Video: The Marketing Leaders' Perspective

And welcome to this panel on the marketing leader's perspective on video. According to LinkedIn, visual storytelling is the most in-demand marketing skill right now. It comes as brands double down on video -first strategy to capture attention, with the research underscoring that the growing importance of short-form video and the importance of creative formats need to be able to cut through an increasingly distracted marketplace. However, at the same time, life is getting more complicated for marketing leaders. There's a real pressure to do more with less, as marketers are expected to manage a growing number of channels with ever-tightening budgets. Alongside this, we would be remiss not to mention AI. AI is frequently mentioned across comprehensive stages such as the one I'm sitting on right now. However, what marketers are hearing is that customers want that human connection to cut through the sheer volume of AI noise. Consequently, video marketing has grown beyond just one channel in this year, but it's now becoming a question of strategy and investment in brand building. Therefore, marketers must ask themselves, what can video achieve and who owns this element of strategy within their organisations? With that in mind, I would like to welcome our panellists. Laurence Paquette, Vice President and Global Head of Brand and Marketing at Vestas Energy. Amanda Gandolpho, Head of Content and Design at Rituals. Rasmus Leth Skjoldan, CMO of Hello Retail. So, my first question is, how has the role of own video content changed in your organisation over the past three years? Amanda, I'm going to start with you. Hi everybody. How is everybody doing after lunch? Woo! Ready to go. I think, just to give everybody a little bit of an idea, I think, just to give everybody a bit of context, most of my career has been in B2C. I've been from advertising agencies to Unilever, working on brands like Dove and Hellmann's, and recently leading Swapfiets as a brand. And now I've joined Rituals only one month ago, so I'll try to speak on their behalf as much as possible. One of the things I've seen shifting in the last 15 years in terms of role of video is, whenever you are in a big organisation, marketeers might suffer from marketing blindness, as I call it, which is you're super focused on the campaign, the product, the thing that you've been working hard to launch. You create a whole campaign around it, and then you just push to people like, hey, we're delighted to announce that XYZ, yeah, it's just here. As if humans are living their lives waiting for, you know, whatever new thing you are pushing onto them. And I think this has shifted a lot onto brands trying to, you know, be there, always on, culturally relevant, as I think we've been discussing a lot in this conference, and trying to create something out of the public opinion, rather than pushing onto them. And I think video has been key to do that and to tell that story. And Rasmus, how has that community and people-led element affected your video strategy? Yeah, so I'm in B2B software, so for us, we're always facing a buying case, a buying committee. There's no relevance for us in sort of just reaching one individual with video. It's all about sort of that coordination of reaching the buying committee. So for us, our own video has been hugely about sort of the brand of the store, of the company, just sort of telling that story of our relatively small software company incredibly well, in a very professional way via video. And then, the other thing we sort of use it for is to tap into communities that we're interested in. So if we have a community of another technology vendor or a particular sort of aspect that we need to tap into, then we go pretty hard on sort of establishing conversation formats and interviews with community peers. So it's an approach for us to also tap into what we don't already have access to. And Lawrence, what do you think is the biggest mistake that European brands are getting wrong about video? I think if you also ask about the last three years, so let me just contextualize my answer first. So I had marketing in a company called Vestas. It's a wind turbine manufacturer. It's pretty big in Denmark, globally 35,000 employees. But what we sell is basically large infrastructure projects, hundreds of millions. So for us, video is very, very different. But I think what has happened in the last few years for us and where we really see a movement is we use more and more video towards governments and towards policymakers to change policies. So we've been very active using our marketing toolbox and the videos to really sway policies and change how policymakers are putting regulations and laws. And it's a new way for us to use video, something we didn't do in the past. ROI is obviously so important with something as expensive as video. Which own channels are currently creating the strongest ROI for you, Rasmus? We don't focus as much on sort of the particular one channel. I have a huge focus on cross-channel orchestration and sort of letting videos permeate all of the channels that are relevant for us. Because, again, I'm in B2B tech, so it's a relatively small amount of people that we need to reach with very high engagement of those few sort of video moments that they encounter with us. So for us, it's about making sure that they can find us anywhere they look. And we're sort of going 100% into maxing out on how we can use AI to get there. What's yours? Your approach to AI, Amanda? Oh. What do I think about AI? Good luck. I think to answer your previous question, also on the ROI, whenever we talk about video, I see a huge role for social organic. I think it's impossible not to comment about it. As a place where you understand what's happening on culture, you filter that through the lens of what your brand can add value to those communities. And tap into that. So I see a lot of ROI from there on the always-on side. But also I believe that crafting big brand pieces, videos with higher production value, it's also pretty much out there. And the bigger brand moves that I've seen in the past few years have been also coming from those big ones, the big productions and et cetera. From an AI perspective, of course, we use it. We use it at rituals. We use it at Swapfiets. Unilever. Unilever. I was exploring this since I know of. We are fundamentally against using humans made with AI. We use it to scale our video production and we use it to make our lives simpler. We don't use it to fully replace, let's say, the human capabilities. Especially at rituals, we use a lot of – and there will be also the European AI Act coming. I think as of August. I think as of August you need to put the little label or whatever and say that it was AI generated. I'm also very curious how especially big brands will be doing that because in a world where people see and they are having their jobs taken by AI some of the time, I'm also very curious on what this will do to authenticity and the trust for brands. And have you found that that video has been a useful tool for building that trust among your customers? Yeah, I think 100%. So if I look at all the formats and I think brands need to be – to do video properly, you need to be bold and courageous and know who you are and what you stand for. Because on static formats you can get away with consistency. For example, you put a logo, you put a pack shot, you put colors. But video, there's a whole tone of voice there. There's an intent there if you do it right. Right? So if there's anything that you need to convey with. More emotional, build a connection and something that cannot be easily copied, then video is the way to go. And Lawrence, how do you decide which stories deserve video versus other formats? That's a good question. So whenever we see we need to do any form of content, we always start with the reason why do we need this content? What is it going to be for and so on? And we only choose really later in the process what will be the format. Whether it's video or others. I have to say, though, that most of my stakeholders in the company I work for always think of video first. So the CEO, sales, everyone wants a video because they think that's the way to go. And it's great because we love making videos. But I have to be honest, it's not always the right format. So we take it upon ourselves to say no when we don't think it's the right format or where we think the cost will exceed the return. So we take our time to evaluate. When that is said, we do more and more videos. We don't use AI whatsoever because it's very important for us to show our product as authentically as possible. And we try to minimize our costs where we can by reusing a lot of B-roll footage. Having a CEO that's so pro-video, I think, is quite rare. How do you manage, and this is directed to all of you, those stakeholder relationships? That's a very good question. I mean, often executives and other people might think that their opinions are an expertise, and it's not. So you do need to manage executive thinking that they have great ideas when their ideas might not be that great. And you have to navigate that complicated discussion. But I think it's important to stand your ground as a marketeer and say, you know, this is an idea. I like it, but let's work on it together to maneuver it towards something. That would actually make more sense. But on the other hand, it's really, really beneficial to have stakeholders and executives that are pro-video because it means it makes it a lot easier to ask for budget. So that's how we balance it. We try to get money out of the interest also. I think many of us are here from an agency side or a B2B side, from what I've heard. And I must say that whenever there is a brief, then you work. You work on whatever was asked. Then there's a rework or a lot of back and forth. It's probably because the brief was not very great to start, right? So I think we all as professionals can acknowledge that. And why the brief wasn't great, I think in many organizations, there is a lot of fragmentation, a lot of people that they think they know better. Ultimately, within a big organization, we're all trying to get the same goal. We want more clients. We want more revenue, et cetera. We want to do better for the world. But then there's... There are different opinions on how you get there. And I think if you're from an agency side and you receive a brief that it's a bit half-ass, you should challenge it. And you should get more... As much your stakeholder to agree or to align themselves as much as possible. Otherwise, down the road, it's going to be a problem. And I think in the end of the day, a lot of things that don't happen in companies is purely, I see, because of lack of... Good relationships and trust. So in the end, I think everyone should be just going to therapy with all their coworkers, you know, to just really build that trust. Yeah, I see a... Hey, can I get a hey, man? Yes, let's all go to therapy. But truly, because if those relationships are not yet ironed out and you're not working towards the same objective from the brief to the execution, you're going to have problems. You're going to have tension along the way. That's the same for our personal lives. So, yeah. Yeah. For us, we rely so heavily on piggybacking as a small company, right? We get reach from working with our partners on video and tapping into those other communities. So for us, it's not so much about internal stakeholder management and getting acceptance of using video. It's much more about reaching out into the world and sort of getting the outside world into our space and really taking advantage of much bigger companies as well that we partner with or that we build. We build interesting campaigns with or technology together with. Nice. And what does your mix of video look like at the minute in terms of between short form and long form or high production versus low production? What is your sort of ideal mix for those channels? I think the company I work for, because we are so B2B driven and our decision makers are usually older people, our main... Our main video format continues to be long form. Four minutes top. But 16:9 YouTube style, also for LinkedIn. That's our main. We do see, though, that even in our space, in our B2B space, we do see we are putting more and more effort in TikTok, but that's to target a completely different audience. It's for employer branding. It's for recruitment. It's for communities that might not be pro-wind and to demystify wind. But when it comes to our general marketing effort, it's going to be a more old school, standard, nice looking branding videos. I'm assuming, Amanda, for you, that's quite different because you are coming to us from the world of B2C. Yeah, I don't remember the last time I had a video of more than one minute in my hands. I think the last time was Super Bowl. But I think for employer branding, yes. But then we cut it into many pieces because... Nobody was watching, not even one, two minutes of it. So maybe we didn't do a great job there. Whatever. I would say whenever we are also talking formats, and within marketing team, we are discussing with your channel growth marketeers, hey, how should we set up this campaign? Let's do the full funnel, blah, blah, blah. There will always be the request, oh, let's make it as short as possible. Let's do it 10 seconds, five seconds. And can you imagine to build a brand with five second videos? Like, it's impossible, right? And the biggest mistake I've seen marketeers and also creatives trying to do is accepting this type of request where they say, it needs to sell, it needs to have emotion, it needs to have a peck shot, it needs to have the price, it needs to be in five seconds. And I'm like, yeah, fine. I think it's really, really important for us to understand context, understand what that is trying to do, and try to stick with single messaging. I've been guilty of that a lot. Because you want to say a lot, but the more, and then I would do consumer testing afterwards. In Unilever, we would test and test everything we would put out there. And then you ask the person, what did you see from this video? And they're like, oh, there was a mother taking care of the baby. And you're like, oh, okay. So the mayonnaise was not even noticed, right? So I think we as humans also tend to get on with all those universal things that make us pay attention to things. So the more you're able to be single-minded in your idea, the better for ROI. We do pretty extreme long videos, like full one-hour videos. And they're sort of the ultimate multipurpose tool for us, right? Because we use so much of the transcripts for SEO and GEO purposes and cut it up into all sorts of different ways. Our YouTube shorts. Our YouTube shorts based on those long videos are working really well for us. But we do also have quite a lot of viewership and sort of bottom funnel buyers that need to validate, can we actually trust this company's legitimacy and their technological savviness? And they use video for that to going super, super deep into our products through video. So obviously what you've all described requires a lot of team effort. So therefore that begs the question, where does video sit within your teams and organization? Amanda, we'll start with you. Oh, yeah. Well, different organizations, it will sit in different places. I've seen also a big move in the last five years or so for a lot of big companies internalizing their creative team. So having an in-house creative team and working with agency partners for bigger productions or bigger needs. For rituals, we do everything in-house. I just found out also one month ago, it's insane the capabilities that they have to produce and to generate content. We're talking here about like a team of more than 70 people doing every single thing across every market. For Swapfiets, we would have in-house external. For Unilever, we would have trusted partners like DDB or Ogilvy. But then we would also, we would outsource quite a lot, especially if it was something social and something that we needed fast. Yeah, so different. Rasmus, do you think you're more, are you more reliant on agency help as a smaller company? Sorry, if I'm right. Are you more reliant on agency help or outsourcing? Not much. We do, I mean, we're all about being super scrappy and getting the maximum out of the few long videos we do. So we just have a single freelancer, And so we have more utilizing a Twitter account And I hint at it. is companies, And Lawrence, what about you? Yeah, so we do use agencies in our case. So we have a large brand team. We do most of the scoping, briefing in-house, but we do have a specialized partner we work with. A lot of the videos we create are almost like mini documentaries where we showcase how do you transport a 100-meter blade through curvy roads in the middle of Portugal. And to capture that footage, we do work with specialized agencies that have the right drone licenses, the right safety measures, and so on and so forth, and we have some preferred partners. But we do all the storytelling and all the decision-making in-house, and then we hire the same people over and over to get the footage. And how do you maintain brand consistency? We have very, very strict brand guidelines in the company I work for, very, very strict. We do have local teams that also create content, but we have very strict approval flows, and we also train everyone, and there's only a selected group of people are allowed to create videos. They're all in marketing, so they're all trained, and the brand is very clearly defined across. So localization is really important. What is your approach to localization across different international markets? So again, tiny team, scrappy approach. So we use machine translation of transcripts coming out of our video platform. So we don't really do much else than that, basically, when it comes to localization. But just one point back to what you discussed before about sort of brand guidelines and video. We actually encode them as actual video. So when we do like blog posts based on transcripts of videos, they're sort of measured and graded up against codified brand guidelines. So it's not so much a process of sort of going through a brand guideline PDF and then sort of figuring out whether that adheres to everything we've decided. It's actually blocked from production in our system. Do you have a question? Do you have a system or an AI that filters, is this according to brand or not? Yes. Okay, let's talk about that. Let's. And what about you, Amanda? Sorry? What's your approach to localization as a brand in video? I think whenever it comes to your question about localization, localization in Unilever and rituals, it's a different game. So I'm not going to talk much about it. Who here knows what Swapfiets is? Blue tire, bikes. Nice. So it's a much smaller marketing team with not a lot of resources. We've managed to triple the business here in Denmark in the last three to four years. So I think we did a lot of great things with a very, very small team. And one of the things I would always tell my teams is the feeling and the intent of that video, that campaign, etc. etc needs to be the same needs to be cohesive because we're all humans then we would show this to the french team and they're like oh this doesn't work for the french or this doesn't work for the germans this would be the two teams that would always tell us that it doesn't work for them i don't know if you have the same experience um and and that's true from a language perspective there are many things that when you translate it will not hit the same so i like the word transcreation for content so you can shift language and stuff but the feeling if you did that right and if the need or the human tension that you have in your video on your campaign if that is true that is great for all humans right so i think me as a global marketeer i'm always looking at what is what do we have in common and i think we have much more in common than we are different and of course culture plays a huge role but finding where to translate versus transcreate i think it's a it's also a muscle for video for agency for marketeers and being able to understand when you need to get the strict brand guidelines and when it's it's warranted to deviate from them for the better good of the results and the relationship with the french team i think that that is also a yeah thing to take into account and what's your approach to those relationships yeah for localization i think at vestas we do two types of localization we make a lot of global videos and you'll say oh that's not localization but the thing we do is that we put a lot of from different locations with different people with different languages in our global videos and then we have subtitles most of what we do is in english but then everything can be subtitled so that's one type so that we can push that out in most markets because it represents various facets of what we do and then we also do very localized videos where for example i'll just give an example of video that came out not long ago in the u.s that we've done we would never make that kind of video here it's it's a lot of you see a lot of construction videos and we do a lot of video about how our turbines are made in america because that's what we need uh for the for the u.s market and then in europe we will do something completely different so we also do a lot of videos for local needs only because we we have to and that's the best way to also make sure that our brand is well represented and understood um what maybe just one one uh thing uh more from for me on that about localization i i used to in my past job i used to run a marketing team uh both in emea and um out of singapore and in the u.s and in tech the videos are just the same all the time right you you everyone says that they want to sort of diversify it more or make it sort of stronger in terms of different approaches and different territories but uh quite frankly all of it looks exactly the same and in software at least so there is absolutely no difference between a software video video coming out of the u.s and and singapore or anywhere else so i mean for us we're trying to escape that of course but it's uh it's incredibly difficult is that a sector wide is that something you've noticed in other tech companies as well similar to yourselves at least in software it's like that all over the place we're all just copying the same basically unfortunately fair enough in terms of uh marketing videos towards europe what do you think the biggest misconceptions are biggest misconception of marketing videos yeah video marketing in europe would you like to go first there you go um i think i think i think for me where where i work i think the misconception are easier to consume for sure. They grab more attention, but the misconception is that video is the right format for every piece of content. And it is not always the right format. Maybe sometimes an infographic would be more beneficial, for example. I think that would be my take on this. Nice. Yeah? I love those briefs when they come and they say, just make it commercial, make it sell. Right? Like, it's... Ugh. Who wants to work on that, right? Like, we're all humans trying to do, yeah, the best to entice people to pay attention to our brands or to want to have a relationship with us. It's almost like you go to a first date and then you're on the first date getting to know the person and you're like, do you want me? Do you want me? Do you want to buy this? Hey, here's me at a very low price. Like, we don't do this. We need to build a relationship. We need to show our values, who we are. Do we share the same commonalities or not? Like, and this over time. So for me, it's not, again, one asset that sells. Of course, if someone is at the bottom of the funnel and they're ready to go and I'm researching bikes all over, yeah, sure, put a price in there and get me to convert. But I think the biggest misconception people, marketeers do is investing 70% of their budget on conversion and then expecting, so they're trying to fish in a very small pond of people that are ready to buy and then they expect that that will keep generating results over time without filling up their pipeline, or creating that culturally relevant relationship with as many people as possible. So I think, especially in FMCG, we have this illusion of loyalty. Oh, this is such a loyal customer. Man, you are buying mayonnaise. If there is one mayonnaise, it's half the price. Like, yeah, maybe you love Hellmann's, but I don't know. You could try something else. For us, and at Rituals it's the same, I'm trying to get as many people to buy our product at least once. And hopefully, if they like the product, they will repeat. Of course, this is not the same logic you would apply to maybe a B2B software business, and it's very different. But I think understanding the logic of the market and the brand you're on and understanding what hands video or whatever other type of content needs to do for you, I think this is where many misconceptions come. And what do you think, Rasmus? So, in my opinion, this might be in a slightly different direction, but there's a lot of concepts and video formats that I feel we have under pretty good control. But one thing that I've been really struggling with is just explainer videos in software, something as seemingly simple as that. And I'm really curious about the fact that there are still explainer sort of specialized agencies out there that charge an absolute fortune to do relatively simple videos on sort of tech or video. Or software in particular, in B2B. So I'm curious about, we're exploring how can we come up with a completely new way of using that format. So based on what all three of you are saying, I think you're all, from different angles, alluding to this idea that video needs to be sort of more weaved in to your wider content and market strategy. How do you ensure that that's as seamless as possible? I think at Vestas where I work, video is a core part of our marketing strategy. We have allocated budget every year for video. We even have a budget where we don't know what videos we'll make out of it, but it's a bucket for video because we know what it will cost and what we need. And we know that that's the best way we can tell stories and showcase how we deliver our products to our customers, how we can also, approach communities and also sway governments. So we have it as an integral part of a strategy and it's been like that for the last three, four years. Before that it was more ad hoc, but now it's a fully integrated part of the strategy. Video is one of the most important things we do. Rasmus, what about you? Yeah, in some ways the same, just on a microscopic scale compared to you guys, right? So it's hugely important. And it also has to do with sort of just standing out from the rest of the tech crowd. I'm in a very saturated red ocean kind of market. So we're doing absolutely everything we can to not look like the others through color and the way that we use video. So it's become extremely important for sure. I think for, I've never had a bucket for video. Interesting one. I have a bucket of content production. And from a marketing perspective, I would always look at the relationship between media and non-working media, as we say it. So in Unilever you have very strict guidelines that whenever you produce something, it should, the cost to produce that should be maximum 10, 12% of the overall media spend. These are guidelines from five years ago. Maybe they changed. I'm sure they changed. But I'm always looking how much it costs me to produce versus the amount of eyeballs that I can guarantee. Of course, everyone hopes that it will go viral. But yeah, you cannot guarantee that. I think for rituals, we are not exploring video as much as we could and we should. So that's probably one of the reasons why they hired me. So yeah, we're going to go into a journey. Well, that leads perfectly onto my possibly last, depending on if there are follow-ups. What do you all think the future of video marketing is going to look like? For you more broadly. The future for video and marketing? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure. So I mean, for us in tech, I think we've got a much better handle on the formats now compared to just a few years ago where a lot of companies would still be struggling a lot to just produce quality that would actually be enjoyable to watch. So the... sort of the imminent frontier for us in tech right now is just to sort of the operational side of things, applying the AI behind the scenes, not on camera, but behind the scenes, and really maxing out how we can distribute video much better. And again, like I said earlier, we can now use it for SEO and GEO in really powerful ways. I think with AI, yeah, allowing us to create video personalization, translation, transcreation, adaptation, everything at scale, I really see the future of marketing and video as a matter of taste and people understanding how to curate different things. I would not be surprised, and I think this is already happening, a lot more value placed onto storytellers, brand builders that really have the brains behind all the content that gets created. And especially when you're creating content, you... you need to understand the backbone of the brand. And AI, it's gonna be, of course, making predictions based on what happened in the past, but no one can predict the future culture or exactly how it's gonna fold. So I think that the best brands or the best marketeers out there will be really, really connected with culture, connected with their brand identity, very clear on what those are, and I think the best content will unfold from this. The final thing I want to say is also removing the friction, from getting to know the brand to buy, and of course, buying TikTok shop and that kind of things. Yeah, this will... We're only at the start of it, and I think Asian markets are much more advanced than Europe in this. But yeah. Yeah, I think coming from a very different place, from a very industrial manufacturing company, I think what I see for the future is that a lot of our decision maker in these large, manufacturing industrial companies are gonna get younger, and the way of consuming content will be different. So right now, the average decision maker will be 45 plus, and over the coming years, younger people will become these decision makers, and younger people are consuming content in a completely different way, on a completely different platform. And so that means for large B2B industrial company like the one I work at, we're gonna need to start doing things the way B2C has been doing, and we're gonna have to go in a completely new direction. And that hasn't started yet, but I think it will, and it will go faster than we probably expect it. All right, what would your advice be for marketers and the video people here to prepare for that future? I'll start, I'll say if you are in B2C, then be ready to go towards B2B, and you will have a lot of experience and expertise that will be very useful for a lot of large, B2B companies, because we don't have that experience in-house. So I think that would be my advice. There will be lots of room for people from B2C and B2B soon. I think my main advice for any creative marketeer out there is remember you are creating and crafting things for humans, purely. And I think very often we are so obsessed with what we're doing, and we are so into our internal world of what is important for our boss, for our company, that we... Yeah, we... We lose perspective of what's happening out there, what people care about, why would someone care about the piece of content that I'm putting out there. And I think reminding me of that every single day, I think it has been a true game changer. I think for me, the best advice I can give from my sort of AI obsessive side here is don't be afraid of the AI coding tools. Dive into it and see what you can get to pretty fast with it. I think there are all of these ways that you can sort of let your great video content live in better ways if you use those tools to orchestrate the journeys better, which is entirely possible. And there are so many people that are still in a bit of fear state around it. I've found that it's not so difficult once you just sort of take the first step. So don't be afraid of that would be my advice. So... Can I just ask one question? One question for the crowd. I am really looking for an AI tool. It doesn't need to be AI, but a tool. All of them are sort of AI these days. That can edit, resize, translate video at scale, but resize not in the way that you do statics, but for video. So if any of you is responsible for this tool or you're working on it, I would love that you come to me and let me know. Sorry, I needed to do that pitch. Okay, I'll talk to you later. Oh, sorry. Good one. Editors, he said. Humans, yes. All right. So on that note, that wraps things up for this afternoon. Thank you to our wonderful panelists for joining us.