Ep 17 How to Remember Long Marketing Copy for a Corporate Video

What do you do if you have 20 minutes of marketing copy to cover in a video to promote your business? Welcome to the weekend edition.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in Life. Speaking with T.J. walker.

This question comes from Joy Lone, one of our Udemy.com students who writes in TJ hi. I wrote a long copy for a product of my company. It's 20 minutes long. Now. When it's shooting time, it's difficult to Remember more than 20 minutes for me how to do it. How do you do it? Well, Joy, this is a very, very common problem. I'm glad you've shared this. Here's the number one thing you got to get over, no matter how brilliant your ad copy is, and I'm sure it's fantastic. What works in one medium does not work in another medium. Think of the best novel you've ever read. Read. If a movie producer tries to just flash the text up on a screen for three hours and sell that as a movie, it would be the worst bomb ever. What works in one medium doesn't work for another. In fact, a movie producer that just tries to follow page by page what's in a book is generally going to be a huge, huge disaster. It just doesn't work like that. I want to answer your last question from first because I often speak for 20 minutes in these podcasts and in these audio and video tutorials and daily courses here and daily shows right here on iTunes, YouTube, and it's seen elsewhere. How do I do it? Because I'm clearly not memorizing 20 minutes worth of content. Now I'm going to show this for our video audience, for our audio audience. What I'm showing is a single sheet of paper and it has bullet points. And that's it. And what I'm able to do for those of you who watch is I'm able to look at you. I'm looking at the camera the vast majority of the time, 95% of the time, because it would be kind of awful and boring to see me. And excuse me, audio audience, I'm now looking down the whole time. And the only one, the only thing people are seeing who are watching this is how bald my head is and how awful my that would be awful, even though the content might be the same thing. And this is one of those differences between doing an audio podcast versus a video. But it's not an excuse to avoid video. It is simply another thing you've got to prepare for. And let's start right there with just the body language aspect.

Language.

So, Joy, one of the things you've got to frankly be worried about is if you focus all your energy on memorizing your 20 minutes of copy, what's going to happen is your body is going to tense up. You're going to look as though you are frozen and scared and trying to read off the teleprompter in your brain. Or even worse, reading a teleprompter. Now folks, I'm not anti teleprompter. I've owned every kind of teleprompter in the world. I have courses on how to use a teleprompter. People hire me and spend a lot of money getting me to teach them how to use a teleprompter. Having said all of that, in general, most the time for marketing people, CEOs, executives of all stripes, I tell them, don't use a teleprompter again. I don't care if that 20 minutes of ad copy or that marketed copy is the most brilliantly written content ever. And that includes every single bullet point and fact and benefit to your product or service. If you try to read it and you're not a professional news anchor, it's going to be awful. Generally, when you see your favorite news anchor reading, whether it's from abc, NBC, BBC, wherever you are in the world, when you see your favorite news anchor reading and they look great and they sound great and they sound confident, it's because they've been reading from a teleprompter three hours a day for weeks, months, years, often decades, sometimes quarters or halves of centuries. And if you're willing to do that, fine. But I don't find it is particularly helpful in any way when it comes to you really having a finished product. Here's what I would recommend with the marketing copy. What I'd like you to do is to read it, read it again, read it a third time, Joy. Then I want you to think about what truly sticks in your own memory. Then get a clean sheet of paper and come up with a handful of bullet points. Anything that's really important to you, but to limit it to two, three, four, maybe five words at a time and let that be your guide to speaking. And then what I'd recommend is just talk to the camera and do as I do in these podcasts for iTunes and YouTube and Facebook video. I occasionally glance down and at the video. Now I can tell you in all the years I've been doing these and I've been making videos not exactly like this But I've been making videos going back to my student days at Duke University for the student TV station 1983, roughly. So it's that puts us at 33 years. And the first ones were a little rough, let me tell you, although I had much better hair. But certainly in the last five years or the last almost 10 years on YouTube, I've never had someone write or call and say DJ I hate the fact that once every couple of minutes you glance down for a second to look at your notes because that's incredibly unprofessional and makes it look like you haven't prepared and you're destroying icon. I've never had that. Now what I do hear from people is tj, I like that even if I don't agree with you on everything. I like that you sound conversational. I like that you're not reading a script. I like that it is more extemporaneous and that if you make a mistake occasionally, and I do, you just keep on going. That's the feedback I get. And I believe, Joy, that that is the feedback you'll get as well if you just work from notes. And it's very, very simple outline. But I got to tell you, that is not the advice you're going to get everywhere.

Bad advice.

So Joey, let me tell you, you are going to get a lot of bad advice if you work in a corporate environment, in my experience, because you have well meaning people who have technical skills, production skills, video skills, and their job. Their focus is on technically making the video look good to pass the test that other technical people would consider to be important. So if you're a video production person, if you're a director, a videographer, an editor, editor, if the lighting is great and the audio is great and everything is framed properly, but you're sitting there or standing there speaking in a monotone, head down, putting everyone to sleep, the video production person is thinking, wow, I did my job beautifully. You need to ignore that because you've got to focus on what the real goal is. The real goal is not creating a perfect video production. The real goal is communicating the ideas that are important to you and making them memorable to your audience so they'll want to take the action you want. Purchase your service, click for more information, download a white paper, whatever it is you want people to do. That's the goal of your 20 minute speech or video online tutorial. So never ever confuse that. And what I have found in many corporations, institutions, governments, UN agencies, is people let the technology drive the show because you have invested $500 in a teleprompter. People think, well, let's use the teleprompter. That way we get every word just right. Folks, that is horrific advice. Again, the big problem most people have when it comes to using a teleprompter is it destroys their speech patterns. They all of a sudden speak at the same tone and the same volume and the same speed and there is no variation in the voice. And yes, technically they get everything just right. But oh my goodness, would you really want to listen to someone talk like that? Forget 20 minutes, what about 20 seconds? That's the real problem with trying to use a teleprompter or cue cards. Also really bad. Now you've seen late night talk show host David Letterman or comedians in your own country and they have somebody again holding gigantic cue cards next to a camera 30ft away. Again, if you are a stand up comedian with your own national TV show and you're doing this every single day for decades, fine. Because so much of comedy is you got to get each word just right. You have to make sure you don't even switch any two words. It could destroy the joke. Well, if you are doing a promotional video for your product or service online, it's not that particular. It really isn't. And if you have a lawyer tell you it is, they are wrong. Now you don't want to put out a video where you've said something factually incorrect or something a lawyer says will put you in jail. But I would be extraordinarily careful about being wedded to a particular script because it's difficult. I can tell you I don't take any pride in this. I'm not proud of this. But there have been times I when I've been hired to be a corporate spokesperson and given a script and I'm talking about like 14 seconds worth. I was terrible. I can easily talk to you, share with you my insights, my expertise on how to Communicate effectively for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, for hours and even for days. And it could seem relatively smooth, fluid and make sense. But if I try to memorize even three sentences, getting the words just right, it's horrible when I do it and really embarrassing myself. Now I was once cast in a movie, Runner Runner starring Ben Affleck, to do a very brief news intro about the topic of the movie, which was Internet gambling. And I had about 8 seconds of copy to go over online. I did must have done 150 takes. I was awful. They still didn't use me. They ended up using former NBC anchor John Seigenthaler because apparently I was so awful. So I'm just here to tell you it is difficult to memorize. Don't put that much pressure on yourself. Instead, I want you to just speak and occasionally glance down at your outline. Focus on one thing at a time. Do that and you will be in great shape. If you try to remember a complex outline of 150 things you're trying to remember, that's going to be difficult. So that's essentially what I'm doing here. I'm focusing on one thing at a time. Then I go to the next thing.

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So, John, I do appreciate your question. My other big advice for you on how to go from fairly lengthy ad copy to a video is just practice. Don't try to get it right in one take. And perhaps your company has hired a big fancy production crew for the day and you don't want to waste time. There's nothing preventing you from practicing at home just with your cell phone practice the night before. Technology is easy these days when it comes to communication because there's so many ways we can capture video of ourselves. With a cell phone, which I'm holding up, an iPad, a laptop, any kind of video. If you practice in front of it and watch it, you'll be much more comfortable because you may feel more tension. If it is a corporate studio and there's a director and a producer and your boss is around and all these people are looking at you and the clock is running and maybe you may even be using a union production crew. So if you don't get it right, that puts more pressure on because you got to pay overtime. All these factors are a part of it. And that's why I want to make your life easy. There are all sorts of experts out there about how to have a perfect memory. Some of them are friends of mine from the National Speakers association. And they're a nice show. And it's impressive to meet 200 people quickly. They stand up and introduce themselves and then you go back around and tell them their names. But it's kind of a parlor trick that I think, frankly doesn't really help most speakers speak more effectively. So my recommendation, have a simple outline. Focus on one thing at a time. And when you've said everything you want to say about that one topic, just glance down and look at the next topic on your cheat sheet and keep doing that until you come to the end.

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Joy thanks for the question. As always. We take everybody's questions here as they relate to public speaking, media training, crisis communications and presentation skills. So we're not taking your finance questions here, we're not giving stock tips, but we do take any question that relates to spoken communication as a part of that. The body language aspect as well. Which by the way, Joy, I didn't go into it in that much detail, just briefly at the beginning. But that's why it's so important for you to practice on video, your prepared text, because then your body can free up to move naturally for this corporate video because the first thing I can see when I look at most corporate videos, the CEO's head is frozen stiff. Nothing's moving, Their voice may actually sound okay, their tones may be okay, they may have a conversational tone to their voice, but their head is frozen, their body's frozen, their shoulders are frozen, and it just screams out, I'm scared world. That's not the message you want to send. All the more reason to practice on video to get comfortable with the word so you can then actually focus on looking comfortable and confident. Joy, thanks again. Send all of your questions to me on Twitter J. Walker. You can also email infoediatrainingworldwide.com and you can also post your comments, whether you're watching this or listening to this on Facebook or any other social media forum. For the weekend edition of Speaking with TJ Walker. Thanks for joining us and may all of your speaking opportunities in life be a huge success.

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