Phil Nottingham, Video Strategist

My name is Phil Nottingham, I am a video strategist. I help companies work out what kind of videos to create, how to distribute them, how to get the most value from the work they're doing, with video in marketing and sales. I worked in theatre and film for quite a few years, was a stunt man and a lighting guy and then doing all the weird side of production. And then I kind of ran out of money, so then got a job doing marketing and then realised hold on, there's some synergy here. So I was able to bring my production and creative expertise to the marketing discipline, learnt a lot about SEO, worked in an agency for a long time and then combined those two things to invent my own job essentially. I'm very passionate about bringing creativity to business and allowing true good storytelling to drive forward a company and I'm passionate about business and I'm passionate about film, so it's kind of a natural fit. I think businesses generally want to know what on earth they should do in terms of content creation, how they should build up an aesthetic and a style and really differentiate themselves with video. I think in a sense we're at a new turning point in marketing if we think back to when websites, a lot of the big companies were just taking their offline brochures and turning them into basically these big pages and websites and it took a long time for people to understand what should a website be, how can we craft something that's true to us and then designers started to come in house and that became a bigger job and people started building these things. I think we're at that kind of turning point now with video where it was advertising for a long time and then people who initially adopted video just did big TV ads online and now companies are starting to realise well maybe this is something that we need to build our own style and skill and all that kind of thing around, so videographers are coming in house, companies are kind of trying to build up that strategy and understand how they can use video. So in a sense my job is now taking that thing that a lot of people would have been doing with websites where they work out how you can build a website and what the strategy for the website should be and applying that really to the world of online video across social media and email and all that kind of thing. Well I think in a sense it's the last bastion of media that's just taken a while to get to the point where it can be online. If you think about video as really the combination of text, image, sound or all kind of thing all rolled into one and we for a while had a web where we can have images and we can have text but that hasn't always been the case and now it's really the case of how can we bring those together. So the technology has enabled that but it's always been a desire of human beings to communicate in that way since the dawn of civilisation, we've done performances in front of each other so it's just the natural evolution of that and the same reason why as soon as static cameras are able to do enough shots per second that we can really build film and that old 35mm kind of thing, just as that became a creative art form we're now seeing the same thing happen with online video where it's made digitally and distributed in that way so it's the natural course of things and the next stage will be even more dynamic interactive content and that kind of stuff. I think there's two major challenges, one on the creative side and one on the technical side. The creative side is what do we make, how do we differentiate ourselves, what is a video, is this really a media or is it something just, can we change what we've been doing or just adapt our blog content or our ads or something to become video, what actually is a good video versus just a sort of fairly boring piece of moving image and words. And then the other side is essentially distribution, do we have these things on social media, do we build them on our website, how do we get people to them, how do we measure video, all that kind of thing. So essentially I think the best strategies are those which understand how all those pieces fit together and can make sure that the distribution is considered in line with the creative and the prospecting and companies are able to build a focus strategy that relies on the right channel for them as well as the right kind of method of storytelling. I think if you haven't yet sort of started getting video, start small. It's never been easier to basically make a video, there's a ton of great tools out there to kind of build your own videos just with a webcam or a screencast or whatever and that stuff can be really great if you get a real focus. So I think practice being on camera, practice trying new things out and think very, very small in your creative process because that will allow you to develop the aesthetic and allow you to start to understand the channels that you're dealing with. The other thing is to build for the channels. So I like to describe this platform first and what this means is that video itself is just a media type, it's not necessarily a value in and of itself, i.e. you really have to build the video content for the channels that you're going after. The kind of thing that's going to work well on YouTube is not the kind of thing that's going to work well on Facebook typically. The kind of thing that's really appropriate for someone on a product page is probably not the kind of thing that's going to work on YouTube. So it's thinking about the full context, the full dramaturgy if you like of how someone's going to be experiencing this content and really building it for that location. I think we often get stuck to think video is like an asset in itself, really it's just a media type. So no one ever says, okay well we've got this image, now we need to distribute it everywhere or we have this text, now we need to push it everywhere. But because the investment in video can be seen as quite expensive, then it feels like when you have the asset you need to kind of distribute it everywhere. But really that's not the right way to approach it, it's more to think about what you're building for which location and then to, you know, it's sure that your creative process really delivers on the promise of whatever it is you're trying to achieve. And that inherently means making kind of more smaller videos than just one massive one as we used to do with TV. I think versioning is kind of like a halfway house in the sense that sometimes it can work if you can tweak aspects of it, but truly the best strategies are ones where the video is made for the context and not just pushed everywhere. That's not to say that a video can't be good in two places, but you really have to build it with that in mind rather than just hope for the best after you've created it. I'd start with kind of three things. It's the goal, the channel and the medium. So if we're saying that we're going to start with the video, if that's kind of our entry point then we need to work out what we're trying to achieve with video, who we're going after, what are we trying to say, what's our message, what's our kind of medium. And then really refine the channels based on what audience we're trying to speak to, where are they present, what's the best channel to achieve that goal. So once you get those things in order it then becomes quite easy to craft the basis of the strategy. The next thing that really is needed is that tone of voice, that brand position and perspective. So too many companies don't really have a position or an idea of what they stand for and who they are. And I think because video is that creative, inherently story driven medium, you need that character and you need a character and aesthetic and the company itself needs to have a character. And that may be comprised of multiple people in the organisation or it might be more of a top down, really focused brand. But you need to build that out and work out what that is. And if you have the character, you have the goal, you have the narrative, you have the channel, everything fits into place quite nicely. But too many companies start with the granular thing where they'll say, okay, we want to get something video viral, we want to really increase conversion rates on this page or whatever. And then they just make the content and they script it out irrespective of really taking the time to really nail that strategy. Often my work involves kind of coming in and saying, okay, let's just get this stuff sorted and we'll realise how easily everything else falls into place once that's the case. I mean it all ties back to that goal. So once you've got the goal, the metrics become kind of obvious. But usually it's about picking one really clear metric that's going to be a proxy for whatever it is you're trying to achieve. So if you're aiming, if you're creating a video for a product page and you want that to contribute to revenue, the thing to measure is like assisted conversions at that page level. It's that simple. So if you're, say, doing something on social media, you then have maybe you're trying to influence the number of people to sign up to your channel, in which case you can look at the number of sign ups. Or perhaps you're just trying to increase awareness of a new product, in which case you really want to measure engaged views, i.e. people getting to 50 or 75% of the way through. Generally speaking, I think that you need a qualitative and a quantitative metric. So with video, you can kind of look at two things. Whether somebody actually liked the content and whether they did anything off the back of it. Whether they liked the content is really whether or not they actually watched it and whether they skipped out and whether they moved away. Video is the most measurable medium. You can always see how far someone gets through a video versus blog post. So first thing, did they actually consume it or did they just hit the page and hit that 200 code? Side note, that's kind of why I get frustrated with impression counts on YouTube and Facebook because they're just garbage metrics. They just mean that a browser loaded a page and something went on. It doesn't tell you if anyone actually watched it. So focus on that kind of qualitative, how much do people watch metric and then, okay, what's that next action? What's the minimum viable conversion from this video? And really make sure that you've ground that in the production. So often if you get the goal right and you get that focus metric right, you build the video towards it. So if you have a clear goal of saying, we want people to like our Facebook page, then you kind of want to make that the call to action at the end of the video, the focus, so that someone's going to watch the end of the video and have that impetus to go and complete the action that you want. If you decide on the goal after you've made the video, you kind of missed a trick there. It's all about integrating that strategy and approach so you have a very clear focus that goes into that editing and production process. For any product, with the exception of perhaps fast-moving consumer goods, so where you're just going to go for brand message and then hope someone goes into the store and picks it up, there's several layers of that sales process. So you really can't do it all in one go. If you're going for a top-level ad, then you have to find what that core product message is. If you're then going for a product page, you can focus a lot more on the features and the benefits and that kind of stuff. So I think it's always about mapping out what are those main decision points and value propositions that you can offer for each product, laying that out and then crafting videos to match each one. That doesn't mean you can't start with something that's less than perfect. So maybe you just want to start with one kind of broad, advertorial video that kind of hits most of those points clearly, works as a good ad on social media, could be used on the product page, and then after time kind of maybe create second ones to refine. But the main thing if you're creating an ad is getting clear on what that core messaging is, that core value proposition, and just try to say one thing with the video. The biggest mistake that people make with video and scripting is trying to say everything. And they'll try and write, turn a product page or a blog post into a video, and then the script is about two pages long. A video ad script if it's trying to sell a product should be really, really tight and very like a short script. And you want to use the visuals to sell and explain the value and tell that story rather than just the language. So it's a case of kind of really refining that script, working with a good copywriter to get that in place, and then making sure that works. In terms of kind of channel, you just need to optimize for whatever you're doing on the channel. So on YouTube, people don't tend to buy things directly from YouTube. It's just not really a thing that works. So you focus on maybe a secondary value proposition. Maybe you want them to subscribe to the channel, so you add that as a call to action. Maybe you want them to watch another video that kind of explains the details and more benefits, so you focus the end screens on that. Facebook, you probably want them to like a page, or maybe if you're doing it as an ad, you want them to click through to a landing page that explains more details and benefits. So for each channel, you need that minimum viable conversion, that clear goal, and you then optimize each kind of variation for that. On the product page or whatever, then you're going to have that add to cart button, whatever it might be, or the get in touch with sales, et cetera. So it's like optimize the video for the context and optimize the message for clarity and conciseness, essentially. Yeah, of course. I mean, in the sense that it's very esoteric and depends on the business and the brand, and you kind of need to understand the message that you have and the journey that people take. But certainly, once you have that level of detail, you can drill into what kind of video should sit where and what the message is. There's obviously still creative choice that goes on there. Not all companies should be on all channels. If you are a B2B finance brand, Instagram's probably not for you. You don't have a visual product, you're not going to be able to communicate in that message. Maybe Facebook isn't too, but LinkedIn could be better. So you need to really understand what the business is to decide on the channels and then decide on the message that's going to apply. So it's that combination of the audience, the channel, what you can actually say to them that's meaningful in that space. To that extent, I often think that the most underrated video channel is your own website. It's the most interesting stuff. You can do the most creative content. If you think about the full, you have full control of the context of that page, so you can really think about how the video interacts with everything else and build content that matters for that. So I think too often, bigger brands particularly focus on social media, where they are at the whim of changes in Facebook and YouTube and what kind of stuff, which is a good video channel. But actually, the brands that really have made a success of this have built their own platform, built their own channel, and that comes from understanding who your audience are and building something that they're going to want to go to as a destination rather than just be hit with ads and stuff. So that digital share copying can cause a bit of an issue, I think, for a lot of companies. The unsub source is probably your own people. So I don't believe that video should be locked down to a video team. Now you may have some videos that you want to make more professional, and I would say the basic test of that is how many people are going to be watching it. And if you're building a video for 100,000 people, make sure you've spent a good amount of money and skills on making sure that works. But if you're just making a video to be watched by 10 people, maybe it's a quick software tutorial or it's a demo or it's a sales video, then it's actually better often if it's done scrappily by someone who is an expert in that particular space and they're communicating human to human in a very clear way. So I think all support teams should be using video or sales teams should be using video as their primary form of communication. I think too often the unsub source is actually people. The real value that video provides is bringing human faces and human interaction back to a space that is often very robot to robot centric. And that honest, basic communication with a face and a voice and all that kind of stuff. And start building videos that maybe do internal presentations around your company to show how video can be a very good communication medium. Encourage that experimentation. Buy equipment that sits in the office that anyone can use. If you have an open resource of an expert that you've hired in for a day that people can come and ask questions to, you have to kind of lead from the front and make sure that it grows bottom up. And that can be very difficult if you're focused on controlling message. So video is inherently not going to be able to be controlled. You're expressing, human beings expressing themselves. So there's a level of trust that has to go into the company there. But I think if you have that level of trust and you can empower people to create more and lead by example, that adoption will flow. And it does happen in companies who have not made many videos before will start making lots and lots of them and realizing that it's a more effective and often easier and more fun method of communication than just tons and tons of emails or images or anything else. We spend our lives sending emails and Slack messages and actually it's more interesting often to talk in person and video brings you closer to that. So I think webinars is an interesting kind of term webinar that's kind of been weirdly coined I think just because of the ultimately the limitation of the technology way back when. So what we're really talking about with webinars is the presentation. It's someone who's built a presentation and is doing a demo or whatever and we see them in person at conferences like this one all the time. So it's just a sort of virtual presentation and we've got to the point now where there's a lot more tools and a lot more things available to make them look really good. And it's great. You can show your screen, you can flick between the screen and the web on the full face and you can bring in other people, have you know chat. So I think webinars is a very dynamic and interesting medium if you just treat it properly as essentially a presentation and think about it in those terms rather than thinking of it as its own kind of beast that people need to plan simply. So I think my issue with webinars is most of them are terrible and that's because companies using outdated technology or really not treating it properly like it should be which is a real presentation that requires that level of commitment and performance in a sense. But if you embrace those two things I think it can be a really exciting and dynamic medium. We're kind of at the point where not every social network is a video platform and that will continue. We're going to find I think you know LinkedIn's been quite an interesting beast since they've had video for what six months or so now maybe it's more than that. But that's been going for a while and it's been interesting to see how that's evolved and people kind of working out what kind of videos work on LinkedIn. So I think the fact that everything will be a video platform will mean that we have to really get smart about differentiating what kind of videos we make for each platform and focusing on that. The other thing is all videos will become smaller and faster so everybody's going to be doing more video. That kind of trend I talked about with salespeople and support people making video I think will have come to fruition and we'll have a huge number of companies embracing that level of kind of casual quick video creation where videos are created by one person for one person and then never seen again. So I think we'll have that as a kind of major mainstay of video creation. The other problem is that we'll probably hit a bit of fatigue which we're already seeing a little bit. So YouTube is kind of now it's kind of not really clear who it's for or what it's focused on. Companies are probably going to be moving away from the social approach I think and building kind of platforms and series for themselves. So I think if we think about the way in which TV has gone that probably gives us an indication where video is going for business. So TV in the last few years has become a lot more episodic so we think about the way Netflix and Amazon have created these big long series that have a huge investment time and people will just binge the whole thing. So that kind of episodic content has become more exciting in a more dynamic space than probably the hour and a half to our cinema approach. I think the same thing is going to happen with companies. So I expect a lot more companies to be making serialized episodic content probably distributing out through some traditional channels. But there's likes of Price Intelligently I really like their series where they do pricing page tear downs every week and this kind of thing where the companies are really investing in long form content over a longer period and they'll be doing it regularly, they'll be publishing more stuff and that kind of thing that's tied into both the Netflix model and podcast and that kind of stuff I think will really make it space in video and I don't think that's going to live on social media. I think it will be companies choosing to build their own platform or choosing to keep control of that and want to make sure that the audience that come in they're able to do more with and they're not ceding all that control and everything to Facebook and YouTube and that kind of thing. Actually the content that will work I think will be a lot more like it will look like TV. It will be multi cameras, it will be shot, it will be properly edited but it will be created by businesses and I think that's where stuff's going so it's not so much the just educational model it's going to be about creative entertaining content as well. Now is a great time to be a video producer or a videographer yeah there's going to be a tonne of work in business just I think it takes you know I feel like I can be rude about these people because they're my people but I think a lot of people from the kind of creative background are kind of loathe to kind of touch business and things so they think it's not creative you don't get freedom but my experience has been completely opposite you have more creative freedom often you can do more interesting things and there's a lot of desire amongst the kind of business community to build really genuinely great things and often I think the restrictions you get from kind of more not for profit content is more punitive sometimes than what you get from for profit business content so yeah I just embrace it and go for it there's so much fun stuff to be done. Gosh, understand storytelling is the first one. I think marketers are quite good at understanding the sales message and they're quite good at understanding like how they can force people to do certain things but we're now heading into a world that is so controlled by the audiences that you can't force people to do anything I don't believe that lead nurturing via email is particularly effective I probably shouldn't say that at a HubSpot conference but anyway I don't believe that this kind of you know sort of inbound approach where you just get an email and then you hit people with a tonne of touch points is necessarily very effective and I think it will become less effective over time as audiences kind of choose to switch off and will have their own private channels like the way I now communicate with most people is not publicly on Twitter it's privately via WhatsApp groups and Slack and things like that I think that private networking as well like middle of the funnel communications are going so we're losing control of that as marketers and I think in order to really improve that we need to get way better at brand and way better at storytelling and understand to build content that people often go oh build content people care about but I mean like really build content that people want to see irrespective of whether or not it's been created by business and really hold in full respect that people don't you can't push your message in front of anyone advertising doesn't work anymore just by saying buy this buy this buy this you have to really entice them with a good creative story and that's particularly true with video which is inherently a storytelling medium so yeah it's all about getting good at storytelling and understand creativity in a far deeper way than I think most marketers do and that's scary for a lot of people particularly if you're technical but I think the marketers that win in the future will be those that can combine the technical and the creative in a meaningful way so go to it.