TwentyThree Summit 2025 | Lev Cribb, Made to See

You are the Managing Director of the video agency Made to See and you are much experienced with webinars. What are the key steps for developing an effective webinar program from scratch? Where we see success and successful webinar programs being rolled out is where the people who pitch and run the webinar program internally get buy-in from the senior leadership team. Once you get that air cover where the leadership team says yes we see the value, we understand what the purpose is and we will give you air cover for the next 12-18 months to develop this, that's when you start going about it in the right way. And then it comes down to understanding what the goals are. What do you want to achieve? You know often it is contributing to pipeline. What is that contribution and how much from webinars should be contributed to that overall contribution that marketing has. And once you have that number you can then work your way back and say okay well if we get an average of 100 webinars, we're going to get 100 webinars, 10 of these and they turn into X number of MQLs and those turn into X number of pipeline. You can then work your way back and calculate how many webinars do we need to run? What does the program look like? And that's the starting point. That's often different to taking an ad hoc approach to running webinars which then is blind really. You're just running webinars for the sake of running webinars. Yeah and it's essential that it's linked, that it's aligned to their overall marketing goals right and company goals as well for sure. Exactly. And you often say that planning, process, quality and consistency are critical for success. What are some of the most common pitfalls that companies face in these areas and how they can overcome these? Yeah so process, planning and consistency are sort of romantic triangles. The two don't work by themselves. If one is missing that triangle falls apart. So it's important to keep those three together and then the quality, the fourth point that you mentioned, that follows. So taking that approach intentionally and saying okay we're going to focus on what our planning looks like, we're going to define what our process is going to be like and those two already together point towards this consistency, this idea of we need to be consistent with that as well that comes out of the processes. So by preaching it that way and focusing on those and they're not the sexiest of things right but but by doing it that way you can then have the opportunity to create some really great content, really great webinars. And again, it's focusing on the essentials and the foundational things first. Yeah. And how can partnering with specialists like Made to See and platforms like TwentyThree transform a company's approach to the video marketing and the live communication in general? I mean, Made to See and TwentyThree, we combine different areas of expertise that are very complementary. You have the TwentyThree platform, which is incredibly versatile, has constant evolution built into it. The team at TwentyThree are always evolving, always introducing new things. This year's Webinar6, we've just seen in the keynote a tremendous amount of new introductions. And then combine that with the expertise of Made to See, where we are extremely well-versed in running large-scale programs for global organizations and being on the ground and actually producing those from a strategic perspective and a production perspective. You bring those two together. And you have a wonderful recipe of how something can really work. And if you look at the TwentyThree platform, any company will be hard-pressed to outgrow what's available and can be done within the platform. So it's a real future-proof model and approach. And for you, what do you think are the strengths and the unique benefits that 23 brings to companies looking forward to scale their video and their webinar program? It's an easy one. The platform, as I said, is incredibly versatile. The team is incredibly passionate. They're passionate about driving forward the video industry in the widest sense. And a lot of what TwentyThree develops is steeped in real life. It is not just a thought of, okay, well, what should the roadmap be? And let's just come up with something. It is very much taking on feedback from clients, taking on feedback from partners, and developing something that people would actually use and actually have asked for. And that's incredibly powerful. And it is more than just a SaaS tool. It is a resource. It is a real partner to organizations that are serious about video and about live streaming. Yeah. You mentioned this feedback part, right? And in TwentyThree, as you know, we have the State of Webinars that we do this research yearly, right, with our customers and the market in general. So I think it's a great example of taking this feedback, learning from the mistakes, the pitfalls, and all of that, and bringing that value back to building the industry, right? Right. Exactly. And, you know, the industry is constantly changing. There's always new ideas. There's always new things that impact what we do with video. We can move fast. Yeah, really fast. And learning, I mean, the state of the industry, state of webinars, state of video, are often obviously retrospectives. We analyze what's happened before. But it also gives us the marching order, the marching direction of where have we come from, where are we going now? And it allows us to anticipate and predict together what we know, you know, what's next. Yeah. So this year's theme, as you know, of the TwentyThree Summit is the human side of digital. What does that mean to you? Well, I mean, video is deeply human at the end of the day. Video has always been about humans and their passions. You know, it displays on screen what we feel. So video is really empathetic. And digital can, you know, sometimes come across as something that is, you know, not personal, is anonymous, is perhaps not visual at all. But video is a huge key part of that. So that's human side of digital because ultimately video is about humans. And it displays humans, engages with humans. So it is the perfect title for this conference. Thank you, Lev. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.