Building a brand has become more important than ever, but brand building activities seem to be accessible only to those with money to burn. In this session, Phil will break down what actually does and doesn’t work in big budget brand campaigns, and how smaller businesses can execute what works in a scalable way that guarantees return. Rather than trying to replicate the wasteful and inefficient behaviours of enterprises, who all hope in vain of going viral, Phil will suggest alternative approaches to targeting, creative, distribution and measurement across video marketing and advertising.
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Grow Growth Turing Fest 2019
Big Budget Video Marketing on a Small Business Budget
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Thank you very much, and what a pleasure to be back at Turing Fest. I was here, I think, four years ago, and it's amazing to see how much it's grown and how wonderful it is. So, to Brian and everyone involved. So, some of you who probably were at the talks yesterday, particularly Ariane's and Jono's, starting to question the very point and purpose of marketing, and our very jobs, and what we should be doing.
How can we stand out in a world where we really have losing control of everything, we have the same technology? I think one of the themes coming out is that we need to market for preference. We need to find ways of getting other people to want to use our product or service in a direct comparison with other particular similar products and services, when there's no differentiation or journey that we can control.
That often comes down, I think, to brands, and how we might think about it more broadly, how we're going to create that thing that differentiates us from everybody else in a meaningful way. The way in which most of us think about making brand is as follows.
We'll probably start by making our websites look great. This is Wistia, the company I've been working with for last few years. We pride ourselves on a fun, kooky aesthetic. So we've put that all over our website, we're then going to write loads of blog posts.
Companies like HubSpot have done this at scale, and just written everything, and built a brand that way. Perhaps we then look at doing things like publishing nice content on social media, getting people engaged on those channels, making sure we're visible on all possible platforms.
Maybe we're also going to sponsor events like this, if we can't get anything further from there. After a while, we'll find that we run out of steam, that we have hit the maximum we can do with the small things at our disposal. Then what happens is a conversation, that will often take place at bigger companies, but smaller companies as well may hit a certain threshold.
It will happen in a room like this, and the CMO will say, we need to somehow find a way of increasing our offering in the market. And the assumed answer to this around the room will be as follows: We need to do a big ad campaign, because this is how we build brands, this is how we've built brands for the last hundred years.
We've all seen madmen. So, a junior marketing director will say, Okay, give Shortage a ring, some kids with beards, get on the call, and we try and find an answer. A conversation like this will ensue. The marketing director is going say, we want consumers to know that we are better than our competitors, so that we market for that preference.
The creative director is going to go, great, let's do a thing where some dogs play chess. All is agreed, budget is one million happy days. The budget allocation is probably as follows: We'll have about nothing on ideation. Of course, you get that for free as part of the pitch, it's not important.
We'll then spend twenty five percent on production, seventy five percent on distribution. We'll make sure we get the fluffiest dogs, the most attractive actors, because that's going to really help, professional film crew, the best possible cameras, great grading, custom musical score, everything that we need that really makes a difference in advertising.
And then we're going get it out there on every single available channel targeting format to everyone possible who we can reach out to. The aim is to get the content, the video, to as many people as possible, and really adopt this twister strategy of just trying to be visible everywhere, get all the things, cover all the bases, and make sure that nobody, wherever they go around the web, can do anything but see who you are, and who your brand is, and how your content works.
So the KPIs become something like views, and we'll, at the end of our media campaign, have a little report that looks something like this, where we're comparing impressions, views, clicks, and the cost per each individual or each interaction that we're able to get, and finding some way to try and quantify the efficacy of those interactions.
So at the end, we'll then get from our media agency, who are always happy to take the money, a conclusion something like this: that almost three hundred thousand people, relevant users of course, watched the video. But of course, we all know that this is maybe not true, because this is what a view looks like on YouTube.
Oh, an ad pops up, and I actually get distracted by the sidebar in the comments. Meanwhile, the ad's still going in the background. Google and YouTube are still saying this is an engaged view, and somebody cares about it. On Facebook, it's a bit similar.
Here's the video, and it's gone. That counts for an important ad impression, that of course is going to increase our brand. With these campaigns, we'll set a goal of something like, oh, we want to improve brand awareness by twenty percent arbitrarily, and then we have to think, well, how are going to measure that?
Someone will get on SurveyMonkey, create a little survey, send that out to a bunch of users, do a bit of unprompted or prompted recall, keep doing that until we get the answer that we like, or even worse, we'll do one of them on YouTube, where a pop up comes up, and your main goal as a user is to click as many things as possible and skip it as fast as you can.
And as marketers, we'll keep doing these until we get the answer that we want, and we'll somehow assume that this is telling us that we're improving our brand awareness in the market. Perhaps even more pernicious than that, what we might do is think that we're being more advanced by adopting some metrics like applause, conversion, and amplification that we're going to get from tools like True Social Metrics, or whatever, that are aggregated likes, comments, shares.
We'll get reports that look like this, and we'll say, well, if our conversation rate, or applause rate are going up compared to our competition, that means our brand is improving. The problem is that these numbers are often really not telling us very much at all.
A thirty five percent increase in brand amplification rate can just be that the campaign had fourteen more shares than the one it did last year of its competitors. And the truth here is that a viral social media campaign generally relates nothing to brand at all.
At Wistia, we had a viral campaign a couple of years ago, where we made this little funny video with a Snapchat hot dog. People loved it. They shared it. It was great. Did nothing to the brand. Just because lots of people saw it, and it was funny, it didn't mean anything.
So the problem is that going viral on social media doesn't even help increase brand awareness, necessarily. And we struggle to really measure brand awareness, and we have no idea what this really means. And yet, we are obsessed by the idea that increasing brand awareness is the way in which we are going to drive preference, drive affinity, and drive those big metrics that are going to change everything in our business.
So we'll end up spending a million pounds on a campaign that looks like this. It's not inherently a bad idea, but it doesn't really do much for us. And we made this mistake at Wistia. We didn't do dogs playing chess, but we did do funny faces on everyday items.
And we spent about two fifty grand on this campaign, in terms of the production and distribution. Saw nothing from it. It was just wasted money. And this led me to the conclusion. I did everything right for this campaign at the time. It wasn't like we were just bad at it.
We're good at video production. We got a good strategy. The script was good. The problem is that digital advertising doesn't make people like you. It can get your name in front of you. It can be good for direct response. It can do a lot of things.
But it doesn't solve the core problem of brand, which is more people engaging with you, having a desire to spend time with your business, desire to spend time with your product, the ability to recommend you to others. And so all of us in this room perhaps, in fact all of us more globally, all of us who are buying YouTube ads, Facebook video ads, TV ads, a lot more, are engaged in probably a collective delusion worth about fifty billion dollars annually.
Which is that we're going give Google and Facebook money. They're going to go put our videos out there. We'll then ask them to mark their own homework, and tell us what we got for the money. They'll tell us that it was great. People loved it.
It was so good. They thought the videos were fantastic. All these views and impressions you got? Wonderful. Great. And we believe them for convenience. Because we don't want to face the really hard truth that actually this doesn't work. Because this is the way we've been building brands for the last seventy years, and we just want to take the same model of TV advertising, apply it online.
Google are quite happy to indulge in the delusion. Facebook are quite happy to indulge in the delusion. Every big media agency out there are happy to evolve in the delusion. And it's only going to come from brands, from companies who stand up and go, this isn't good enough.
We need better. That we're actually going to shift, and we're actually going to do something different. And so this talk started as me trying to say, well how can small companies do the stuff that the big companies are doing well, and improve on it?
But through this process, actually discovered that the things that the big companies are doing isn't working either. And that all of us need to radically shift the way in which we're trying to build brands using video. This is not a good advertising strategy.
Trying to hit love at first sight every time. And yet, that's what we do with most video distribution. We have a very quick interaction that maybe lasts thirty seconds, and we just hope if we do it enough times, that enough people will somehow watch the thing and then, through a means that we've never really understood, like us.
Doesn't happen. So the problem is that we don't need to build brand awareness with our marketing. We need to build brand affinity. And those two things are not the same. And I think we need a new strategy for video marketing, for big brand building, that really is centred around this idea of affinity, this idea of a connection with a brand, rather than just people knowing who you are.
Because in the world where we're all subjected to so many ads every day, and all have the same kind of access to all the information, awareness is trivial. It's meaningless. So, today I'm going to break down four different aspects that I think are crucial to this new strategy, which is instead of building brand awareness, working on video marketing to build brand affinity.
I'm going to start with metrics. So with awareness campaigns, we're focused on things like impressions, views, shares, extensively reach. But the number of impressions is not the number of people impressed. So we need to measure something else. Through this campaign, the failed one I talked about with the faces, I actually think we worked out the answer to this.
And it took us about two years to get there by But I'll tell you the story. After this campaign that we also spent about two and fifty thousand on, in total, and saw no meaningful return that we could really put our finger on, we ran a conference called WistiaFest, and these two guys, Chris Savage and Adam Lisagore, had a few beers, as you do, and randomly came up the idea of why don't we do a project where instead of doing this faces campaign, we'll do another ad campaign,
but we'll do three ads for three radically different budgets. We'll do one for one thousand dollars one for ten thousand dollars and one for one hundred thousand dollars and we'll see which one works the best. So, Gentleman's Handshake in the evening, we were then committed to doing this, and we did.
So we went and produced with Sandwich Video in LA. These three ads, one was shot on an iPhone for a budget of one thousand dollars One was shot on a Canon C300 with a budget of ten thousand dollars a bit more mid range video.
And then lastly, we got a proper Hollywood camera and did the full shebang for one hundred thousand dollars as well. And the results were as follows. We actually saw that the ten thousand dollars one performed best out of the three, not because it was necessarily better, but just because the production isn't the big thing.
It's all about storytelling, scripts, and everything else. And through this whole campaign, actually ended up it was a really fun campaign. We decided to create a load of supporting documentation and content to go with it, and discovered that we had a huge amount of content.
So put together basically an hour and a half documentary that we then put on our website, as you would, as a bit of content, and thought, this is a cool asset. We've built a film randomly. Why not? That's a cool thing to do.
So, let's set ourselves a little goal, and we'll treat this almost like an advertising campaign, and see if we can use it to build brand. So, we had a goal of about one hundred thousand engaged views. So, that was people watching twenty five percent of video or more, and we didn't hit it at all.
We only hit thirty one thousand engaged views, and obviously I was very disappointed by this, and thought my work as a marketer in distributing this particular film has failed. But something else was going on in the background that I only noticed through a bit of SEO credentials, which was that our branded search was up about eleven percent of the time.
And we'd done no other campaigns that may have shifted that. It was just this one bit of creative content. I thought, that's interesting. I wonder if the long video that we've done, this movie, is actually the thing that's driving that additional brand search.
So digging further, we discovered that what happened is that if we look at the metric of time spent, the time spent with this one piece of content, this long film that we'd made, was greater than every other single blog post we'd ever written that year.
So we had about seventeen hundred blog posts on the website, and four videos that comprise a documentary, where people were spending about equal time with them. So we'd actually just through one piece of content doubled the amount of investment and time that people were spending with our brand.
And this is when it clicked. The metric you should really care about for brand is not to do with reach. It's to do with resonance. It's about time spent. So this is the kind of thing that for brand affinity you need to start thinking about.
It's about time spent for engaged users. And if you think about different kinds of videos, you'll see it map out in this way. A product video, if you compare three different metrics, assisted conversions, views, and time spent, product videos are going to perform best for assisted conversions.
Your stuff on social media is going to perform best for reach, the number of views, but the thing that's going to really matter for time spent is this longer form engaging specific niche content that you're making. And this new type of video is, I think, what we should all be investing in for brand marketing.
A quick word of caution about this time spent idea, though. Time spent is a metric that, while I think is very important, Google and Facebook have been providing for a long time, but they've just been lying with it. Because they recognize, probably as well as I do, and as well as you all do, that time spent really matters.
So they've been providing this detail in their apps. But actually, what happens if you break it down, here we see a video that supposedly has had thirty thousand minutes viewed, a certain number of three second views, ten second views, and that looks like most people who watch three seconds stay to the full ten.
But actually, we break down the retention graph, here's what it looks like. Pretty much everyone just drops off, and Facebook have set the threshold such that it counts as a ten second view, but when someone's just vaguely scrolling by, that's not real engagement.
None of these people who are scrolling cared. They were just going past. The only ones that matter is that very slither at bottom. Which is why Facebook may tell me that I've got thirty thousand minutes watched, but really our view number of minutes watched is far, far lower.
So, when we're using this metric, make sure that you clean the data you get from Google and Facebook, because it's false, and try and find something that tells a better story. So, that's what we're going do for our metric strategy for brand affinity.
We are going to look at time spent. What about the creative? Well, for brand awareness creative, we tend to focus on short form video, display ads, that kind of thing. And as I've kind of alluded to, the thing that we're going to care about for brand affinity is longer form video.
And essentially, the model that I want you to imagine is Netflix. If we think about ourselves as users, we are surrounded by options of things to spend time with all the time. And Netflix has done a wonderful job of capturing the time for all of us.
This idea of binge watching and having this enormous amount of time spent on Netflix. They've built a platform, they've built the content that we just get hooked into, and want to continue to consume. I think that is exactly what we should be doing as marketers.
Building the content that people want to sit and binge and enjoy. So things that people are going to choose to watch, that requires that significant time investment, that is in-depth and detailed, not just a passing trivial interaction. It's non advertorial, and we call it binge worthy content.
And there's a lot of companies who are actually, inadvertently or otherwise, starting to invest in this. Uber has started doing something called Uber Presents, so they've got people like Spike Lee to make little films for them. Small B2B SaaS company called ProfitWell have started doing pricing page teardowns, where they'll just compare different kinds of pricing pages over a couple of drinks, and talk through what they think is good otherwise.
Very niche content, long form, entertaining for a very specific audience. Mailchimp has started doing. Mailchimp Presents, again, a series of fun, creative videos that are ostensibly TV. So instead of advertising other people's TV content, we now need to start making our own. That's how we're going build this brand affinity.
Through this, we also need to change our view of budget allocations. As I mentioned earlier, advertising plans are normally nothing on ideation, twenty five percent production, seventy five percent distribution. This needs to flip for brand affinity content, where the thing that really matters is the ideation.
It's coming up with a great idea that's going to resonate with a niche audience. And maybe twenty five percent production, the quality is not the thing that matters. You can do stuff very simply with just one camera. It's the idea that matters. And again, you shouldn't need to spend a fortune on distribution, because you're going to bring people to you.
So we're going to make some binge worthy content. What about the audience that we're going after? Well, with advertising, we tend to look at our audience as potential customers. Naturally, we want more people who are gonna buy our product and our service to actually watch our content.
But the problem with this is that preference is not just driven by direct experience. It's driven by word-of-mouth. And we live in a world now which is ever more private, and also ever more connected. And what I mean by this is think about the apps and the means in which we all have to connect with one another.
We all have WhatsApp, we have Slack, we have Messenger. These private social networks are where the real, genuine recommendations or engagements are happening. These are very, very hard, if not impossible, to market to. You can't do advertising on WhatsApp yet. You can't do Slack insertions.
These are things that happen organically. And they are the thing that are driving recommendations and word-of-mouth across the world. And I'll give you a very simple example. I was here in Edinburgh earlier at the weekend, and I had a couple of options for how I'm going to decide what fringe shows to watch.
I could do this and Google the best Edinburgh fringe shows, and I'd probably get some pretty generic recommendations. Stuff that other people have already booked up, things that critics thought was quite good. Or I can do what I actually did, which was send a message to my WhatsApp group of friends who went to Wilderness Festival like minded people who enjoyed a similar experience and ask them whether or not they knew of any good shows, and got a picture back from my friends Henry and Joe, who are actually doing a show, and were like, Yeah, come see ours,
and here's list of other stuff that we can go and see. Much more specific recommendations tailored to me, and my affinity, my choice of preference, was driven not by my direct experience, but by the experience of the connections and people in my community and subculture.
So, we need to create content for communities who speak to one another. That's how we harness word-of-mouth. That's how we create distribution within all the content we're creating. And I think that means we need to target subcultures. We need to target communities, people who are talking, things that are different to the norm, groups.
And a great example of this done well is from a company called Anderton's, who are based in Surrey. They're a guitar shop. Some of you may have heard of them. It's a family run business that is just a single shop in Surrey, and they have built a remarkable global brand to compete with giant e commerce competitors.
Buy nice brand, the website looks good, but it's not radically dissimilar to the other options out there. What they have started doing is their own TV. And their own TV is basically some guitar nerds get in a room and do silly things. So they'll blindfold up, and they'll see if they can spot the sounds of different amplifiers.
They'll play with random pedals. They'll just mess around with all the gear that anyone who dreamed of playing guitar as a kid would want to play with. So audience for this is not people who are going to buy their stuff, because most people watching this content don't have the money to afford to buy a good guitar.
It's people who are dreaming of wouldn't it be fun if I could have all the fun toys? People who want to be professional musicians, but haven't got there yet. So probably younger people than their potential customers. But this word-of-mouth is driven by that conversation and engagement from those people, and that has lifted their brand enormously.
So, the fact that they keep winning awards for becoming the best ecommerce shop, And if we take a look from even in the US, organic research from SEMrush, we see that they're growing, and they're doing very, very well. So worth looking at what they've done, just to build their own TV presence, with very simple content.
So the strategy here for targeting is not about customer need. It's about the needs and desires and interests of subcultures and communities. I approach that by basically saying, find your nerds. In every single company, there is going to be some nerds. There's going be some interesting, exciting, different ideas that stand out.
There is no company so boring as to not be able to do something for a niche community. No matter what your organisation is, there's someone in the backroom who is really, really interested in one specific thing, and there's other people that they will speak to that they know that are also interested in that thing.
Find those people, find that insight, and start creating content specifically for them. I mentioned that you're competing, really, with Netflix, and you are, but you've got to remember that Netflix has done very well by making content for slightly niche audiences. Stranger Things was about great people who love the 80s, and are into that, and will build something that's based on 80s nostalgia.
But you can go even more specific, and that's what you should do. Find a really much more specific audience, make something that Netflix is way too niche for Netflix, that they never consider, that you can actually stand out with and do something a bit different.
A great way into this is maybe looking at subreddits. If there's a subculture, there's a subreddit. And that's a great way to find potential communities that you could really create stuff for. Go and speak to them. Say, Hey, I'm going make a TV show.
What would you like to see in it? So, you have your metrics, you're going to be building stuff that you're really focused on time spent. You're going to be creating binge worthy content for subcultures and communities. What about the distribution strategy? Well, distribution of advertising is usually centered around paid ads these days on social media, historically on TV.
But there's a kind of different approach that we're going to have to take with this. And this is perhaps the most controversial part of my pitch, but I think one of the most important. Which is that I do not think brand affinity marketing, this new form of brand marketing, is a social media play.
There's a few reasons for this, but not least of all because YouTube is a terrible place for binge worthy content. And this is why Netflix exists. Think about your experience on Netflix. You sit, you watch a nice thing on your sofa, you lay back, it gets rid of the intro of the next one, it queues you straight in.
You can just autoplay and keep going. The YouTube experience is very different. Okay. Let's check out this brand that I like on YouTube. Here's the latest video. Hey. I'm Chris from Wistia, and I'm shooting this video on a webcam. Cool. You can make an awesome video using nothing but your laptop's webcam.
And then, of course, I get distracted very, very quickly. Start watching something else. He was great. Oh, I've got to see this. Yeah. And then, immediately, on something else, and then we go and read the comments, and then we go and click on something else.
Like social media, you've got to remember, YouTube's designed to try and get you to bounce from one thing to another, so they can serve more ads. That is not what you want as a brand when you're focused on time, time spent. What you want is people to really immerse themselves in your experience.
Additionally, with YouTube and Facebook, if people like your page, or they subscribe to your YouTube channel, you can't contact them. That's Google CRM. That's their database. And they're not going to give you access, because they're going to charge you to access it. So this whole model of using social media to distribute all your content is fundamentally flawed.
Some of are thinking, Yeah, but Phil, we have several of our videos on YouTube, and that's where video is. Everyone goes to YouTube to watch video. If our content isn't there, no one's ever going to watch it. Well, I don't know about that. Who here uses YouTube?
Who here uses Facebook? Who here uses Google? Who here goes on websites? Yeah, we're the same people. It's not like there's a single location that you have to go to reach an audience. So there's this outdated concept, I think, of content distribution. That we have an asset, and our job is to get it out there so that everyone's going to watch it.
People are able to watch it. The problem is more you have to get them to the right place to have that experience. As Hannah was saying, context is king. So stop thinking about content distribution, start thinking about audience direction. What I mean by this is drive people to have the experience that you want them to have, that's beneficial for you and them, not just capitulate to the social media giants all the time.
So YouTube is a bad place, I think, to host your full binge worthy content. But here's the kicker. It's actually a really good place for shorter content, I. E. Clips and trailers. So look at what Netflix have done. Netflix's YouTube channel is just full of clips, it's full of trailers.
And it's there to entice people and excite them, and provide enough interest that people can see what's going on. But actually, in order for people to get that full experience, they have to come off YouTube onto Netflix, onto a platform that Netflix control, to get that full experience and provide that value.
So your approach with brand affinity content is not about social media syndication. You want to market like a media company. You want to become the platform. You want to build the location that someone's going come to, that destination, so that you can bring them into your world, your brand, your environment, and such they will get that brand affinity growing.
And this is how we approached it at Wistia. We have a Netflix style experience on our own website for our brand new talk show that we've been doing, and we've made a trailer for the talk show, which will sit on social media, and then we use our marketing spend to distribute the trailer that's then going to drive people to the full experience.
And this is the trailer. From the creators of over twelve hundred blog posts that aren't performing as well as they once were, and the team who's as tired of making quippy advertisements as they are of seeing them. From the company that literally designed thousands of paid media assets that were uninspiring to work on and barely move the needle.
And the marketers who know that the number of impressions does not equal the number of people impressed. Comes a brand new show with a brand new strategy in a brand new studio. Introducing Brand Wagon. It's like a talk show, but for marketers. Hosted by Wistia's own CEO, Chris Savage.
Join us as we learn from entrepreneurs and creative marketers who are investing in brand to grow their businesses. The way we build our brands has to change. So hop on the Brand Wagon and see where the future of marketing is headed. So, it's an ad, it's a social media ad, but the ad is not for the brand, the ad is not for the product, the ad is for the content.
We are treating the content itself as like a product line, that we drive people towards, build a CRM around, have people engage with, and use that as the goal is adoption towards brand affinity, rather than adoption towards revenue. So, the strategy is as follows, to summarize.
It is around instead of having impressions using shares, we are going to focus on time spent. Instead of just making really short videos, we're going to be focused on making binge worthy content. Instead of just going off potential customers, we're going to target subcultures and communities.
And instead of just pushing stuff everywhere on social media, we're going to market like a media company, and drive people to have experiences that we can control. So this new concept is called Brand Affinity Marketing, and I would love for you all to start investing in it as soon as you get back to the office on Friday, or whenever it is.
So creativity is really the last unfair advantage that we're legally allowed to take over our competitors. And I think it's the thing that's going really make us stand out in this commoditized world, where we all have the same technology, when users can decide for themselves who to follow, and when the thing that's going to really differentiate us is brand, it's our story, it's that that's going to really change preference.
So I'd like you to stop advertising on TV, and actually just start creating your own. Thank you very much.