The only job your business video really has

One of the main things that I'm hearing every time someone comes to me is like, hey, I want a video for my business. They think straight away, this video is going to solve it. When this problem is going to solve a lead generation problem and they're going to solve their credibility credibility problem, right? And that's such a wrong way to look at how purposeful that video actually is, because you're in business at the end of the day. The only job any video at the end of the day would have to do for you is to make you money.

It's all intentionality. If you want, like the polished style video where everything is clean, all the camera work, all the lighting is included and stuff like that, that needs to sit more on your either your YouTube or on your website. Right? Some of these stats that you actually give you in your office like wow. One of them is like $224 billion is projected to flow through ad spend.

Video assets in 2026. That's nuts. I'm pretty sure there's like a statistic of like It was 6,068% of businesses used video like a decade ago and has like 9090 plus. I mean, it's it's a good thing for us because I'm thinking at the moment. Like, we're we're in a golden age of of marketing.

Right. So there has never been a time where we have the capability of measuring everything. Like you remember when we started question. The question that we used to ask is like, how do we measure the ROI of a video? Video?

Yeah, right. And for me, I think that's a that was a very loaded question at the time because like we were doing videos and we weren't we weren't sure how to provide the ROI to our customers. Do you think it's. Do you think you can measure everything still? Or is that.

Yeah, 100%. Everything. Everything you can you can measure everything. I mean, like looking at the stats that you give me at the moment, right? Um, I mean, the cool thing is that I'm trying to push everybody to YouTube, right?

Because like the that platform, you can virtually analyse every bit of information that you want out of a video. You can see, watch, see, watch time. You can see hook rate. You can see like how many views has been, uh, like how many views people have viewed the video, right? So I mean, it's a it's a very cool thing to, to, to be in this industry at the moment.

I reckon this stuff has been like writing's been on the wall for a while, isn't videos was always showing better. Uh, I don't want to say this out too much, but like, better returns in terms of better results. Better than the traditional stuff. Why do you say you don't want to say it? I don't know, I think everyone's still kind of, but I think there's always still a market for the older styles of marketing, for sure.

And some people just don't want to watch video. They want to read an article. True. I mean, depends on who you're talking to. Because like, we've had a customer, um, who owns a golf club, I think was one of the third biggest golf club, golf club in Sydney or something like that.

But the majority of their members were still reading physical newsletters. Right. And to me, that blew my mind because I'm like, well, why are they not on on YouTube? Or why are they not putting the content on LinkedIn? It's to me, as a video marketer that was like almost blasphemous.

You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So yeah. Different generations. Right?

Like different, different ways of wanting to get marketed to and obviously like videos got it's what do you call video? Video has it's own like image where it's like, oh no, you're a social media. Like you're addicted to your phone kind of stuff. It's kind of a hard thing because like, for me, even now, because I'm in this field and I love to see what people are thinking, how people are doing things. I like to watch the ads.

I don't skip the ads. I'm the same. I'm the same. I do like watching ads and like analysing and and finding out like what was the sort of like process of thinking of that. But then it's interesting because people still get frustrated at that, like ad ads.

Yeah. But I think there's a simple message in that is, Um, if you find that annoying. It's just not for you like that. That's. My piece of marketing.

Is not for you. No, that's that's a that's a cool way of thinking about it. Like. Right. I mean, uh, you were telling us you were.

We were having this conversation before where, like, you know, we're we're thinking that we're in a silo where all we think about is, like, the forefront of marketing, what's new and what's exciting at the time. But new and exciting doesn't mean that it's working, right. You know what I mean? That that's why you see some of our clients still using physical newsletter, right? And and still using, you know, techniques or where, you know, I'm thinking about where are people even watching TV?

Like, I can't remember the last time I watched free to air TV. Yeah. Well, if you look at Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime. Like, if you watch, uh, shows on there, they actually started running ads, even on their memberships. Yeah.

Which is cool. All right, I'm gonna get a question. Send it. So first discussion question. What do most businesses get wrong about video that you fix in your first meeting with them.

The main misconception are like. Yeah, yeah, no, that's that's a really good question because like one of the, one of the main things that I'm hearing every time someone comes to me is like, hey, I want a video for my business. They think straight away this video is going to solve the awareness problem, it's going to solve the lead generation problem, and they're going to solve their credibility credibility problem. Right. And that's such a wrong way to look at how a video, uh, you know, look at how purposeful that video actually is.

Because if that one video is doing everything, it's doing nothing. You know what I mean? And sure, one of the things that I try to explain to them, or rather I educate some of my clients on, is that you need to look at what you're trying to do in the first place. Do you come to me for awareness? Yeah.

Do you come to me for lead generation, or do you come to me for personal branding? Right. Yeah. So I just say we start with these three. Well, if it's personal branding, you need to show your face on your on the videos.

It doesn't have to be the prettiest video. It needs to be a video with you sharing a piece of information or an opinion about what you believe, and that needs to go on like your social media, right? If it's a set piece, your video needs to be on ads. It needs to have some ad spend behind it. You know, you need to put it behind, uh, you know, you need to put some meta ad spend to it, some Google ads spend or however you want to put this offer in front of people.

Right. And that's the other thing with ads as well. It's just it's not about awareness. It's not about your company. It's about what offers you have.

And when I say offer, what are you solving for your audience? You know what I mean. And if it's awareness piece, then that's, uh, solely putting videos out there on a regular basis about your company. And what do they do? And like, you know, more about us, more about your stuff, about what you stand for as a company as a whole.

We've been recently putting a lot of, like, meme style content out. Where do you think that sits and all of that? I love this, and this is credit to Anisha, one of our newest staff. She's been helping putting it. Putting out a lot of, like, uh, funny style videos.

The meme style videos is more of a relatability piece, I think. It's, uh, it is intentional. It's intentional in that we. We are keeping up with the times. We are also relatable, right?

We are people at the end of the day. And we always say people like to work with people. People buy from people. So if you don't know who you're buying, buying from on a personal level, it's harder for you to do business with them. You know, I mean.

I agree, I agree. So keyword is for you is this couple months has been intentionality right? 100%. It's my. Buzzword.

Yeah. Intentionality and what content you're putting out and what you're trying to do with it. And then this next question is you've seen what works. When should a brand invest in polished content, high quality videos versus like the raw, authentic, you know, face the camera like foreign content? I love this question because like, there's always that, uh, there's always that discussion of this versus versus that, this versus versus with this versus that.

Okay. So there's always that question about that. And um, I kind of don't like it because at the end of the day you have to do everything. You have to try everything, right? It's all intentional.

It's all intentionality. It's the is the word that, uh, that I want to go here for here. So if you want, like the polished style video where everything's clean, all the camera work, all the lighting is included and stuff like that, that needs to sit more on your, uh, either your YouTube or on your website. Right. Because that's when people have started looking at what you do.

So they'll go to your website, see what's see what's up. They go to your YouTube and see what's up, and they try to gauge whether or not your product and services and who you are as people, as a brand is compatible with them, so that they then they they then would like to like, hey, let's say, um, they've seen all your stuff. They're like the long form video they're ready to buy. Mhm. Right.

So it makes it a lot easier. Right. And then the other thing as well, uh, when, when you're talking about like uh the this versus that, there's the short form videos where it's like quickfire, uh, style videos and doesn't need to have that production quality in it. Right. Um, that's it's more in like, you know, your Instagram, your LinkedIn and whatnot so that, you know, you can keep having that conversation on a quickfire mode and you're it's only there to share information, opinions, and news about what you're thinking, uh, at a time kind of thing.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Does that. Does that make sense?

Or like, uh, is there something that we can clarify with? I mean, there's always like, you don't want to get caught on the extremes of it where you are completely, uh, like raw, authentic, low quality because people still look at the professional of your business. Right? I think the Polish stuff still matters. Yes, I agree with it.

I mean, if you if it didn't matter, we wouldn't still have this. You know, the industry would, would, you know, go straight to phone cameras as opposed to, like having high quality cameras. Right. Horses for courses. Is one another one of my favourites saying.

And you need to think about like, okay, well what I'm trying. What am I trying to tell here. Right. Do. And how do I want to appear?

Right. So as a brand, you need to figure out like what impact do you want to make? If it's like communication with your peers, then a low grade quality video wouldn't matter as much. It's all about the information there. Right.

But if you're trying to attract the masses and like, pick the interest a little bit, or rather, um, you know, talk to the people who are further down their journey in trying to figure out whether or not you're the right person for it. YouTube and long form, high quality, high production quality videos might be the better way to go. Because if it sits on your website, if it sits on your YouTube, you want it to look good. It's to like if you go to professional, it comes off super corporate, unrelatable. If you go to authentic, it comes off unprofessional.

So 100%. And look at the stats you've actually given me here, 89% say 89% of people say that video quality directly impacts their trust in a brand. So it still matters. Yeah, it still matters. Like, I love how some people are just saying, oh, you know, you just record a video.

Yes. But that's the the start of your journey. That's it. This is the start stop. It's the starting point.

Yeah. I mean, if you look at our, uh, if you look at our YouTube, our Instagram and whatnot, I think we have a really good breadth of style of videos, right? We have the funny meme stuff for relatability. You have my, my head talking about, you know, the stuff that I think about in the stuff that we've seen and, you know, having guest on here that shows that we have a network that we can rely on for, uh, our knowledge in the industry and in marketing. Right.

And then we have our polished stuff, our client work, where that sits on its own playlist on our YouTube. Right. Sure. And the funny thing is, we've had customers who, at the end of the sales call, they've said, oh, we've seen your video. Right.

They've we've seen you. We've seen. I know who you are from because I've seen the videos that you posted. I know you like Peaky Blinders, and I know you like whisky. And to me that's a fascinating thing to see because, like, that's the point of connection that pushed that deal over the line.

Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Have you watched the movie? Uh, it's I'm one third of the way there. I think it's I need to watch it without my daughter bothering me.

Uh. Great show, great show for anyone wants to watch it, like Peaky Blinders. Yeah. I've watched. Oh, man.

Yeah. Perfect. Okay, good. Keeping on that topic of intentionality. A lot of agencies repurpose one video everywhere.

Why does that work? Or why doesn't that work? Give me an example. What are you thinking? Just taking a single piece of content and then just, like, blasting it to every platform.

Yeah. Uh, it kind of comes back to the whole idea of like, what are you trying to do with this video? Right? Um, if you're trying to blast this video because you're promoting an event and you, you want people to know about this event, great. You can cut it up like, heavily little snippets of, uh, b rolls and little snippets of, like, uh, talking heads or, uh, clients saying something about your past event and blasting everywhere.

Great. But if it's just that one video, it's a, it's a long, long form, uh, horizontal video that sits on YouTube works. Well, then you try to put that onto Instagram. That might not work as well, because it might be 2 or 3 minutes long and people on social media or Instagram or or whatever don't have the attention span for that, right? So it might not work.

It may work, but it might not work. But for me, I'd like to be clear. Whenever we do something for our clients, it needs to have a purpose. It needs to have a purpose. It needs to have a clear intention of what you are trying to do with it.

Are you trying to promote? Are you trying to inform? Are you trying to educate. Are you trying to, uh, shed a light on a particular topic? You know what I mean?

So if you were to ask me that question, my short answer would be. It won't work, right? It may work, but in my eyes, it confuses the crap out of me. Right? And if it confuses the crap out of me, I'm not going to buy.

What's a vanity metric? You wish clients would stop obsessing over? Ooh. Vanity metrics. Mm.

I feel like that. I kind of like that question is self answering. It's a vanity metric, right? It is a vanity metric that, uh. Dude, like, if if people didn't care about royalty virality, then how do you measure the success of a video?

At the end of the day, that's the first sort of buzz metric that you want to have. Look to see, like the performance, like it's a quick glance or my video is working because I've got 500,000 people, like watching the video kind of thing right then, you know, then you'd look at. If you go deeper, then you look at the hook rate, the retention rate, um, you look at the, the like the view duration and all that stuff. But vanity metrics still has its place. But it's not the only metric that you can use to, uh, to dictate whether or not the video is performing.

Right. Yeah. Um, and I wish, I wish or rather, I will educate like, people coming up to me and asking me that question. I will educate them like, yes, that's a great thing to see, but that's not the end all, be all. It's only the start of the journey of that video and, um, and the start of your journey in how to look at how video would perform.

Yeah. And going after that, we know enough businesses that their content doesn't go viral but multi-million dollar businesses. Mhm. And their, their goal is always just to I mean the main goal for a lot of business content seems to be being an authority. That's right.

Yeah. You're in business at the end of the day. So the video, the only job, any video at the end of the day would have to do for you is to make you money. That's all the video should do. So whether or not you get millions of views or like 500 views, is that video making you money?

Is it informing your customers so that they can eventually pay you money? Then if that's the case, yeah. It's working. You don't need like millions of followers to do that. You're not a content creator.

At the end of the day. We'll get a million views for you dancing. And what's that going to do for the business? Who knows? Well, that's gonna show people that I'm a fun guy.

Yeah. No, the thing is, I've. You've heard so many stories about, uh, you know, content creators going viral and not making money out of it. They have millions and millions of followers, millions of views. And then at the end of the day, they come.

They they ask the question, well, how do I make money out of this? Yeah, yeah. It's especially like those guys who do a lot of skits, you know what I mean? That's true. Yeah.

So yeah. The whole thing is about making people laugh. And how do you make money out of that? Yeah, it's all human. Yeah, I think you entertainment's great and it seems a core fundamental of content.

But education and like building that trust and authority is, I think, a lot more important. Yeah, yeah. Got a last question for you. If a CEO handed you one quarter's budget for a single video, what would you make? I mean, depends on what the company is like.

If, uh, if someone was to hand me a quarter's of, uh, of their marketing budget, I need to be really, really clear on what they want, because I can make. I can make so much out of that, uh, you know, budget, you know, do I want to make a massive TVC with, like, uh, you know, aeroplanes and dudes jumping out of the plane, you know, like a Red bull style, like they expect, you know? You know what I mean? Like, they spend so much money on those kind of stunts. But that's because they want to showcase people.

They're the type of brand who are exciting. They are at the forefront of the venture. And, you know, like if you buy Red bull, this is the type of person you are. 100%. You know, and weather and the other other spectrum is like, oh, are you a, uh, farming machinery type of business?

Well, if that's the case, then I'm going to make sure that the video is going to be that cinematic, uh, farm type of videos where you see the machinery going through their day at the start of the at the start of the video kind of thing. Right. It's again, horses for courses. Like if I mean, I'll take any money, like even if you're going to give me out, I'll take it. But I need to know what what I'm doing with it.

Right. I think we, to be honest with you, I've, we've had clients giving us money straight off the bat and we're like, cool. There's just five figures here. And what do you want us to do with this? It makes me so uncomfortable because I'm so wired to give value to clients that 100%.

Someone gives me money, I'm like, okay, well, if you give me money, I need to give you some value out of it. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Go ahead and go.

Interesting. Like my mind kind of went to social media on that. When you talked about Red bull, it's like anytime. Like Red bull's branding is so interesting in terms of all their content is just like they do, like the smallest jump and they get like somebody called Red bull. Yeah.

It's so interesting. Right? Like their brand is so interesting in that. Well, we did a job. You remember that job?

Like we did a job for Red bull? Yes. Oh, yeah, we did. And the whole thing was like, okay, cool. This is Red bull.

We're gonna get to do some awesome live action stuff with like, bike jumping off the of of a plane or something. No, we were at UTS covering a freaking national Tetris tournament for Red bull. Mhm. Do you know what I mean? So like I was like to me it was just like I'm just thinking I guess that's playing on to the whole excitement angle.

Yeah of. Course. Athletes man I think they're trying to brag and do that, that uh, esport athletes kind of. Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Because this there's the whole, uh, uh, what's it called? The the whole, you know, esport is a big thing now, and you're literally called an athlete when you are esport environment. It's a weird thing for me. Yeah. You want to get into that?

I'm just kidding. Oh. We can we can dive into this. We can do this. Uh, but.

Yeah, man. Like, let's talk about some of these stats I only really want to show. Show people, uh, what these stats are all about. The most obvious one for me that stands out is the AI stuff. Right?

Like, it's an interesting one because obviously we're a video production company. Um, and costs I think it's costs are going down in terms of creating content. Yeah. Speed is going up. Yep.

What do you think? Where do you think that helps businesses? I think it's more. My mind kind of goes to smaller businesses. Yeah.

Yeah. But I think with this one, uh, like, I mean, if I look at myself as an example, using AI to create content, That takes the whole thinking aspect out of my brain, right? So I could just tell AI we use code. For example, I've fed it all the information that I like to consume books, articles, videos and whatnot. And so when we create content, it knows exactly what I want to what I want to write about.

I just, I can all I have to do is just give it like a topic and it will write me an article. I'll look over this article. I'm like, yep, this is a great article, or it's a great script. Let's go, let's go bang it out. Right.

So, you know, with with the advent of AI for small, smaller businesses, if you're not on it, you're you're already losing, right? It's moving so quick. And we've only experienced AI in the last what, you know, three years. We were there when we first heard about ChatGPT. We were there when we heard our clients talking about it.

We're like, okay, well, what does this mean for video? Yeah. But now you can create a video in the span of like, you know, five, ten minutes. And this video could, could generate you, you know, a great engagement. So when you say this, the AI is generating video, I talk.

What do you mean? I'm saying that I'm talking about the whole thing. You can script. You can create the video using like, generic videos. You can add your AI voiceover to it.

Hell, you just showed me that we can actually create music. We using. At least we can. This is not sponsored by the way. Using at least we can create music.

We can create music with a singer, with lyrics, with. So basically you can use it for, for almost every single aspect of creating a video now. Do you know what I mean? Save for there's still some aspect that you can't do. Like, uh, I would say personal branding.

Uh, like the high end budget, uh, type of commercials and stuff like that. That's still going to be around. But then you think about Coca Cola making their entire ad out of AI prompts, right? Yeah. And I believe the stats was like 70,000 prompts to get that out of there.

Yeah, I think that's the things people underestimate about, like AI video creation is there's some absolute like process, like massive processes going on behind the scenes. Yeah. I mean, to that point, I think one of the things that we need to to if you want to use AI for your business is to be very, very clear. Like if the prompts are not clear, then it's just going to generate your crap. You know what I mean?

So and I guess that's the same like I mean you've you've always you've always drilled into me that you need to be clear. You need to be clear about what the customer wants. You need the if you're clear, the process is going to be a lot easier across the board. What did you think of that Coca-Cola AI ad? It's like obviously it got like polarising reviews, whereas some people hated it.

Some people loved it. I think I don't have really I don't have a thought behind it. I think, I think I skew more towards this is great in the sense that you're pushing the boundaries and it's rare. It's rare to see like bigger companies actually take the initiative and try new things out. Right.

Um, and I think that's a, that's a really good thing by like Coca Cola because that shows the industry like at least the marketing industry what's possible. Like what you can do with it. Right. Mhm. Um, I mean I'd love for us to see if we can actually generate an, uh, AI content piece for somebody.

You know, like, I'd love to see that if that's a possibility. Because at the end of the day, this is where we're heading. And I see I mean, I see us I have a vision of us becoming like an AI content marketing agency. You know what I mean? So yeah, I think it's a good thing.

Mhm. No, it's uh it, it was. A very interesting podcast and I think, I think you've, you've actually asked some pretty thought provoking questions that I think people. Should need to think about as well. So um, guys, if you're interested in some of the things that we talk about, give us a follow, give us a comment, uh, reach out to us or any other topics that you might want to hear in the marketing world.