Toke Mølgaard: Surprise Your Audience and They Will Listen

GS1 runs the global barcode standard. Infrastructure scans billions of times, serving over 15,000 companies in Denmark alone. That's quite impressive. But that's not exactly the first name that comes to mind when you think about video. Can you take us through your journey becoming the person leading the communication at GS1? Well, that's quite a personal question, or at least I'm going to answer it quite personally. Because for me as a communication professional, I really enjoy working for, you know, kind of like underdog brands. I find it much more interesting and challenging instead of taking care of a brand that everybody knows of already. So in that sense, that was kind of what attracted me to an organization like that. Was video already part of how GS1 communicated when you arrived or did you have to build that from scratch? I arrived at GS1 about five years ago. So that was kind of in the post end of the pandemic. And as almost every other company, you can find more or less professional video content on various platforms. And we had that as well. But we were also, you know, in the end stage of the pandemic, in my opinion, kind of the video market was really matured. So I found out that it seems like our audience, the users of GS1 standards, where the barcode is just one of them. They were actually quite open and interested to meet us face to face on video webinars and such. So that gave us energy and the willingness to, to get involved. To kind of take, take the next step. That's so cool that from the context, it was a moment to mature video and have more content about it and to position yourself more strongly in video. But, well, I have to say that when we talk about the work that you do at GS1 and the barcodes, it's not the first type of thing that people think about when they think about video, right? So my question to you is back to how you introduced yourself and how you've been working with video. How do you get people excited or how do you get people engaged? I mean, I know what you say, but exactly because you say it in that way, you don't, you don't expect to meet a brand like us on video. I actually kind of want to surprise our audience or our users, because when you are thinking of barcodes, for instance, or data sharing platforms that we also develop and maintain, in the whole world, you particularly maybe don't think of an organization filled with even also younger people that actually has quite some deep knowledge and really burns for this nerdy topic. And, and that is kind of the, also the communication, strategic thoughts that we have done that we kind of want to surprise. Because when you are surprised, you listen a bit more and we have to make people listen. And working with barcodes and working with global standards, it's not the easiest thing in the world. And nobody really wakes up in the morning and say, today is the day that I'm going to sit down and produce bunches of barcodes. So because we are in that environment, we need to look good, sound good, and also surprise our audience in order for them to, to follow us. And you also produce different types of video content, right? Yeah. Can you walk us through like how, how you do this content in practice? Do you have this in-house? Do you outsource some of it? How, how does that work? Yes. You know what? We do everything ourselves, which is, again, also for me personally, also as a communication, as a manager, I really enjoy to see my team develop themselves because not only I have my marketing communication team engaged with this, I have one colleague that is kind of the, the queen of the studio, as we call her. She makes sure that all the techniques and the sound and the light is functioning. If we have external people on, she will sit kind of like producing it all, sending it out afterwards. But we also engage with the rest of our organization. So we have people from our support team that on a regular basis are talking in the phone or answering tickets to our members. We have them in the studio because they are the one having the knowledge. They are the one also you can kind of feel, you know, feel them, see it in the eyes, how much passion they actually have for this field. So it's very important for me to, this is not just an activity that the marketing team are doing, and that is not just something that we love to do. It's actually also something that the rest of the organization see as a value. And that is why also this, we do this video project. Or this video strategy, because it is connected to our business. So imagine me just sending out bunches of PDF files with manuals on how to do that. I believe many people will call us and say, what do you mean by that? So this is also, you could call it a call reduction process. So if we teach people how to do it in the best way, I believe that they call us less. Not that we don't want to talk to them, but I mean, in the first place, we want to give them a good and positive push into working with this field that nobody asked for. And that can be some kind of a complex at times. Can you also walk us through what are the different formats that you do? How do you actually work with video? Our main focus is working with the webinars. As I said, they really work for us. We can see that. We can see that in different ways. Of course, we can look into the webinars. We can look into the dashboards that TwentyThree gives us and see the statistics. We see people actually come. So they actually attend and they also stay until it's finished. But again, we also measure in other places in the organization. So if we get too many calls or too many tickets about a subject that we actually have quite a few webinars about, then we have to do some adjustments. That's also how we kind of align with the thing. Then ahead of us is the personal videos. We are experimenting with it right about now because we also believe that it has a value on both sides of the screen. So now talking about our users. Personally, for me, I really enjoy watching a video about it could be anything about changing a tire on my bicycle or the brakes and such. I rather want to see it. I want to see that video than reading a long manual. And I believe we believe that that is the case also for if not all, then many of our clients. So maybe we can even also help them better when handling our tickets. We have not surprisingly quite some questions about how to work with our standards. So we really want to raise our way of working. And we believe even maybe also it's more effective for us. You know, writing long, long email with links and screenshots than a video running through the platform, touching on the questions that that the user has might even also be more efficient for us. And you mentioned that when you have many questions about a certain topic that you actually have many webinars about, that points are like that maybe something needs to be tweaked. On the flip side, what shows you that, OK, this type of content is going well? And we are using the platform and we are using our video content as we should. Well, first of all, we make webinars that we believe are demanded by our users. Sometimes, of course, also we need to open users eyes on something that they did not know that they needed. But that is actually also an area where we really have used webinars. And we have also used webinars as a, you know, as also as a sales generator. Because having quite complex products and services in your portfolio, you need to take some extra time to get people to understand what is this actually about. And our field of expertise and our field of deliveries, they are in the complex place of the world. And we have to make services that are that makes the life easier for our users and members in order for them to comply with different regulation and also regulation, not sexy. Right. So we need also to kind of think about our formats. Should we invite people in? Should we look at the the object from different angles in a way that we can engage people to get a new understanding? Of what this barcode could be for you and your business? Right. If you were to say something, one thing for someone here at the TwentyThree Summit, who is about to go back to the organization and push video forward, like try to use more video and get the company engaged with video or webinars. What would you say? My advice would be to go and ask your boss about some money to invest. Yeah. To invest. And then, I mean, you can invest in different platforms, but I was happy when we decided to invest more in TwentyThree. Because before that, we had to, of course, jump out in the market and do some Teams webinars and try with other sources out there. But I think we could have saved lots of time, lots of frustrations, and just working more efficient also as a team, as a company and giving a better experience. Yeah. For our users. If we adopted and jumped on a more full-blown platform, and I'm not going to sweet talk you anymore, that as we get when working with TwentyThree. So that will be my advice. Amazing. Thank you so much for your time and for your insights. Happy to be here.