John Bohan argues brands should shift from making 30-second ads to becoming story starters that invite customers to finish and share the narrative. He cites Deluxe helping small businesses generate 100 stories and California Pizza Kitchen's #CPKLoveSweeps campaign as examples, and recommends distributing shareable video through Facebook, YouTube, and platforms like Vine and Snapchat.
I think the headlines are greatly exaggerated. And you wouldn't hear me say this when I got into the digital space back in 1995. I was a big advocate of internet spending going up, traditional TV dollars going down, and, you know, it's 20 years later. So it's been quite a long time that we've been saying these types of things. And the advent of TiVo, I think it was probably maybe 1999, 2000 when it started to get some traction. People started talking about it a lot more. All of the parameters to say that television is going to really go away significantly have been there for a very long period of time. And it hasn't. TV dollars have remained pretty flat. Digital has jumped up. Started to get some momentum, obviously with the dot-com, and then it started to flatten out with all the VC dollars going out of the market. And then in 2003, bang, there became another market, and that's when the real boom started. So there became a belief that digital is the promise that was made, you know, early on. But I think the television networks are very smart, and the advertisers have had a great relationship with the television networks since roughly 1950. So I believe that the TV networks are actually going to be a lot smarter in terms of how they market themselves, and I think they'll do just fine. Storytelling has changed significantly. I mean, we've always, as you mentioned, been storytellers, but what I like was what Eric from J. Walter Thompson was talking about— story starters. We live in an environment now where we can begin an amazing story and let the consumer finish it. And that's incredibly powerful. You know, they— by evangelizing your customers to talk about you in a way that supports their lives, makes their lives better, entertains them, and obviously they share the story with other people. I honestly think that's a good part of our future. Because this one-way message, highly curated message that's been created in a conference room with marketing executives and then spent 3 $300,000 producing it and throwing out in 30-second commercials, I think we all know that's dead. Or is dying a death. But the notion of thinking about less about how I can market my brand and more about how I can improve my customers' lives is I think something that's gonna begin to gain a significant amount of traction. And you, we've seen that with what Deluxe did in terms of helping the small businesses create stories, 100 different stories across their small businesses. My company did it for California Pizza Kitchen. We created something called "What We Do for Love" on Valentine's Day, so their customers could actually say what they do for love and say #CPKLoveSweeps. So it becomes this story-starting message from the brand, and then you create this whole ecosystem of communication through various technology tools that again ultimately helps the brand. I think when you look at video, there's clearly, there's many different things, but let's focus on two right now. I mean, the first is the content itself, right? And we are not a big fan of content that is not viral, content that is not shared. We are— I think I see that as direct response. I see that much further down the funnel after somebody's already bought into, "Yes, I like the brand. I've seen you a number of times. I love what you're doing." And then you kind of hit them with a hard message, 'cause you're gonna get a much higher level of conversion there. I think so many advertisers marketers are still stuck in that, you know, I need to talk about me and let's go ahead and sell the consumer on all my services. I think we all agree in this conference that that is out. So I think the first thing is, you know, thinking about— I'll get back to it again— how I can make my customers' lives better, how I can entertain, how I can influence, how I can make them laugh, you know, touching stories. Maybe I partner with a charity and there's a goodwill message there. So what is that emotional connection that you're gonna make? Because people make decisions emotionally, then they justify them rationally, right? As Eric again said, you know, aim at the heart first and then the eyeballs will follow. So that is very important, obviously, the message. Then there are so many distribution areas out there, you know, it's YouTube, there's Facebook, there's Snapchat, there's Vine, there's Instagram. So what we think about is if you have the budget, how are you gonna communicate in each one, right? We like YouTube. We don't see YouTube as a social network. We see it as a video distribution channel. So it's a great place to house your videos, or Vimeo if you want a little bit higher quality. But we're a bigger fan of Facebook. Facebook views are, I think, on par, getting close to YouTube's. They're somewhere in the neighborhood. But then you have that viral aspect, right? And you immediately share it with all your friends. So we're much bigger fans of Facebook when it comes to video versus YouTube for that reason. Then it depends upon your audience. If you're reaching a young audience, and only if you're reaching a young audience, let's just say teens and early 20s, then Vine is a great spot. Influencers are great, obviously, with videos. So connecting with influencers in Snap and Vine and, and getting it in the right hands of people that could influence your customers to make a buying decision.
