A Hilarious Tale of One Business Video
Posted by Catie Foertsch on Wed, Oct 21, 2009 @ 10:19 AM
(This is a true story. Names and other details have been changed, but the story is real.)
Company A is an office supply company. One day, Company A's owner - let's call him Bob - had a great idea. "We'll make a video to promote the company," Bob said. "And we'll make it a funny video! We'll put it on a dvd, we'll make a bunch of copies, and we'll hand them out to potential customers. People will love it! We'll put it on YouTube and it'll go viral!"
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So Bob found a video producer named Tony. Bob had a general idea of what he wanted, and he and Tony wrote a script. The video would be a funny little play about a business that buys all their supplies at the local office supply store, only they always get inferior products. The shredder dumps paper all over a worker's desk. The ink doesn't work in the printers. The furniture is too hard to put together, or else it breaks. |
The punch line is that if that company had bought its office supplies at Company A, none of that bad stuff would have happened. And Bob, because he's the owner, gets to be the one who says the punch line at the end of the video. He knows how to give just the right sympathetic smile to make the point.
It's a complex play, so Bob rents a vacant set of offices for a week, for the shoot. As actors they use Bob's people, so his company stops doing business for the week of the shoot. They need many, many takes to make sure they get the right shot. And there are technical challenges - how do you have a chair break when someone sits on it? How do you rig a pen so it spills ink all over someone's hands? It takes time, but they work these challenges out.
They shoot the video, it takes three months to edit, and it looks great. Bob is thrilled. He orders 500 dvds. He pays a design firm to make a beautiful dvd label and insert. The project is costing a boatload of money, but Bob isn't worried - he just knows that three or four or five times the money he spends will come back to him in profit on increased sales.
The dvds are made, and Bob gives them to his three salespeople. "Hand them out to everyone," he says. So the sales people do. Bob posts the video on YouTube. And then... nothing happens. Bob waits, and waits, but the phone doesn't ring. People don't call to tell Bob how great his video is. Sales don't go up. There are only 27 views on YouTube, and that number doesn't budge. But that's OK - obviously the word hasn't gotten out yet. Bob tells his salespeople to hand out more dvds. Bob instructs his salespeople to tell prospects to go to YouTube and watch the video. Again, Bob waits. Again, nothing happens.
Two years later, Bob is still talking about what a great video he made. How much fun the process was, how ingenious he and Tony were to figure out how to get that chair to break when Sue sat on it. How the design firm nailed the dvd insert. How the whole experience really helped him understand video production.
What Bob doesn't talk about, or let himself think about, is the video's complete lack of impact. Except, of course, for the impact to his bottom line, which was a doozy.
There are many things you can learn from Bob's adventure, but I'm going to mention just one: if you have an idea for a video and you're in love with it, if you're dreaming about how it's going to go viral and your sales are going to shoot through the roof, then you should ask someone to dump a bucket of cold water on your head. Because you don't understand how to use video to market your business and you're about to make a very big and very expensive mistake.