It was actually pretty funny,
because I, it kind of became, like, an ongoing thing,
but, I came into the meeting,
and I'm like "So what is Uberflip?"
And everyone was like, "Exactly."
(John laughs)
"Exactly."
That's why you're here.
"That's why you're here, Mitch."
The following is based on the true story
of how one B2B software company
risked everything by featuring a Dungeon Master,
a Baseball Coach, and The Bachelor
in their homepage explainer videos.
Viewer discretion is advised.
Welcome to Video In Focus,
the show that explores the expanding world of video
in modern B2B marketing.
Here in this special episode,
I'm on-site with my friends at Uberflip,
a content experience platform,
and if you don't know what that is, don't worry.
In a few minutes you're gonna know,
because you're gonna see their explainer video.
Now the reason I'm here with the Uberflip team
is I feel like they've created an explainer video
that takes advantage of video's real superpowers.
It not only educates and explains what they do,
but it connects with you on a real human level.
In fact, it actually makes you laugh,
and it makes you wanna share their content
with others in your business.
We're also gonna talk with their agency of record,
OneMethod, who came up with some concepts
that actually include one of these.
(dramatic clanging)
The first thing is making sure that
everyone on your team can deliver
the same message to the audience,
and when you look at our own team,
everyone had their own version of what is Uberflip?
What does it mean to a marketer?
What does it mean to a salesperson in that organization?
What does it mean to the company as a whole?
And, we couldn't get a straight answer in our own office,
let alone, at home from my wife.
Like, she couldn't describe what we do.
Uberflip is a content experience platform.
It's a scalable way to create frictionless,
personalized experiences around your content
that shape and influence the buyer journey.
(chuckles) Whoa! Slow down, Sheldon!
(bell chiming)
How 'bout you explain it to me like I'm five?
We're known in the market currently
for a very specific thing.
Lots of people think that we're
a content marketing platform,
and we're really starting
to create this new category, content experience,
and with that comes a lot of different layers, right?
And that was also part of the challenge.
Not only are we trying to get people to understand
this new category, but we're also
trying to get them to understand what it is that we offer
and what we do, right?
So, the way I approached it was,
okay, let's do a product explainer,
but let's also do, like, a really slick brand video.
There has to be a way to merge the two.
This is a blog post, this is a YouTube video,
and this little guy here is an ebook.
Most of the time you give your customers this!
(plastic bricks clattering)
But Uberflip let's you give them this!
Meow.
(gasps) How did you know?
We obviously looked at a lot of explainer videos
when we were looking at this project,
and I think there's a lot that kind of follow
the same patterns, and whether it's an animated video,
or whether it's a simple kind of straight explainer video
where it shows a lot of the backend of the product,
and I think for us we really wanted something
that was going to be...
Viral's not the right word,
but something that people were like,
"Wow, this is a great piece of marketing.
"That's something we wanna, we wanna share," so...
We went to some different B2B agencies
that have really great experience in doing explainer videos,
but they all felt like the same approach to me,
and we just we wanted something else.
(romantic music)
You, the marketer are vying for the affections
of the star of the show, your prospective customer.
No sooner do you sit down for a little heart-to-heart,
than your competition shows up,
with his square jaw and washboard abs,
how are you supposed to compete with this?
That's where Uberflip comes in.
Full confession, this project was not smooth
from beginning to end.
Now, working with OneMethod was a great experience,
but we actually tried to rock this before that,
and that first go, I'm not gonna name the agency
that we worked with, but it didn't work out,
and in that go, we tried to overly script, direct,
and envision the end before it even began,
and we got all the way through to filming it.
We saw some raw versions, and it was terrible.
It was the wrong level of cheesiness.
It lacked professionalism, just in terms of
the visualizations, the acting.
So many different ingredients we were able to take
a step back and look at that outcome, and say
"what would we actually do differently this time?"
And one of the first things we said is
"we gotta remove ourselves from this to a degree,"
and that was a big part of deciding let's go,
and let's trust someone to help us run this production.
(dramatic clanging)
OneMethod, we kind of specialize in doing
a few things: advertising, design,
as well as our own kind of experiments,
and things that we find interesting,
kind of turned into our passion projects.
Myself, I'm an Associate Creative Director here.
Grew up as a kind of art director and designer.
I mean I grew up watching a lot of sit-com comedies,
so like, Seinfeld over Friends, all day everyday.
Wow
That'd be one of my--
Bold statement
One of my bold statements I'd make
about how I was brought up.
That's also really dated yourself, as well.
Yes, I did, yeah.
So you can have a bit of a range in mind there.
I'm a copywriter at OneMethod.
I write a lot of the things that we do.
I'm a big part of the ideation process
a lot of the time, and just kind of like
throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.
A lot of what I like to put in this industry
is kind of the halfway point
between stand up comedy writing-writing,
and having those creative challenges,
and trying to come up with something
with a lot of different requirements,
and then still be satisfied with
what you're doing at the end of the day
is a really fun challenge.
Your content is a legendary amulet stuck
in Mount Kragathar.
Your audience reaches the summit.
They pull the amulet out of the mount.
(dice clatters)
Success!
Sale! Bling!
Amazing!
A lot of our clients include brands by Nestle,
so Kit Kat, Smarties, Delissio Pizza.
We have Johnson &amp; Johnson,
but also brands like Rogaine,
which Mitch and I found ourselves working on.
Didn't expect you'd get a chance
to work on Rogaine in your career.
Yeah
(John laughs)
It made us very self-aware while we were working on it.
(John laughs)
I worked on this one for Delissio a little while ago.
The project was called crust paper,
and we turned competitor's pizza crusts into posters,
that then we used to advertise our new pizza,
and then, another one we did was with Motrin.
We came up with this concept called Tina's Uterus,
that was basically a whole bunch of employees working
to sort of brainstorming pain for Tina inside her uterus.
It was really weird, but also, it ended up being--
Painstorming
They were painstorming, yeah.
(laughs) And that's why I can
no longer attend the holiday party.
Anyway--
I think I was, to be honest,
at first hesitant, but intrigued.
I mean they had done some very cool branding work
for companies like Tangerine, more recently, Scotiabank.
There's a campaign that we helped Burger King launch
for the month of October leading into Hallowe'en.
There's a limited time offer.
If you buy the nuggets you can get free ghost nuggets
on the side, which, ghost nuggets are nothing. (chuckles)
So we had video content that elaborately advertised
this empty parchment paper with just a lone dipping sauce.
Ghost Nuggets.
So, elaborately shooting nothing was
a highlight this year for me.
(Mitch laughs)
I mean no question, it was a risk going
with OneMethod versus some of
the other companies we were looking at, who had,
not in a bad way, but the generic
B2B marketing explainer video.
(dramatic clanging)
So, I've been a bit of a fangirl for a while,
and so, we reached out to them with our proposal
and what we were looking to do,
and they wrote back, basically saying
"sounds great, but I don't think we're a fit for you."
Which really sucked to hear, right?
Because, why not?
First reaction was "what the fuck is Uberflip?"
(interviewer laughs)
We quickly learned through analogies,
because it's kind of the quickest shorthand
to explain such a complex digital product and service.
It was actually pretty funny,
because it kind of became an ongoing thing,
but I came into the meeting,
and I'm like "so, what is Uberflip?"
And everyone is like "exactly."
(John laughs)
"Exactly."
That's why you're here.
"That's why you're here, Mitch."
So, that was kind of my first reaction,
and it was kind of a lot of reading initially,
and then kind of just talking with John a lot
and just being like "okay, so I get this.
"I get this.
"I get this."
And I write an analogy.
I'm like "does that make sense?"
And he's just "No, not really, no.
"Let me see this."
It's like "that's closer."
I'm like "okay, all right."
It was a really interesting exercise that ultimately,
I think became really helpful
for actually crafting the content,
especially when you're the one who has to go
on that journey of "what is this?"
From zero, 'cause I think a lot of stuff we work on,
we kind of know what it is already.
Even like, chicken nuggets.
That's a lot simpler than Uberflip.
(bell dings)
We definitely had a process which was
the reason we went with them, right?
We tend to go into something already 3/4 of the way baked.
We're just like "no, this is our vision," right?
And we did not want that to be the case this time,
because we felt like any time we were trying to do
this in the past, we were hitting a wall there,
just because we were too involved, like way too involved,
so Jason and Dan and I kinda had to sit down
with Randy and he'd be like "I have this great idea,"
and we're just like "we're sure you do,
"but just no this time."
I actually think I did a really good job at taking
a bit of a step back, which is hard for me,
which is why I say it was a good job.
Now, first off, we have an amazing team here at Uberflip
who owned a lot of the day-to-day work on this.
It was important for me, and it was important
for the outcome I think, that we let the people who are
the product marketer today, who are the branding
and creative messaging today, take the lead this time.
I loved the fact that these guys had,
like Paige said, a process.
They had a vision, and they were experts,
way beyond what we were, in how to create a great video.
Definitely early on there was tons of jargon
that was kinda given to us as
"here's the reading material to understand
"what Uberflip is."
So, a lot of times we were trying to strip that away
and find more human ways to say things,
or even just questioning is this term a legitimate term,
or is it jargon for jargon's sake?
And the other thing too, is I think Johnny and I talk
about this in terms of B2B is still kind of B2C,
'cause you're still talking to a person
on the other end of that.
They want to be entertained,
and they still need to be informed,
so it's kind of like taking that information,
and not taking yourself too seriously,
but making sure you're getting
all those essential points in the mix.
So, here are three lunches that I made in seconds
using mostly the same stuff.
PB&amp;J, light on the J, for Ryan,
crust-free PB sandie for Ethan,
and whatever these things are supposed to be for Lyla.
She's going through a bit of a phase right now.
I know exactly what my kids like,
not because I'm a great fake parent, though I am,
but because every lunch, I get to see
what parts they loved and hated, which means every day
those bagged lunches get better and better.
I start adding fruit snacks,
little hand-written notes to build self-esteem.
The best part, totally scalable.
I can pack custom lunches with love for three kids, or 3000,
no industrial kitchen required.
(dramatic clanging)
When OneMethod approached the project, they said
"we're gonna go and talk to a whole bunch of your team,
"and understand how they describe Uberflip,"
and as they went around, they kept hearing
all these analogies.
One of the earlier simple explanations we got from,
I don't know if it was Randy, or someone
from the sales team, but the analogy was baseball related.
It was about just getting up to bat
and automatically having a higher batting average,
and having more at bats.
And it's like a benefit thing.
You kinda can't understand what the platform does
out of that, but that was one of the earlier analogies
that were helping to explain it to us.
I definitely love analogies.
A lot of the keynotes that I do are filled
with analogies, left right and center.
My analogy batting average is probably
a good baseball average.
You know, .300, maybe I have a season where I'm .400,
but that's because my team helps me filter
through all the garbage that I'm throwing out
to find the gold.
One little tidbit that I did pick up from his sales team
is that he'll come in every other week with a new analogy
(Mitch laughs)
on how to sell the product,
so they're constantly getting up to speed
on the latest way to talk about it,
and/or poking holes in his previous analogies.
So they came back, and they're like "there are
"a ton of analogies beaming through this organization,"
and that was in a meeting,
and Paige and Jason and Dan all kinda looked
at me bein' like "his fault, right?"
One of the decks, like I said, it just had one word on it,
and it said "Analogies,"
and they were like "so, your team really likes analogies,"
and we're like "Yeah, we know."
Yeah, there was a slide, I think towards the end,
that was just like "analogies, question mark?"
And it was more so to just raise the question
what the eff is happening with the analogies?
I even created one I said was a teppanyaki table one,
(Paige laughs)
like at Benihana, where you have the marketers
in the middle with all the content,
and you're serving up different dishes
around this circular table,
'cause it's all the same ingredients,
but the experience you're delivering is different.
Amazing! (chuckles)
Explain it like you're my boss, selling it to his boss.
Profits, progress, sports analogy.
Nailed it. (chuckles)
OneMethod themselves got to a point where they said
"there's so many damn analogies here.
"We just have to get rid of the analogies,
"and we have to explain what Uberflip is
"in a more concrete fashion,"
and that's where they were for probably
a week or two of their process,
and then they said "why don't we just embrace this,
"and distill down to a few analogies
"that are really gonna stick?"
I think as we got further into it, analogies became
more and more handy to explain something
that was so complex, to just dumb it down.
We were doing it kind of already,
in terms of okay, what is Uberflip?
How exactly does it work?
Simplest terms, how do we do that?
And I think as we kind of worked through that, it became
a useful tool for us, and we're like
"if this is useful for us,
"it's probably just useful for everyone."
(laughs) We should probably just go with this.
We should probably go in this direction,
because I think we're needlessly complicating things
by throwing this out the window,
and let's focus on making this really engaging.
And boom, prospects nurture themselves.
(laughs) Will it make my team smarter?
(laughs) Your team?
No, but it will make your content smarter,
by giving you useful analytics,
insights and optimization tools,
always learning, always getting smarter.
(suspenseful music)
Maybe too smart.
What?
(dramatic clanging)
I think the main hero video, the first one
that's on our homepage is by far the most clever
and amazing amount of information compacted
into two minutes, but it's funny.
My favorite one, in terms just simplifying what we do,
is, we call it the sack lunch video,
which, funny enough, the first version of that,
I think we were gonna do something with preserves,
like different jams, and it was like
"no one cares about jams."
We were being pitched, and I was like "I love the idea,
"but no one is really passionate about jams,"
and so we're all sitting there, throwing different ideas,
and one of the things that I was able to relate to myself,
is I've got three kids,
and packing lunches for them is not as simple as
let me go and grab three sandwiches that are
all cream cheese and bagel, and three of the same cookie,
and three of the same fruit.
It's like, no, they each have their own preferences,
and we started to play off of that,
and that landed us at sack lunch.
Well, the Dungeon Master is pretty hilarious.
Yeah, that one's so good.
And that's just like a scene within a video.
Yeah, I thought you were gonna say Bachelor,
'cause we love The Bachelor.
We were comin' up with different themes, right?
So it was like "okay, what is
"the analogy we're gonna go with for this one?"
And we're both bachelor fans,
so we kinda came up with the idea--
I think when we finally got into the actual videos though,
we all really liked, the Moneyball was a surprising one,
where everyone was like--
Whoa!
According to this data, it seems like
that aging outfielder and injured catcher are actually
a winning combination of content.
You might be able to turn this season around after all.
How those two worlds kind of seamlessly wove
in and out of eachother, like baseball analytics
and your team, and you're making sure that
all your content's working hard for you, and just adjusting.
It just seemed like an easy kind of fit.
And actually one bit I loved was also like
the weird S&amp;M bit that we have in there.
I loved that bit so much.
(laughs) It's so funny.
Now, explain it to me like you're a Dungeon Master.
(latex glove stretching)
No, no, no, no, no, no, wrong dungeon.
Oh... oh, I gotcha.
Yeah, I think that's like a bucket list checkbox.
Yeah, that's a bucket list item, for sure.
(John laughs)
So there's all kinds of these props,
whether it be like a ball gag, or like a latex suit.
Honestly it was--
It was one of the funnier parts.
This is actually a completely true, funny story.
We were supposed to film this at a studio
and it fell through the week of,
so we had to film it here at our office,
and we did it on the weekend.
I was with my kids.
I think my wife was outta town, so I brought my kids down,
just to kind of play in the office
and have fun while we're recording,
and they kept over and checking in, and at one point,
it's the Dungeon Master scene, and I'm just like
"no, go back.
"You're not... no.
"Just go eat another snack."
(laughs) Oh my gosh.
I didn't even think about that.
(both laugh)
He realized quickly
that it's time to take the kids to lunch.
Oh my goodness.
It is time to go.
Wow!
(dramatic clanging)
So, I'll be very honest.
I was nervous,
because I think that the videos are extremely clever,
but they are high-level, all right?
And we did that intentionally.
We decided we're not gonna go into the weeds
and overly focus on product at every stage.
We wanna make sure people would understand
how we could help them,
and how we help them, especially in technology,
changes so quickly,
and the investment in these videos,
we didn't want them to work for three to six months.
We wanted these to work for at least one
to two years in our mind.
Our risk though, was would people be able to connect?
What do we offer, to what do we actually do?
And that's the way I look at it is what we try to do
with these videos is capture attention, capture awareness,
create intrigue to want to speak to our team
to see that demo.
These were not product demo videos,
which was a very important distinction to make.
(dramatic clanging)
The reactions are great on these videos.
My wife first of all, finally says she can explain
what we do, so that's a huge win.
It's funny, in our Slack instance, you'll see
a lot of our employees talk about
how their parents understand what we do now,
so it's this whole aspect of just connecting
with a broader audience to explain
the value of what Uberflip can do.
The next aspect is some of our customers who really say
"this captures the value that you're delivering for me
"in ways that I never could,"
so my hope is what trickles from there is that
those customers then say to other people
in their organization "you gotta watch this.
"You gotta see why we're invested in content experience,"
let alone Uberflip.
The ultimate goal is for someone to understand what we do,
and be intrigued enough to talk to us about it, right?
But we use it in so many different places.
We have it on our home page.
We use them in decks at speaking engagements.
We also have them in all of our nurturers
as part of that path.
We have some ad campaigns that it maps to,
so we're putting it where it makes sense
to be able to engage our audience throughout that journey.
Some of our sales reps are using it
in their cadences, just for outreach,
and one of the reps sent me a screenshot,
and she was like "oh my gosh, this is the best.
"I had a VP of marketing who actually went
"and clicked the video and watched it,
"and he's like 'I loved those.
"'I will get on a call with you,
"'if you explain it to me like a Dungeon master.'"
Like he actually wrote that and said that,
and she was like "'kay, done, sure.
"I've been trying to get you to engage at all."
(both laugh)
That's amazing.
Now we've probably cost Uberflip a huge expense
in sending their sales staff to improv classes.
Improv class, yeah.
(dramatic clanging)
The biggest reason these videos were a success was trust,
(bell dings)
right, at multiple levels.
I mean, for me, I'll be honest.
I'm a bit of a control freak sometimes,
especially when it comes to our brand,
and the key on this project was
the ability for us to go to market
with a bit of a different lens on what we do,
and that was a combination of me trusting our team,
but also our team trusting the agency
that we partnered with, which is hard to do
because you always say "well, they don't know us.
"They've only gotten to know us
"over the last number of weeks,"
but sometimes that's a strength,
because the person you're talking to
doesn't know you either.
Let go of some of the control, for sure.
Like, I would say my number one thing is that.
You know your product.
Trust that someone will help you deliver what you need.
Yeah, go into it with more of an open mind
about taking their advice and feedback and stuff.
Exactly.
Especially if it's something like an explainer video.
The whole purpose of the video is
to communicate what you do to a person
who doesn't know who you are,
and I think you're so close to it as being in the company
that letting an outside company
who ideally doesn't know anything
about you, explain you is...
Yeah, you need to just kind of have an open mind
and let them do their thing.
Know and understand your category,
and try to do something that doesn't necessarily
just follow that.
The trends are the existing model of that.
I think with that would come trusting
the agency or the team that you're working with on it.
I think that trust is really important,
just transparency, like, don't pull any punches.
If you hate it, that's totally fine.
Just say you hate it.
Just say you hate it,
(John laughs)
and we will rework this, and we're gonna make something
that we both really like.
I would say the second thing would probably be,
if you've ever heard Mark Schaefer speak,
or any of his books, he's talking
a lot about being human, right?
And so, I would say that's probably
the second biggest takeaway with me is like,
at the end of the day, I always get so caught up,
like I read this stat from Google that said
"B2B buyers are looking even more for a B2C experience."
It's like, well, no kidding, they're people.
Nailed it.
All right, I think I got it, but just once more,
can you explain it to me like I'm
almost done watching an explainer video?
I kinda believe that B2B kinda doesn't exist.
It's bullshit.
Treat it as B2C, and see where that takes you,
and then layer in the B2B facts and content,
kinda as you go.
Information can be compelling,
but I think entertainment is too,
'cause if you're not paying attention,
the information doesn't matter,
so I think that was one of the big things we came with,
looking at this content and these videos.
It's like, if we have to make a two minute video
to explain all this, it's gotta be entertaining,
because no one's gonna watch
a two minute video that is just stuff,
(John laughs)
like lined up edge to edge, so...
Look to connect on that level, just like be human,
and not try to over-explain something to death,
and just try to connect.
Yeah.
Well said.
Thank you.
Well said.
(light cheery music)
Okay.
(whip cracks)
(he laughs)
(hands clap)
(he clears throat)
Question, can I keep this?
Here, we let the dice decide.
(dice clatters)
Yeah, totally, go ahead. (clears throat)
(light cheery music)
