Does your video tell a compelling story to your potential customers? Listen as Jillian Boyington from Adam Grubb Media talks about what a story is, what a story is not, and how to create unique video stories to draw in new customers.
Jillian is the Head of Studios for Adam Grubb Media. She oversees all AGM studios including production, animation, creator and marketing to make sure that a client’s brand stays consistent across all platforms. Jillian is passionate about helping clients bring both clarity and creativity to their brand messaging so that they can thrive in perspective industries.
Here is the transcript from the presentation:
Jillian: So again, my name is Jillian. I’m the Head of Studios at Adam Grab Media, and if I started a video out with just that one line, you would have already scrolled past it.
Jillian: You have about one second to engage your audience, especially on social media. It’s about the amount of time that your audience looks at your video and decides, do I want to watch this, or do I not want to watch this, and moves on.
Jillian: Also, on social media or really any online video, the average view time for a video is only about 3 seconds. So, it’s super important to learn how to engage your audience to hook them in and then to continue with a powerful story.
Jillian: Now, stories is one of many tools, but if you know how to use it correctly, it is a very powerful tool that you can use in your messaging and in your branding.
Jillian: So, I want to start off with a little story for you guys, this is a story about Extra, the brand. OK, so, Extra gum. This was about in 2015, they were starting to lose market share and they needed to figure out a way to engage their customers in a fresh way. And so, they did some research. They had some big marketing people that came in and the research showed that, for a consumer, the decision to buy gum is made in less than 10 seconds when they’re at the checkout counter, and it’s also made subconsciously. It is not a choice where people stand and say, should I buy gum? Should I not buy gum? They make it quick, they make it in under 10 seconds.
Jillian: What they also discovered was that on a deeper level, really the reason that people buy gum in the 1st place is for that sharing and social connection. How many times have you made a connection with somebody over offering them a piece of gum or vice versa?
Jillian: And so, with this information in mind, extra gum decides that they need a way to tap into this emotion of human connection as a way for them to connect with their consumer, and so they came up with the story of Sarah and Juan, and I’m going to let you guys watch it here. : Watch the video on YouTube
Jillian: OK. So, we’re going to talk about a few things and talk about why this video worked for Extra. So, Extra used this as part of their marketing campaign back in 2015. It went viral on social media, on YouTube, and they were wildly successful with this. Well, they barely mentioned their brand in there. They mentioned it a few times. They show the gum a few times. They mentioned no facts about extra gum. They don’t say that you should buy it. They don’t say that they have long lasting flavor. None of that.
Jillian: I promise that all of you, later today, will be able to remember this story. You’ll be able to repeat it back to someone. Had you watched a 2-minute-long video about why Extra gum that has long lasting flavor and all of its data and all of its facts and just bullet pointed list, you would not be able to remember all of them. You might not even be able to remember any of them because you’d probably zone out.
Jillian: So, why did this work for Extra? We’re going to talk about 3 reasons why it worked. One, they included all of the elements of story, and we’re going to get into that, too, what are the elements of story. #2, they incorporated the right production elements into their story that elevated it and that helped connect you as an audience, whether you knew it or not. And then the last one was, they knew how and where to use their video once it was made, they knew how to get in front of the right audience.
Jillian: OK, so let’s go back. Let’s talk about what is a story. But before we talk about what is a story, let’s talk about what a story is not.
Jillian: This is confusing for a lot of people because people think that really anything can be a story, and while that doesn’t mean that presenting information in a different way can’t be compelling or you can’t use it, but to understand the difference between the elements of story and something that is not a story is a really important distinction to make, because when you’re telling it in story form, you’re getting in, you are connecting with your audience in a different way.
Jillian: OK, so what is a story not. A story is not simply just a collection of data points. It’s not talking about fun facts about your business. It’s not a bullet pointed list of why your company is awesome. It’s not a simple recount of a history. If you’re starting your story off in 1994, we became a business. You know you can’t. That’s not a story.
Jillian: It’s not buzzwords used to describe your product a lot. If you look at shampoo bottles, if you look at hairspray, a lot of people will say, this is our story. When really, all it is is kind of a description of how you can use this product and how it might make you feel after. But it doesn’t have all of the elements of story.
Jillian: And then again, it’s not a chronological account of events. It’s not just simply a timeline.
Jillian: So, well, what is it then? Let’s talk about that. So, I like to point out five elements of story that you really want to include in any story. Now, keep in mind that whether you have a video that’s 10 seconds or whether you have a video that’s two minutes or 7 minutes or a full feature length film, you can include all of these elements to create a story, if you do it right.
Jillian: OK. So, the first element of story, this is the most obvious one. A story has a beginning, a middle and an end. In a marketing world, you might say a story is the beginning or what life was like for a person before they used your product. Then a transformational moment, kind of the middle. Where does it, what changes for them? What solution comes into play for them? And then what is life like after for your customer? Beginning, middle, and end.
Jillian: The second element of a story is having an identifiable character. People like to try and stay high level. They like to try to include too many things at once instead of focusing in on one particular person, or maybe two particular people. But you really have to have one identifiable character that is, that the center of your story is around. This is so that people have somebody to connect to. They have somebody to empathize with, they have somebody to remember and to connect with your brand.
Jillian: The third is authentic emotion. Now this is not the emotion that you feel when you watch the video. Authentic emotion is not that you felt hopeful or you teared up when you watched the Extra gum video. The authentic emotion is being able to feel what the characters feel, understanding what they feel, knowing that Sarah and Juan were in love. They’re two little high school love birds. You can tell that in the story. It’s very clear to you how they, how they feel emotionally.
Jillian: The 4th element of story is having a significant moment. A lot of people make a mistake here because they want to try and generalize their story. They want to try and stay high level so that they can fit as many people in as they can so that they can relate to as many people as they can in a story, for example, you might say, Gosh, traveling the world is amazing. There’s so many benefits to traveling the world. Anyone can benefit from traveling the world. You’ll meet lots of great people. You’ll experience great culture. You’ll, you know, find out lots of fun history facts.
Jillian: I’m just making this up, but you stay high level when you’re trying to tell your story instead of picking a moment that you had when you were on your trip. Maybe it was your experience in watching your son see the Eiffel Tower for the first time. Or maybe it’s the chocolate gelato that you had on the street and the person in front of you paid for it or and making that cultural connection of people and culture, so really a significant moment, honing in on a specific story and at a specific moment in time and being detailed about it in that way.
Jillian: And then the last one is including specific details. Now these things, when I say specific details, it’s little things. It’s little things that kind of give your story flavor, so it may be an, in video a lot of times we call this like B roll, so for example, in the Extra video, it pointed out that they were at a high school. It zoomed down in on Sarahs books. They’re small little things, and it’s not just only focusing on the beginning, the middle and the end in the story, it’s incorporating those small little, full details throughout. These give your audience things to connect to and things to hold on to and really help to put themselves into your story.
Jillian: So, those are the five elements of story. We’ve talked about what’s a story is not. Let’s talk about choosing the right visual and audio elements when you’re creating a story.
Jillian: So, behind every good story on video is a good post-production. It’s having good editing. Now, do you have to have the most professional, the most fancy cameras, the most of everything? Should you sometimes? Yes. Do you have to all the time? No.
Jillian: There are lots of things that you can do on your own to help with the post-production of your video. So, to help you stay away from just a simple point and shoot, it’s a lot different if I just stand here in front of the camera and I just talk to the camera and I say my piece and I tell my story and that’s great. But what if you had an angle here and then you also had a second angle here? And you can edit these things very simply on your phone, there are lots of apps that are very user friendly for you to edit things on your own.
Jillian: So, telling that same story but changing up your camera angle helps to keep your audience engaged. So, the types of shots you use, the camera angles that you consider your music selection. Almost always, I would say 99.999% of the time, if I make a video online, I put music behind it. It’s a very easy thing to do. It can be very low, even if you’re just talking to your audience, even if it’s not really about the music. You have it kind of underneath, just in the background. It’s amazing how much this helps your audience to stay engaged with what you’re saying.
Jillian: Choosing the right music. In the Extra video, it could have been another song about love or another sweet soft song. But what if it was like a like, a rock, a rock band playing in the back. It would have given you a completely different feeling in the video, so it’s really important to choose the music correctly to impact overall mood and emotion.
Jillian: The importance of editing and shaping narrative flow. So, this is just in editing, a lot of times we will go out as a media company and we film this and we film that. We film that and it’s not really until editing in post-production that the story even really comes together, so having a good understanding of how you want to incorporate the events, because it’s not always chronological.
Jillian: You may not want to tell the story from, I know I said beginning and middle and end, but that’s not necessarily in a time order, does that, does that make sense?
Jillian: Establishing a rhythm and a pace that suits the story. So, this video, it was kind of, it’s like you’re slow dancing with the song. It could have been fast. What if the punches or the clips that you saw were super fast? It gives you a different feeling in the story, so considering that.
Jillian: Enhancing stories through transitions overlays, effects. This is where it starts to get a lot more technical and they are things that you think about when you’re doing major video productions. I think that they’re still important to think about these things, if you’re making your own social media video.
Jillian: You can there, and again in the apps, there are lots of ways to create transitions that kind of help move your pictures along. You don’t just have to have one slide out of the other. Maybe you need to pop. Maybe you need it to slide up. There are different elements in that way that you can incorporate.
Jillian: And then you get in, you can get into leveraging color grading. So, if you noticed in the Extra video, when Sarah and Juan went away and they, she got a big corporate job and they’re on, they’re on FaceTime with each other, the color changed a little bit. It was a little bit more cold. So, and you can incorporate elements in that way too, to help your audience feel what the, what the emotion is that you’re trying to convey.
Jillian: And so it’s really important, especially in video, because it’s kind of when you’re telling a story in person with no video, it’s kind of like when you read the book, and you get to decide what that visual is for you and you don’t even really put it all the way together, but it’s a kind of idealistic picture that you have in your head, and it’s one of the reasons why when we go watch it in the movie theaters, or I guess we’re not doing that anymore, we’re watching it on Netflix or whatever, but when you go to watch a movie, you’re sometimes disappointed. I mean, most people would say they like the book better than the movie, and some of that is because they’re disappointed the characters don’t look like they thought they would, or different visual elements aren’t there in the way that they imagined them.
Jillian: So, you really have a responsibility when you’re sharing visually to make sure that you’re getting these things right. So, that you can capture your audience in an impactful way.
Jillian: And then lastly, I want to talk about what you do with your video after. So, a story I like to say is only as good as what you do with it. If you tell a story and nobody gets to hear it, what’s the point of the story? There’s no one to impact.
Jillian: So, you have to identify the appropriate platforms and the channels. For your content distribution, that’s different depending on what business you’re in. Some businesses may do well on Instagram, others, their audience may be on LinkedIn. Some may just be YouTube, others may be simply, maybe you don’t have a social presence online. Maybe it’s through e-mail, through an e-mail marketing campaign, or maybe it’s just when you have a lead, you’re texting them this video so that they can watch it. So, there’s lots of different platforms, and choosing the right one is done by understanding who your audience is and where your audience is.
Jillian: Secondly, developing a comprehensive distribution strategy. What is your plan if you create this awesome video and you don’t really know when to post it or how to post it or how often to post it or where you’re posting it, it’s just kind of like throwing spaghetti up on the wall and hoping something sticks. It’s really not a good plan just to make a video and then kind of fingers crossed, people see it and it goes viral. That’s not usually what happens. Usually people have really thought through how they’re going to show this to the world.
Jillian: And then lastly, promoting video content, again, through social media or through other marketing channels. I think people make a mistake of thinking that, well, I put the video out there, people saw it and that that’s the end of that. As consumers, it used to be 7 times, now it’s in the 20s, of how many times people have to see something or hear something to act on it, to understand what it is that you’re saying for a lot of different reasons. Maybe they weren’t listening the first time. Maybe they scrolled past. Maybe they didn’t see it at all. Maybe they weren’t ready for what you’re offering, so, showing the same content over and over and over again in different ways is very important to think about.
Jillian: So, a couple of clients that we’ve had in the past that I wanted to talk about really quick as it relates to story. So, Riverview Hospital. Riverview hospital is one of our newer clients, after 15 years they decided that they needed to switch marketing companies and they wanted a fresh, a new approach. So, their focuses were on cardio and cancer and then ortho.
Jillian: So, we brought in for them the power of story and we came up with three unique stories with different characters at different ages to tell their story in each of these different ways. Instead of going in and talking about all of the stats of cardio and how many people go to Riverview and how many, you know, when they come out of the hospital and just listing off facts. Instead, we told somebody’s story. We told the story of a dad who is at his son’s football game and had a heart attack and told that story and how his family rallied around him and the care that he got when he was at Riverview and then showing what his life was like after, playing baseball with his son out on a Sunday night, so you don’t have to get up and talk about yourself all the time. You have to simply know how to tell a powerful story that your audience can relate to on a more subconscious level.
Jillian: Another client that we have that I like to talk about is a home manufacturing company. About a year or so ago, we did this video for them and it’s, there’s no words in it, it’s just music overlay. There’s maybe one sentence at the end that the actors say in it. But it’s the story of a couple, and they’re walking through the whole process of buying a home. They’re walking through construction and seeing how a house that they might choose to build is being built, you see them walk through with the architect and drawing up plans. You see them walking through with the designer and picking out pieces. Visually, we pop, zoom in and we show really close up like them looking at the trim work or the cabinet work showing some of those little details in the story and then at the very end of the story, the husband and wife are driving home and he’s like, So, what do you think? And she’s like, I think we should build our first home. And so, it’s a very simple story that if you watch the video, you can capture without anybody saying anything. Everything that this whole manufacturing company can do for you in the process without saying what they can do for you. So, that’s the power of story.
Jillian: And we had a client after that come to us and we’ve had several clients after that come to us and say, OK, well, you know, I want testimonial video and I want to talk about the history of our company, and can we include some shots of the homes that we’re working on right now, and then they watch that video and they say, yeah, but like that, that’s what I want.
Jillian: And so, I like to talk about that because sometimes people don’t know how to articulate what it is they really want in a video, but when a consumer sees it and is impacted by it, it’s instinctive and you know that that is most impactful to you versus just hearing a list of facts.
Jillian: So, I want to leave you with a couple of tips. If you’re going to do anything today, I say take action, go home and just do it. Just post a video. If you have a social media account, just go home and try it out. You care so much more than anybody else cares about what you look like or what you sound like, no one is paying attention to those things. Like I said, half of the people aren’t even watching it yet because they’re scrolling right past it. Just go home and practice. Just try it out.
Jillian: This one’s really important. Clarity is more important than creativity. Now, I work for a very creative media company. Our tagline is Create and Be Great. We talk about not making boring videos. Say goodbye to boring, but if you are not clear in your message, then the creativity won’t matter because your audience is confused and they’re not listening anymore.
Jillian: So, focus first on what is my message. How can I be clear? Probably say less. Whatever you’re going to say, say less. And then focus on creativity. How can I take my clear message and make it creative, not the other way around.
Jillian: Know your audience. When I work with a company and we’re doing research on their target audience. I like to get it down to being able to understand or describe one person that is using this product, that is that is interested in this, that will watch this video and be impacted by it and then act on it. OK, it’s not enough just for somebody to say, oh, that was so cute. You want people to do something about the video that they’ve watched, right? So, if you can narrow down who your audience is by being able to describe one person, and then when you’re on video, talk to that one person. Your video is going to be much more clear. Your message is going to be much more concise.
Jillian: Show your face. I know that that’s so hard to want to do, but so many studies out there show that showing your face on camera, connecting with your audience in that way is so much more impactful than not. Now, can you do video without showing your face? Yes, you can incorporate both, but especially if you are a small business owner and you are the face of your business and you are connecting with people through social media and you are getting leads that way, it is very important for you to be showing your face and connecting with your audience in that way.
Jillian: And then last and most importantly, when you’re making a video is, just be you being unique, we’re not inventing the wheel, nobody is reinventing the wheel. Nobody has a product that somebody else out there doesn’t have as well. So, what is unique about it is that you were involved with it. Put your own spin on it, put your own words to it. Put your own thoughts behind what it is that you’re making and the people who are impacted by that, that’s your customer. Those are the people that you want to see it and that you want to come to you.
Jillian: Well, and I mean, especially today, people are just moving so fast and there are so many things out there, that, to choose from that, we don’t have to be picky. We don’t have to stop. It’s no longer, you know, where you’re stuck watching this television commercial while you’re waiting for your show to come back on. So, it’s really important now more than ever to find creative ways to engage your audience.
Jillian: I always like to say that when you’re forming messaging, it’s more important to think about who you’re talking to than what you’re what you’re saying about yourself. This isn’t about you, your message, while it seems like it is, it’s about your brand. It’s about your business. It’s not about you, it’s about your audience and it’s about what you can do for them, it’s about figuring out what their problem is and providing a solution to them and helping them see that transformational change.
Jamie: You guys have any questions?
Jillian: Awesome. Thank you guys. It’s great to be here.
