face as agencies, it is very difficult to know where to turn. If you look at the landscape online, if you look at what people are hearing in the video world online, there is a lot of evangelism for audience focus. And audience focus is so important, really. Audience focus, as somebody else mentioned before, and sorry, I can't remember who said this, but the audience is the most important part of it all. The people watching the videos at the end, whether that's the consumers who are buying companies' products, whether that's their employees that they're trying to communicate to and grab their attention and harness them and keep them interested and communicate effectively. This audience focus is absolutely critical as well. And there's a lot of talk about that online. There's a lot of talk about where most people go to get their information, which I think is a critical point. But there isn't a clear path into this. There isn't a clear way to find a reputable, legitimate video expert without having to do the really hard yards for these companies to jump in and jump onto the internet, search every single website, sift through the fantastic agencies like everybody on the call here today. From the not-so-great ones who will not necessarily have the expertise, don't have the background to know what they're doing. They might create really beautiful-looking video content, but not be able to contextualize that, not be able to help companies implement that in a strategic way even. And this has been, incidentally, a fantastic thing that TwentyThree have done, creating things like the video agency directory that they've got. If you are from a brand on this session, definitely recommend checking that out. It's absolutely fantastic. Got my TwentyThree plug in there. And more to come. But there is so much information out there, it can be really, really difficult to sift through the good and the bad for so many people out there. So part of our role as agencies, as well as creating fantastic content, as well as being strategic and offering all these services to create this sort of halo of services for people so that they don't need to go to 15 different agencies to have a video strategy. Because that was the way people used to do things. They would have, John was mentioning before, Hurricane Group is split up into a couple of different parts that service those unique needs. And this is how companies operated before. They had different agencies to do every little bit of different stuff, media buying, social media content, video production. And it was a headache. A long time ago, I worked in-house at some of these large corporations. And I know just how splintered just how siloed all of this stuff was. You'd have all these agencies who thought that they could compete with each other, who thought they could do better than each other, working on the same projects together, undercutting each other, backstabbing each other. And I saw this happening in real time at a couple of the very large tech companies that I worked for. And it was an incredibly frustrating experience as somebody in-house at those companies. I worked in, just to contextualize for those of you who haven't met me before, I worked in-house long time ago now at both Apple and Microsoft on segments of different consumer marketing initiatives. And it was fascinating to see how our agencies would play nice together on calls, but you could absolutely tell they were at each other's throats behind the scenes. Also frustrated because they couldn't offer the services that the others did. So us as agencies being able to sort of look at the industry, take a big picture standpoint, take a step back, and look at what our strengths are, how we can collaborate with each other, and then offer a halo of services that compliment what the client's needs are is so, so critical. Lots of hyperbole in there. The other big thing, and I'm trying to get to on this slide here, is that there's this opportunity now for incredible amount of real -time learning from huge amounts of publicly available data online. And this is a fantastic thing for all of us so that we are I'm happy to be a part of a group that follows you through this, business focus sort of model for our clients that really works for them and in the way they interact with us. And we've essentially in the last year had a massive amount of change. I mean, it couldn't have come at a better time for me. About halfway through the year, I suffered a back injury, ended up in hospital. Then off the back of that, caught COVID in hospital and was knocked out for really several months. I missed the TwentyThree Summit in Copenhagen, one of the worst moments of the year, missing that. It was awful. But what it made me realize is that these changes that we'd been seeing in our business, if I hadn't learned from all of the video agency day last year, the TwentyThree Summit side up tended and thought about how the industry was changing, I don't think my business would have survived me not being there for three and a half months in the middle of the year this year. But because we'd started to put a lot of this stuff in place, we'd started to build these systems for our clients to help empower them to not only have us create lots of incredible content for them or work on their strategies, but also to do it themselves. And Lev was talking brilliantly about this sort of suite of services that he offers, training people to create content and all that other stuff. Sorry, Lev, I can't go through all your product offerings there, but it's such valuable stuff. And we've gone from an agency that was 99.99% pointing cameras at people, pressing record, doing edits and getting them back to them. So almost that's 1% of our business now. I haven't, I can't remember the last time I actually made a video myself for one of my clients. Our entire business has really shifted so much, particularly in the last year, this has accelerated into pretty much a consulting-based business. And all of the clients that I do have on these retainers have us in there for the long term to really hear knowledge, to hear what we have to say, and to really get our opinions. If anyone's ever read this fantastic book by a music producer called Rick Rubin, The Creative Act, in that book, and then in all the advertising materials for that, one of the things that Rick Rubin brilliantly said, and sort of dared to sort of go out publicly and say, is as one of the most successful, most famous music producers of all time, he hardly knows how any of the equipment works, doesn't know how to play any instruments. And while I do know how the equipment works, and do know how to play the instrument of a camera, microphone, that sort of stuff, it's actually being able to separate myself from being out there in the field and separate myself from this ego-driven thing I had that I wanted to create award-winning films. And I think decades ago, my dream was to, you know, be up there on the Oscars stage with Scorsese at one point in my life, but really separating the ego, I realized that the future is being able to step in like Rick Rubin. Hi, Amelia. Step in like Rick Rubin or Amelia and offer a really strong opinion and that is what clients will pay you for and keep you going on for. And it's a fascinating, fascinating thing. And I think the industry has sort of really shifted forever. And this is what people really value now. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Nick. I'll be excited to see if maybe you'll be able to share an Oscar stage with someone at some point for video content. I would not put it past you because I've seen your content and you're absolutely brilliant. But for now, you'll have to make do with sharing the screen with me and the digital stage. But thank you so much for all of your amazing inputs. I want to thank all the speakers that have participated and really given us a deep dive into their video agencies, their reflections, their kind of, their feel on their take on, you know, the trends that really helped develop their competencies and help them cater to their clients. So thank you so much for sharing all this incredible knowledge. To everyone who's watching, please, keep your questions in mind, bring them on to the Video Agency Day Lounge, and then we'll dive into them there when we have a little bit more time. But stay tuned because next up, we have two masterclasses and they're going to be incredible. We're going to get the company perspective from Michelle Williams, as well as building a successful video agency. Went a little quickly for me there with Tapio Haya. And yeah, then we'll continue with the video agency day lounge and a very nice way to kind of wrap up the day together and get all of your questions in. So stay tuned and you will be automatically redirected and I'll see you over there in a short minute. Bye.