Video Enabling Your Organization

We're going to be talking a lot about video enablement, exploring how organizations can really unlock video throughout every layer of the organization, right? So maybe even breaking some silos. Everybody loves breaking some silos. We have a great panel. We have Rob, my fellow Brit, Head of Brand at Veo, one of the really great Danish scale -up success stories of recent years. Rob, you were Head of Strategy at McCann London before that, so your client side, your in-house, you've done it all. And I know you even ran your own cultural anthropology agency slash consultancy back in the day. I know that sort of understanding human behavior, what drives us as humans, it really guides everything I think that you do professionally. It's interesting because Veo, the company, the way you lead brand and marketing is, it's literally everything, right? So it's the product. Veo, if you don't know it, it's an amazing innovation, a camera that sort of uses AI to record sports, providing insights and analysis for coaches and athletes. But video has also become the sort of the marketing language, right? The way that you grow the brand globally. Katrina, over to you. You're CMO at Pixels, which is a very rapidly glowing host production partner. And Pixels is interesting because, I met the CEO a long time ago and he was telling me about this idea and he used words like machine learning and things like that. And that was way, way before AI has become this kind of mega force, hyper disruptive force that it is today. So Pixels are using a lot of these technologies to sort of scale and accelerate content production for growing brands and global brands. You've spent your career in sort of senior digital roles in-house, agency side as well. So I think we're going to have some unique insights on how to sort of lead teams, empower teams with new technologies. And Maurice, I think you're something of a sort of a hero with the team at 23. You were on stage yesterday saying how I think your first email to somebody at 23 went back to 2012. So in 13, an early adopter, you've been championing webinars and webinar technology in your role, sort of running digital and marketing comms. Within Gia, which is one of these huge global companies, probably not many people have heard of, but they kind of, we depend on them, right? They do all of the engineering and backend and difficult stuff that without that, we wouldn't have the world that we do today. So we're looking forward to hearing more about your role, sort of running video and webinars and driving that kind of innovation within such a huge organization. Before we let the guys, you know, go. No, actually, let's get on to the presentations first. And I think, Maurice, you're going to kick us off. And then the way it'll work is maybe I'll ask a question or two. And then I want to give you guys as much time as possible to sort of ask the team here about their journeys, how they've been enabling their teams and so on. So let's kick it off with you, Maurice. Yeah, thank you. So first of all, I want to have a little bit of a shout out for 23 for making us feel comfortable. And thank you. All the energy you give to every room. So really good. And thanks for having us. Quickly go on. So this is us, 18,000 people running around in the world trying to sell machines. And we just released a video called You Think You Don't Know Us? You Do Know Us. Everything you can buy in the supermarket except for fresh vegetables comes out of our machines. So if you run to the supermarket tomorrow or this afternoon, you can buy it. Drinks, lollipops, candy in bags, meat, you name it, we do it. And also new food like algin-based, cell-based, et cetera. So we have it all. Imagine we have on top Gaya, then we have five divisions, as we call it. It's very corporate, all of that. And some layers on that. We have country. So there's marketing in all those areas. We have marketing in all those five, which are also divided in subdivisions. So imagine how many marketing people we have to deal with. Then we have country marketing. Also a huge amount of people. Every country where we have a presence, there is somebody doing at some level marketing. So that's another difficulty we encounter because sometimes they are PA and marketing and, and, and. So, yeah. And then at the bottom, there's us. And part of my team is out there. And together with Téa, I'm, and most of the time, a student, work student here in Copenhagen. We run video and webinar. So it's a big job. Three people doing that for 18,000 people. So a bit of numbers. I'm not going to name them. But on the right side, you can see the industries we are in and the amount of people. We have going live. So we're part of a group called communication and branding. So there's no marketing in there. So we talk to marketing and we more or less own the strategic tools for marketing to work with. So we want them to focus on content. So our audiences are stakeholders because we are on the stock market in Germany. Customers, those weird people. Then we have internal video platform as well. Yeah. So it's a wide variety of people in different industries. So how do we do that? So we learn what do we need, which tools do we need. Then we have to go through German security and legal. So not all tools are available for us, unfortunately, sometimes. But with 23, we hit the jackpot because they're in Europe. And it's great. It's such an easy, simple system to use. So from there, it's easy to start growing. And then we need to discover who needs it, what do we need. So looking at tools, try and fail a lot. Reaching out to people. Make sure they get trained in the programs we have. Make sure that they get data back to act on. And then there's the development part. We keep on going. We keep on developing. And since we were working with 23 since 2013, I think we grew together a little bit. So if I would today have to explain the WebEconArc program, it would be a little bit more difficult than with the functionalities we had, let's say, pre-COVID. And everything which was coming in, we could gradually teach our people to start using that. And therefore, the videos got better. We started handing... We have a big studio in Dusseldorf in our headquarters. But we also have small studios where we have little setups for people which they can use. Camera, a screen, maybe two screens. A little bit of production and we're off. And again, everything to focus on content. So we need monkey-proof functionality. If I do WebEconArc or have people start using 23, it takes me half an hour and then they can do WebEconArc. Then it comes all down to content. But that's what we want. I keep repeating that. So final slide. All we want is focus on content as a closure. If you saw a lot of art, that's not to distract you. But you can have a look at it. But that's because I'm... I'm an art student and teacher. So that's why I always put art in my slides to support what I'm trying to say. So thank you. Thank you, Maurice. Football must be you. From engineering for a better world to... Yeah. ...support for a better world. How do I follow that? Okay, cool. Test test. All right. You're going. It's waiting for me toDanner. Tess might want to professionally analyze the mic. You're gone. I could that anyway. I feel are a team called the Mamelodi Sundowns. They're from South Africa. Most of the team are either 13, 14 years old, have never been outside the township, let alone been in Europe. This match is happening in Drongen in Belgium. It's part of Kevin De Bruyne's under-15 championship that he does for kids. The team in blue is Manchester City. They are worth cumulatively around 50 to 60 million euros. I've been traveling all around the world, and four of the team are now going to be training with the first team. And then about second half, halfway through the second half, the game is nil-nil, and this happens. There's a little bit of sound to this, if possible, as well. APPLAUSE My favorite is the lady. The lady in blue. So part of that is a really unforgettable moment, we can agree. They're one-nil up. But then with the last kick of the game, when it's 1-1, and remember, these kids have never been outside the township before, this happens. Last kick of the game. CHEERING CHEERING CHEERING CHEERING CHEERING CHEERING CHEERING CHEERING CHEERING fluent fø sheer. to amplify this match was live streamed and ended up being watched it seemed by most of South Africa which was really really cool for us which we didn't expect we produce an AI camera hardware as well as software so that's just to give you the kind of the background to that but also what it's about is that we've had to not just have video embedded in what we do as a product but also how we market and I'll explain a little bit of how we found that so we consider ourselves to be the market leader in sports technology great yes with Danish owned and operated were just over 10 years old which is fantastic as you saw what we do is record stream analyze and share a lot and we recorded over 4 million games last year well over a hundred countries and we have a ton of users which is amazing okay great but how did video become our brand strategy and that's the point which I'd love to really get into and I really thought about until I was asked to do this today because it came quite naturally and for us there's three things the first thing is you need to really catch lightning in a bottle so what we do is we have been making all sorts of different videos there's a video probably being made right now somebody on their phone we're from that all the way up to expensive productions and we try our best to try and catch the zeitgeist what will catch people's attention what will hold people will engage people and it's a critical part of our process because we are effectively a b2b SAS company but b2b SAS isn't sexy well I don't think it's that sexy but hopefully when you see it captured like this all of a sudden it starts to become a little bit sexy and video and photography the video in particular is a really really engaging format secondly I prefer speed over perfection it drives my team crazy because my thing is how can we get it out as quick as possible learn from it and then pivot onto the next thing and I've had some might even perfectionist so they hate it but after a while you actually end up getting faster you learn quicker my thing is how can we get to the hundredth edition of what we're doing as quick as possible or we could sit there I was about to say a really rude word fly effing over the first one let's get to the hundredth one and the cumulative knowledge we would have gathered in that time will be much more powerful and third is measure stories as well as statistics. So we need all that quantitative data. We use social very, very heavily to gather all of the data to see what sticks, what works and why. But what's really interesting is to see how far the stories go. So when we have our salespeople are on calls and somebody said, I saw that thing you did with so-and-so last month, or I really liked that. Or when our CEO is at a conference like this and somebody says, I love what you released last week. One of the key things we're seeing is that, especially from a social media perspective, all of the platforms are loving when you do video. The biggest impact we've had with video, which is really, really weird given all the things we make, is whenever we make a video about our office, which is bonkers. But it's the one thing that performs the best. We just released one this week and it's gone nuts. I've done things with famous people, with people like Snoop Dogg, with famous sports people, make a video about an office in Copenhagen. All of a sudden, everybody, everybody wants to see. And I think it's because video taps into something intrinsically human, which is really, really interesting. And hopefully we'll get onto that. But that's our take on that. That's VO. I'm going to hand over to Katrina. All right. Seems like everything's working. It's perfect. So let's jump right in. I think most people hear video in marketing, right? They think big productions, endless storyboarding, lighting setups, and sometimes even longer invoices. I think that perception is so ingrained in so many teams that they hesitate to even get started. And that's sometimes where video dies. But it doesn't have to be like that at all. So I am here to call bullshit on that. And I think that's the notion that we have to let go of in order to really enable the team or enable the organization to work with video. I'm just holding on, holding off on the bullshit calling for just a second so you can understand where I'm coming from. CMO at Pixels. I lead a small but great team. We're about nine marketers. Very, we're a global team. We also market to pretty much the entire world. I've got 20 years in B2B marketing, software as a service, mostly tech. Just a background on Pixels. We are the global leader in e-commerce that on a daily basis, we create around – well, I shouldn't say create. We edit and we perfect around Our products are the product videos, the product images that you see on all the product detail pages on a lot of the big retailers and brands out there. Also, just want to highlight this, not all videos are the same. We do have highly produced videos from some of our live events. We have webinars. We have all of that on our website. But those are not the videos that I'm going to be talking about today. I'm going to be talking about the lo-fi, the authentic, and the social-first videos. Those are the videos that we use to really humanize our brand, keep our relationships warm. And we use those videos on all the platforms where all our customers already are. Even though we are B2B, we have very long sales cycles, we sell to enterprise accounts, we're still selling to people, right? Those people. They are on LinkedIn, they're on Instagram, they're on TikTok, because they're people just like we are. So, there's just a video playing in the background here to show a little bit more what I'm talking about. When I first hired Annike, who's our social media marketer, I sat her down and asked her, so tell me what you need. You probably need a camera. You probably need some editing software. Lights, maybe. And she just looked at me and she's like, well, I got my iPhone. But maybe I could use one of those tiny mics we use for interviews. And maybe a ring light for a webinar. I was like, all right. Let's figure that out. So that's when we went to Amazon and $50 later, we had the entire setup. She edits everything with TikTok, sometimes, I guess, Instagram, sometimes Canva, depending on where we're going to be using the video. So there's really no big production team. There's no big investment. And the beautiful thing about this is that we can all do it. Annike isn't the only one who knows how to do this. So we do a lot of events. And Annike doesn't go to everything, right? So when Annike isn't there, I'll bring up my iPhone. I'll film it. Depending on when we need it. Maybe I'll edit it myself. Maybe I'll send it over to Annike and she'll handle it. But, I mean, we've all edited, like, videos from our vacations, right? We know how to do this. And that's how we decided we were going to work with this. Anyone can do it. And I think the key here is that this is not a compromise. We decided to do it this way. Very lo-fi. Very deliberate. Because we believe even in a B2B enterprise world, we're selling to big enterprises, we still believe that authenticity, showing our people, it beats polished, highly produced, expensive video almost every time. I think, again, I said this before, especially when we are working in big enterprise sales, right? The buying team is big. People don't just log on to our website and self-serve and boom, and there they are. No. We have a whole buying team talking to quite a few people from our sales team. So, for us, long sales cycles, all of that, it's really about people, right? So, we want to get our own people out there, build brand awareness, build thought leadership, show their faces, personalities, all the behind the scenes. I love how you're talking about how your Copenhagen office is the one that works the best. I think it's similar here. We do get a lot of interaction and showing a lot of the behind the scenes stuff. So, it's really lo-fi. And I think that's also expected today, right? We are in the era of the TikTokification, right? So, it doesn't mean that, like, traditionally boring B2B enterprise. We don't have to produce boring, blue B2B content. We don't have to produce B2B traditional videos. Nobody wants to see that. That's not what we are on those platforms for, right? We are on those platforms to be entertained. So, please entertain us. So, that's what we do. We do this very deliberately because we want to build trust and we believe that we build trust this way. We build relationships and we build reach. And if you want to see how we do this, more of those very low-file, authentic, personal, sometimes fun videos, go check out Pixel's LinkedIn profile or even our TikTok profile or go follow me because I'll post a lot of that stuff as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Katrina, Rob and Maurice. Before I throw it out to you guys, I just wanted to ask a maybe dive a little bit deeper into this idea of where we're coming from, right? I think we all know a truly video -enabled organization would be an ad. So, having pretty much anyone on the team who can make, manage, share video and webinars, that feels like that's where we want to get to because there's an assumption and we think a reality that video is a truly powerful human way to create connections and do business. That's the vision, but what is the reality right now? And then I think we're going to talk more about how to get that through other constraints that maybe cultural constraints that are still in place that are stopping us, that are hindering us. I love the way, you know, Rob and Katrina, you know, you talked about it's almost as easy as, well, we just hire a couple of video-native people and we let them do their thing. I imagine that's probably a bit different for Ghia. There's a few more hurdles there. But is it that simple? simple maybe you guys just want to elaborate a little bit on sort of you know what has enabled you to sort of tear down those silos give up a little bit of control and enable you to make progress on that video journey yeah I can start I think it's it's an emotional thing first which is the organization especially the leadership in the organization have to stop being so scared and it's the it's the responsibility of the brand marketing or the marketeers to show the benefits of doing so so for us it was when we showed we made a video about the you know just a light video about the new office and then we were able to show the data to say hey look this works we should do more when our CEO was used to making all hands presentations and those types of things but when one time he was on holiday we had a big thing happen he did a video on his phone we had more engagement from that than we did from anything else okay then after a while that barrier kind of comes down a bit which is really really important yeah I think it's really about setting the team free and letting them know that it's fine if it's not perfect b2b doesn't have to mean boring and perfect because we're still just people selling to people and I mean we also we have a wonderful CEO and he's funny in a weird way sometimes and we do get to some into a meme, put it out there. And people love that. And he also doesn't mind for the most part. So being able to do something like that, I think that sends a really strong signal to the rest of the organization. Yeah, we had a kind of a journey with this. So Gaea exists originally of 250 little brands with technology and machinery and very, very engineering, very German as well. Well, in 2015, we decided to get everything in one website. So it was the first step to get this one identity. Created Gaea.com, come up with a similar, let's say, Gaea language. But it was still light blue and gray and very, very far away. As you might have seen on the slides, we have now this exciting pink and organic gray. Green, as they call it. All the colors have names all of a sudden, but I really like it. So don't get me wrong, but it's... So I think that was a next step in getting more professional. And we started with that two years ago and now we see the follow-up in video, in quality, in terms of what we have in branding. And I think that's a great step we made. But we don't get ourselves... We don't get ourselves a CEO so far to do a short TikTok. That's never going to happen. But underneath that, there's a lot going on in what we do on social media, in short, and different kind of platforms. Because obviously, we were on Facebook and on Twitter still. And we are shifting that a little bit as well. So yeah, we are exploring. I don't think we will ever be front runners in this. But I think we... In terms of B2B, we are quite far, I would say. Yeah, and we, with the team, just try to have people focus on content. So that's, I think, the most important thing we established, yeah. They don't need to bother about which camera to use or hire a studio and have stuff like that. This idea of kind of almost giving up control, right? And really empowering, your teams to go out and express themselves. Is that... Do you have any examples of how that's working sort of outside of video as just sort of top of funnel and mark-coms, right? But maybe more in sales contexts or internal comms or anything like that? I think, you know, 23, we see video as so much more than just, you know, social brand films, et cetera. It is also these videos that maybe sales team are sending out to prospects, et cetera, et cetera. So are you also... giving up that control there as well and saying, guys, you know, go and do TikToks, send them to prospects? I mean, how is video kind of permeating down throughout the organization and not just in marketing? Okay, safe space. We all... This isn't going out here. There's at least once a day, something crosses my desk, and I've literally got my head in my hands. I'm going, please, God, don't put this... So we got to the stage where we have, like, we've got engineers as well. The engineers will do a video. The partnerships guys will do a video. But yesterday, I spotted a YouTube channel out of nowhere that one of our countries has started. So I've had to be a little bit less dictatorial than I would like to be. But yeah, when it goes, it goes, and you can't really control it. But as long as you have some standards and some things in place, controlling the master brand. But yeah, I think once you guys at Gear get the drug, we've been there. It can be very dangerous. Yeah. Well, I think, at least in our organization, I don't... Well, when we're talking about enabling the organization here, honestly, I think we've only got to enabling the marketing team at this stage. And now I don't know if I should be happy about that. Almost sounds like it. Our sales team is not actually using video that much. I would love to see them doing it even more, but I do think, we still have a little bit of that fear of it. Oh, it needs to be very professional. But I don't know, maybe that's not a bad thing. For us, it's quite difficult. We have a lot of customers who really don't want to be identified with any company. So for example, we built the chicken nugget lines for McDonald's and nobody knows. And because they just don't want it, they want to keep their hands free. and stuff like that. So they don't want to have that out there. So in that way, it's very difficult sometimes to do like these bigger customer stories. And we have our fair share of... I think yesterday we received an email from a person in the Netherlands saying, yeah, I have this German colleague. He makes like these really nice video videos on YouTube about pumps. Can I start a channel for him with a Gale logo on it? No, no, no you can't. So we have to guide people in that. But that's also a message to us that we didn't yet get our fingers out all over the organization. And we need to make sure that if new people come in, that they're onboarded correctly, and that they know which path to take, that the tools are there and free to be used. But there are obviously, because if you have 18,000 people and you just lose control, then you're gonna have a, yeah, there's no brand left. So still a little bit of command and control is necessary. And of course it's a case by case by basis, right? We can't have defense organizations, banking organizations giving up completely. There's ethical, there's financial, there's political reasons, but it's really refreshing. Yeah, patents as well for us. And patents. And patents, yeah, okay. But I think it's refreshing to hear that there is this willingness from senior profiles here to say, guys, we believe in the human side of digital, so go and make that video and all in on authenticity is an overused word, but it's still a powerful word. We have eight minutes and yeah, I think there's already a hand there, which is great. And let's get as many questions as we can. So in the third row there. Hi, Christoph from Flexi Charge. Thanks, really insightful. Couple of questions if I may take a few. A quick one, I'm curious, Katrin, why did you leave out Instagram? Instagram? Yeah. We are actually using Instagram, but we are using Instagram for a very different purpose. This is where we're highlighting a ton of editorial photographers. So we just have a very different objective with Instagram, so that's why we're not posting these videos on Instagram. Makes sense. Yeah. And maybe to the control, and have you thought about making part of the onboarding of new employees? Is it part of your, Rob, in your case? Yes. So when your employees start to like, we have tools, we encourage, you know, do it, but this is how you do it. Yeah, I mean, we still got a little bit of a rebellious streak, which is really, really nice to have in a kind of, cause we're a SaaS B2B engineering company, which is really lovely. It's coming for sure, because like I said, when I saw what, I saw yesterday, it was actually really, really good. I was relieved, but yeah, you need to then start having the brand controls in. When I've worked for the much bigger multinational organizations, you need to have everything absolutely locked down, you know, massive brand book and things like that. But I think what is important is where video is super dynamic. So when you want video to travel, when Angela Arendt, when she was head of retail at Apple, she did a video on her phone to, you know, she's gonna speak to millions of people potentially, or thousands of people in the organization. Her kid phoned and she didn't stop the video. She said, sweetie, I'll call you back. And then went straight back to it. That from people I know there is one of the main reasons why as a leader, she was so well loved during her time there. So I think we can be quite innovative with how we use video, not just for what goes out externally, which is really important. So I don't want to kill that, but I just wanna make sure to your point, what goes out, we have to make sure it's aligned with everything we're trying to achieve. Yeah, and also I think on boarding, it can be a tricky thing, because if they're gonna be on board with us, then it's gonna be video, webinar, newsletters, email signatures, and the list goes on, SEO, whatever, everything is like somewhere in a guideline or brand book. So if you just gonna drop that on them, and they actually start doing video six months later, they don't remember that somebody during onboarding mentioned that. Anyway, you saw our setup, it takes six months to even catch what we do in all those different industries. So it's really overwhelming. So it's sometimes also waiting, and wait till the question comes in, and then go, because I think most of us, if there's no idea, there's no reason to train that in depth, but make sure it's on top of mind. So be careful sometimes with, on boarding people with dropping everything on them, and then thinking that they know. Good point. And the second row here. Thanks guys, really interesting to see how it's been enabled in your organizations. We heard over the last couple of days quite a lot about video strategy. So I'm really keen to hear from you all, how does strategy feature in this enablement, and letting loose, and being less dictatorial, and then off the back of that, how do you then measure the adherence to that strategy, and the outcomes of this enablement? Nobody wants to go first. Over to you. Great question. Well, at least for us, right, we know just from looking at our sales cycles, talking to the sales reps, we're talking about strategy right now, right? I'm talking about closing business. And we know building those relationships are key. Even when I say that our sales team, they don't use video themselves, every chance we get, we're a very distributed team, but every chance we get, we will feature them in our videos. So just like getting their face out there to the world, we use that on LinkedIn a lot. We target very, very specifically. We use thought leader ads to get those videos with the sales reps' faces out to our target accounts, so they'll see it. So strategy right now for us is showing our people, because we know that closes deals. Does that answer the question? It's almost a paradox, right? Because is it a strategy to be authentic, right? It's almost like, well, authenticity cannot be so prescribed, but I think there is. I mean, I think it's saying we wanna show our people. We know that that is what creates the sales. So let's make that a strategic intent. The reason why I point is I really loved your platform point earlier, because it depends. We've got video that will be super precious. So when we're launching a new campaign and we want to appear, we wanna get attention, that's where everything in that video is thought down to the absolute frame and what people are wearing and everything like that. And then we've got video that will be, a couple of new people at our office are playing ping pong or something. And we wanna put that on LinkedIn. That takes maybe slightly less thought. That's not six months planning and casting and those types of things. So I think it's really important to think about what is the role of video to your point? What is the role on each platform or where will it go? Who do you want to see that? And not necessarily who from a kind of a specific perspective, but what kind of people do you want to attract with it, which is really, really interesting. And then the second thing is keep evaluating how many people are engaging, how they're engaging, soft metrics, qualitative and quantitatively. And don't be, like I said, be married to like stories and the stats, not just this did well, so we'll do that again. That's not what it's about. Keep thinking, how can we surprise and delight people, for instance, or inform people. We got one minute, I can see. So I'd love to maybe round off with one more question if anybody is out there. Otherwise, I think we can say, thank you so much to our amazing panel and thanks for being here. Thanks for choosing us. Thank you very much for sharing your insights. You guys can just.