3. The Importance of Story in Video Advertising

Welcome to another episode of The Digital Distillery Podcast as we continue our exploration of the Digital Media & Marketing topics discussed at the Vienna event. 

Today the show is all about storytelling in video advertising campaigns. 

The medium is the message and knowing your medium is key to presenting the right kind of story in the right format.  What aspect ratio should your video content be in? How do you construct a story? And what is the secret sauce to a successful video advertising campaign?

What makes a good story. Why we remember messages in story form better and why Video has the power to capture attention unlike any other medium. 

We hear from the CEO of a video solutions company  Ilhan Zengin, cameraman and video content creator Konstantinz Makarovs, as well as keynote speaker at the Digital Distillery Vienna Christian Schneider as he takes about the story behind children’s bicycle company Woom. 

Contact the show with your thoughts, questions, corrections or if you want to be involved in the event at podcast@the-digital-distillery.com or fill in the contact form on the website.




Links & References

https://en.99designs.de/blog/video-animation/types-of-videos/

https://screencast-o-matic.com/blog/3-reasons-brain-loves-video/

https://www.visualstorytell.com/blog/how-to-tell-a-story-through-video

https://www.creatopy.com/blog/video-advertising-guide/amp/

This episode is brought to you as always by The Digital Distillery.

If you would like to get in touch with us you can head to our website or email podcast@the-digital-distillery.com

You can follow us on:
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Written, Produced & Engineered by Phil McDowell
Executive Producer: Nadia Koski
Project Leads: Dennis Kirschner

Transcript

Why do people connect more with video than with any other medium?

Why is Storytelling in video advertising so important?

And what exactly, definitively, and unequivocally the secret sauce when it comes to a successful video campaign

Find out with me Phil McDowell, as we head back to Vienna for The Digital Distillery Podcast.

[Intro Music]

In the development of humanity it has been our ability to tell stories that have made humans able to play in a much higher weight class in the animal kingdom than our puny claws and teeth would suggest. 

Our ability to describe a situation, a landscape, a technique, and to tell tales of caution and lessons learned into the future, has been arguably the key factor in our evolution and ability to develop and use technology.

It has essentially positioned us in the world where we are today.

From cave paintings to hyroglyphs, scrolls, tomes…. And now tiktok. Not to say that a short inane video of someone dancing backwards into a pool is necessarily the ultimate evolution of human creativity and understanding, but you get what I mean.

But one thing has always been true and will always be true:

We love a good yarn, a legend, a tale, a myth, a saga even. n all its forms, nothing sticks in our mind more than a good story. And nothing captures our attention more than video, but we’ll get to that… .

Since Motion Picture was invented in the late 1880’s, 

[flicking film sound]

audiences were instantly in love with how they tell their stories. How they can provide immersion into countless other worlds, time periods, and lives, and how they can both convey the whole gamut of emotions on screen as well as elicit them in the viewer. 

The heartbreak felt when the protagonists keep missing each other, the jumping out of your socks at the rat-tat-tat at the window, that single tear tugged from that ridiculously cute ad about the puppy dog and the turtle, and the nausea from the slow-motion, flowing loose clothes, 80’s music-laced beach embrace…

While every medium has its specialties, there is literally no other form like video that can engage and impact people in such a meaningful way.

And as far as Advertising is concerned in film, it has been there from the very beginning.

Like music, when Film began it was an ‘event’ activity rather than something people could do any time they liked. 

You had to go to a specific place at a specific time to see a certain film, but when that changed with the introduction of the home tv set, the real power of getting a marketing message across through the magic of the moving pictures started to come into its own.

A lot has changed over the decades so here is a quick timeline

Ads in the 50’s were generally either promoting a new product or pushing some kind of political propaganda or reinforcing the division of roles between the sexes.

The 60’s and 70’s saw a move towards advertisers using programme statistics to target specific demographics and strategically place ads to have the best chance at capturing their attention.

In the 80’s and 90’s it was the idea of the USP or Unique Selling Point that came to dominate advertising psychology. This is the idea that you need to present first and foremost the angle that makes your product stand out from the building masses of competition in the advertising space. 

The 2000s (yes, 2000’s, I refuse to say ‘naughties’ no matter how trendy you think it is mum) saw a disenchantment in advertising and a general feeling that ads were a bit…annoying, and this pushed the industry into focusing on trying to make ads that no longer felt so much like……well…ads.

The 2010’s saw social media change the focus on advertising with a general consensus that pure Push Marketing (ie. here is my product, come buy it) was finally obsolete and was being replaced by Content Marketing which aims to offer added value to the prospective customer

Again, this is stuff we might go deeper into in a special episode before we get too far down the rabbit hole,

Lets not forget where we are and what we are doing.

Head of E-Commerce from Woom Bikes Christian Schneider took to the stage to talk about his company and to demonstrate how important video has been for both their branding, and as a customer service tool.

Describing that the importance of video in their business speaks for itself having him there being from the money side of things, and not marketing because E-commerce works directly with video as a conversion driver.

Woom bikes is the brainchild of two bike-mad dads frustrated with the lack of genuinely children friendly bicycle designs. 

Established in 2013 in a garage in Vienna, they started out designing, building and selling their vision of what a kids bike should be, and went from 300 in the first year, to 300 000 and their bicycles are now highly regarded as THE choice for any parent who is serious about a safe and comfortable bike for their kids.

Something that was apparent to them from the get go is that they wanted to sell not just the idea of a nice bike, but rather the thing that made them love riding with their kids in the first place.

Christian here puts up some truly classic photos with some truly tragic fashion of him as a kid with a bike in his childhood. (No offence if you’re listening to this Christian, just, you know, 90’s.)

It's the kind of picture that almost everyone has, of themselves or their parents, grandparents. 

A picture of the summer holidays with a grinning kid on a bike and dad's thumb shadow on the lens.

And this is the idea that Woom wanted to portray in their marketing. Not only their high quality, safe and practical bike, but the everlasting memories that you will make your kids going on all sorts of adventures on a Woom bike.

As an example of how Woom uses video for their branding Christian then presented this video:

Now i think you can get a pretty good idea from the audio but if you would like to watch the whole thing I have linked it in the shownotes

Basically it is a very cute and simple line drawing animation of what the narrator is saying, like it could be drawn by a kid…. No accident there.

But the point is, when you watch or listen to this clip your not coming away with:

20 inch frame, 10.4 Kilos, front rack, dynamo hub, balloon, twist-grip bell, mudguards, disc brakes, frame bag, kickstand,

But rather it’s the story. Two dads passionate about riding, tenaciously tinker in a shed inventing a new kind of bike just for kids, it’s so successful they outgrow their shed and move it to an office in Vienna, then opens another in the US, then keeps growing and moves again, continues to develop, wins awards and is hugely successful.

And you come away with this whole association with the Brand that sticks, because it's a story.

The core reason behind this is that story’s engage the emotions along with the intellect and humans simply remember things so much better, when emotion is involved.

This is Ilhan Zhengin, CEO of Showheroes Group and one of the original 3 Digital Distillery musketeers. 

And as one of the founders of a digital video content, tech, and advertising solutions company it is he who is going to tell you, what exactly, definitively, and unequivocally is the secret sauce when it comes to a successful video.

I mean you saw that coming right? Of course there is no single solution to a successful video campaign simply because there is no single medium within the scope of video.

‘The Medium is the Message’ is a famous phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan in the 60s and is familiar to anyone who studied any kind of media. Basically it means that the thing, the format, the medium that contains a message is as important, if not more important, than the message itself.

And in digital media advertising today, this idea is as import ant as ever, because the mediums within a medium in media are more immediate than ever……medium.

Think about all the different kinds of places and formats that we experience video in our day-to-day life for work and for entertainment. There is our CTV or connected tv, more about this in the next episode, where we might watch our favorite streaming service of an evening, from your couch, on a big tv.

There are the short 10-second vertical tik tok clips on your phone with a morning coffee. The video embedded in a cooking recipe, even the FaceTime with the grandkids across the pond. These are all video format media, but they are worlds apart in terms of how we consume them, what their purpose is, and how they are presented to us.

Now,  we know why a story in itself engages our brains in a way that makes us remember it, but when this is coupled with the unique psychological impact of video, it is a potent combination.

Scientists say that our brains process images almost 60 000 times faster than text and due to the way that we have evolved, this makes sense. And as Ilhan said, we simply are more likely to remember a message if we have seen it in video form, somewhere around 95% of it in fact, compared to 10% when reading text and this fact is key to understand if you are trying to get a message across.

As a business, or advertiser, the whole point of your content is to have people remember and recognise your brand or product, and ultimately build a loyal following of current and future customers.

And video allows you to get personal and address your audience directly, actually show people your product or service, how it works, and most importantly, give you an opportunity to craft a story around it. 

We have seen this trend develop as companies take a less formal and more personal approach to how they advertise with video.

This is Konsta. My video counterpart in our global content team and he specialises in telling storys contained in short Snackable videos. 

Let's now take these ideas, tie them into a coherent thread, and talk a bit about how to tell a story in advertising.

Step 1. 

Set a goal. 

Ask yourself what exactly it is you are trying to achieve with your video. Is it raising brand awareness, generating leads, or educating your customers? Or perhaps you want to inspire and engage your already loyal audience.

Your desired outcome from your video campaign should be one of the key factors that informs your approach.

Step 2.

Choose and research your target audience. 

Decide who it is you want to reach and build some personas. Personas are like a fictional profile of the individuals you are trying to target and should be informed by the goal that you set in the previous step. You should spend some time noting what you actually know about them in detail.

Step 3.

Brainstorm your story. 

At this point hopefully, you have a metaphorical metric ton of information about your target audience. Their likes, dislikes, whether or not they need to buy a pram in the next few months and what platforms they generally hang out on.

Use your brainstorming session as a means to conceptualise the outline of your story based on everything you have worked out so far. Ideally look into what your competitors have been doing in the same field and try and come up with a fresh angle.

At this point in the game you should also decide what type of story you would like to tell. Is it an Origin story? A how-to? A failure story? Or maybe an unrelated story with a related moral. There are a bunch of typical story frameworks online. I have included a link outlining 10 of the most relevant ones for advertising in the shownotes 

4. Select your video format. 

Now this comes back to what we were talking about before. It is absolutely critical that you carefully consider what format you want your video viewed in based on what platform you want your responders to experience it.

Now this list is by no means exhaustive and there is a lot more to these so consider this an overview.

In-stream ads. These are the ones that crop up in a video you are already watching. Most of us  know these from Youtube. In general they are skippable if longer than 15 seconds and un-skippable if less than. These are often the first that come to mind, perhaps because of their disruptive nature. 

If you are creating an In-stream ad you first have to consider whether it will be skippable or not. If so, then you need to make sure you really grab the watchers attention within seconds of the ad starting. It is also important to be aware that because these are showing in a video someone is already watching, then the audio is likely to be on. Very important to consider.

The next is Outstream. Now these differ because they are not physically connected to other ads and will usually be found playing muted in the background of a website or mobile device. The fact that they are generally muted is important to consider. If you know this then you may want to put more importance on including dynamic text or subtitles into your video as well as visually striking elements to catch attention without sound.

Native ads are designed to look like the content that they are placed in which is what makes them stand out from other ad types on this list. They tend to command more attention from their viewers and usually the main giveaway that they are and ad is a label of sponsored or paid. 

If developing native ad’s you need to make sure fit in with the content they are running with.

Another format available, but mostly used in mobile-gaming are that of Rewarded video ads, and these are an interesting beast. These ad’s offer an exchange of some sort with the user. Usually in the form of allowing a mobile game player to continue playing, or earn some in-game reward like in-game currency, extended play time or not having to buy the game for example, in exchange for them watching a short video.

The last one I am going to mention today is that of the newly trending interactive ads such as Shoppable ads. These are where brands add a product feed to their video ads so that viewers can find out more about their product and even begin the purchase process without actually having to leave the video.

Things like clickable overlays with product pictures are more likely to convert a watcher to a buyer that standard video content. Mostly you will see these on product websites, and if you’re making one you want to make sure that the video is focused on the products that you want to sell and shot in a style that puts them on display.

Lets head back to Woom and the bike mad dads and how they use video for telling their story and selling their bikes. 

They know from their stats that over 70% of their website traffic is mobile, so they don’t want to use walls of text when a succinct video will do the job better. They also know that the vast majority of their audience are parents, and this fact means that two key things stand out.

The first is that for parents, riding with their kids is all about those magic moments, a daughter riding her bike to school for the first time, a cycling trip on a family holiday, those kinds of experiences. And for Woom, video is the perfect way to stage these moments and inject that experience into the prospective buyers.

The second stand out thing about parents buying bikes for their kids is that of safety and customer service. 

Woom also uses video not as a branding tool but as an educational and customer service tool for their current customers. Woom knows that when putting together a bike for their kid, parents want to be able to see it done step by step so that they cab follow along and be confident that they have put the bike together properly before they send their 5 year old hurtling down a hill and into an upturned trampoline at teeth jarring speeds (a poorly thought out invention of my fathers which ended in more than one sprained muscle and a few days off school where i could only watch the tv looking over my left shoulder).

Video is the single most important medium of our time. For advertisers, for company’s and for viewers. 

It engages our brains and our attention unlike any other medium in history and can cram more information into a condensed space than anything else.

It has extensive reach with recent findings showing that people watch an average of 19 hours of video content each week. It is cost effective, highly sharable, suitable for entertainment and educational purposes, a great return on investment and more and more, is the favoured format for search engines.

If you take anything away from this episode as you set out to change the world with your new found fervour for storytelling and video advertising, consider these best practices.

Grab attention within 3 seconds. Thats it, 3 seconds is what data tells us is the critical amount of time for to grab that oh so valuable attention and have any chance of holding it. This could be an intriguing question, a baffling statistic, a flashy visual or any other piece of strong eye-catching content.

Showcase your brand early on. This is important because A, it gives your brand more of a chance to stick if you get in in early and repeat it a couple of times throughout the video, but also if someone doesn’t watch your video for very long, you still get a chance to get your brand into their head.

3rd, is consider where your video is going to be and how it will look if there is no audio. Most people watch video in public place and possibly while listening to some other media at the same time, so you have got to make sure it maintains its message if its muted.

4th is include at least one call to action.

And 5th is know your format. Know where its going to be seen, (probably mobile) and optimise for that. Get your aspect ration right so if it is going to be watched on mobile (spoiler yes it probably will) priotise vertical (9:16) or square (1:1) over landscape (16:9) wherever possible.

Next to ratio, font size is hugely important, your text should be easily readable on mobile devices and preview and check everything on your phone before putting it out into the world.

And there we have it, another episode of The Digital Distillery Podcast…

A big thank you as always to everyone who makes this show possible. Nadia Koski, Dennis Kirschner, Steanie Leonardi, I couldn’t do it without.

If you havent checked out our DMEXCO special episode and want to know what all the fuss was about, head on over to your podcatcher of choice and have a listen. Its only 5 mins and gives a pretty good feeling for what it was like to be there plus Konsta put together a great video where we experimented a bit with some sound design stuff we thought was pretty cool.

Currently we are working on a special episode all about ad fraud which will be coming out in a fortnight or so as well as our next full episode all about CTV with our very own Sarah Lewis.

Thats it from me for today, if you have any questions or just want to say g’day you can email us at podcast@the-digital-distillery.com or use the contact form on the website. 

Until then…

Skippy cesky crumlov story?

https://screencast-o-matic.com/blog/3-reasons-brain-loves-video/

https://www.visualstorytell.com/blog/how-to-tell-a-story-through-video

https://www.creatopy.com/blog/video-advertising-guide/amp/