Chris Kubby: The 4 'Ables' of Video Marketing

We've been privileged to work with some of these guys. Actually some of the people in the room as well. We've also done some stuff for Copenhagen airports. So you can see here, Jabra, Kohlpass, Fitzer, DFDS, and then IT. Some of the large brands in Denmark, right? So we've been pretty lucky to do this. But what I really wanna talk to you guys today about, so what is it that you were actually looking to produce? Before I get really into that, I just wanna sort of, I mean, I think you guys all get it. Video's massively important, right? If we look at some of the latest numbers or the sort of trends, and who knows if this is reality or not, but basically a lot of smarter than me people are saying that video's gonna represent about 82% of all IP traffic by 2021. That number's startling, like in two years. 82% of everything that we're doing on the web, on our phones, on whatever is gonna be video. I actually think it's probably correct if you look at your own user behavior today, you're probably spending a significant amount of your time consuming video. Who believes this number? All of you, but you don't watch porn. I want you watching, right? Anyway, but video is everywhere, right? We know that YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn added video this past, what, like seven, eight months ago, maybe that, maybe nine months ago. Snapchat, the dying brand of Snapchat, had it musically, TikTok, which is just exploding now. Everybody wants video, more and more and more video, and which is great because video's a fantastic medium. Video, we can tell a lot of great stories, but as more and more platforms do this, it gets harder to cut through that noise. I mean, DR said, I mean, everybody here has basically said the same thing, like how do you cut through that noise? And that's what I'm here to tell you guys. I'm here to get your guys' video marketing to this, because right now, for a lot of you, if you're like me, it feels sometimes, sometimes I feel like this when I've posted video or I've done video for somebody and it's just not working, you're like, oh man, I just want to take a nap. But there's four Able's, as I say, when it comes to video. Is it searchable, which is largely a YouTube thing, or even an Instagram for the explore feed or going after any sort of thing where people are like busty Asian girls, people are looking for that kind of stuff, who like mustaches, of course. Is it clickable? Is it the instant that I see it? Like I'm scrolling, all of us are scrolling our lives away on Facebook or Instagram. So is it clickable? Do I instantly want to click on it? Is it enjoyable? And there's many forms of enjoyable. And then is it shareable? These are the sort of things that I look at when I go through video productions or videos that we do or looking at other people's videos. I say, okay, is it these four things? And there's a lot of things you can do to make all of these things better. One of the things that you have to consider is this. And I don't know if you guys fully believe this. Who believes that attention spans are at an all time low? Quite a few of you. Okay, this is a yes and no, right? Because I believe that attention spans for shitty content is low. And everyone's got a really good shit detector right now. We can see almost instantly within the first three seconds if something is worth our time or not. So that's very important. So I don't think it's that our attention spans are low, but our attention spans for shitty content are low. Because if attention spans were really low, we wouldn't be doing this till 3 a.m. watching House of Cards, right? We could sit here and do that and watch Game of Thrones and do this and do tons of YouTube videos and all that kind of stuff. And it's not really about attention spans. It's about how our attention span is for shitty content. This is how people are scrolling today's, folks. They're not slowing down for anybody. So you really have to stop the... He's clearly doing Tinder. Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? He really wanted to swipe right. So you have to stop the scroll. So some of the things that you can do to do this is think about the audience and think about what people are consuming, right? I really, I'm super interested in what gets popular. What is pop culture? Why are things working in the web? Why are things working on YouTube? Why are things working in Instagram? And a lot of people will sit, it's a mindset thing. They'll roll their eyes. How many people have caught themselves looking at something that's done extremely well and you roll your eyes and you're like, oh, that's complete crap. Why did that get? There's somebody who has their hand up back there. How many people have done this? How many people have looked at something on LinkedIn or on YouTube or when they're like, oh my God, why did this get a million views? We've all done it, right? And we kind of like scoff at it and we roll our eyes and we stick up our nose at it. But I've really worked hard to try to train myself to go, why? Why did this do well? And start to reverse engineer it or analyze it to figure out what's actually working here. So Instagram's a good example. I mean, if you look at stuff that's done really well there, there's some red threads or there's some things that you can really take away from it, which is, it uses sort of high, I would say like bold text. It uses something like a question or uses something that it wants you to click on it. One of the clickable things, right? So would you spend this much on this jacket? You instantly wanna go, what is this jacket? Is this jacket that nice? So you instantly start to, your brain starts to fire away on, oh, maybe I should check this out. Or what did Pomegranates ever do to her? You instantly want to know why is this happening? Do you agree with him? Now these are all question ones, but man explains valuable life lesson using two lighters. Okay, right? I mean, when, okay, this is an easy one. One, free iPhones and MacBooks and all that garbage, right? This cop couldn't hold it, ha ha ha. But I use these and I go, okay, how could we apply this to our clients? How can we apply this to the videos that we're making? Because clearly this is working. So what are the elements? It's okay, it's using text, because we all know we're scrolling without sound on. It's using something that tweaks my brain, my mind to go, okay, I need to connect the dot. I need to find out what this actually is. So it's using some mystery. If anybody watches, you guys like David Fincher? Anybody like David Fincher, the director? Watch some of his stuff. I saw a really good video essay on it where he talks about how David Fincher, when he uses the camera, he really makes you want to know what's on the other side of somebody. Like if an actor's looking at something, you want to know what are they looking at. Whereas some other actors, or sorry, directors, might show you what they're looking at first, and then show you the actor or the actress. David Fincher throws it around and says, no, I want to show you the actor reacting to something first. So your brain goes, what are they looking at? And that's what you have to kind of do in social, is you kind of have to tweak the brain to sort of say, what is actually going on here? So being bold, use of text, use of captions, colors, the first three seconds matter a lot. So you have to stress test your content and say, is this actually meeting these demands? Here's an example of something that I've done that's similar in that zone. I'm using a lot of bold color. I'm saying what does marketing and sex have in common? I'm using a lot of sex things, I'm sorry guys. I didn't mean to, this is just how my presentations end up being. I don't know what's wrong with me. Maybe it's because I'm married, I don't know. There's something wrong with me, I'm getting it worked out. But listen, let's just quickly watch this, and you can sort of see I'm putting all these things sorted together, right? I feel like advertising is a little like this. When I go to my wife and I say, hey honey, you wanna have sex? The chances of conversion are very low. Very fucking low, like very low. But if I come with this, if I come with some flowers, I get a little bit closer. If I come with a cupcake, I'm getting really close now. If I put on some Barry White, things are probably gonna happen. So I really think about brands need to get into this zone, because I think a lot of brands are doing, hey honey, you wanna have sex? And the instant answer is no. Specifically for the younger generation as well. They smell bullshit from a mile away. They're used to advertising, they're used to being bombarded with messages. You know, you gotta get away from that. You gotta get above the noise. And some of the ways you could do that is being very smart about advertising, communicating, and marketing on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, whatever those platforms are. New ones that are coming up as well. So, and the growth hack is actually this. If you all wanted to know how to bypass the flowers, the cupcake, and the Barry White, just come with a nice bottle of wine, and you can kind of bypass all that kind of stuff. But there's, so when we put some of these things together, being bold, use of text, I think that a good sort of way of doing this is actually going into the platforms that you're going to be producing stuff for, and doing a search on what it is you're actually producing first, and saying, okay, what are the top things that actually pop up? Because these are typically the most popular. And if I want to compete in this zone, if I wanna compete for clicks, how can I compete for clicks in this? Right, so looking at the thumbnails, you can also do it with Instagram and the Explore feed. You could say, okay, today we're producing a video about shoes, right? Why don't I go to the Explore feed, type in shoes, see what the hell is coming up, and say, okay, if I wanna compete against all of these motherfuckers, how do I do that? How do I create my content that sticks out in this? Because that's where you guys are basically having to compete. So this is such great things, you can also do this in Facebook, you can do this in all the platforms. You basically just do some searches for whatever you're producing and saying, how do we stand out in this noise? It's like back in the day when product marketing people wanted to produce the best package, right? They would go down the cereal aisle and they'd say, okay, here's all the cereals. We got Cheerios, we got oatmeal, we got cornflakes. And they could say, okay, if our package needed to be really out there on this shelving, what do we produce? And that's what you guys have to do. You have to look at your video as a product on a shelf. How do we make it stand out on that shelf? Now, now that they've clicked on your video, let's say we've crossed that bridge, one of the cool sort of elements that I like working with is either the passive story arc or the active story arc. And there are two different ways of sort of looking at video productions, a lot of, well, a lot of all stories in general, but sort of the, I don't wanna say old school because I still think there's a large place for sort of the TV style or the movie style where you're kind of, you're leading in, you're building up to a climax, you have a big climax reveal, and then you have like an offer, like this is advertising, buy now, and then you might have your branding, your logo at the end, right? So you typically have this sort of character or story arc that's a bell curve. This is a standard story arc. What if we cut that story arc in half? What if we started at the climax? And you'll see this actually, if you start looking at more and more advertising, they're taking parts of the film or the parts of the video that they're creating and taking it at the climax and actually pulling it to the front. And they're showing you the good stuff early, and then they're gonna build back. They're gonna build back that other stuff. So they've realized that, hey, man, we gotta grab some attention. We can't start with like a big drone shot. You know what I mean? Like we, that's just not gonna grab people anymore. We have to start with the juicy stuff. So if you started the eye-catching visual, or it could be even eye-catching sort of story element, whatever it is, then do some sort of subtle branding or some things like that, a big reveal or a climax, or not a climax, a resolution, as they say, and some quick cuts to the end. Then you have a much more attention-grabbing piece of video content. Does everyone understand this? Is everyone alive? Good. I haven't bored you guys enough. Someone's dead. There's been a few of those tonight. It's actually, it's like a musical chime here. So Gap did this ad campaign. They did this kind of web series two or three years ago where they were introducing some new genes, and they wanted a cool, creative way to do this in social, and this is kind of what they came up with. And see if you can pinpoint the sort of, the sort of using of the half arc, if we want to call it that, the action story arc. See if you can pinpoint that. So this is a trailer. Do you guys want to see it again? It's really good, I think. It's really cool. It's really cool. It's really good, I think. It goes by so fast, but like, and if you notice actually there's genes in almost every scene, and they really actually like focus in on the genes, and it's so fucking subtle, but it's so great. And what it's doing is like, it's showing you a preview of the series to come before you even see it, but it's really doing it in a very smart way. So this is, I think, the kind of good content that's good for social, right? It really grabs our attention. Someone getting dressed or undressed is always going to grab attention. Let's just be real here, right? So I mean, that's, and then the way they produce is where they're showing you, they're bringing the sort of action points in, they're doing some subtle branding cues. They're not overtly showing you what they're doing, what they're doing, what they're doing, what they're doing, they're doing subtle branding cues. They're not overtly shoving the product in your face. They're actually using it in the story, which is a fantastic way to do advertising, and it just works. You wanna see this 12-part series. Now, one of the things that I've heard here, actually, which I think is very, very, very, very smart, a lot of people talk about quality content, and I have a problem with the phrase quality content. Not because of high production values or things like that, but a lot of brands will say, we really want quality content, and I ask them, what is quality content? And typically, it means high-end production. But I say, okay, but for me, quality content is content that works, and very rarely is production and something working tied together. In fact, like Frans said at the beginning, there's a little bit of inauthenticity. If you go too high production values, is Frans still here? Did he leave? That bastard. Anyway, so actually, production value has very little to do with actually quality content. So produce stuff on the fly that works, and you're checking your data, making sure it works, is what I consider quality content. The other thing about quality content or produced content, lower-end production, is that it feels timely. If you see a video that's shot on your iPhone, because we're all walking around with 4K cameras, people are more receptive to it because they feel like it's breaking news. They feel like it's timely, that it was shot today, that I need to see this. We're all afraid of missing out. So when we see something that's a little bit like shaky cam, low cam, stuff, we instantly say, oh, this is something right off somebody's phone. It's just been produced. I need to see this now. So keep that in mind. Going live is also a big trend in video today. How many of you have gone live on video, like live streaming? Just a few. I wish more people would dive into this because I think it's a fantastic area. It's about that fear of missing out thing, right? When you're going live, people think that this is happening now, I want the information now. So it's a part of that sort of fear of missing out thing. And you can do a lot with live video today, so don't be afraid of doing that. You can do, and if you don't even need to create the content, a lot of people are scared of content or going live because they're like, what the hell am I gonna talk about? A lot of times you can do ask me anything, just getting questions from the audience. You can send us your questions in the comments, we'll answer them. So if you work for a brand, say you work for Mata's or you work for any fashion brand or something, there's a lot of people that maybe have questions about, hey, what's happening with this color trend or what's happening with this or hey, I set myself on fire with your products, what's... What can I do about that? A lot of fun stuff like that. One of the things that you can do to tap into this and produce better content and get more reach and get more views is think like show business, right? So one of the things that show business or TV or movies is sort of trained into us is release times at a specific time, right? So if you, for example, are a brand and you wanna produce content on a regular basis, that's a very good strategy, but then have that in mind that you wanna produce every Tuesday at 12 o'clock, this piece of content is coming out, right? And you're training your audience to come back and view your content because the trick here is that there's so much noise and there's so much stuff you gotta get through that you can actually train your audience to come back to your content. You can become like a destination within your content like IKEA is, you know, like we don't just happen upon IKEA. It's not like we're just walking around, oh, that's IKEA, great. It's like we actually have to physically go there. You have to create content and create schedules and be consistent so that people go, okay, every Friday at noon, I know this is coming out, I'm gonna go check it out. One of the things that I want you guys to be leery of as you pursue more video marketing is inflated view numbers. I'll be quite honest with you guys, all social media is lying to you. They're fucking with us, like literally, they're literally fucking with us and I'll show you why because here's the sad thing, I might put up a video for myself and like look at the view numbers and be like, wow, I got 892 views on that video, that's fantastic. I'm so proud of myself and I call my mom. But the truth is when you dig actually into the numbers and you can use platforms, of course, like 23 and Facebook and stuff like that to get into it, you can see that this 892 views of the video is only like three seconds, right, which is dog shit. Like we can all say like a three second view is dog shit. We can't do anything with that. It doesn't mean anything. So of course, LinkedIn has the numbers. Of course they could actually give me the real numbers and say, hey, actually, you know what, that was 800 three second views and one 10 second view and one minute view and one 24 hour view because somebody fell asleep at their desk watching your shitty video. They could actually tell me this, but they don't, right? They have the numbers, but they won't because they know that this little trickery here is going to continually reinforce that I should make more videos for their platform. And all platforms do this. They don't readily give you the numbers. You have to dig a little deep into it. So please watch out for this. It's important and if any of you who are working for ad agencies or stuff like that, please train your clients also in this because sometimes they come with these big numbers and they're like, they're so proud of it and they should be proud of it and you should be helping them get there, but you have to instill a little bit of reality into this so that they also understand the business metrics around this. One of the trends that's coming is actually longer videos on Facebook and YouTube. It was supposed to be YouTube. We're just seeing more longer form content on all these platforms. Can anybody tell me why Facebook wants longer video? Who said what? Group I guess. Advertising, advertising, advertising, advertising, yeah. They wanna show more. Traditionally Facebook has been 30 seconds to 90 second videos and they want to show longer ones because seeing an ad in a 30 second video that's 15 seconds of ad is probably not so nice. So they realize that so they're also competing with YouTube so just keep that in mind, right, for your clients or for yourself, longer videos are working better on those platforms. Gifts, now okay, obviously this is not specifically a video thing but I think it's important to note that GIFs are exploding. How many people are using GIFs in their marketing? Ah, quite a few of you guys. I did this poll a year ago and everyone was like, no way am I ever using GIFs in my advertising or my content marketing. But GIFs of course are giant and you can actually use platforms. I'm blown away by these numbers and this is probably a half a year since I updated these numbers, but Giphy, one of the biggest GIF search engines, 300 million daily users and one billion GIFs serves today. These numbers are close to being one of the biggest social media networks now. That's crazy and nobody thinks of it as a platform to get your brand out there. Not nobody but not quite a few. So creating video content and then turning that into GIFs, seeing what you can actually make out of it is a very smart strategy going forward because people will be searching for stuff here and if your brand is related to, I go back to shoes or whatever you're selling, then you'll most likely wanna be in places like this. Here's the other thing that I really, this is actually Tinder, this is how, anybody wants to buy this, I have some in my car. $10, no I don't have any more, I sold out. Here's the thing, most companies when they're doing video they're really not thinking about mobile. They're really not, they're really not thinking about the format, the vertical video, they're not thinking about the time that people are spending, they're not thinking about how to capture attention when scrolling, all those things that need to be in here. So please be super aware. We work with, for example, I'll just say, most video directors or video editors, what are they working on? If they could work on this, they fucking would. Seriously, it's like the biggest screens ever, and they're editing in this sort of size, and then I'm like, but guys, it's gonna end up like this. It's literally going to be this size. The text you put on this is not even readable. So a lot of times you have to train for this sort of style, and I have some video guys here, sorry guys. You're awesome, I love you. I love you guys so much, you know that. But sometimes you have to remind people that, hey, this is for literally somebody's phone, so please make it work that way. Two minutes, I'm fast. That's what my wife says. So vertical video. Vertical video's huge, it's massive, we all know that. If you want some stats, there's a big study done on sort of vertical video ads within Facebook. Vertical video managed to reach 58% more people than horizontal videos. Horizontal video ads, which actually get less exposure, are 63.5% more expensive than vertical video ads. Run vertical video. Not gonna say it, everyone say it. Run vertical video. Run vertical video. Now the girls. Now the guys. Oh my god. We're so fucking doomed, guys. We're so doomed. We're dead. Vertical video gets 28.5% more post reactions than what horizontal video gets, and vertical video also gets 39% more shares. So think about that. Here's some vertical video examples, but we don't have to see those. How to milk your content, okay? I think some of these other guys have covered this before, but basically we like to use the content pyramid, which is have longer form video content, split it up into micro content, so repurpose it, distribute it across, yeah, get a picture. That's a good one. So create short form, like memes, images, quotes, stories, mashups, remixes, rant. Just basically remix all of your shit, distribute it across your channels. Here we go. Listen, here's the big part. Listen. Listen to what people are actually saying about it. Listen to what people are actually doing. Use the fucking data and say, okay, we learned something, we're gonna recreate it or remix it for next time because we've gotten smarter, and then redistribute the next stuff after you've done this, right? So use your community, use your social stats to figure out what's working and what's not. You can even go in to find out where do people drop off on the video, where do they react more to the video, all that kind of stuff. Use that data to produce better content. One last tip. This will take your shit to the next level, okay? Think like Hollywood. What does Hollywood do? They do this. They find a vehicle that works and they keep doing it again and again and again and again. They keep tweaking it to get better and better, but they literally, like, what are we on, Transformers 20 or something? Like Michael Bay's in a wheelchair. Here's the thing. Find out what works and just do it again. Oftentimes as marketers, we move on to the next thing without actually learning anything from the previous stuff. We actually just start producing again and again without actually saying, wait a second, this worked. So if you find a video format or you find a content platform, you find something that works really well, most times you just have to keep doing it, right? Build it into a show, build it into a webisode, build it into a property that you can actually leverage later for branding and for business. That's it for me. Thank you. Thank you.