Most B2B marketing is boring, and in a world where the alternative to your content is someone closing their laptop to watch Netflix in the middle of the day, boring is fatal. When people feel the human element is missing, they connect less with your product and switch to a competitor more easily, so the real job is to give them a reason to care.
Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia, traces his company's path from faceless screencasts to a marching-band parade, a feature-length documentary and an animated series, and shows that any company can do the same. The route in is permission and low-risk moments: carve out a slice of time and budget, start with an iPhone or a DSLR and a few lights, and find the small experiments, like a delightful survey invite, where the downside is tiny but the brand upside is real. Then put video everywhere, from hiring to onboarding to support.
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Well, hello, Turing Fest. Good to see you again virtually, but here here with you in your screen. I'm here. I'm here in my office. No one else is, but that's the world we live in now. So excited to be chatting with you today.
I'm gonna be talking to you about how to fight your boring and how to make more interesting content and videos. I'm Chris Savage. I'm the CEO of Wistia. We are a video platform for marketers. We've been around for a little bit, and what we do is help people figure out how to make better videos, videos that connect, with their audience, understand, how those videos are performing and all different sorts of stuff like that.
I'm excited to kind of walk you through our process and and show you some of our lessons and some of our mistakes. And I hope you leave today feeling more confident that you too can fight your boring. At Wistia, we've built our brand and our company with video.
Silly videos, fun videos, musical videos, but this is not how we started actually. We we started as being a video company that was making no video. That may not even seem possible if you know our brand today. And after maybe, I'm gonna say a year, two years, we started making screencasts.
I made screencasts walking people through our product. I thought that's what they wanted to see was how does the product work. Don't worry. There was no faces, not even a talking head. Just just a just a screen, just a poorly designed web application.
But over time, we got comfortable taking risks. We started trying different things, and that brought us to some pretty interesting places. We had a I think one of my favorite examples is we want to introduce a new pricing plan. We thought, how can we show people this in a way that they'll understand the significance of it versus us just adding one more column on our pricing page?
And so we came up with the idea of hiring a marching band and putting together a parade. For our conference WYSIFS, we wanted to show people that you could have so much fun while you learn and engage with other people. We want to set the tone for the whole event.
So we've we've created a musical, which we've recorded and introduced to every single person who came to the conference. We launched a new product, Soapbox. Soapbox is a video creation tool that's record your webcam and your screen simultaneously and quickly make videos that look really good.
And we wanted to do something different to launch Soapbox. So we hired Sandwich Video, an LA based production agency to make ads. And they were gonna make three different ads for us at different budgets. One with a thousand dollar budget, one with a ten thousand dollar budget, and one with a hundred thousand dollar budget.
And we realized, hey. We can work with them. They can make the ads. But what if we document the process so we can show the difference between the budgets and the relationship between creativity and how much money you have to spend? And so we did that.
We ended up making a feature length documentary that I'm super proud of, has done really well, and is also just an incredible example of the relationship between creativity and budgets. But it set us on a path. It set us on a very different path where we start to realize, you know, no one would have expected that b to b marketers would watch an hour and I think it's forty minutes, an hour and forty minute long documentary about the creation of three different ads.
And it turns out that they did, And they really engaged. We saw that when people made it three minutes into one ten one hundred, they made it all the way in. And it made us realize we can go deeper on these topics. We can go far, far deeper than we ever thought before, and it set us on a different path towards making shows and letting our audience come on the learning process much more with us.
So now we have tons more content like this. We have a better workplace, which is a podcast about diversity, equity, and inclusion. And it's really our journey in trying to learn how to build a more diverse and more equitable and a more inclusive workspace.
We have show business, which is a twenty video series on everything a from a to z on how to make a really exciting show because we decided, let's get meta. Let's share what we're learning. And now we have a new animated series that is coming out, which is called gear squad versus doctor boring.
And it is an animated show about a bunch of production equipment that comes to life at night, and their mission in life is to make to make the videos they're making more fun and engaging, but their arch nemesis, doctor Boring, is constantly trying to stop them.
So I wanna show you gear squad versus doctor Boring now because I'm super proud of it. But, also, I think it's, like, it's kind of wild to me that any b two b company can make stuff like this. And let's watch it, and then let's let's learn from it.
When the workday is over, the video gear comes alive. I'd say we're done for the day. As soon as we finish a few more minor details. From Wistia Studios, it's Gear Squad versus Doctor Bore. Every night, the Gear Squad battle evil Doctor Bore and his boring team of villains.
Marketing was so much better before you came along, Gear squad. You seem distressed, sir. Can I offer you a cup of ice cold water or perhaps some scalding hot? But this doctor has misdiagnosed the power of creativity. Who said you? Doctor Boring. Right?
It's always Chopper. We are going to engage. Archive. Upload complete. Shotty and game. Did we do that? Ringer. Let's get lit. And the lovable tripod, sticks. So charge your batteries and clean your legs. There's a new set of heroes in town. Who's got a dongle and feel super cool right now?
This guy. Yeah. So that's Gear Squad. So you got an idea of what we're doing. Is it madness that a b to b business is doing this? It may seem like it, but I'm gonna say no. It's not. It's actually critically important that we do this.
And the reason is that what Wistia does, video like, you know, we're a video technology platform. We are basically a place a platform where people upload very large files. We do. We change those files around, and then those files get downloaded in other places.
I hate to tell you. I hate to be the one to say it, but it's kinda boring. Like, it's large files going up and down. Yes. There's other stuff around it, but, like, the fundamental tech of encoding, whatever, like, do you really care about that?
I don't think so. And I think for for us, we found our way to realize, wow. We actually we need to do stuff like Gear Squad. We have to do take these types of risks. We have to invest in brand. And that's really important for how we differentiate in our space and how people know who we are.
And we're not alone. Don't just take my word for this, but there's a huge trend of people feeling disconnected from the companies they interact with. PricewaterhouseCoopers did a study recently that said sixty percent of people feel that the human element is missing from the customer experience.
They feel like we're bits and bytes. Like, we're anonymous people on the Internet, right, like, and buying things. And when that happens, folks are gonna have less of a connection to your product, less connection to your company. It's gonna be easier for them to switch to competition, and that's what happens when things are boring.
When things are exciting and things are interesting, when things are entertaining, when they are inspiring, when your brand has meaning, that is when it matters. And you can build in a meaningful brand around something that might otherwise be boring. We also live in a world that's been dramatically changed by the pandemic.
We're at home a lot more. Many of us who are fortunate enough to work remote, like, most people are still working remote. And what does that mean? Well, it means the second you get out of a meeting, the second you turn off this video, we're not competing with what you're gonna do in person if you were at the conference or if you were in a meeting in a conference room and you walked out.
We're competing with you shutting your laptop and walking over and literally watching Netflix in the middle of the day. Like, the competition has shifted more than we can possibly imagine. And so you have to give people a reason to care. You have to give people a connection to your brand.
And to do that, you're gonna have to take some risk. You're gonna have to figure out how to make some different content. You're gonna have to figure out how to establish what your values are. But when you do that, you can go from being boring to interesting.
At Wistia, it was pretty easy for us to make this investment. It doesn't hurt that we are a video business, but it I will say it was a little scary at first. We thought, should we really show our customers that there's only six people here?
And what are these videos really gonna be about? Like, are they gonna figure out that we are naive and we are in early stage startup? Like, we're supposed to present and project being a successful b to b business. That's how we projected ourselves on the web at that time.
Of course, the funny thing is that it was the moment that we we actually didn't have great expectations for our first videos that allowed us to do it. We thought, oh, we'll make a little video that shows behind the scenes of the team and what it's like for us to work here in this startup.
And there was no real pressure on it. And so when we saw our customers respond really positively to it, was kind of a surprise. And we just kept learning and leaning in every time every time one of those surprises happened, every time we had a better response from customers.
And we got ourselves to a place of realizing like, oh, this is obvious. Of course, we should be making video the whole time. Of course, people wanna connect with the the folks behind the business. Of course, it makes sense to do these, like, silly and fun, like, little things in every video.
But that's not where we started. We started by giving ourselves permission, honestly, to make something that we had almost no plan for. So the obvious question is how do you get started? What do you do? Do you just hire someone? Do you hire a particular agency that made your friend's video?
Or what what do you how do you begin? And I think you have to begin by, first of all, creating the space. You have to create the space for the creativity. You have to create the space and the trust that you're gonna be investing in something that has a little bit of a longer time horizon.
And you need to create the space also for your team. You need to give your team and say, I want you to spend some of your time on these creative efforts. And at first, if you're small, it's gonna be ten percent of someone's time, five percent of someone's time.
If you're if you're a bigger organization already, it might be one person or two people, or it might be in hiring an agency. But you just kinda have to quarter off some of your budget, some of your time, and say, this is going to be where we experiment, and this is gonna be where we take risks.
And, actually, this is us investing for the future. So you can really start with just one person. That's that's all you need. You need one person's time. The other thing you wanna look at is, like, what is what are the basics you need for gear that are gonna help you make something really amazing?
That can that can be starting with an iPhone, and you're walking around with it in your pocket. And the key here is you're gonna wanna use the tools you already have access to or the tools that are easy to get going with. So today, that can be your webcam or that can be your iPhone.
For us, we spent years with just a DSLR and three lights, and we got really, really far with a very minimal setup. So it doesn't take a lot to get started. You just have to ask yourself, how are we really going to shoot these things?
Where are they gonna live? So you can make something that you're excited about and that you're proud of. So that's how you wanna begin. You also wanna look at, are there opportunities to dramatically improve the production of what you can make with some one time purchases.
There's a lot of gear guides that exist. There's they're all over YouTube. They're actually if you want them from us, they're all over Wistia dot com. And we actually have a great a great clip from show business I'm gonna share with you right now about figuring out how do you get the right gear, what does that look like, and and how do you put together a package that can help you execute on your creative goals.
Sydney Rudman knows a thing or two about getting the best gear for your budget. Yeah. I do. Renting is a great way to get your hands on gear that you might be curious about and test out which setup might be best for your show.
There are so many gear reviews out there, and there's products coming out every single day. So renting gives you that flexibility before you have to invest in a full setup. Most cities have at least one gear rental house, and there's tons of online options that will ship right to you.
So before you go out and buy a fancy lighting setup, rent something. Try it out. You'll wind up saving money in the long run, and then you'll figure out what works best for you and your show. What camera should you get started with?
What microphone should you get started with? And what's a basic lighting setup that you can use that's going to make you feel more confident that you can make something that looks really good. Because it turns out I'm gonna let you in on a little secret.
If people see themselves on camera and the lighting is good and the lens is good and they sound good, they feel more confident, and that actually makes it much easier to put them in a position where they take a risk. For most of the time, you're gonna need the same stuff.
You're gonna need you're gonna need the DSLR and the three lights and the microphone, but you need to just listen to those creatives. Like, they know what's going to work and what's not going to work. And there's gonna be times that you need different things to come in that are gonna enhance the production.
But it's really about creating the space then making sure you have the budget or you have the tools that you can use to actually make what you wanna make. And there's actually a great clip from show business I wanna play you called build, borrow, buy, and it goes into this in even more depth.
So it'll do a better job of explaining it than I will, I think. So let's let's watch it now. You basically have three ways you can get started producing shows for your business. You can build, borrow, or buy. Build is all about hiring and building an in house team to produce produce your shows.
Borrow is when you work with freelancers or agencies to get your content spun up, and then buy is when you license content that might already exist in the world that feels super aligned with your brand. So you need to let creativity into your business.
That's that's the first part here. If you can't let it in, you don't have a shot. If you let it in, it doesn't actually need that much space for it to flourish and start to grow and start to have an impact. So the second thing you wanna do is identify low risk moments where you can be creative.
You don't need to start by being creative and taking a big risk in a high risk moment, which is going to really, really benefit you or really hurt you, you can start at places that don't matter as much where you can get your footing underneath you and can start to feel more confident in in what works for your brand and what doesn't.
I'm gonna give you an example of one that was a really good one for us, which was this video we call take the survey. And so we were growing. We had a lot of subscribers to our our blog, and people were paying attention to the videos we're launching.
And we're decide trying to decide what content should we be making next. Like, what does our audience really want? And someone on the team said, hey. We should we should run a survey. You know, you get surveys all the time in your email, and mostly you just ignore them or you archive them.
That's that's how surveys normally work. And some small fraction of the audience comes back, and they click on a link and they take a survey. Well, we thought, alright. This is it. We wanna try to get as many people to take the survey as possible, and we wanna do something that's gonna really engage them.
It's not that high risk. Like, the truth is if no one fills out the survey, we're not in a different place than we were before. So, hopefully, we get people to fill it out, but it's like, if it doesn't work, it's fine. And we just thought, can we do something that is really shows our audience, like, that we are invested in this, that we're spending real effort on it, and is a signal to them that they should want to take the survey.
And can we do something that's also just, like, fun and delightful? Can we can we do something so that the time they spend with us taking the survey will feel like it was at least it was worth it was worth it from a fun perspective.
We sent out the survey to, I think, twenty five hundred people and sent this video along with it. And I want you to watch the video here, and then we'll talk about how it did. We would really appreciate if you took our survey.
Check survey. Take the survey. A little bit of the hustle. You know, if you're wondering if it worked, it was a risk that paid off. It did work. So we sent that to twenty five hundred people. Fifteen hundred people filled out the survey.
Fifteen hundred. And when we we had a final question, which was in the comments of, like, just anything else you wanna add. Almost every comment said something to the effect of, I felt that I must take this survey because the video was so delightful and fun.
Like, I feel a responsibility to fill this out as a thank you for what you just sent to me in my inbox. And it was so cool because it was it was a risk that was really small. We didn't need it to work.
It worked unbelievably well, and it actually ended up helping us build our brand in that moment. When you start looking, there could be a lot more low risk moments around your business than you might realize. There's a great series that I that I saw from Terminus that's called the roof that I think really lives and breathes us.
They take people up onto the roof of their building, and they interview them for one to two minutes on different topics. And it's super simple concept. It's a simple idea. It's easy to remember. And yet, like, the content they're making is extremely compelling.
So don't feel like you have to set yourself up to make an hour long piece of content or or a twenty part series from the get go. Sometimes it's much easier to say, like, hey. Can we do this in one minute chunks? Like, what would happen if each thing was only one minute long?
Looking for those low risk moments are exciting because the downside is often not that great, but the upside can be pretty high in terms of the learning that you can get and the confidence you can build from having a successful brand moment. So how do you find these moments to take these risks?
Well, someone smart once said to me, you wanna figure out where is the party and what is the dress code. So where are the parts in your customer experience where you can take a risk? Ask the creative people around you. Ask them to look and say, what what are the moments that we can really elevate?
What are the places that we can really change our perception? And then what does it take to do something there? Is it a black tie event? Do you need the full tux? Do you need to be really suited up with, like, the best production possible?
Or is it something that an iPhone, even without cinematic mode, would be good for? So ask yourself these questions and just have a conversation. And you'd be surprised by often how many moments are sitting there waiting for you to interject and join the party.
Great. So you're giving yourself the space to be creative and to take risks. I'm proud of you. You've got a team. You've got people. You've got time focused on actually making this content, and you got the tools to get it done. So what do you do now?
What do you do now that you can make videos and you can incorporate videos across your marketing? Well, actually, the best thing you can do for your marketing is to incorporate video everywhere. You wanna put it into your customer experience, of course, so inside of your product, in your sales experience, in your support experience, in your success experience.
If it makes sense to give people a delightful moment or it makes sense to give them something they can watch instead of having to book a call, all of those things, those are positive brand experiences you can create for your customer. You also wanna look for your team.
And how can you use video to change your team's experience? And that starts with hiring videos, something that we do here, and actually making a video for each job so that people understand what it is we're looking for, what success looks like. All those things they wanna understand and normally get through the interview process, give it to them upfront, and do it with the video.
And so these places to build your brand, it's, yeah, it's not just in your ads. It's not just on your site. It's not just in your product. It's everywhere. And when you start to think about it like this and you invest in it like it is an asset that's gonna keep growing, it actually gets really easy to incorporate video into all these different places because the skills and the risk taking and the focus on a brand, it's something you've learned and know how to do.
One of the things we did is we thought, can we make the experience of coming in for an interview at Wistia more fun and less stressful and more exciting? And so we made this video called the hiring weather report, which I'll play for you right now so you can get a sense of the types of things that we're doing.
Let's kick it on over to Chris Levine for a look at our interview forecast. Chris? Thanks, Courtney. The forecast is calling for a great interview at Wistia in Cambridge. You can expect a low pressure atmosphere for the entire day with light winds out of the southeast.
Now there's a chance of some passing nerves in the lower stomach region here, but we are expecting those to clear up early on in the day. Highs are expected throughout the interview. There'll be a wave of friendly faces from folks in the Wistia office.
Now if we zoom in on seventeen Tudor Street, you will notice that we have a large logo right here on our front door. And if you move inside, there will be the spiral staircase here in this couch region over That's where you're going to want to wait for your point of contact to pick you up.
So looking at the long range forecast, things are just shaping up to be a beautiful interview ahead. Lots of interesting conversations. Now over the next few days, it will be warming up, and finally, you can expect to hear back from us soon. So that's a look at the interview ahead.
Now back to you. This is ridiculous. Do we have to make this video? No. But did we make it? Yes. And what was the goal? The goal was to make people feel more comfortable when they come in for an interview. We wanted that part of the the pre employee experience to be really amazing and really exciting and really delightful.
And what we've heard is that it works, which is amazing. But we're not the only people to do this. Lots of people are doing this. Another example I love is from three sixty Learning. So they have a series called onboarding Joey, which is about their director of content joining their business and starting to work with the rest of the team.
This is a very, very cool look at what it's like to join three sixty Learning. They've taken the onboarding experience, which would normally only be seen by new employees, and they've turned it into a marketing event. And then Joey is the director of content who is directly involved in the creation of the series.
So it's a little meta. It's a little out there, a little wild, but I think, like, it really works, which is awesome. So you should check it out. And I think it's something that seems like they've figured out and that you will figure out as you figure out how to actually, you know, create the space for creativity and have the tools to make this stuff is that it's not about, oh, I hope there's a place where I can take a risk, or I hope there's a place where I can enhance the brand with video.
You actually usually have the opposite problem, which is that you end up feeling like you have an unlimited number of places where you should be making content, where you should be making video to differentiate and enhance your brand. And it it changes. It's it's no longer about, oh, I need to make one video here and a different video there and a different video there.
But you start thinking in groups and you start thinking in campaigns. It's like, oh, this is kind of more of a brandy behind the scenes culture video. And this is something that's more showing off our expertise around our product. And this is something that's showing off our expertise around this production topic or whatever it is.
As you get into a rhythm and figure it out, it actually gets easier to figure out what video to make next and where it should go and what it takes to make it successful. We we live today in a world that has changed so much in the last eighteen months.
And people are at home. They can turn off at any moment. And so having content that actually is not just educating somebody, but is inspiring them, is not just an explanation of your product, but it's fun to watch. This stuff ends up mattering, and it matters more in a world where our work and our life has all been so intertwined.
I hope you try some of this stuff. I hope you get started with video if you haven't yet. I think there's a huge opportunity for everyone to use video really well. And it was great being here with you at Turing Fest. So take care.
