Quibi & PBS NewsHour: Capitalize on the Changing Ways We Consume Content Webinar
It’s no secret, COVID-19 has created an insatiable desire for news. But networks that have adapted to the changing ways we consume content are seeing explosive growth well beyond the coronavirus bump.
In this webinar, you’ll get exclusive insights from Shawna Thomas, Content Development Executive at Quibi, and James Williams, Executive Director of Digital Strategy at PBS NewsHour. You’ll learn:
> How to transition content to short form premium
> Niche approaches to streaming for tangible audience growth
> What to look for in talent to build community
FEATURED PANELISTS
SHAWNA THOMAS is a Content Development Executive at Quibi, and a political contributor to NBC News and MSNBC. Shawna opened VICE News’ DC Bureau, where she served as Bureau Chief for three years, and served as the senior producer and senior digital editor for NBC’s Meet the Press. Her work has garnered four Emmy wins, a Peabody, a Gracie Award, and two Scripps Howard Awards.
JAMES WILLIAMS is the Executive Director of Digital Strategy at PBS NewsHour. Before joining PBS, James served as the VP of Digital Video at National Geographic, and the Senior Development Producer for Discovery Digital. James’s work in digital video storytelling has made him a Pulitzer finalist, an Emmy winner, and a 13-time Webby winner.
Green Buzz Agency Brings Home 5th Consecutive Emmy Win
WASHINGTON, DC — Aug. 8th, 2020
The Capital Emmys announced that Green Buzz Agency was named the winner for Best Commercial: Single Spot in the 62nd Annual Awards Ceremony for our work on “Lena’s Story” for Georgetown Lombardi. Green Buzz Agency has taken home a Capital Emmy win every year since 2015.
Green Buzz Agency’s Emmy for “Lena’s Story”
Green Buzz Agency’s winning video, “Lena’s Story” for Georgetown Lombardi explores the full spectrum of emotion that comes with a cancer diagnosis and lands on a message of hope. Our team members Adrian Hopffgarten, Andrew Whipp, and Steve Belcher created the spot from start to finish. Watch it here:
About the Capital Emmys
The National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences recognizes outstanding individual achievement in the National Capital Chesapeake Bay region by conferring annual awards of merit. In 2020, the Capital Emmys continue to be the fastest-growing, and second-largest, chapter in The National Academy, with more members than the Texas, Northern California, and New York chapters. This year, the Capital Emmys received nearly 1,200 entries in 127 different categories.
Due to the pandemic, the winners of the 62nd Annual Capital Emmy Awards were honored virtually. The program was hosted by Ava-Joye Burnett, a reporter and anchor at WJZ, and Moisés Linares, an anchor-reporter for Telemundo 44 and NBC Washington.
About Green Buzz Agency
Green Buzz Agency is a full-service video production company that works with cutting-edge media outlets and impactful brands to create compelling video content. Our team of in-house, innovative storytellers create rich story arcs that retain viewers’ attention, evoke emotional responses and maximize return on investment. Trusted by clients like the Make-A-Wish Foundation, Upworthy, Hilton, the Ad Council, HGTV, SYFY, Nickelodeon, Lowe’s, American Red Cross, Navy Federal Credit Union, Children’s National, AARP and the ACLU, Green Buzz is a go-to creative partner that delivers on both empathy and professionalism.
Find The Capital Emmy Awards Online:
Website: capitalemmys.tv
Instagram: @capitalemmys
Twitter: @CapitalEmmys
Facebook: Facebook.com/capitalemmys
YouTube: Capital Emmys – NATAS-NCCB
Making Trade-Offs in Marketing Webinar: TripActions
Is your marketing plan a revenue-driver or a cost center? For marketers, the true test of success is the ability to manage cost-revenue trade-offs. To make the biggest impact on the business, marketing leaders must direct a strategy that will drive revenue, while also cutting costs.
In this webinar, learn how to make effective trade-offs that create profitable marketing plans. Meagen Eisenberg, Chief Marketing Officer at TripActions will break down her approach to maintaining a revenue-driving marketing strategy, even in times of uncertainty.
You’ll learn how to:
> Make your marketing strategy a direct form of revenue
> Minimize marketing costs that won’t convert
> Implement change-resistant strategy that will weather uncertainty
FEATURED PANELIST
MEAGEN EISENBERG is the Chief Marketing Officer at TripActions. Before joining TripActions, Meagen served as the CMO for mongoDB and the VP of Customer Acquisition for DocuSign. In just one year at TripActions, Meagen has grown the marketing team by 5x its size, and led TripActions to it’s ranking as G2’s #1 Travel Management App.
Understanding the New Consumer Webinar: Huge & BPI Media
2020 has irrevocably changed the consumer landscape. And while the “new normal” has become an overnight cliche, the reality is brands and businesses have to understand and adapt to an entirely new consumer mindset.
In this webinar, Dan Hou, President of Huge Inc. DC and ATL, and Andrew Bleeker, President of Bully Pulpit Interactive will break down new research and strategies on how brands can reach re-emerging U.S. consumers.
You’ll learn:
> The 5 post-isolation personas and how to connect with each of them.
> How major societal shifts are impacting brands and media consumption.
> Core communication components brands should answer to.
FEATURED PANELISTS
DAN HOU is the President at HUGE, Southeast. Dan has played an instrumental role in growing Huge over the past 10 years, and has transformed the user experience for clients ranging from Target and Four Seasons to USA Today and the PGA. Dan’s passion for content marketing and addictive consumer experiences, has made him a successful CEO of several startups and co-author of a book used at Wharton.
ANDREW BLEEKER is the President and Founder of Bully Pulpit Interactive. Andrew served as the lead digital marketing strategist for both of President Obama’s campaigns, as well as a senior advisor to Secretary Clinton. Since Bully Pulpit’s inception in 2009, Andrew has expanded to four offices and managed a billion dollar marketing budget.
Future-Proofing Virtual Entertainment Experiences for 2020 and Beyond: Universal Music Group & Getty Images Webinar
Our entire lives have become a digital experience, and the entertainment industry is taking note. From Travis Scott’s record-breaking live concert on Fortnite to reimagining the red carpet in virtual and also in six-foot increments, audience engagement with respect to live entertainment is transforming in real time.
In this webinar, you’ll learn how Kirstin Benson, VP of Global Entertainment at Getty Images, and Zach Dresler, Director of Global Content and Channel Strategy at Universal Music Group, are tapping into the power of authentic virtual communities to transform the field of digital entertainment. You’ll learn what it takes to future-proof your business or brand and break through audience fatigue, while stimulating long-term interest in digital experiences.
Featured Panelists
KIRSTIN BENSON is the VP of Global Entertainment at Getty Images. Kirstin brings her expertise in digital content creation, and her experience in front of the camera to her work in building audience reach. Before joining Getty, Kirstin launched Time’s new outlet, Instant, taking the outlet from its inception to over 130 million video views in less than a year.
ZACH DRESLER is the former Director of Global Content and Channel Strategy at Universal Music Group. Zach brings over a decade of experience in creative production with media giants including NFL and Buzzfeed. Zach works and understands every stage of video creation, allowing him to bring an idea from inception to execution.
Why Your Marketing Campaign Will Never Go Viral: Twitter Webinar
“Make it go viral” is the least helpful directive a manager could give a team. Virality can’t be forced into being. But there are some savvy fundamentals behind viral campaigns that can be stolen and adapted to the project currently on your desk.
In this talk, Joe Wadlington, Global Creative Lead at Twitter breaks down successful viral campaigns from the Internet Hall of Fame as well as some fresher examples you can use as inspiration for your strategy. Hear him outline immediate, actionable strategies to improve your brand’s Twitter presence and stand out on the platform.
FEATURED PANELIST
JOE WADLINGTON is the Global Creative Lead at Twitter. Joe leads a brand spanning 8 languages and touching every hemisphere. A published writer, Joe commands a compelling global brand voice and optimizes Twitter Business’s premium content, developing everything from podcasts to video shoots.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Andrew Whipp:
All right. Happy Wednesday, everybody. Thank you guys so much for joining us. We know that your time is super valuable, especially with the current state of things. So we appreciate everybody choosing to spend that time with us, and above all else, we hope everyone’s staying safe right now. My name is Andrew Whipp and I’m the lead creative and editor at Green Buzz Agency. And today, I’m also joined by my friend and my colleague, Tod Plotkin, who is the CEO and founder of Green Buzz Agency. How are you doing, Tod?
Tod Plotkin:
I am doing well, I’m doing well. We have a nice breeze today. The humidity is finally gone here in the DC area. So I’m just going to, after this is all over, go outside and eat some lunch and take in the cool weather.
Andrew Whipp:
There you go, there you go. I might do the same. That sounds like a good idea. Today’s the sixth webinar that we’ll be doing in this Green Buzz Agency webinar series. So today, we’re going to be covering why your marketing campaign will never go viral. So if you’re looking to break out of the box or bring some new ideas back to your teams, then you guys are all in the right place. And with that, I want to get to introduce our speaker today, Joe Wadlington. Joe, thanks for joining us.
Joe Wadlington:
It’s absolutely my pleasure. And thank you all for being patient. I’m sure no one on the call has ever had a technical difficulty. But there are these things that sometimes happen to other people. So thank you for your patience. And I’m so excited to talk about this today because this is a big passion point for me. I apologize for the negative title. It’s not that I don’t believe in each and every one of you. But when I was originally developing this topic for social media week this spring, we did research and it turns out that titles and negative people got more people in the seats and that ended up to be true. It’s very well attended. And I’ve updated this presentation with a special video research that we’ve just rolled out. So people are getting to see some stuff for the first time.
Andrew Whipp:
Oh, that’s awesome.
Joe Wadlington:
I know and this is all public. So you can take your screenshots, you can go to your boss and say, “Joe Wadlington from Twitter said this is true and that will be fine. Our legal department is down. I have the email trail to prove it.” So why your marketing campaign will never go viral. So picture it, it is 2013, the Super Bowl is happening, Beyonce is the halftime show, one team is playing another team, and all of a sudden the lights go out and it looks like this. This is actually a picture of the field at that time. And so this is a moment that a lot of people remember. And then in that time, Oreo tweeted this. And I know you’ve all seen this before, so no one hang up, no one hang up.
Joe Wadlington:
But this is a really exciting moment for marketers in the digital space because this tweet shows a time when people really started to understand why they would market or pay for ads during a specific time. At this moment, it was $3.5 million for a 32nd Super Bowl ad. And if we look at the headlines from the next day, Oreo tweeting this organic tweet, no budget behind it. This is where all of the marketing places were saying, Wall Street Journal’s like guys in NPR. Everybody was talking about Oreo. And there was this idea that they had won the Super Bowl with just one tweet. So while other companies were spending $3.5 million for their ads that they’ve been working on for I’m sure months, maybe their whole lifetimes, then Oreo seemingly just jumps ahead of everyone with this no budget tweet.
Joe Wadlington:
So I studied this, I had to be in meetings about this. I’m sure many of the audience members did. And that has been my entire career. So my degree is in creative writing and I spent my entire career working with social media teams, digital marketing teams. And every time anything happened on the internet that was slightly interesting to marketers, I had to analyze it front to back. So I jumped all the way into this one. And let’s see the next some misconceptions with their one tweet. I dug into Oreo. They were actually one of Twitter’s first premium advertisers. They were spending quite a debt on the platform at that time. And they had been developing content for a long time. This is a partnership they did, and we all know how complicated partnerships are to keep going.
Joe Wadlington:
So this is Oreo and they tweeted, “Can we play with this?” Kind of confusing, like redesigned. It’s like Oreo Xbox controller. And then Xbox responded, they replied with this tweet with their Xbox controller perilously falling into milk and appear. But they were clearly trying to get into the gaming conversation and the idea of Oreo being a snack that you would eat while you’re gaming, as opposed to just the desserts. They’re trying to move into a new area. That was really interesting. And this is the same year as the Super Bowl tweet.
Joe Wadlington:
And then next slide, I have stuff from the year before. They did 100 years of Oreo and they did 100 days of Oreo content. So each day, they would create a brand new one. And you can see in the bottom quarter of the red one they were clearly developing this manhole cover version of their logo. So they were doing one of these every single day. I really liked the Mars rover one with the red cream, you can tell they took the edges of the cookie and rolled it through. So they’re being super creative, they’re being agile. They’re putting themselves in a place where they have to… These are definitely quality as well, but we all know when we’re creating content, when you switch into really becoming like on the content farm and you’re pumping it out. And whenever you do that, you always end up, of course, learning a ton and being able to move super quickly.
Joe Wadlington:
And these were done the year before the Super Bowl tweets. So this idea that Oreo… just happened to jump in there and everything just happened and then for them and then that ended up shaping the industry where people were understanding much more. Why they would want to respond in a specific moment was actually very carefully planned over years and lots and lots of budget. So I got excited about this idea and all the other viral campaigns I’ve been pulled into meetings to talk about and think about very deeply. And I came up with basically the hot takes for why I think something will go viral.
Joe Wadlington:
So these are my ideas for the three things that are catalysts for virality. Obviously, lots of things with virality we cannot control. That’s why it makes it so sweet and elusive. But I realized with each campaign that I dug really deeply into, these were things that were absolutely a part of it, refine your voice, learn from the good tweets, and surprise your followers. So I’m going to go into each one. I’m going to have specific examples I’ve seen from Twitter for each one. Don’t worry. We’re done talking about Oreo. All the others come from other companies across different verticals because I always learn best when I can see an example of someone doing it well. So if you don’t like my examples, if you have other ideas, if you have more questions, that is the perfect time to save those up. I love talking about these in depth.
Joe Wadlington:
So let’s jump into the first one, refine your voice. That’s a very common idea. You want to refine your voice, you want to have your personas, you want to sound like yourself. But we are at this new evolution or a new level of clarity with social media and digital marketing where every platform has become more differentiated than it’s ever been. And so we’re at a place where you would not… Let’s think of traditional marketing examples. You would not take the copy that you put on a billboard and copy and paste it and put it in newspaper ad. You wouldn’t use the same script that you did for a radio spot and have it be a video on the nightly news as someone could actually see the person speaking. So we’re very used to in these traditional marketing platforms changing the way we talk and the way we present ourselves and what we present based on each platform.
Joe Wadlington:
And now, social media has gotten to a level of maturity where we need to do that with each platform as well. I believe I have the bad example too. This is what you don’t want to sound like. I love this one. Cancela Lansbury is also very good follow. And this is obviously in response to COVID and I was seeing a lot of COVID marketing and working in marketing through all this. It’s been rough. I think we can all look at other companies who maybe had a few splats and say, “Yeah, I understand that it was shaky ground.” But we definitely don’t want to sound like this, companies to be like, “Now more than ever, we will let you buy our product.” So this is what happens when you’re tone-deaf. And you can become tone-deaf by missing the point, by not reading for room, but also by speaking in a way on a specific platform that those folks just don’t talk like that there.
Joe Wadlington:
So I’m going to go through a few examples and I’m going to show you different companies that do it well. And I’m going to show you how they look on different platforms. So this is Pop-Tarts. Pop-Tarts quote tweet says, “Public service announcement. Pop-Tarts are not ravioli, Pop-Tarts are not sandwiches. There will never be a Tide Pod flavored Pop-Tarts have a nice day.” It’s so sassy. It’s like, “Wow, who hurt you Pop-Tarts?” They clearly have a lot of questions about Tide Pod flavored Pop-Tarts. There is a lot of innocent Twitter banter about if is a hot dog, a sandwich, or people argue, thinks are sandwiches or thinks are ravioli. So they’re jumping in with that. You see with their header photo, it says, “We fixed the pretzel,” which is similarly just silly. There’s no conversation around people saying, “Oh, pretzels, so broken, so upsetting.” But they’re jumping in with this whole idea.
Joe Wadlington:
So let’s look at Pop-Tarts Facebook. And then their bio on Facebook says… And they’re using the same like, “We fixed the pretzel,” across platforms, which is a great tactic that we’re seeing. Clearly, this is their consistent brand push at the time, but their buyer is different. Their buyer says, “The Pop-Tarts Facebook page is meant to be a fun environment for our fans to discuss Pop-Tarts products and promotions. The community is intended to be a lighthearted.” The screen cuts it off, but it goes on for several paragraphs explaining about abuse on their platform and say you need to play nice. And so they’re having a very different approach to their Facebook audiences and what they think is important on Facebook. And they’re saying like, this is lighthearted, we want to talk about products, as opposed to Twitter, where they’re just being lighthearted and talking about the product.
Joe Wadlington:
Royal Ontario Museum, they’re in Canada, they’re really incredible on social. This is their Facebook. And I use this idea because both of these examples are picking up a specific moment, which people really like to do on Twitter. You find a moment that’s in your lane. And then they did this funny Facebook post where it says, “Everyone crowding at malls looking for Boxing Day deals.” They’ve got some going emojis, and we’re seeing these massive penguins, you, an intellectual. More than 5,000 emperor penguins working together to keep themselves and their eggs alive. Oh, wow. It’s so emotional. So beautiful photography. Ad then of course, that link leads to their website.
Joe Wadlington:
So I actually picked the post from, I believe, the same day or the same week to see how they’re jumping into specific events Twitter. A24, which is their production company that produced Uncut Gems just tweeted this screenshot from their movie and then… Oh, no, wait, wait, wait, I’m getting it wrong. It’s even better than that. So Royal Ontario Museum… This is the quote tweet. Royal Ontario Museum tweeted this picture, “Our gems uncut.” And this came out… Yeah, so it’s the same week as the penguin post. And at that time Uncut Gems, the movie produced by eight A24, was getting a lot of Twitter traction. Twitter is the discussion, the conversation layer of the internet. People love Twitter to discuss any culture that they’re consuming. So they tweeted this hilarious photo of an Uncut Gem and then A24 actually saw it and quote tweeted them with the picture of Adam Sandler, the star of the movie, looking longingly at Royal Ontario Museum’s Uncut Gem. So same week, same museum, different platform, different approaches of jumping into specific moments.
Joe Wadlington:
Hinge. Hinge’s advertising is really wonderful. They just updated all of their ads for both Black Lives Matters and for Pride. So you will no longer see this bio on their stuff, but their brand color they’ve changed it to black. It was purple before this month. And then their bio says, “It’s designed to be deleted. Please do your part to keep everyone safe and date from home.” So, again, it’s a really wonderful way to stay in your lane, talk about the current environment. They’re referencing COVID and then Hinge actually, their dating app. And they did some product update pretty good actually from the chat, messaging someone on the dating app, schedule a video date in the app. And you can move into video date. So they’re encouraging people to be safe and to stay home while still finding love.
Joe Wadlington:
And they kept this tagline across all platforms. So you can see their Twitter. This is their Instagram. Oh, and their Facebook, “Designed to be deleted. Please do your part to keep everyone safe and date from home.” We see the same brand colors and then their Twitter. All right, this is a Facebook post. So the content that they’re doing on Facebook, for every video of a person taking a shot with the hashtag #shotchallenge, we’ll donate another dollar up to $25,000 total. So they’re doing a money raising initiative here. And what was interesting is that I didn’t see them tweet at all. They kept it just on Facebook, whereas on Twitter, they have things that are more timely. So this is the same time. “Shout out to all the people who give great advice, but never take their own. By the way, this is to everyone, including me, author of this tweet.”
Joe Wadlington:
And then again, jumping into… We see with the third tweet a specific moment, but staying in your lane. “This is not a drill. Please take a break from baking bread and vote for us in the Webbys. It will only take 20 seconds, we promise.” And it was their link to their Webbys voting page, which they got an honorable mention, I believe, on the Webbys. So congratulations to Hinge. Though I have been tweeting it then asking why I keep getting ghosted and they have not been responding, even though I’ve done several presentations about them. So if you’re tweeting about this presentation, feel welcome at Hinge and ask them to either put me on their podcast or respond to I keep getting ghosted during quarantine via Hinge.
Joe Wadlington:
So as you can see, Hinge is using a different… It feels like the same company across all of those, which is really wonderful and a similar voice. But with each platform they’re choosing something different so that they sound like themselves. Let’s skip MoonPie. Well, no, no, no, let’s all do MoonPie. It’s really funny. Sorry, so this is MoonPie on Facebook. I’m sure MoonPie have been everyone’s presentations. So this is MoonPie on Facebook which blew my mind. If you follow MoonPie on Twitter, then this will shock you. You see a lot of the snack companies they do pushes around big gaming events, both video games on Esports and then also non-electronics.
Joe Wadlington:
So MoonPie was trying to break into the tailgating conversation and present themselves as a tailgating food. So you can see this in like football kickoff. So, again, they picked a timely moment. And the caption, it’s just like beautifully, like editorial MoonPies that have gently been rolled into cashews and it says, “Football season is upon us, folks. If you don’t want to be known as the tailgate with bad snacks, we advise you to try this one out.” And it goes to a place where they’re doing moonpie.com/recipes. This is sweet and salty MoonPie. So it’s really wonderful. And then if you look at the comments, we’ve got Jan Cook and weighing in on the recipe. Jane Cook says, “Love MoonPies. You need to make micro mini ones in a refillable package. My grandsons are very messy, but they love MoonPies. And MoonPie responds and says, “We will let the team know, Jan!” It’s so kind. It’s so sweet and not what MoonPie is like on Twitter at all, at all.
Joe Wadlington:
So let’s look at MoonPie on Twitter. This is some quote tweeting, someone added MoonPie on the left saying, “What are you playing at MoonPie? Who eats a third of a MoonPie?” Rightfully calling them out I think that apparently on their nutrition facts, the serving size is a third of a MoonPie, which is ridiculous. I eat a lot of MoonPies. I grew up in Tennessee. The road trip snack is a MoonPie and a Coke at every gas station. So I’ve had a lot of MoonPies into my body and at no point was only a third sufficient. So, Brian J. Ball is calling them out. He’s cracked. And then MoonPie quote tweet and says, “Look, Brian, I just write the tweets.”
Joe Wadlington:
So I use this one because it’s another customer service instance, where a customer who clearly is a fan… If you’ve eaten a MoonPies is the fact that you’re actually looking for nutrition facts, like MoonPies are wonderful. They’re not a nutritional moment. That’s not the thing. So Brian’s clearly a fan just as much as Jane Cook is. Instead of praising Brian and lifting Brian up, they decided to dunk on Brian. And then on the right, we have another quote tweet where’s it’s a brands to brands talk and Safe Auto. I did obsessive deep dive on Safe Auto’s Twitter at this time. And they were clearly going through an entire rebrand because they did lots of… They were like clouds scoping, if that makes sense, like adding other people. I’m interested to see what Safe Auto does next.
Joe Wadlington:
But they said, “Hey, MoonPie, how come you never returned my calls?” So they’re adding another brand that’s really popular on Twitter just to see. And then MoonPie just quote tweets and says, “Because you are car insurance,” which is so funny and definitely a little mean. But Safe Auto got exactly what they want. And this is such a good technique because in terms of brand recognition, Safe Auto, car insurance, like 100 or 1,500 retweets, 22.9 thousand likes on the idea that Safe Auto and car insurance are associated. That’s great branding mission. This is really good for Safe Auto, again, showing how MoonPie is just spreading around the sexiness in order to get people… And clearly, people really like it or Safe Auto, they would not raise their hands to be dragged by MoonPie.
Joe Wadlington:
So even Twitter does this. So this is Twitter’s Twitter. And we’ve since updated it as well for Black Lives Matter. So Twitter, of course, is the conversation layer of the internet. We’re a neutral platform. I’m standing by the idea that to think that black people are important and valid is of course an entirely neutral nonpolitical thing. So we’ve changed all of our branding with that, but this is what we had before. And this is a company wide side eyes that we even have an installation in headquarters in San Francisco with these side eyes. It’s corrugated. So when you walk down the hall, it follows you, like it moves. Definitely, the idea was cute. The implication is creepy. This is our Twitter.
Joe Wadlington:
See other platforms, this is our Facebook. And then they did this. Our Facebook posts are very much like really large to brand pushes, like when your business says a hero video or something every year or every branding season. That’s what they put on Facebook. And then our Instagram… Oh, this is LinkedIn. Apparently, everybody laughs at Twitter all the time. I think this is a good version. This side eyes is gone, which makes sense for a more professional concept. And also to think if you’re coming to LinkedIn, you’re probably interested in applying for a job at Twitter and the sassiness is probably best left for after you’re already hired, maybe not like the resume stage.
Joe Wadlington:
So for our LinkedIn, we’re just like everyone smiles at Twitter all the time. And then our Instagram, there’s this joke within Twitter that you see the bio is just says, “Twitter, screenshots of tweets.” And the joke at Twitter is that Instagram is just screenshots of tweets. And so our Instagram is just screenshots of funny tweets, which I really like. And I don’t think that necessarily carries externally. It works for us. But then when I was doing research for this presentation, I did go to Hinge’s Instagram to see a difference. And the next one I looked at theirs and it’s a screenshot of a tweet. So it does carry through, it is legitimate.
Joe Wadlington:
So the reason you want to sound different on every platform and to have a differentiated strategy for each platform is to use the platforms’ superpowers. So let’s look at the things that I think Twitter does the best. When do you take your brand to Twitter? You’ve got a giant marketing, you’ve got all these brilliant plans. I’m sure they’re all going to go extremely well. And we know that not every single one of them is going to go to Twitter and we would much prefer, and I promise you, your metrics would prefer as well if you save the ones for Twitter that are going to do exceptionally well. Everything that you’re marketing at a specific time needs to be done on your primary platform.
Joe Wadlington:
So here’s the things that I think are best for Twitter. Come to Twitter when you want to connect, when you want to launch, and when you want to play. This is a very good screenshot of all screen. When I do the presentation live, people are taking pictures of that. And so what do I mean by those three terms? When I say connect, what does that mean? Come to Twitter, bring your brand here when there’s something that you want to… Thank you, I say for screenshotting this. Be conversational. So when you want to create conversation, and so that’s the back and forth.
Joe Wadlington:
So when you want to ask questions of your audience, if there’s something you want to weigh in, very often we’ll have people asking, “What should I do on Twitter? What should I do on Twitter?” And we’ll say, “Ask.” Just tweet, “Hey, team, what do you want to see us do?” Or run a poll where it will say, “What type of content would you appreciate the most? Do you want best practices? Do you want FAQ? Do you want behind the scenes photos?” They will tell you. People love weighing in on Twitter. Connect in the moment thing, so if you have anything about your marketing strategy or something you want to say about your business specifically in the moment.
Joe Wadlington:
This does not have to be a big cultural moment. Right now with COVID, with police brutality conversations, we are seeing a lot of brands not to do a great job and often it’s because they’re not staying in their lane. So your moment it could be something around Black Lives Matter, but it could also be something around mornings, about it being Monday morning, about it being Friday afternoon, about it being June, about work from home, about being proactive about your health, about connecting to friends remotely, dating remotely, connecting to family over phone and FaceTime and so on.
Joe Wadlington:
There’s never just one moment going on. There’s so many that are happening and you can pick and choose which one makes the most sense for you to be a part of. You can double down on one and make it central to your main campaign, and others you can just release a statement. Twitter is the perfect place to go to release a statement from your company. If a journalist is going to cover your company, I guarantee the first thing they’re going to do is go to your Twitter. So if you want to comment on something and to control the conversation, being on Twitter is the place to do that.
Joe Wadlington:
Launching. So the idea of launching on Twitter it can be a bit intimidating to people because launching can seem like something we only do every five years, every two years because it’s something really massive. But what I want to color here is the idea of stuff being new. So in the style guide that I’ve created for my team, I only let us use the word new for six months and then we can’t use it anymore in reference to a material, a product thing, news, whatever, because it is so powerful. The click through rate is really wonderful with both subject clients and then on our website as well. People on Twitter love new stuff. The number one reason people come to Twitter is to discover something new.
Joe Wadlington:
So we have a very curious audience. And anything that is new, it doesn’t have to be a big launch, but your new tagline, a product in a different color, a webinar you’re rolling out, a new blog article. You updated the design on your website. You have a new video. Anything that is breaking, is fresh, that is forthcoming, Twitter is a great place to tease stuff that you know it’s happening down the road. If you’re unveiling a product, you want to crop it so people can just see a corner here, one piece of it there, find out what the color is. Tweet, threads, and moments are a great way to just very quickly aggregate several tweets around a teaser or a run-up for your advertising campaign. But if you have something new, if you have something timely, bring it to Twitter because people are really going to respond.
Joe Wadlington:
And then lastly, come to Twitter when you want to play. And we have a lot of clients who are health insurance, medical device companies, law firms, they don’t know how to play or being sassy or being risking a joke that could somehow be unclear, could actually be legally detrimental to them. We’re not saying that every brand needs to be sassy, we’re not saying every brand needs to be mean or funny to be successful on Twitter, rather think of the most human conversational talk like a person version of your brand and that’s the one you want to bring to Twitter. So it doesn’t have to be outright and super bold. People on Twitter love boldness, they really appreciate it. But think of your peers and what’s in your industry.
Joe Wadlington:
And if you’re a B2B company and everything is pretty straightforward and can maybe sometimes feel a little bit boring than you just being human or a bit more conversational than your peers, and then the corner of Twitter they’re in just takes off like wildfire. People really respond to brands that tweet like they talk or sound conversational and warm and human. If you can add a little sassiness to that, that’s generally appreciated. But absolutely not our requirement to be successful on Twitter.
Joe Wadlington:
So those are the three things that I say are the superpowers of Twitter. Obviously, you can take any of your marketing to Twitter and it’s always evolving, nothing is faster than Twitter. So there will be something in a month that will be successful, that will be brand new to even us, that these are the things that are tried and true about Twitter that you can look at your giant marketing campaign and hack off the bits that fall under these three categories. And those are the things you should take to Twitter first because they are going to do well.
Joe Wadlington:
Learn from the good tweets. Okay, in the way that you are good in conversation, that you speak well in meetings, that you are someone who’s interesting to talk, the way that you become that spot is by listening more than you talk. You’re getting life tips today as well as Twitter tips. And so the way that we do that implication for Twitter or that application for Twitter is to learn from the good tweets. Seeing you need to normalize on your marketing team the idea of bringing up the tweet and just talking about it and trying to figure out why it’s funny? Why it’s interesting? What went well about it? And here are some great tips.
Joe Wadlington:
Did you all know that KFC is a gaming company. KFC launched a Colonel Sanders dating simulator. You can still look at hashtag, “I love you, Colonel Sanders.” That was the name of the game. And if you don’t believe me, I would understand. I would understand why this would seem to sleep. And what I’m talking about right now is social listening and how to learn from the good tweets and do it in a very sneaky way. KFC is sneaky as hell because let’s look at these different tweets that they have about their game. KFC the gaming company has about all of Colonel Sanders.
Joe Wadlington:
We have a tweet from the WWE, we have a tweet from PC gamer the KFC retweeted. And if you look, they did not even add KFC. They didn’t even use the hashtag. And then on the other side, we have a popular eGamer in streamer, who’s also tweeting about it. So how did KFC find these? How did the find the WWE? How did they find the PC gamer tweets? Because the next slide if we look at KFC’s account, they’re only following 11 people. And who are those 11 people? The five Spice Girls and six guys named Herb. So it’s 11 herbs and spices which KFC original recipe chicken, they have their secret recipe. It’s 11 herbs and spices go into the branding. It’s very clever, but not a best practice. Yeah, should you be following people that you can learn from their tweets and you can see those?
Joe Wadlington:
So what are they doing to be able to… In their stream, they’re finding tweets from the WWE, they’re finding tweets from streamers, they’re finding tweets from PC gamer, which are not in their industry, which are not even tagging them. And they only follow the Spice Girls and five dudes named Herb. So, clearly, they are doing stuff on the backend. This is using Twitter like Twitter, TweetDeck, Sprout Social. We have so many official partners that can help you find the good tweets and to set up lists and columns where you can look at your peers.
Joe Wadlington:
This is MailChimp and this is me showing you all behind the scenes how my team aggregates the good tweets. So at this time, I was talking with the Twitter Business team about how to do some really cool product flybuys. We didn’t really know how to think about it because we were just like, “Gosh, we just want to show people where these two buttons are. It’s not so in depth as a tutorial, but we just want to show a few quick things.” And so then this ad for MailChimp came across my timeline and I just thought it was really cool because they’re showing you the backend. So this is basically saying this is a website for how or an advertisement for how MailChimp can plug into Twitter and then plug into… You can basically get signups.
Joe Wadlington:
So they’re showing you the ad goes into an email and then the email goes into your email builder. So super clever because you’re just getting a little bit of a tutorial. It’s also just very eye-catching. I mean, MailChimp’s branding is really beautiful. It’s weird. There’s a leg holding a phone, which I don’t know anyone at home, but that’s just not how I hold my phone. And so I thought it was really eye-catching and I just DMed it to Lindsay Crider, who manages their Twitter Business and to our boss saying, “What should I say?” Very clever execution of splashy ad that is low key a tutorial. And again, we’re trying to figure out how to do this for our own team.
Joe Wadlington:
And then Marissa responds, and she says, “I saw this ad from them, too. They’re running a super solid video campaign right now.” And she sends the MailChimp ad she got that same day. And if you were able to click through, it’s a completely different ad. And then Lindsay, Bruce, now Crider, weighed in as well. And she was also getting served a completely different ad for MailChimp that she also liked. So if I had walked into that conference room that morning and said, “I really love what MailChimp is doing,” both Lindsay and Marissa would have nodded and said, “Yes, absolutely. We should do something like them.” And we would have been talking about three completely different ads.
Joe Wadlington:
And the three of us are on the same team. Our desks are beside each other. We follow a lot of the same people on Twitter. We have a lot of similar interests. And even with that, MailChimp has us in three completely different targeting buckets. So sending these to your team and then talking them through is really incredible for normalizing this thing. So you can pick stuff apart and find out what you like because this is behind the scenes. This is how Twitter Business does it. So this is our TweetDeck. Lindsay Crider runs this. And you all should be glad that the screen is cutting it off on the right because if it did not, it would wrap around your entire room and apartment building and block. This is a wide document.
Joe Wadlington:
And one thing that you can do that’s really incredible with TweetDeck that’s just very easy is lists. You can do private lists that no one knows that you have. And I recommend today if you do not already have it, make a list of every business that you consider up here. And that way you can just watch what everybody in your industry is doing. Make another list that is just businesses you think are doing a really good job on Twitter. It doesn’t matter what industry they’re in. It can even be just some people. There are a lot of great people who are just promoting their own things that they promote like a business or even better than some top agencies. And so make another list that’s just weird, creative, interesting account that will fill yourself with examples.
Joe Wadlington:
And just watching if you do that, just having those two lists, I guarantee you, by the end of a week, a month, if you take a few coffee breaks and watch those, you will be filled with so many more interesting ideas for ways that you can bring your brand to Twitter and exciting ways to break into the conversation and use those three superpowers for Twitter that we talked about before of launch, play, and connect. That’s learning from the good tweets. It’s also a very fun thing to do if you can.
Joe Wadlington:
And also right now, I think we’re all trying to find interesting and creative ways to connect with our co-workers and feel some human connection with the people that we worked at as well. And so something that I would recommend is having your team, if it’s a Friday meeting, just have everybody bring a tweet and present a tweet that they thought was funny and this can either just be something that you thought was funny as hell or really good brand example and spend the top 10 minutes of your meeting just talking through tweets that you think are funny. And that can be a great way to normalize the idea of bringing other companies’ marketing into the conversation and then just dissecting it. You don’t know the answer for why you think something is effective. It’s just so inspirational and sparks a lot of brain synapses to show cool examples.
Joe Wadlington:
So the last thing I want to talk about by the last topic is surprise your followers. There are 1 million tiny Twitters inside of big Twitter. There’s Skincare Twitter and Outdoor Twitter and there’s Black Twitter and Gay Twitter, there’s Feminist Twitter, there is Plants Twitter. You name an interest or an identity and there is a robust corner of Twitter that is a part of it. So I want to talk about how to surprise your followers by going into a slightly surprising corner of Twitter, but still gracefully staying in your lane and not talking about something that doesn’t make sense for your brand to be talking about. You can’t.
Joe Wadlington:
Hey, let me explain myself. So Shutterstock, we’re all familiar. Back when you used to do illegal marketing practices and you would just Google an image and grab that stock photo and put it in your ad, but none of you do that anymore. Shutterstock would be the watermark that you had to somehow get rid of. So we all know Shutterstock does stock photography, but what they wanted to push at this time was… So what was the conversation that’s happening on Twitter right now was the Fyre Festival. Of course, this huge scam that was really hilarious to many people because the most of the people who were scammed were people who have quite a bit of money. So we didn’t really shed too many tears watching them lose some of it.
Joe Wadlington:
And then there were two different documentaries that happened around the Fyre Festival, one produced by Netflix and one produced by Hulu. And this happens quite a bit where there’s some interesting cultural moment that happens not on Twitter, the Hulu documentary, the Netflix documentary. So Twitter does not produce movies, but it’s the conversation layer of the internet. Whenever there’s a feud on Instagram, something weird on YouTube, or something like this where there’s feuding documentaries, people come to Twitter to discuss it. So the Fyre Festival conversation on Twitter was hilarious because Twitter already loves scammers. It went right into Theranos conversations, Rothenberg ventures conversations, just all sorts of those. And so Scammers Twitter is another corner.
Joe Wadlington:
So Shutterstock jumped in. And the Fyre Festival is something where is a music festival that the promoters made it appear as if they had a lot of things nailed down, but basically making models and Instagram influencers show these beautiful pictures of the festival that promised to be incredible and it turned out they had none of the infrastructure that was promised. So they are jumping straight into these scammer conversation and showing you that they actually do stock video. Video is extremely important, video is the most exciting and robust thing on Twitter right now, it is going wild. So of course, they had launched this campaign on Twitter and showed off that they had something, a product offering that we did not know that they had in a really incredible way.
Joe Wadlington:
And this is them jumping into scammer conversations, jumping into the Fyre Festival conversations, which we know that no other shutter… Getty Images is not jumping into the Fyre Festival conversation. So they got to do a Blue Ocean Strategy, get away from their competitors and really make a splash. And they actually won… They rolled out some of those things because they did thought leadership with this as well. So Fyre Festival lessons to influence your next viral video. I believe this was by their CEO, their chief marketing officer. And then they actually got a Webby for this campaign because it did so well. And so them pairing it… They used the Twitter conversation to snag people and then pull them back to the Shutterstock blog. If you hit the button, we’ll get to see they’re ready. Yay, I got a Webby.
Joe Wadlington:
Should I incorporate video into my campaigns? Absolutely. So every time we do Twitter research on how well video is doing on Twitter, we normally have to do it again because it just performs so well on Twitter and it’s growing as well. So at the top of the discussion today, I said that I was going to be showing you all some new stuff. So we have two brand new video pages that went live this month. And I’ve not had these in a presentation before. So let’s gaze upon some data. This is another great screenshot of all page. So we have more than two billion video views on Twitter a day, a day. And that number is only going up. We’re at a 72% year-over-year increase in watch time on Twitter. So that’s not an increase in video views, that’s watch time.
Joe Wadlington:
So not only are there more video views because people are watching them for longer, which is incredible to me and a 62% year-over-year increase in daily video views on Twitter. So that’s the daily video views of the people who are coming back and viewing videos on Twitter again and again. So similar to what we see with most audience data on Twitter, the Twitter audience is very interested, very passionate, and very sticky. People at Twitter are loyal and they will come there every day and they really digest because their timeline is so customizable with following their interests, as opposed to someone they went to high school with, or a heavy algorithm or something else. They are very sticky on their timeline and have a high consumption rate.
Joe Wadlington:
So these are just two fresh examples that I wanted to show on the left. Very cool. Tello is cool. And I’ll just riff on both of these. So these are just two that we included in a blog lately. And there’s so many great ways to go after a video. One wonderful best practice that Tello is doing here is their last frame and also shows on the right is you can see the brands in both of them. So we recommend having stretchy caramel. Could you play that one just again? Thank you.
Joe Wadlington:
So with Tello Mobile, what they’re doing really well is this bold text where it comes through. So when you’re doing video on Twitter, you want to remember that Twitter is a really noisy and a really active place. So we want things to stand out. And I like these two on the same page because they’re actually in juxtaposition at each other. On left, Tello Mobile is trying to get above the noise by being louder than it. This is a high contrast image with just the text and the image we’re seeing right here, which is great. It stands out and the visuals feel super modern and cool. And then it ends with their logo.
Joe Wadlington:
So after that very short video played, it would just basically turn to a static image. And then OCHO is doing the opposite where they’re giving you a quiet timelines in space. I love the drooling face emoji. And then throughout the entire time the short video is playing, you can see that OCHO caramel right there. And then of course, they’re going into the food porn visual pleaser of the satisfying direction. We’re getting to see that caramel stretch. So, yeah, two completely different examples. And on the left, we have a much more highly produced. And on there, I would not be surprised if the social media manager made that on their desk and that is a white sheet of computer paper and a ring light and they probably just stretched out about 20 different caramels before they got the perfect one. And so I wanted to show high five and low five as well.
Joe Wadlington:
So catalysts for virality, these are the things that I am telling you every single viral moment, huge campaigns that really just stole the internet for days or weeks. You dig into them and you are going to find these three essences. If you refine your voice so that you sound different on every platform and you’re using the platforms for what they are best at, you’re looking at all the things you want to do in marketing with your Q3 and your Q4 and you’re really picking the things that you know that those places are going to do extremely well and holding those precious and taking them to the platform. For Twitter, of course, that is connecting to the moment, launching anything new, and then being human and irreverent or sassy if you can.
Joe Wadlington:
Learning from the good tweets. There’s so many creative and incredible examples of marketing out there coming from all corners of Twitter. So don’t limit yourself to who’s in your neighborhood. Make lists that are private, no one knows you’re following those people. And normalized sharing really great tweets with your team. Doing that, then you’ll have so many good ideas and you’ll see where so many other brands are clearly doing that and learning and moving forward. And then surprise your followers. Move into a place a little new, a little fresh, stray into a different corner of Twitter where none of your peers are and you will absolutely grab some new customers and some new loyalists. I am so confident that if you add these three ingredients into your marketing campaigns, you will be fully set up for that lightning bolt of virality arrives and then you will go off. And win all the awards. And then in my next presentation, you will be an example. Thank you.
Andrew Whipp:
Thank you.
Joe Wadlington:
Thank you for your time and attention. And how much more time do we have for questions?
Andrew Whipp:
It looks like we have about eight minutes. So I would just suggest to anybody who is in the attendees panel, feel free to throw a Q&A question at the bottom, just to jump right into it. And by the way, phenomenal presentation, Joe, I feel like I learned a ton. And every time I was going to write down a question about something you said, you would immediately answer it. So frustrating, but in a great way.
Joe Wadlington:
And I know we don’t have much time because I spent so much of my presentation making you all replay that caramel GIF. Twitter is the conversation platform. So when people come up with questions later in their day the next time they take a shower in a week or whatever, I’m not going to judge you. Take those conversations to Green Buzz Agency on Twitter and to @TwitterBusiness on Twitter and keep the conversation going. We were more than happy to keep asking them. But do you have any questions for me?
Andrew Whipp:
I love it. Yes, I do. So you showed some shorter video examples I believe from your blog, from Tello and OCHO just a second ago. And I noticed they were pretty short, pretty tight, pretty to the point. Is that like a best practice that you have found for video on Twitter or do you see content that’s longer doing just as good?
Joe Wadlington:
It is absolutely a best practice, 6 to 15 seconds, 6 to 15 seconds. And if anyone tweets at us, we can absolutely give you the URL for the new video resources. I’m very excited to say you can Google Twitter Business video resources, and it should show up, or video best practices. And we’ve gotten great SEO with those pages. That’s really wonderful. But 6 to 15 seconds is the best place for Twitter video. But I will say if you are doing something that happens to be longer, you can still use that as a strategy to just front load your video and have a complete narrative arc happen in the 6 to 15 seconds where you’ve made your point. And then if people don’t finish it, but they still got what you were trying to get and they scroll on, that’s absolutely a win. And I would say definitely for those 6 to 15 seconds, keep your logo visible the whole time.
Tod Plotkin:
Awesome. And Hey, Joe, this is Tod. And I know we didn’t get a chance to chat before the presentation, but to reiterate what Andrew said, phenomenal job, really, really good, really enjoyed it myself. I was curious, kind of taking the conversation to COVID-19, how has consumption of content on Twitter changed, if at all, over the last few months during the pandemic.
Joe Wadlington:
It’s gone so up, Tod. We are up on daily active users, 25%.
Tod Plotkin:
Wow.
Joe Wadlington:
That’s daily active users. So that’s people who are opening it every single day. So Twitter has actually had an extreme amount of growth, which makes sense. Twitter is where so many people get their news and nothing moves faster than Twitter. So for us to be in a news cycle with COVID where there is new information every day, especially when we were going into quarantine, new information every day and every week. So people really want something that moves very quickly. And with COVID, that was definitely a conversation where people want second opinions and multiple opinions. And Twitter’s really fantastic for that because when I say I was home, my parents are like, “Well, you don’t watch the news.” I go, “Well, no, but I read Twitter and I follow six different news outlets there.”
Joe Wadlington:
And so I get to see them beside each other. And it’s really you learn a lot by watching news organizations, even how they will phrase a tweet when they’re putting out new information. So Twitter is up, social media consumption is up, and with that, our video is up as well. And I think people have found Twitter to be kind of a haven in this time where they’re feeling very disconnected from each other. It’s a great place to go and to have that water cooler chat and hallway conversations that you’re missing.
Tod Plotkin:
Awesome, awesome. And the other side of the equation, we just talked about how consumption has changed over the last few months. On the content creation side, on the brand side, these brands creating content specifically for Twitter, which you did an amazing job of outlining all kinds of really fun and interesting case studies. Are there any trends that you’re seeing there from the brands in terms of the types of content that they’re creating?
Joe Wadlington:
Yeah, absolutely. The tweet that I had for was the thing not to do, where it said brands are like, “Now more than ever, you can buy our product.” I’m seeing a lot of brands… And this is where it’s the beginning of quarantine within saying things like, “In these trying times, now more than ever, we’re in this together,” and these soft nonspecific phrases. And another thing that’s great with Twitter is you get to see the marketing and people reacting to the marketing. So you get to see how people respond to it. If you think a tweet is great, then you just look at the replies and you see the people it was targeted at think it was great. But I know that people are really fatigued with that unclear, indefinite, vague, soft language. It feels like all the brands lowered their voice and tried to be soothing.
Joe Wadlington:
And with Twitter Business, we lowered our voice. We went through and we took all the exclamation points out of our copy. A sense of urgency is the best practice on Twitter. So normally saying things like try now, sign up today, limited time. Those things work really well on Twitter because Twitter moves so quickly. We took all of those out because we were aware we’re just not the most important thing going on right now. And people already feel a sense of anxiety and stress. So we’re going to take the feeling of urgency out. And so there’s a lot that you can do with your marketing and tone adjustment just by subtracting things. That is really incredible.
Joe Wadlington:
And I think now we’re getting a bit more savvy to this specific time and brands are realizing maybe they shouldn’t speak up unless they have something that can actually help. So if you’ve decided to do like ClassPass doing video classes, or a bookstore in San Francisco did free intercity delivery… This is when Amazon was not delivering books. The library was closed and they did free delivery around the entire city. That’s a great marketing campaign.
Andrew Whipp:
All right, awesome. And then the last question that we might have time for is from Cameron. And the question was, on the COVID conversation, do you see any new or unexpected specific spikes at certain times of day?
Joe Wadlington:
Time of day, no. I would say with COVID, it would actually bring out people really changing their habits because all of our routines have changed. And so all the times when you may have checked Twitter before, I know for Twitter Business specifically as a B2B handle the morning, is really great for us. Noon is good. And then mid-afternoon, Lindsay Crider describes that as a dream crusher in terms of tweets. So one thing Twitter is great for data nerds and you can schedule tweets. My team just made a video on how to that I’m actually the voice-over of. But if you haven’t, you can do an ads Twitter account, ads.twitter.com. You have to put in a credit card, but you don’t have to spend any money. You don’t have to spend any money. Scheduling tweets is free. You can also do that for TweetDeck. And I would recommend scheduling a few tweets for different times of day. And you can see how many people responded to them and see who your specific audience does.
Andrew Whipp:
So, Joe, you’re telling me you’re the global creative lead at Twitter and you do VO?
Joe Wadlington:
And I do the what?
Andrew Whipp:
And you do VO, voice-over that’s on the link.
Joe Wadlington:
Yes, I do voice-over. Yes, if you were soothed by my voice at any time during this presentation, there is a microphone in a rehashed room divider now covered in styrofoam that is my recording studio.
Andrew Whipp:
I love it. I’m sure it sounds great. I’ll definitely be on the lookout for it.
Joe Wadlington:
And Nina, I see your question and I have an answer to it. Tweet your question at me at Joe Wadlington, I have an answer for you.
Andrew Whipp:
Awesome. Well, I think that is all the time that we have for today. But everybody who joined us, thanks for popping in. We hope you guys had fun and learned a couple things along the way. I know that our team always leaves this with ton of ideas and best practices that we can go back and use at our own shops. So excited to do that. And then finally, of course, an enormous thank you to Joe for sharing all of your time and insights with us today. Be on the lookout for our next webinar, which will feature thought leaders from Universal Music Group and Getty Images. They’ll be talking about creative ways to build a virtual community experience. It’s going to be an awesome time and a lot more fun facts and insights that you can glean along the way. So we hope to see you there. Thanks so much again, Joe.
Joe Wadlington:
Thank you so much for having me. Follow @GreenBuzzAgency on Twitter, follow @TwitterBusiness on Twitter for more things just like I shared today. And then follow me @JoeWadlington on Twitter for things that are completely unrelated to anything I talked about.
Andrew Whipp:
Awesome. Thanks so much.
Joe Wadlington:
Thank you. Have a great day you all.
Stay Relevant: How to Innovate and Lean Into a New Virtual Culture Webinar
TikTok, Zoom, Livestreams and digital events, it’s no secret that virtual culture is rapidly evolving amid the pandemic. But what does that actually mean for your business or brand? How do you gain traction and carve a space in uncharted digital territory?
Tune in to hear from VP Social Strategy & Content at Elite Model World, Gregory Littley and CEO of Hashtag Sports, Anthony Caponiti about what activations are working on platforms such as TikTok as well as what it takes to turn large-scale industry conferences into interactive virtual events.
FEATURED PANELISTS
GREGORY LITTLEY is the former VP of Social Strategy and Content at Elite Model World. He is a Shorty Award winning global brand leader who brings over a decade of experience in crafting digital brand strategies. At Elite Model World, Gregory led a team of creatives to leverage celebrity and partnerships to build powerful brands in our new digital age.
ANTHONY CAPONITI is the CEO of Hashtag Sports. Anthony is the mind behind the company’s creative brand strategy and quick rise to notoriety over the past six years. Anthony took his background as a competitive NCAA Track and Field athlete at Emory University to build a community dedicated to engaging the next generation of sports fans and consumers.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Andrew Whipp:
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We know that your time is very valuable, especially with the current state of things, so we appreciate everyone choosing to spend that time with us, and above all else, we hope everyone’s staying safe right now. My name is Andrew Whipp, and I’m the Lead Creative and Editor at Green Buzz Agency. I’m also joined today by my friend and colleague, DJ Jamiel, a producer here at Green Buzz Agency. How are you doing, DJ?
DJ Jamiel:
Hey, what’s going on, Andrew? I’m super excited to be along for the ride today. I’m super excited about both of our panelists. I think what they’re going to talk about is extremely applicable to everybody right now in the moment, and that’s pretty cool and unique.
Andrew Whipp:
Yeah, it’s going to be awesome. Today’s webinar is the fifth in our Green Buzz Agency webinar series, which was created to connect our community of thought leaders who can help us break down top line strategy and best practices and advice during these tough times. Today, we’re going to be covering how to innovate and lean into a new virtual culture. If you’re looking to break out of the box, bring some new ideas back to your teams, then you are in the right place. But before we begin, just want to make sure that our audiences know what to expect from today’s webinar and that everybody is familiar with the features on the platform.
Andrew Whipp:
Firstly, our webinar will be an hour long, and in that hour, you’ll hear from our two panelists who will present for roughly 30 minutes. Afterwards, we’ll have plenty of time for a live Q&A where we’ll take audience questions. And we’ll send a copy of the presentation and the recording to everyone who registered after it happens. With that, I want to get to introducing our speakers and telling our audiences about a very special panelist announcement. Today, as you can see, Carter couldn’t be here with us, but in his place we have the multi-talented powerhouse, Anthony Caponiti, who is the CEO of Hashtag Sports. As CEO of Hashtag, Anthony is the mind behind the company’s creative brand strategy and it’s quick rise to notoriety over the past six years.
Andrew Whipp:
Anthony took his background as a competitive NCAA track and field athlete to build a community dedicated to engaging the next generation of sports fans and consumers. Today, he’ll be walking us through the strategy behind transitioning Hashtag’s flagship conference entirely online. Of course, we’re also joined by the incredible Gregory Littley, a shorty award winning global brand leader who brings over a decade of experience in crafting digital brand strategies. As the former vice president of social strategy and content at Elite Model World, Gregory led a team of creative people who leveraged both celebrity and partnerships to build powerful brands in the new digital age. Thank you both for sharing your time, your wisdom and your experiences with us today.
Andrew Whipp:
We are really, really excited to kick this off, as DJ said. With all of that out of the way, let’s jump into the good stuff. Gregory, I think we’ll turn it over to you to start us off.
Gregory Littley:
Yeah, thank you so much. All right, my kind of case study and story that I want to share with you really comes from, if we can think back, to a late March, the early days of COVID when there was so much, not only anxiety and unrest and confusion in terms of creators, contents, talent, our models that we really had, me and my team, we had to take a step back and really look at what are the safest ways to approach content creation at this time? What are the most sensitive ways to create content at this time? Depending on where our talent was located in the world. We had to really focus on making sure that we were gauging the comfortability of our talent, the safety of our talent and the overall mental and emotional wellbeing of our talent. With all of those considerations, what we wanted to do was to creating a safe way to showcase not only our talent, but also to spark inspiration while making sure that we were remaining safe and providing safe guidelines to our talent in the time of COVID.
Gregory Littley:
That really was the birth of our holistically TikTok specific trend PoseAtHome. Really, what we were trying to ideate was, how can we make a statement or provide a creative way that our talent can showcase their life and bring to light what they do best, which is modeling and creating beautiful and disruptive visuals, but also playing within the confines and the user behavior, and what we know to work on the platform, TikTok. We had originally launched and thought really deeply about who to launch with. At Elite, we had access to such amazing global talent, but one talent, particularly that my team became quite close to in terms of creation and ideating, and just really thoughtful content conversation is Coco Rocha.
Gregory Littley:
If you know anything about her, you know that she’s not only vibrant, but creative, and just falls into her passion, really hugs her passion of creative and content on social, not only across more legendary older platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, but really has been such a standout content and model on TikTok. The idea of launching with her was very important, because we knew that we had to pick someone that not only would inspire current talent, but also resonate with real people to really make sure that we were driving that unique asked for user generated content at this time, but to also make sure that it all fell under the umbrella of entertainment and sensitivity, and falling within whatever your region’s guidelines at the time were dictating about COVID-19.
Gregory Littley:
To date, we’ve had 2.3 billion views of the trend, which honestly is a huge number and certainly surpassed any of our expectations. I remember hitting 300 million and just celebrating with the team, being like, well, this is the most, this is huge. But what we did not necessarily anticipate was TikTok sat up and took notice at the trend that we created. What they really saw was they enjoyed the fact that they could instantly see that PoseAtHome was not only drawing the attention of real users, but additionally, it was becoming a holistic trend that certainly drove home the idea of sheltering in place, being at home, practicing social distancing, but also showcasing your creativity and giving you a little bit of a spotlight at a time that the world was so dark and bleak truly.
Gregory Littley:
TikTok sat up and took notice. Within working with them, we have a wonderful relationship with TikTok. They’re some of the most passionate, creative driven people that I’ve ever worked with at a platform. I really can’t sing their praises enough, but they took it, PoseAtHome, and placed it on the official challenge section page, which, from a brand perspective, from a company perspective, the value of that placement is absurd. It’s literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, that brands, companies, people pay to have their campaign placed on this page. This occurred during the first week of May. Like I had said before, we could have never expected the type of numbers and engagement that resulted from that placement, which truly does speak to the power of TikTok being the most relevant social platform of the moment, and also the user behavior, the ability to adopt quickly and create instantly, really showcased its power through this.
Gregory Littley:
Within that first week, we had hundreds of millions of new views, tons of people actually creating and being inspired by the PoseAtHome and adding the tag. Then I think we actually have an example of our launch video and then a little bit of what that trend challenge page looks like.
Gregory Littley:
What I love about that video, clearly there was no better person to launch with than Coco, but the idea of taking all those considerations and making sure that me and the team were really guiding this through in a safe manner and having the addition of the Yo Gotti song pose, which was like the perfect suggestion by one of my team members, Christina Monroe. It really brought it together in this lightning in a bottle moment. I think what we saw the proof that this worked and the proof that it was the perfect combination of leading with our strategy, thinking about the execution, making sure that this was alive and living on a relevant platform, in addition to making sure that we were inviting others to take part in this in the safety of their home. When you look at the page, and it’s over 2.3 billion views, that’s all the proof you need to know that, not only was this effective, but it was such a successful campaign, really.
Anthony Caponiti:
Thanks. Hello, everybody. It’s nice to be on with you today. I appreciate your time, and thanks to Green Buzz Agency for inviting me to speak on this topic. Hopefully, you like what I have to say. What we’re going to look to do here is, it’s a bit of a shift from the sexy TikTok campaigns that you just heard about, but living in this now, more so virtual world, how to, especially as an event organizer, but equally for anybody really, that is a marketer today in 2020. Likely, you’re touching on some element of events or lead generation in your day job. What we want to touch on is how can you make that transition? What are some basics? What should you be thinking about? Some lessons learned and maybe how to grow that strategy over the near term and the long-term.
Anthony Caponiti:
There’s a little bit of quick information. We’ll keep it short on Hashtag Sports. But the reason we want to share this is give a little bit of irrelevancy about our mindset about how we think of producing and organizing an event. Something to keep in mind as we go through this is, there’s no one size fits all, and that’s something that’s really important to keep in mind. As an event producer and anybody that’s putting on any type of event experience virtual or otherwise, we’re going into our fifth year as an annual gathering for the sports entertainment ecosystem, which is more and more, as each day goes by, converging. Interestingly, we were born as a predecessor event to our real world event from a fully virtual conference.
Anthony Caponiti:
Really, at its time, I believe it was quite trend-setting, and not sure how many experiences like it really existed. In 2014, 2015, when we partnered with Google Plus and Google Hangouts, which was a newer platform at the time, we built a fully virtual experience. I think the first year in 2014, we had 65 speakers live from around the world, including five different countries. Every speaker made it on, everything went off without a hitch. It was fully built on the Google plus API connection built on top of it, and everything was fully virtual. In fact, it was even dual track where you could go in and select your track. We were ahead of the market in that sense at the time, and then that became the springboard to our real world event platform, an industry gathering for the sports entertainment ecosystem.
Anthony Caponiti:
I just share that with you in the sense that I’m bringing in some historical knowledge about where we were five to six years ago, from where we are today, and watching all go full circle is very interesting. We wouldn’t have had that crystal ball to predict it. As I mentioned, again, like anything in life and as a marketer and event producer, content creator, there is no one size fits all. We obviously learned that from what we just talked about with TikTok in creating a campaign that’s going to generate views and eyeballs, and ultimately win for your goals. When you’re thinking about what this transition might look like, number one, the starting point is again, what is your event type? i.e., really, what is going to be your goal here?
Anthony Caponiti:
If you are an event organizer and your living is organizing one or more events, and that is the engine of your business in terms of revenue, as opposed to you’re a marketer who is trying to reach B2B customers or even consumers for that matter for product or services. There’s going to be elements that are similar or different. Obviously you just have to know who you’re creating what experience for, that’s always paramount. Are you a large scale event? Do you cater to B2B audience? Is it B2C. In our lane, as a B2B event organizer of a growing large scale event, so our business again, is generated, in terms of revenue, primarily in the early days, especially as an annual event, an annual event platform.
Anthony Caponiti:
We started with a conference that grew. Last year, we introduced our Hashtag Sports Awards in the Engagement Academy of Sports Entertainment. As we grow, we put more layers on top, but at the end of the day, we are a thought leadership event and conference that we aspire to turn into a festival. At this point in time, what we are not is a large scale trade show or a large scale exhibition. We have certainly touched on some of those elements, but for us, in short order and in that very generous intro that I received from Green Buzz at the top, getting to that point of prestige quickly was built on top of our reputation for high quality thought leadership and programming. Now that we’re transitioning, we find ourselves in a situation where everything is much more virtual than it is in the real world, at least for the time being, you’re competing against different entities for that attention.
Anthony Caponiti:
But in general, just knowing what your event type is, what you’re building, what you’re going to do, obviously that’s paramount. What are the strengths and weaknesses ultimately for the type of event, event series that you’re trying to build? For example, again, really if content and program is what you’re known for, well, there’s a lot more of that out there right now. Is that really what you want to lean into, or do you want to take this opportunity to be a time to maybe experiment with other elements of your event or even your event strategy for that matter? Maybe you haven’t been doing a lot of webinars, and now the world is coming to life, and that’s the mainstay and expectation. Maybe now is the time to dip into it, but whatever it is in terms of what your value proposition is to your attendee and your growing audience, you obviously have to keep that in mind, and that clearly goes hand in hand with what you’re selling.
Anthony Caponiti:
In terms of knowing your audience again, addressable market becomes very key. Perhaps, and in some situations I would argue with this current time that we find ourselves in, in terms of COVID-19 and restrictions on where we can spend our time in the real world and with live events, of course, it’s not one size fits all as far as what’s available to us as event organizers, or marketers, or content creators, but perhaps your addressable market has an opportunity to grow. Maybe there are complimentary audiences that you can now reach easier through, we will touch on it a tiny bit if we can move quickly, as far as the different type of event experiences you’re creating virtually. Then maybe it would be a little more difficult for whatever reason to mesh together in your live event experience.
Anthony Caponiti:
Again, take Hashtag Sports, we’re an ecosystem event annual gathering, meaning we have a top objective of seven, eight, maybe even more key stakeholders in this ecosystem that are not necessarily used to being in the room together, and it’s taken us multiple years to set the stage in terms of having the event component parts to make all these stakeholder, or put these stakeholders, I guess should say, in a position where they’re going to have a great experience. It very well could be that, in a virtual setting, that’s easier to do because you can do things in piecemeal parts or whatever it may be. The value proposition, again, obviously at the end of the day, the attendee experience and the experience of your sponsors and partners are what really is going to drive your success. You can never move away from that. We all know that that’s paramount.
Anthony Caponiti:
In terms of, again, your attendees, just doing your very best at a stage to understand what a potential target attendee and your addressable market may have experienced. In the lead up to our event next week, we thought a lot about, all right, in the early stages of many events and event organizers and marketers creating these virtual experiences, are people getting more of one type of experience or another? Maybe certain platforms are used and technologies were used more than the next one. Maybe they were presented in a certain format. Just keep it in mind, like just being very candid about it. There could be exhausted at certain levels.
Anthony Caponiti:
Maybe it’s an opportunity to just analyze that and think to date, over the last three months, especially in this COVID-19 environment, what potentially has your attendees had the opportunity to experience? I think here, in terms of what we’re talking about today, clearly for anybody that’s interested in how you are transitioning your event strategy, in particular from the real world, and you may have already been thinking, and that was the case of us. Interestingly, as I might have, or probably should have mentioned up front, we were planning a large scale virtual event as part of an evolution of our platform’s business model for October. Ironically, the good news for us was we just flipped our calendar through a postponement strategy with our real world event, and now our virtual event was fast tracked.
Anthony Caponiti:
We were already thinking in those terms. We’ve had the hypothesis and the thought process that I think most of us who have been active in some capacity of producing events, B2B or B2C, otherwise, especially B2B, that I think the reality is to be a 365 day value proposition to your attendees and your audience. They’re naturally, is most likely you’re going to want to have virtual elements to what you do, I think it just makes sense. Certainly, it has an impact on, I think, ultimately the long-term sustainability, especially of the event organizer industry. Revenue is paramount, of course. Especially if this is the first event that you’re producing in terms of a larger scale event or something that is a big piece of your event strategy, so i.e., more attendees than less, what does it mean for your revenue stream?
Anthony Caponiti:
I think for some event organizers and some companies, we’re all in different spectrums. If you happen to be one of the lucky ones that revenue is doing really well, it’s obviously going to give you an opportunity to probably be more experimental and really push the envelope. Naturally, if for whatever reason, because of timing or other things that might’ve been out of your control, or just your industry and vertical, you might really have to press the needle on revenue and thinking about how you’re going to ask your, either existing attendees and addressable market that, whether they’re year over year retention or that you’re trying to draw who maybe didn’t have an opportunity to buy a pass or a ticket to your event, to ask them to now do it in the virtual world, or are you trying to reach new customers?
Anthony Caponiti:
Obviously, from a revenue perspective, that’s going to shape it quite a bit. Also, just your relationship with sponsors and partners. I can’t stress how much that needs to be an open conversation and dialogue. I think it’s very difficult, just being realistic about it, how much we have on our plates, but the more that you can have, even at this stage, three months in, an open conversation about each other’s goals and just what they’re experiencing, that’s going to make a huge difference and put you in a position to ultimately succeed. To do so, again, that’s going to take elements that are listed on the slide, like great production, thought leadership is important. It was already at a premium, I think it clearly becomes more to premium, and just more emphasis perhaps on layers that maybe in the real world you didn’t need for whatever reason, whether it was because it was necessitated by size or venue providing it, or just the natural infrastructure that you may need to now do to give a little bit extra level of satisfaction and delivery of value to your sponsors or your partners.
Anthony Caponiti:
And thinking long-term as best as possible. As I said before, we were already thinking of some of these elements in our strategy, they now became fast tracked. You have to always solve the goal at hand, or the problem at hand, if there’s an issue, and meet those goals. But being long-term is always, in your thinking, going to be helpful for something that I think isn’t going away tomorrow in some shape, form or fashion. We already live in a difficult attention economy, and as I alluded to before, anything you’re doing from your event strategy perspective, but especially a large scale or a larger scale event like Hashtag Sports where we have a couple thousand people that attend, let alone something like VidCon or Collision or larger events, whatever it may be, now when you’re going into this virtual arena, big and small, you don’t have a captive audience in the way that you did before.
Anthony Caponiti:
That’s just the rules of engagement. That’s the way that the playbook goes. It’s paramount, as we thought about, in our position, we’re creating an event three months after really the beginning of this shift. I would say we’re lucky in a sense to have the luxury of being able to sit back and watch a little bit. At the end of the day, your attendees, your audience, your customers, any of the stakeholders, and any stakeholder is going to be multitasking. Attention is scarce right now. We all know that for a variety of reasons. You will need to, I believe embrace that as part of your strategy and delivery in event, and just understand that that’s the case, and think about, how are you going to be able to create the best experience for the attendee that you’re trying to reach?
Anthony Caponiti:
In that capacity, there’s already a lot of amazing content out there. Look at everything we just talked about. TikTok, I probably watch that all day long. Whether it’s just content itself from social media platforms, incredible law informed documentaries that are capturing our attention, whatever it is, there’s more out there, let alone the fact that barriers to entry to create really great thought leadership has been lowered to a certain extent. You may now be competing against other thought leadership experiences at a larger scale than you weren’t before, and it’s important to keep in mind, sponsors already most likely create their own events, but it becomes a little bit easier in theory, or perhaps you might have some partners and sponsors that are going to be more ambitious about creating event experiences of their own. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Anthony Caponiti:
If anything, I think it offers complimentary opportunities to enhance value with your sponsors and partners, but it’s just important to keep that in mind. Technology is a tricky one. It’s important. Anybody that’s thinking about how to deploy, especially a larger scale event, is likely not going to find a one size fits all by any means. If you do know that answer, please reach out to me after this webinar, and I would love to know what it is. There are some really large scale events that are out there, I think like Collision, for example, Patty Cosgrove for years with web summit is building his own technology internally to a certain degree, at least, whatever it is or isn’t, and they’re attempting to deliver that experience through their own technology. That’s not the reality for 99% of those of us that are creating virtual events, big, medium, and small.
Anthony Caponiti:
Your technology is going to be important. I think the reality is for most in talking to other executives and other event organizers, and also just our team’s observation, is that a technology stack is likely going to be the best way that you can deploy any experience, especially a larger one. In our case, I think we’re going to be relying on, for sure, two technologies and maybe even three. Partially that’s because in order to going back to the upfront part of identifying the component parts of your event, in particular, in the value that you’re trying to drive, there’s just certain elements that realistically a software technology is really built to do.
Anthony Caponiti:
It might be built to replicate what really feels like you’re stepping into a stage in a big ballroom or whatever it is, to feel like you’re listening to that keynote or that speaking session, but it might not be as good at networking, or vice versa. In our case, we picked a networking led platform because for us that’s a more sustainable strategy. We were planning to use this technology for our real world event for the foreseeable future, and hopefully, sustainably, so that became more natural for us. I think that that’s just a reality. Production is paramount. Clearly, right now we have a fantastic webinar that’s going down. Green Buzz Agency does an amazing job with production and all elements. It goes off without a hitch, and that’s easier said than done.
Anthony Caponiti:
We have observed some major players, and the industry have to cancel or call off their event even the morning of. There’s just so many little things for a more complex virtual event when you’re moving from the real world space as a conference or trade show, or whatever it may be, to replicate. The more ambitious or the more holistic that experience is like, there are some events that are trying to replicate incredible scale in terms of speaking and programming, alongside buyer or seller markets, trade shows. It’s a lot to do, especially if it’s the first time. Honestly, it’s just Murphy’s law, the more that you’re executing, the more that can go wrong per se, but that’s not a reason not to do it.
Anthony Caponiti:
But there’s all kinds of issues that can come in play if you’re not thinking ahead of the curve, from time zones, to just the simulation itself, the communication of your team, and even little things like the technologies you’re deploying as far as some people find out the hard way that they can’t embed a YouTube livestream, because they’re not a part of YPP, they’re not a program partner. Just little things that sound like they’re not significant, but can easily trip you up at the last second. Again, your sponsors and your partners are paramount in all aspects. From our experience, in particular, and the sports industry has had some very difficult challenges. Not all industries and verticals are the same obviously, but just making that an open and transparent conversation to … and doing your homework, no matter what your role is as an event producer and an organizer and marketer.
Anthony Caponiti:
To the best of your ability, you should always have a pulse on what your sponsors and partners are doing in the marketplace, but obviously knowing that at this point and moving forward, how the marketplace has affected them. To a certain degree, does, in all honesty, affect how you’re approaching those partners and sponsors about whatever new experience you might be taking virtually, creating, and just the longevity and sustainability of that strategy. It’s very important. Again, like the slide says, your sponsor mix might look very different than what it is for a live event, and might be very similar. That goes back to how you’re deploying that strategy. But at the end of the day, the majority of us, there are some lucky few out there beyond just platforms like [inaudible 00:29:33] and Zoom that are going through the roof.
Anthony Caponiti:
Some people can’t answer the phones, but that’s not the majority. Lead generation is at a premium, and at the end of the day, no matter what you’re doing with your event or your event strategy and your media, if you can generate leads, you probably have a customer that wants to find you in terms of sponsorship.
Andrew Whipp:
Well, thank you both so much for your amazing insights. I think now would be an awesome time to transition over to an audience led Q&A. I have a question just to kind of kick things off for Gregory, which is, is there anything about creating content during this COVID-19 environment that we’re in, that you wish you had known before COVID-19 had started?
Gregory Littley:
The truth is, is that when this all started to happen, and so this is … the world has been forever changed since March, 2020, let’s just say that. I would say that for me and the team that I was working with, one of the greatest aspects of the dynamic and the talent that we were, not only working with, but also trying to lead, was that we were already used to pivoting. Digital and social is a living, breathing entity. We are already so used to pivoting quickly, playing catch up with change of algorithms, new features that are being exposed and released. The only real difference was having to finitely add in a layer of Uber sensitivity and Uber health and wellbeing.
Gregory Littley:
Where the strategies may have changed a little, the drive and the intention remained the same, and it was heightened in terms of, you had that added extra layer of really having to consider, when you’re creating a campaign, when you’re creating messaging, when you’re creating content, you have a responsibility as a brand, as a marketer, as a content creator that has perhaps a large following. You have to keep safety in mind, especially when everything from the CDC to the WHO were changing so much of their guidelines and their requests of regional guidelines and global guidelines.
Gregory Littley:
I don’t necessarily wish I knew something before, but what I am thankful for was the ability to take already how we approached work and content, and people as well, and added that hyper layer of sensitivity, wellbeing, and safety measures.
DJ Jamiel:
That’s awesome, Gregory. We do have an audience question here. It’s from Heather, and Anthony, this is for you. Heather wants to know, can you share some of the technology companies being used for events?
Anthony Caponiti:
There are some bigger names that service the event space. I mentioned one, for example, I think I’ve seen used with fair frequency, 6Connex has been around for a while. A software like 6Connex attempts to really bring more of a virtual emulation of what’s happening in your real world event, versus, for example, the platform that we’re using is a networking led platform called Brella, Braintree. There’s a couple different software technologies in that area, but the reality is pretty much any company that’s in the event registration space has now deployed some type of virtual experience.
Anthony Caponiti:
We use Bizzabo for typically our registration and event management. Bizzabo has created multiple integrations and has a live product. There’s a lot out there. Honestly, it’s very comprehensive, but again, it comes down to … or even using just a stack itself, like trying to … We’re deploying a simulcast strategy. Obviously, we’re building on top of things like YouTube Live and others, but I think what you’re really asking is from an event perspective, and all the big reg players have some type of solution, and there’s new ones coming up. There’s one called Airmeet that’s trying to simulate more like tables and that type of conversation, so some very interesting ones. But yeah, a lot of the big C. All of those are players at this point offering some type of live virtual experience for events.
Andrew Whipp:
I have another question for Gregory. Gregory, when you guys are trying to create these kind of challenges, I’m sure this isn’t the first one that you guys have tried. I’m not sure where it ranks in terms of how successful it was compared to other trend challenges that you’ve done on other platforms, or even on TikTok, but why do you think that this one was so successful, and what things about it did you learn along the way that helped you prepare for the next one that you might do?
Gregory Littley:
That’s a good question. I think what set this specific activation and homegrown campaign apart from even past work that I’ve been involved in, in my entire career was never before have we had such a tuned in captive audience. That’s the truth. Across all social platforms, you’re seeing 45%, 55% uptick in users, people that are onboarding specifically to TikTok just exploded really. It was the perfect moment to take advantage of what we were seeing in user behavior, and also take advantage of how people were digesting content in confines of creating a relevant narrative. We knew, at the time, practically everyone across, not only our country, but the world, was really being instructed to social distance and to be mindful of staying in your home or your living space. So, sparking creativity from that, like, what would you do?
Gregory Littley:
A lot of the talent was open to working, and they were getting a little stir crazy, which was understandable. It’s a healthy reaction to being asked to stay in one place when you’re used to traveling all over the world multiple times a month. I do think that it was taking all of that knowledge, recognizing what was happening in the world, and then creating a solution and an answer and content vehicle so that people could not only, or talent could take part in it, but it is an easier low barrier moment for people to join in. That’s why it was born directly. It was created directly to be consumed and to trend on TikTok.
DJ Jamiel:
Anthony, we have another question from the audience, and it is for you. It’s something that you actually just alluded to before in your previous answer when you were talking about tables, and this has to do with replicating breakout groups. [Lexi 00:37:06] asks, how can you make virtual events interactive without breakouts groups only?
Anthony Caponiti:
I think it’s a good question. I may be able to ask or answer Heather’s question a little bit too, thinking about some of the other platform softwares and technology you might’ve considered, but yeah, for sure. Because to that point, given that there is more competition and multitasking it happening, having that attendee lean in more and not just sitting back and watching content is naturally a challenge. In our case, again, as I mentioned, because it was very cohesive with our existing live event strategy, we opted to select a technology partner in software that utilizes one-on-one matchmaking as the backbone.
Anthony Caponiti:
In of itself, one-on-one matchmaking, no matter how it’s deployed, even if the end result is only that you’re introduced to somebody that you might not have otherwise discovered yourself, that’s a form of being interactive, obviously. I guess it depends, if Lexi’s question is more so interactive with your program, and your content, and your broadcast, or just interactive between attendees. We’re using Slack as well as a complimentary channel, because when you just think about it often, again, in terms of like no one size fits all. So we use Bizzabo, for our real world event, we’re using Brella, as I mentioned, we’re using Slack. We’re even using, I think, one other technology out there, or considering it.
Anthony Caponiti:
It’s difficult, but if you have that ability to do some matchmaking, to generate the conversation, to do it in parallel, our software allows for chat during the event. You can turn it on and off. We’re doing, in terms of broadcast, that’s obviously another element. We’re using some more expensive technology in order to make the broadcast itself more interactive. We’re trying to have more of a professional touch of that. Not everybody can necessarily do that, but it’s been democratized. Q&As and polls and live social feeds into your broadcast of your keynotes or sessions, that certainly helps too. There’s a myriad of different ways to attack it, but again, that’s where just knowing your audience really, really, really helps. But personally, I’m a huge, huge proponent of the networking portion, because I think that’s, at the end of the day, that’s why most people are tuning in, or a good majority.
Anthony Caponiti:
If you can give them a great networking experience, and do that through some type of matchmaking introductions, facilitation, that’s going to be a strong strategy.
DJ Jamiel:
Gregory, the next question is for you, and it pertains to tick talk and just how unique of a culture it has. My question is mainly, what advice would you give to the participants right now during this webinar who are thinking about jumping into a social platform like TikTok, but they’re a little intimidated by how unique that culture is? What advice would you give them about jumping in and making sure whatever they create [inaudible 00:40:19] with the culture on there?
Gregory Littley:
That’s a really good question. Honestly, it comes up so much. I think that there was this popular belief that hasn’t really held true. It’s not real, but there’s a popular belief that, specifically to TikTok, there’s this age gate, that you have to be a certain age, or you have to have certain types of abilities, whether you’re prolific and dancing or comedy and all these different things. Honestly, what rings true on TikTok, rings true for any other platform when you’re looking to onboard and you’re looking to utilize and dive in to user behavior. You do have to take a moment and study whether it’s foreign to you or not, you do have to take the steps to understand, to really explore what the different content trends are per platform, per user, per narrative. I think, one of the most exciting things about TikTok right now is, yes, they certainly exist right now.
Gregory Littley:
There’s popular narratives, there’s popular dances, there’s comedy bits. There’s a ton of right now Black Lives Matters of videos that are doing an amazing job to address and to educate a wide audience about real life issues that are happening now. I think it’s some of the most impressive content work that’s coming out of the movement that I’m seeing, it’s taking place on TikTok. There’s a wide breadth of various ways to take part and get into it. But like every other platform, it’s important, from a brand safety, from a company safety, to understand the platform, to dive in, to take the time, to partner with someone who has taken the time, to really understand what that environment is, what does the user behavior dictate, and then to make sure that you’re creating content that’s relevant to join the conversations that you’re looking to be a part of.
Gregory Littley:
With anything else, that upfront, that studying, that foundational knowledge, it’s not different from any other time you’ve been asked to learn, study and understand a social platform. TikTok isn’t different in that respect. What makes it so different right now in comparison to, whether it’s Twitter, or Instagram, or Facebook, I never talk about Facebook, but what makes TikTok stand out right now is, not only it’s mass adoption, it’s the age of the primary user base, even though that’s changing, like I had said. It’s the ability to really go viral and to position your content in front of so many different and new people’s feeds. That’s just really how the actual interface is devised.
Gregory Littley:
You have the section, it’s a dual path. You have your feed split into two, where you have the people that you’re following, and then in addition, you have the ability to be exposed to new users with the For You section, or you have new people that can be exposed to you that you’re not following.
DJ Jamiel:
Yeah, that’s extremely fascinating.
Gregory Littley:
It is. I find it to be the most exciting platform right now for all of the reasons that I just described, but I love any time that in the infancy of a platform, the creators are really in power, because they have the ability to dictate so much of popular cultures conversations. What I’m just so impressed and inspired by is all of the videos that are really taking hold of that power and talking about so much of the ideas and frustration and mental wellness about isolation from COVID, to discussing the current social injustice and the BLM movement right now. It’s a very exciting time for creators to use their voice and to be heard.
Andrew Whipp:
Absolutely. Well, I have a question for both of you about … there’s kind of, and both of you have alluded to this. There’s no going back after COVID-19 in a lot of organizations. It sounds like you guys as well have pivoted and done your best to adjust and adapt to the new world that we’re living in. We’re curious if there’s anything that you think, when things return back to normal, whenever that is, are there things that you’re going to keep around or things that you learned along the way that you think will survive the quarantine, things that you’ll continue doing that you learned during the quarantine?
Gregory Littley:
I’d really ask that, I think the safest route forward is to really let go of the idea or the mental or the business construct of normal, because our entire world has been changed since March, 2020. If we’re speaking to marketers, if we’re speaking to people that are able to put brand policy in place, able to really affect change on the diversity element of their employee base, I lean in and I celebrate the idea that this is uncharted territory and we’re able to really go forward in a positive, helpful, equal direction. The things that we would take away from this moment is really that awakening almost, and that transparency, that so many through … Whether you think that your company or brand handled COVID well, if you think that your company has been handling the social injustice conversation and the reaction to protests and Black Lives Matters, if you think that they’ve been doing a good job, that’s such a wonderful place to keep moving in that direction.
Gregory Littley:
Right now, the things that people are learning and holding onto most, and really holding people accountable, whether it’s a company, a brand, a creator, a person, a celebrity, whomever, the NFL even, it’s that idea of transparency and not allowing people to regress. There’s only progress going forward. When you’re arming yourself with all of these quick, fast lessons that we’ve been forced to learn in the last 90, 100 days that we’ve been awakened to, I’m so excited for what’s going to happen next in terms of company makeups, employee transparency, and emotional intelligence that companies can now guide through based on their reaction to COVID, and how they’re dealing with social injustice conversations right now.
Andrew Whipp:
Anthony, how about you?
Anthony Caponiti:
Yeah. I certainly agreed as well said, echo Gregory’s sentiments in terms of what he’s speaking to, in that component of businesses and purpose has been gaining increasing traction in the everyday operation of, I’d say, even the Fortune 500 now, it’s not where it needs to be. But it’s not a new concept, even when I was in school a gajillion years ago, which I could tell you it was like two years ago. Sustainability and purpose was talked about often. It’s just continuing to gain more and more traction, and then, inflection points certainly, always help in a positive manner to accelerate. Accelerate change, accelerate innovation. I think he’s right about the areas that he touched on. From the perspective of the question of, like you said, the now versus a later, there’s two quick component parts to the way that I think about that question.
Anthony Caponiti:
In general, I am an optimist. In general, I also believe in the power of humanity to innovate and to create change in broad strokes. It’s not saying it’s right or wrong, but pendulum swing. Generally, life is built on balance. You have a pendulum, it swings one way, swings another. I think much of what’s happening now in terms of what the net effect to the way that businesses operate is not going to come and go. There’s going to clearly be some lasting effects. I think what Gregory said that’s very powerful is, just thinking in terms of a new normal in the sense of most likely many of the strategies that you’re employing, if you weren’t before, holistically across the board areas. He touched on just your business were probably very sustainable strategies. From our perspective, as I alluded to, we were already thinking about what can and should be done in a virtual capacity.
Anthony Caponiti:
We were born out of that. In fact, we’ve been sitting around thinking like, what a gold mine we weren’t leaning into. We were thinking in that way, and the good news for us is we were ahead. Ultimately, my belief is live events are not going away. Like I just, I just don’t think that’s realistic. You can debate what the impact is or isn’t, but human beings are still going to gather in live forums. I personally believe there’s still going to gather in large forums. It’s simply a matter of time, then maybe the way that you do that and you interact will certainly change. I think from a marketer’s perspective and an event organizers perspective, what I would say is that, much of what is happening is here to stay.
Anthony Caponiti:
The reason is, think about the business models of event producers, event organizers and media companies. Media companies make a lot of revenue or a good share of revenue, often B2B or B2C, otherwise through experiential, through events. There’s kind of a race to the middle. A lot of ways, media companies, especially B2B ones have started to look more like event organizers and vice versa. Each has a competitive advantage. I think, as more sponsors and partners and others create events, as the walls of access is democratized through technology, you’re going to see more and more people creating events. The reality is you need to be holistic in your strategy, and these strategies in the virtual component and space are here to stay.
Anthony Caponiti:
The question is, how synergistic is it not only with your go-to-market strategy, but your business model? What becomes truly advantageous to your attendee to open up their virtual wallet and to spend on a pass to come to your event, or provide value that’s really 365 days, if your model isn’t 50, 60 events all across the calendar? That’s the key to it. My belief is, sooner than later, you’re going to see some really smart event organizers and marketers putting together some plus models, if you will, that are going to emulate what you’re seeing more so on the media side of the equation.
DJ Jamiel:
That’s awesome. Thanks Anthony for that. I know we’re getting close on time, and we’re going to try to end right exactly at 1:00. Personally, I just have one final question. This is for Gregory. It alludes to what you were talking to before in your previous answer, where you were talking about these moments and movements that are happening. I know there’s a lot of detail that goes into this answer, but can you give us like a 30,000 foot look about how you go about developing content for your brand when it is attached to a movement or a moment that’s happening culturally?
Gregory Littley:
Yeah. Really quickly, there’s two ways to really approach it. If you have then operating in a transparent landscape, then you’re fully prepared for this moment. You don’t need any guidance, you know exactly what you’re doing. If you’re not, it’s a watershed moment, and it’s a time to come to the table. There’s multiple different hashtags that are calling out companies and brands asking them to be transparent in terms of the breakdown of their employees and how their employees identify, whether it be gender or race, or even as getting as detailed as sexuality as well. I think that, like I said, if you’ve been transparent, you’ve been leading in a blended workplace in a way that promotes talent and people and humans, then you’re fine. You’re set.
Gregory Littley:
You’ve been prepared, and you can make these statements and stand behind it and call out culture isn’t going to cancel you. But if you’re not, it’s an amazing opportunity to step up to the plate, say what you want to do, say what you have not been able to do, take responsibility, and then allow your consumers, your employees to work with you to hold you accountable. I think that we’re seeing some brands that are doing it really well and that are leaning into it, and they’re owning up for the blind spots that they’ve had in their past. I think we’re also being exposed right now to brands and companies that are not as educated and aware, and they’re taking the time to do the work, to put in that work, and to make sure that they’re providing a workspace, a company, an employee dynamic that fits the face and the culture of our country and our world.
Gregory Littley:
I look at brands like Glossier, immediately, I think it was possibly June 1st, they released a huge statement saying that they were going to make sure that they were giving a million dollars of their own money, Emily Weiss, the founder of Glossier, of their own money to women of color and black-owned beauty brands and startups. Putting your money where your intention is, is making the difference. People right now, of course, are focused on looking because we care about where we spend our money, and that the money that we spend is reflective of our personal ideals and who we stand for as people. This is the moment to really stand up and be proud that you have done the work, or to admit that you haven’t and that you will do better.
Anthony Caponiti:
Yeah, and can I just make one quick point, because I think it’s critical with the 30 seconds we have to echo what Gregory said?
Andrew Whipp:
Absolutely.
Anthony Caponiti:
We have a big initiative that we’re very proud of that we’ve been working on for more than six months behind the scene with a top Fortune 100 company who’s a big partner of ours in terms of diversity and inclusion. But I think what’s key, as well to what Gregory said is, and I know it’s easier said than done, 100% when it comes to competition, but we also have an opportunity to be, I think, collaborative in these efforts. Part of what we’re proud of and what we hope we’ve started with our announcement on Monday, building on top of what we started a year and a half ago, is using our platform to invite other movements, organizations nonprofits, whatever it may be to be more cohesive.
Anthony Caponiti:
Because I think, often outside of the really biggest ones that are a part of the conversation, it’s very fractional. Anything you can do to collaborate is frankly, just good business. I know there’s limitations to it, but if you can be a catalyst and you can be cohesive for your niche, for your industry, for our case, the convergence of industries, it’s going to bring about a lot of positive change, and I think ultimately, business for your business.
Andrew Whipp:
Well, you guys rock. I think there was a lot of really valuable information in there and a great dialogue and discussion that we were able to have at the end that I’m really happy we were able to have. I think that’s all the time we have for today’s webinar.
7 Strategies for Remote Content Creation
With the universal shift to remote online work, a new virtual culture was born. For marketers, this transformation has ushered in a huge shift in the ways consumers engage with brands and consume content. And, content creators have been dealt an entirely new set of limitations in video production.
But, research suggests that constraints actually drive innovation. Given the constraints of our new virtual culture, we compiled 7 ways marketers can drive innovation.
Know Your Audience
Everyone is online. Being able to capture the attention of a wide audience can be impressive, but to really make the most out of our new virtual culture it’s crucial to know your specific target audience. Start with social media – it’s one of the only ways you can directly interact with your consumers during lockdown. This doesn’t mean that you have to rush to every platform. Identify your primary platforms for engaging with your target audience and focus your energy there, first.
Once you’ve identified your target audience, your content strategy can be more personalized to engage that group. Figure out which platforms your audience is drawn to, and then optimize your content to best suit the capabilities of each platform.
Experiment With New Content
In this new virtual culture, chances are a lot of your brand’s pre-planned marketing projects have been put on hold. In place of these postponed projects, take time to explore new online platforms.
Although podcast listening is down, the NYTimes reports that TikTok usage is up by 15.4%. With popular social media platforms like TikTok, there’s a huge opportunity to build new connections in digital spaces. And, TikTok has the highest social media engagement rates per post, when compared to Twitter and Instagram, making it the perfect platform to retain consumer attention. TikTok videos generally have a very basic production value, making it easy to produce content for the platform within our new virtual culture.
In place of podcast listening, consumers have gravitated towards more visual insight through webinars. Dipping into the world of webinars allows your brand to connect with thought leaders in your industry, while also providing valuable on-demand information. Plus, webinars allow for a more open line of communication between your brand leaders and your audience. With question and answer segments, webinars foster a space for live discussion in this new virtual culture.
Creative advertising agencies, including our own Green Buzz team, have taken to webinar programming as a way of leaning into innovative industry education.
Lean Into User-Generated Content
In today’s virtual culture, anybody can be a content creator. And, this extends beyond what we think of as YouTubers. With platforms like Instagram and TikTok adopting livestreaming capabilities and long-form video content, users have the power to create and share like never before. In fact, Instagram Live saw a 70% increase in usage during the month of March in the US alone.
User-generated content (UGC) already had an enormous footprint on the internet, but the pandemic has skyrocketed content creation to new levels. And yet, a lot of marketers haven’t fully accessed its potential for their brands. With consumers in our new virtual culture prioritizing relatability over aspirational content, it’s the perfect time to lean into UGC.
Simplify Your Production Levels
User-generated content isn’t just useful in creating relatable content; it also removes the pressure and cost of creating content with a high-production value. Especially now, video producers are exploring every option for facilitating remote content creation.
But, the new virtual culture created out of the pandemic isn’t the only driver for simplifying production value. Today, consumers are generally more interested in pared down, realistic content.
Plus, with the newest generation of content consumers increasingly skeptical of advertising, marketers need to prioritize authenticity. According to an AdAge study, 84% of Gen Z trusts a company more if they use actual customers in their ads, and 79% will trust a company more if the images its brand uses are not photoshopped. Both of these statistics point to the rising importance of realistic content and user involvement, especially for the future of brand marketing.
Stay Culturally Relevant
With most of people’s social lives now existing on the internet, information travels faster and trends can seem to expire in an instant. But in order to lean into virtual innovation, it’s important to adapt to the speed and tone of online culture.
Marketers should never compromise their unique brand voice to match fleeting trends. However, being aware of consumer perception of industry leaders is an important part of staying relevant. Make sure your team is staying up to speed with what consumers are actually responding positively too. When you’re appropriately engaged, you’ll also have an easier time identifying trends that will stick, and trends that won’t.
Repurpose Existing Content
Even if your team doesn’t have the bandwidth to be creating new content right now, you can transform your existing content for new platforms. By taking existing well-performing video content to new platforms, your brand can expand its reach to new audiences.
Especially when resources are low, repurposing content presents a low investment option for maximizing brand exposure. Try reinventing video content for TikTok, or bringing webinars to IGTV. Expanding into new platforms with old content also serves as a great starting point for your social media strategy. Your well-performing content should already be optimized for your audience, so repurposing that work will only maximize its effectiveness.
Ensure Your Content Can Stand On Its Own
Lastly, make sure that your content isn’t so specific to our current virtual culture that it won’t stand the test of time. Of course, your marketing should always be relevant, but it’s still important for your content to hold up in the future when it exists outside of the cultural context.
To do so, make sure that every message your company sends aligns with its brand values. Your content can be both timely and reflective of your brand’s stated values. Down the line, this ensures that your messaging still comes off as genuine, and not solely opportunistic.
So, what can your marketing team do today to lean into the new virtual culture? First, begin to understand your audience and the online spaces they occupy. Then, lean into the new virtual culture by investing in digital innovation. By embracing our new consumer culture, brand marketers will stay ahead of the curve.
Emily Herman, Marketing and Communications.
Content Creation that Powers Growth and Digital Transformation: PBS Digital Studios Webinar
Quarantine means video consumption is on the rise, but how do you cut through the noise? It’s time to forget clicks and views. Video success is all about engaging your audience in a relevant way. If you want to up your video content and increase organic growth, look no further than the digital transformation of PBS Digital Studios.
In this webinar, hear from the Head of PBS Digital Studios, Brandon Arolfo, on how to keep viewers engaged and activated and how online communities can help your content grow organically. Learn how to identify new audiences, balance what platforms want and what your organization needs, as well as how to serve audiences during COVID-19.
FEATURED PANELIST
BRANDON AROLFO is the Head of PBS Digital Studios. He is a Grammy-nominated, Webby and Telly-winning creative leader with deep experience developing and producing content that entertains, informs and grows massive audiences. At PBS, Brandon is at the helm of the team responsible for over 2 billion lifetime views and original programming across streaming/OTT, YouTube, Facebook, IGTV, podcasts, and Oculus.
EPISODE TRANSCIPT
Andrew Whipp:
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We know that your time is valuable, especially with the current state of things. So we appreciate everyone choosing to spend that time with us. And above all else hope everyone is staying safe right now. My name is Andrew Whipp, and I’m the lead creative and editor at Green Buzz agency. I’m also joined by my friend and colleague, Tod Plotkin, the founder and CEO of Green Buzz Agency. Tod, how goes it?
Tod Plotkin:
It goes very well, very well. I’m very much looking forward to Brandon’s presentation today.
Andrew Whipp:
Ditto, ditto. And today’s webinar is the fourth in our Green Buzz Agency webinar series which was created to connect our community with industry experts who can help us break down top line strategy, best practices and advice during these tough times. So today we’ll be covering content creation that powers growth and digital transformation during COVID-19. So if you’re looking to break out of the box, bring some new ideas back to your teams, then you are in the right place. To walk us through all of this and much, much more is the multi talented thought leader and PBS Digital Studio head Brandon Arolfo. Brandon is a Grammy nominated Webby and tele-winning creative leader with deep experience developing and producing content that entertains informs and grows massive audiences.
Andrew Whipp:
As the head of PBS Digital Studios, Brandon is at the helm of the team responsible for over 2 billion lifetime views and original programming across streaming YouTube, Facebook, IGTV, podcasts and even Oculus. So thanks Brandon for sharing your time, wisdom and experiences with us. Today, we are really excited to kick this off with you.
Brandon Arolfo:
Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Tod.
Andrew Whipp:
And last but not least, we have a number of webinars coming up. So keep an eye out for those. Next week, I believe we have Carter Hansen, the VP of content and programming at VidCon, as well as Gregory Littley, who’s the VP of social strategy and content at Elite Model World. And there’ll be talking about virtual events and viral activations on trending platforms like TikTok so don’t miss that. It’s going to be a super informative webinar with tons of hands on takeaways. So we hope to see everybody there. So with all that out of the way, let’s jump right into the good stuff. Brandon, would you mind kicking us off?
Brandon Arolfo:
No, thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Tod for the invitation again. So today I’m going to speak a bit about PBS. Think the original programming that we develop and the types of audiences that we’ve grown across multiple platforms. Along the way, I’m going to discuss sort of these four topics, how to identify an audience or gain a growth through online communities, keeping viewers engaged and how we’ve served audiences during COVID-19. I think that in a way, a lot of what we are doing now, a lot of the ways that we’ve been able to change from a digital perspective PBS to doing COVID-19 programming is really because of the way that we were sort of operating before. And we’ve got crews all over the country doing content, we’ve got multiple producers everywhere. And we’re already set up in a remote fashion, like I mean, I’m in DC, obviously. But then I’ve got producers all the way on the west coast. Sometimes we’ve got producers shooting in other countries.
Brandon Arolfo:
So an institution like PBS is concerned, we kind of had a good foundation for how to be nimble and adapt our content. So just for context, these first few slides I’m going to talk a bit about PBS and our different priorities and our different audiences. This is just to give some context and then I’ll go into a few best practices around audience development and like I was saying before how to keep people engaged, and that sort of thing.
Brandon Arolfo:
So for context, just about PBS Digital programming, we along with our member station partners continue to increase the reach and relevance of public broadcasting by developing original digital programming and engaging new communities across multiple platforms. It’s sort of our mission, we see it as sort of our duty to ensure that PBS and member stations reach new and diverse and expanding audiences online that broadcasts can’t always do. Everyone knows there’s a lot of video platforms out there. And look, if PBS thinks that there’s potential for audience growth on a particular platform, if we feel as though we’re going to be able to utilize our core values and sort of springboard off of what PBS holds as far as our mission is concerned on these different platforms, then we’ll give it a go and we’ll see what we can do as far as audience growth is concerned across different platforms, but as far as everyone knows, it’s a constantly evolving space. And it can be really, really hard to grow audiences on a platform and then before you know it, you start to grow an audience there and that platform is no longer in vogue.
Brandon Arolfo:
That platform is no longer getting investment, the platform has become a different thing. And for an institution like PBS, who sometimes does react a bit slower, who does sometimes it takes a bit longer to fit all the pieces together in order to start producing content by the time you’ve gone through all of that. The platform may or may no longer be around like Facebook Watch, for instance, we got on the bandwagon a couple of years ago, whenever Facebook watch launched, thinking that great, we’ll get in early, we’ll try and control our destiny.
Brandon Arolfo:
So far we’ve got good engagement across our Facebook Watch pages. We are definitely growing audiences there, we have a windowing strategy to Facebook from some of our more popular YouTube shows, but it still changes all the time. And tomorrow before you know it, it could go away. So there’s always that, there’s always that sort of risk that you take when it comes to developing audiences across different platforms and new platforms especially.
Brandon Arolfo:
So I think the mainstay for us, obviously, has been YouTube. It’s always been there for PBS ever since Digital Studios, or PBS, I should say, started to produce digital content 2012, 2013. YouTube is one of the first platforms and it’s always been a constant. Like I said before, we tried other platforms. And we are still on other platforms. But YouTube has always been the behemoth. And just for context, I’m sure a lot of people on this call or on this webinar know this, but there are 500 hours every minute of content uploaded to YouTube at 720,000 hours a day.
Brandon Arolfo:
And 90% of internet users 18 to 34 across YouTube, this qualifies them as active users. And for this age group, it’s the most used social YouTube network according to certain sources. And obviously, when there’s 720,000 hours of video content uploaded every day, it’s really hard to kind of cut through the noise. So you’ve got to make sure that you are doing what’s right for your organization as far as your priorities, but you’ve also got to do what’s right by the platform that is your primary platform. So YouTube is your primary platform, and you’ve got to do what’s good for you balancing out. What is going to be good for YouTube and how to sort of gain the algorithm and make sure that you are utilizing all the products that YouTube has to offer or that platform has to offer in order to not only create really good content, but also to get that platform to recognize your content and be willing to take a chance to surface that content to other subscribers or to other users.
Brandon Arolfo:
So when it comes to all the different platforms, I would say, here are our most popular platforms as of now, like I said before, each platform has different audience potential. And each has its own set of optimization techniques to ensure audience growth. If you’re an organization that prefers to window content on multiple platforms this can make that a challenge. Because really, in a way if you have a strategy, okay, great. Well, I’m going to produce this web series or this digital series, it’s going to cost a lot of money. I’m going to want to make sure that I’m using all parts of the buffalo sorry, from Texas, I’ll use that term, but also to be able to maximize this content to other places. You just got to be prepared that it may not always translate from YouTube to Facebook Watch to your owned and operated platforms like we had pbs.org, PBS OTT, Apple TV, and Roku TV.
Brandon Arolfo:
So you just got to make sure that you are prepared to sort of select that primary platform and how to optimize that piece of content or that series or whatever it is for that platform. And then have in mind also, your secondary and tertiary platforms where that video might go. So it might be good to build in with your production partners, we typically build in with our producers, our member station partners, and people who create content with us. Well we’ll consider multiple versions, a version that’s for our primary platform, which is YouTube, which bows down to the YouTube algorithm that drinks a YouTube Kool-Aid, and really allows us to have a successful piece of content on that platform.
Brandon Arolfo:
And then we may create another version that is Windowowable, if I can use that to other platforms like Facebook Watch or somewhere else. But right now, we’ve got across YouTube, we’ve got a network of 21 active YouTube channels. We’ve got seven Facebook Watch pages, we have two apps in Oculus which 360VR and then we’re also creating content, original content for like I said PBS OTT, like Apple TV and Roku and what we refer to as sort of our SVOD play, which is passport. I shouldn’t say SVOD because it’s not necessarily a subscription based service but there definitely is a membership. It’s a membership perk. When you become a member you get access to passport.
Brandon Arolfo:
So these are the four primary platforms that we’re producing content for. But there are other platforms in our universe that we’re also creating content for but these are the four primary ones. When it comes to let’s say different formats and different types of content, digital content that PBS does. And look it, this is just the way that we refer to it. It’s a way to keep it clean internally. If you’re from a funding perspective, from a underwriting perspective, and just from a format perspective. So, on one side, we’ve got our ongoing programming, which is sort of what I was referring to when I was talking about our active PBS YouTube channels.
Brandon Arolfo:
So these channels, they’ve been around for multiple seasons, some of them produce between 20 and 45 episodes a year. We’re continuously adjusting for audience data and feedback. This is really original content that’s optimized for those platforms. So most of it, like I said is YouTube based, some of it though is straight up made for Facebook Watch. And some of it’s made for other platforms. But it’s really, it’s platform-specific content. And it serves large audiences by engaging really in these communities within these overall audiences. Typically, a lot of this content is host driven, and I’ll talk about this more later on. Not all of it, but typically, it’s host driven, we find that in this space it is in a way building a show. A series around a subject matter expert, it gives us PBS, it allows us to be more bona fide because a lot of our experts are subject matter experts in their field and then what this series is created around so some of our experts or some of our hosts have got PhDs, some of them are music or musicians if they’re on a musician show or whatever it might be.
Brandon Arolfo:
And we also find that marketing and promotions is easier when you’ve got a host involved because they’re able to typically their of their digital natives and their of social media and they know how to promote their show across other platforms as well as engage with other hosts or other shows that may not be within our network itself. And then the other bucket of content that we have is what we refer to, for lack of a better way to say it, and I wish that I could hire like an agency to help us figure out these terms, but like we refer to our other bucket of content as multi platform.
Brandon Arolfo:
And these are more like limited run series or miniseries that typically connect to larger PBS events. So for instance, I think there’s a thumbnail there from our digital miniseries called Stellar. This is a six-part miniseries that was inspired by PBS’s summer of space that happened a couple of summers ago or maybe it was last summer.
Brandon Arolfo:
There were several massive’s last summer, there were several massive broadcast shows that had to do with space, the 50th anniversary of the moon landing or whatever it was. So because we wanted to extend that, for lack of a better way to say it campaign of summer of space to other platforms, to other PBS platforms, we created this miniseries, asked three of our YouTube hosts to be a part of this six-part miniseries, we set them off on a cosmic road trip around the country to visit some of the most important space research facilities that America has. And this is a miniseries, sure it use these other YouTube hosts from their own shows, but it was a miniseries onto itself, and we try and do that as much as possible and these miniseries are distributed in multiple ways.
Brandon Arolfo:
So we may tailor a couple of the episodes to fit that particular host’s channel and their series but then also, that miniseries itself might be windowed onto other PBS owned and operated platforms. It may be on a Facebook watch page. It kind of depends on the KPIs and the goal of that content, the content is also used. And the last thing I’ll say about this, we also use this content for like CTA integration like calls to action. So for instance, a miniseries that we did called It’s Lit was tied to this massive event that PBS had a couple years ago called the Great American Read, which is basically asking Americans to vote on their favorite book, it was a larger campaign that over a year’s time, almost a year’s time, it asked Americans about their favorite book.
Brandon Arolfo:
So this show this It’s Lit show was episodes onto itself, it was a series onto itself, but it also was encouraging its fans and its viewers to go vote on their favorite book. So you’re able to not only create a great show for a great miniseries inspired by PBS, larger PBS events, but you’re also able to weave in marketing capability to create awareness about broadcast shows, and you’re also able to integrate things like CTAs into the episodes and for us obviously the value is creating good content and engaging audiences across different platforms, but also to add value to PBS.
Brandon Arolfo:
And for funding purposes as well we will use this as marketing potential as well. So across our original content, across our multiplatform content, as well as our ongoing series, right now we have across YouTube and Facebook, we’ve got 26 million plus subscribers, and we’re averaging around 53 million views a month, between all of our content and I think that one of the important things and that’s all great, great, neat, neat, neato you’ve got a good audience and you’ve got a great amount of views. Super great. I think that the thing that YouTube especially likes from our content is the retention rates. Plus it proves to us that great, we’re doing a good job. People are actually watching the majority of the content that we put up there when I say that not just per video, but they’re also watching the majority of the content all the way through, let’s say.
Brandon Arolfo:
So 55, we have a 55 to 64% retention rate on YouTube. And this varies depending on the channel, depending on the series, but this is a really good thing compared to other PBS content or other platforms, and compared to other content in the YouTube universe, this is a good healthy retention rate that we’ve been told proves to YouTube that obviously, we’re keeping people in platform and when YouTube sees that sort of thing, they’re more likely to help you out when it comes to maybe pushing people to your next video, even though you’ve got a bit of control over that.
Brandon Arolfo:
But also, when surfacing your videos to people who may not be subscribing to your channel, they’re more likely to do that if the retention rate is higher. So this is just for more context. This is just some of our popular ongoing series that we have renewed for 2020 and beyond 2020 a bit. You’ll see it, some are member station partnerships, so some of the digital programming that PBS develops and produces is produced in partnership with member stations. But also we’ve got what we refer to… And again, it’s I hate to say this what we refer to as national producer partnerships. So these are a series. This is content that isn’t necessarily produced by PBS entity or member station. These are production companies and producers or host or whatever it might be around the country. And we’ve got some incredible producers and production companies that some of them had been with PBS Digital Programming since the beginning. So we got really, really lucky there.
Brandon Arolfo:
So getting more into the best practices part of the conversation, I think that… So I’m going to talk a bit about researching vibrant communities, making a community plan and how to get your audiences involved in the next few slides. But I want to say that and I kind of touched on this earlier that okay, great. Look, especially those of us who have been in the business for a while now, creating content, like be it a traditional content or be it nonfiction TV programming, or YouTube videos or whatever it is. I think a lot of people who are successful and who have been around long enough, they understand how to make good video, and they understand how to make a good video series be it the combination of a great post or great narrative or storytelling or whatever it might be. But when you’re dealing with digital platforms, it isn’t enough just to do a really, really great video series. It’s a lot of it. But it isn’t enough.
Brandon Arolfo:
When you’re going into the development of a new digital series, obviously, you’ve got another platform you want to be on, obviously, you’ve got to know the different tools that you can utilize to make your show really good, all that kind of stuff. But it’s really important that you’re using everything on that platform to make your show and to make your series the most successful it can be and that’s everything from recognizing the different products you can use. It recognizes that you can’t just put a video up there but you’ve got to have the engagement. You got to have people commenting on it. You’ve got to have people sharing it. You got to have… The retention rate has to be up.
Brandon Arolfo:
If you’re on Facebook, it’s got to be thumb stopping, if it’s on YouTube, it’s got to be etc, etc. So there’s all this stuff that goes into it. But there’s also having the conversation with your audience and with your community. And the more that you show the platform that you are having a conversation, that you’re using the tools again, the more likely that platform is going to support you better, to surface you to people that it might not be surfacing or just to give you some more love from a marketing perspective.
Brandon Arolfo:
So identify your audience and research vibrant communities. So what this means is, this is basic stuff. We begin to develop a new show, we might know broadly that there’s a need for a show about math, or that we think that a show about art pop will be popular or that we think that a new physics show is going to be, is going to be popular. It’s really good though if you are and everyone sort of knows this, but digital is massive and there are massive communities. And it’s not enough just to say, “Okay, we’re going to make a show about space. So we’re going to make a show about, I don’t know math.” Like I said before, you’ve got to really drill in deep, especially in the beginning of who that audience is that you’re going to be serving so that when you launch your show, there’s organic growth at first, there’s an audience that, that show attaches to that people recognize themselves in this show.
Brandon Arolfo:
So by starting off, while you’re developing the concept for this show, while you’re developing, you know what this is going to look like, even which platform is going to be your primary platform of distribution, it’s really good to start asking questions about the audience, to really sort of get an audience first perspective and that’s basic stuff. So that’s age, location, gender, education, that’s all pretty easy. But then moving to the next level, that’s where these people congregate. So if I had to show X, where might this audience about physics, diving deeper into physics, about black holes, diving deeper into black holes, is this show about gravity or episode’s going to be about gravity, physics gravity or some episode’s going to be about the gravitational pull of love?
Brandon Arolfo:
What makes this show different? And who is the audience there that’s going to watch a show. And then where does this audience currently sort of congregate, even if you’re making it up in a way, you’re still sort of figuring out, “Okay, well these group likes this, this group is talking about this, across this blog, or cross this publication, or whatever it might be.” So you’re getting a sense of where they congregate and where they speak to each other.
Brandon Arolfo:
And then what are these people interested in? And this part’s really good from a competitive analysis sense. So while you’re doing this sort of exercise, you’re also looking at other shows that these people might be interested in. So common hobbies like what other television programming are they watching? What are they watching on IGtv? What are they watching on YouTube? And how is our show going to be different than what they’re already talking about? And what they’re already listening to, and how’s it going to capitalize on their hobbies and how’s it going to capitalize on closely related content that they’re watching.
Brandon Arolfo:
So during the development process and before launch, what we’ll typically do is and this is just what we typically do to keep everyone on the same page, we will create an audience targeting statement. And that’s for everyone from internal partnerships for people like corpcom’s to promotions to social media, to people who are on my team, like the programming people, to the ops people, to the producers, to the hosts, to everybody, we just we create an audience statement for internal purposes to really keep everybody on the same page. And then all of his work that you’re doing ahead of time be it the audience targeting or be it stuff like this you can reuse this later on when it comes to descriptions for episodes, when it comes to show descriptions, when it comes to your press release.
Brandon Arolfo:
So as you’re doing this, it’s not like all of your work is just going to evaporate. All this is going to be used not just during the development of the show, but also during production and in publishing. So just real quick this was a show that we launched a couple of years ago called Monstrum, seriously y’all it’s like one of my favorite shows, I can’t say my favorite but one of my favorite shows that PBS Digital does. It’s a unique from a competitive analysis. There wasn’t much else out there like this, but we did a survey, just speaking of data or qualitative data. We did a survey a few years ago. And one of the questions that we asked is, “Well, what kind of show would you want PBS to produce next?” And in a weird way we got thoughts about monsters.
Brandon Arolfo:
So we were like, well, how the hell do we make a show about monsters so we kept thinking about it, kept doing the kind of analysis, kept seeing who the audience might be for this show. Then we reached out to a producer, we ended up finding an amazing host called Dr. Emily Zarka who is a subject matter expert in the field of folklore and monsters because she got her PhD in [inaudible 00:23:54] but Victorian literature and folklore I believe so she’s like the perfect host for this show. So the audience statement for this show is this is a show for comic book geeks, horror buffs and fans of Netflix, more monster movies and Stephen King.
Brandon Arolfo:
They love the mythology unit in elementary school. They may feel a special connection to Wednesday Addams and Tim Burton and other ghoulish icons, they probably wear more black than most. There’s a lot… It’s funny. Sure, great. But there’s a lot in there that allows us to sort of keep going in the right direction when it comes to this show and launching this show. So make a community plan. Similar to what I was saying before it’s important. Where else do the audiences congregate? Where else do the viewers like have a conversation?
Brandon Arolfo:
And if you start to monitor these different, let’s say conversations in these different areas, and you can actually sort of find out A, are they talking about you? Are they talking about your show, which does happen and if you’ve done your research ahead of time properly during your community plan, sort of strategy you’re really able to branch out from the kind of videos and content that you may have slated to be up first. And to be able to start branching out into other subject matter. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times that I’ve seen that episodes have come to mind, because we’re following our audiences across another social media platform. For instance, we have a great show that just hit 2 million views this morning I think. Not 2 million views, 2 million subs. It’s called PBS Space Time.
Brandon Arolfo:
And a couple of years ago, we were following a few subreddits that we knew that our audience congregated on. They were having a conversation about LIGO. And I don’t know if many people on the webinar know about LIGO but gravitational stuff I’m not going to go into because A I’m not such a matter expert, and that’s not the point. The point is, is that we heard people talking about LIGO, we knew that there was a ravenous group on subreddit that was discussing LIGO. So we didn’t know when LIGO was all going to go down. So we went ahead and we banked an episode and stored it away for when the LIGO happened and Einstein’s theory came true, then we were going to publish that episode.
Brandon Arolfo:
So what we did was when it did happen, we were able to put a sneak preview of this episode into this subreddit and people went nuts over it because they knew we were listening to them. Some of them were already fans of the show, but it converted. I don’t have the exact measurements, but it was able to convert several people over to space time and the share rate on that episode was nuts because sure it was a good episode. It was timely, but also because we did our time, instead of spending money on paid socials and paid media, which doesn’t really always work. We found out a way to do it organically through having a community playing, knowing where people are congregating and knowing how to speak to them in different ways. Now that all said there’s a lot of different other platforms out there that you could be following across your community plan.
Brandon Arolfo:
But you can’t spread yourself too thin because well, hey, I know this because I work at PBS. And we’re resource strapped but no one has the resources to follow everything. So it’s about picking one or two platforms, other platforms other than your primary platform and then following those platforms, and don’t spread yourself too thin because what’s the point? Keep audience engaged and activated? I think along the lines of what I was saying before, it’s listening to your viewers. It’s figuring out ways to listen to your viewers, be it in platform, in your comments, or in community tab on YouTube or across other platforms as well. I would not like let’s say that you have gotten the budget from a network or let’s say you’re doing an ongoing show or whatever, depending on how many episodes you have. If the order is big enough, there’s danger in shooting all episodes at one time.
Brandon Arolfo:
And if a network or somebody says, “Well, we need to have all of these different shows planned out now and episodes planned out now.” That’s great and all but there has to be room for adaptation. There has to be room to adapt your content depending on what your first episodes or your first set of content is telling you. If you had to shoot out all 40 episodes in a couple of months, then you’re kind of screwed because it may not be relevant, you may not be hitting on… You’re doing what you assume is going to work on that platform instead of releasing something, listening, iterating and then adapting and then putting out more content later on.
Brandon Arolfo:
So there’s a way from workflow perspective, from economies of scale spread out that content production and development. And that’s great. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have an idea what you’re going to do, but you really need to sort of like respond in a way to audience behavior and what people are talking about in almost in real time, kind of collaborate other influencers and serious channels. That’s great. So if you’ve got like-minded friends, if you’ve got like-minded hosts, there’s nothing wrong with collaborating with them, do an episode on their channel, they’ll do an episode on your channel, it’d be great. It shows that you’re engaging with audiences, you’re trying to give them what they want on somebody else’s channel even as long as you’re sort of adhering to your own personality and your own authenticity.
Brandon Arolfo:
And then of course incorporate audience feedback and questions into your content as much as possible. Now, that’s not just within the video content, but that’s when it comes to comments and everything else. So just a really, really quick clip. It’s on the next slide, but let me set it up. Like I was saying before, we develop content, it’s okay to be smart for instance, it’s one of our older shows, it’s got 3 million subs. Dr. Joe Hanson’s amazing. I love him, I would go on vacation with him, we’d have a good time.
Brandon Arolfo:
This show really responds to audience feedback and data. And in a clip I’m going to show Dr. Hanson tells viewers that he’s making an episode because of their response to a previous episode. I’ll run it and then I’ll go on the next slide.
Joe Hanson:
“Hey, smart people. So a few weeks ago, we made a video about the pyramids and how while they are pretty hecking impressive, we can trace the evolution of their construction and see the ancient Egyptians using trial and error even making a few mistakes. Which basically tells us they didn’t need aliens to build them. They just needed science. You guys really liked that video, but a few of you were a little bothered that despite the fact it was called, who built the pyramids, I didn’t talk about how the pyramids were made. So let’s talk about it.”
Brandon Arolfo:
Great, thank you. And just a little bit more on keeping audience engaged and activated. Like I said before, creating videos based on viewer suggestions is great, like Dr. Hanson did in a way, feature your viewers on the show, it’s always a great way to do it. Even if the people who are recognizing that it’s not them, it’s still great that maybe next time I’ll get recognized. Shout out individual viewers on your videos, same thing and then ask viewers as much as possible to participate. Now all of this changes over time. So there’s different ways of doing this. But this is just sort of a baseline of how to do it. You can use different products available in Facebook or on YouTube or wherever the platform is to do this sort of thing. But it’s always a good sort of baseline.
Brandon Arolfo:
So just another clip. So I think that one of the things, and this might change over time, but it’s definitely in there now, I’ve seen some obviously amazing content, digital content that makes me cry, that makes me laugh that makes me get angry. It definitely can be likened to the same sort of subject matter that is on PBS broadcast that’s on other streaming networks, or whatever it is. But no matter how though, no matter how, what the subject matter is, or whatnot, it’s still delivered in a conversation away across digital platforms. I think that’s something that’s unique now at least, that might change but I feel like the more conversational you are, the more that a host feels like the friend of the viewer, the person that, that viewer might see themselves in, then I think it has a better chance of sort of resonating with different viewers, different communities considering this is a pretty… In a way it’s a personal experience.
Brandon Arolfo:
So this clip, I’ve used this before and it’s a bit older but I love this clip from one of my favorite shows the art assignment in one of my favorite people, Sarah Green. I won’t set this up too much because it’ll explain itself. But basically, she’s been incredibly conversational. And she’s basically explaining something from a previous episode, so please roll it.
Sarah Green:
“A few weeks ago, we got a question from Trey Willetto, who asked how we respond to people who say, “I could have done that. It’s so simple about art.” For example, Felix Gonzalez Torres. John and I answered the A, you probably actually couldn’t do it. And B, you didn’t do it. But some of you like Becky were dissatisfied. She said, “Doesn’t that imply that the artist has no merit outside of some guy thought about doing this first and now we care about it?” It just seems like a really lazy answer. Challenge accepted Becky, I’ll give you a less lazy answer.
Okay, if you’re looking at a work of art and feel compelled to say I could do that, or my kid could do that. The first thing you want to do is assess if you really could do that, take some hard edge abstraction like this painting by Piet Mondrian-“
Brandon Arolfo:
So I didn’t mean to cut it off, if you want to see more please go to the video I need your view. I love that example because A, she’s conversational, B she’s referencing another episode and C she’s incorporating someone’s comment into that cold open. And it really just hits on so many different points for me. Plus, I just like her, I love her delivery there. The algorithm, whatever the hell that means, right? I know it’s like, it’s the black box. We don’t always know what… We don’t always know what makes our content popular on different platforms.
Brandon Arolfo:
And one of the things that happens during the upload of a video is it takes time to process it. Sure, of course, it’s looking for indecency, it’s looking for things that may not be appropriate for that platform, but it’s also analyzing the platform, it’s analyzing. I’m sorry, it’s analyzing that video. And it’s also analyzing all of the other content and metadata that’s associated with that video. It’s assessing that video. It’s assessing… Overall it’s trying to give… It’s assessing a score, how likely that this video in this content is going to keep a person on platform, how likely it’s going to be to keep a viewer going to the next video, how likely is it that they can feel more comfortable about surfacing your video to other viewers that may not be in your channel or in another, or even if you’re on Facebook and a feed of somebody that normally doesn’t feature you even though you’re their friend.
Brandon Arolfo:
So when you’re creating the video content, it’s important, of course, make it audience first, make it a good video. But you’ve also got to think about the other content that goes along with that and that really, there’s several different, there’s metadata all over the place, but when we say content, I’m talking about not just the video content but the title, the thumbnail, the video and closed captioning and description, all of this meshes together and the AI of the platform is able to analyze your video, take it apart from its audio, take it apart from this video cells to see if those video cells and that audio matches up the look and feel of your thumbnail, and plus it’s also analyzing is this thumbnail representative of the video but also is it a good thumbnail? Is it the kind of colors that people respond to.
Brandon Arolfo:
The AI is going to be able to recognize different faces or different objects that are in the thumbnail so it’s going to know if your video’s about cars, your thumbnail may want to have something about cars in it and it’s scoring it there. The video and the closed captioning is important as well because the closed captioning is interned in SEO too and the description making sure that the description is good for SEO but also making sure that the description lines up with your video, making it all one cohesive sort of thing, just sort of like the flow of things and title, and thumbnail should tell a story together. So the accuracy of pick a title that is an accurate description of the videos content and the platform will know. Trust me, it’s going to know if that title is an accurate description of your video.
Brandon Arolfo:
Optimization, use recognizable and frequently searched keywords at the start of the title. Branding, include obviously consistent branding, such as episode numbers and that sort of thing, but that’s really on how you think your show should be represented. And then get to the point, stay between 65 and 75 characters and here’s the deal. When it comes to thumbnails and when it comes to titles. That stuff can be changed later on too. The video can’t be changed, the file can’t be changed, but you can adapt the title and the thumbnail and the description years later, for instance, there was a, forgive me, I don’t remember the exact timeline here.
Brandon Arolfo:
But there was a bunch of volcanoes that erupted like a year ago, I think. I don’t know where they were, but they were some where on the planet. And we’ve had a couple of videos about volcano eruptions and the science behind that. We went back in, we changed the thumbnails, we changed the titles, and we changed the descriptions, not completely separate from what we had originally done. But we just added a few key terms in there that we knew people had been searching for the last couple of days because of the recent volcanic explosions, and we changed a few things around to make it a bit more modern. Boom, it went nuts.
Brandon Arolfo:
Not only did the algorithm recognize that we were fiddling with the content, but also it became highly shareable. The content became a highly viewed and it spiked within a week I think one of the videos from our show Physics Girl went up a couple of hundred thousand views, it was kind of nuts. Serving audiences during COVID-19. During this strange time PBS has continued to adjust its strategy to serve the American public in a number stations. That’s kind of our responsibility, obviously, is to modify our programming to represent what’s happening in the world. But conventional production with PBS and other places, obviously, I’m sure there are producers on the webinar now, conventional production has slowed down due to social isolation and other things, but many of our digital productions have been able to remain operational, really because of a lot of what I have just now covered when it comes to being flexible, when it comes to already being able to respond to audience behavior quickly when it comes to being able to have a conversation with audiences.
Brandon Arolfo:
Bring some calm to things, some of our shows, we’ve got a handful of science shows, we’ve got a handful of DIY shows, we’ve got a handful of other sorts of content that are related to PBS, and we’ve been able to do COVID-19 related content within these individual series. But that still relates to their communities and relates to their theme. So for instance, it’s okay to be smart, which is all about biology and science, they were able to publish a video about fighting the curve.
Brandon Arolfo:
Another show, another one of my favorite shows is Two Cents, it’s a personal finance show. They’ve done episodes about the economy and about how you should spend your stimulus check. So it’s all about doing it in that tone and in that voice, and obviously your still connecting to what PBS is, but the ability of these different hosts and these different digital natives I hate to use that term because it makes me sound like I’m not and I’m old, but also they don’t necessarily need the green screen studio that we set up. They don’t necessarily need to be in the field on location, the research and the rigor of the information still remains. It’s just being presented differently. And considering we were already on that verge of conversational, and bloggie vloggie style, audiences are more accepting of the look and feel of the format considering they’ve already built a rapport with these different hosts and with these different channels.
Brandon Arolfo:
It is because we are already so digitally, like that’s our mentality that we’ve been able to have very nimble workflows. I mean our infrastructure that we use the most or is cloud based technology to transfer files from between editors, to transfer files between hosts editors, to transfer notes between us and in our different producers. It’s all remote cloud based, we definitely remain community focused. We don’t want to create alarm during this time, we want to get accurate information.
Brandon Arolfo:
And we are following the response that whenever we publish something via video or via a social media promotion and whatever it is, a comment we’re definitely monitoring the response to see okay, are we are we giving this right? Are we still adhering to our community and what they expect from us. We definitely are relying more on hosts for engagement not only on that platform, but also on other social media platforms that they may appear on, we’re definitely relying on them to help out to keep audiences let’s say hot or warm, because maybe we couldn’t publish a video this week because of social distancing or whatever. We’re utilizing hosts on other platforms to keep wanting to remind them that we are around and that more videos will be coming soon.
Brandon Arolfo:
Or even just to get, if we couldn’t publish a video, they may just do something on Twitter or whatever live sort of giving, sort of giving the same details that would have been in an episode, we’re partnering with other influencers. So we are collaborating with other influencers as much as possible to cross pollinate audiences still during this time. And again, audiences are rather forgiving during this time, as long as you know you are remaining authentic and you are serving them with content that they probably want right now. So that is the presentation. I think now we can do questions. I feel like I was on time. I feel like I did pretty well on time.
Andrew Whipp:
Yeah, no, you did phenomenally. Thank you so much, Brandon. And I mean, one thing I definitely am excited about is just all of the takeaways that you put into this presentation. I definitely will be coming back through the slides and taking notes. I mean, as a production company, we are in constant development mode, trying to come up with ideas for shows and working with media outlets like yourself. So it’s awesome to hear how you guys approach it and some of the techniques and insights that you have to making great content. And I guess I’ll just kick it off with the first question.
Andrew Whipp:
I feel like a lot of the content that I see on YouTube that’s successful is host driven. And you had mentioned that a lot of your content at PBS is host driven. And I’m just curious, on a platform like YouTube, that’s so big. Do you feel like you almost need to have a host to be successful if you’re trying to make entertainment type content?
Brandon Arolfo:
I do. And I’m going to sound hypocritical when I answer this because it kind of depends. And again, this makes me sound kind of weird, but it kind of depends on your goals on that platform. Like for instance, frontline, which is one of the most amazing PBS let’s say brands. They put their episodes… They’re folding feature, documentaries and such onto YouTube, and they have amazing engagement and amazing views. And so they’re just putting it straight from broadcast onto YouTube. But when it comes to making like a traditional, let’s say YouTube show, I do think you need a host, I really, really do. I think that, that is part of that universe. Now, I’m not saying that, that’s the only way to be successful, I’m really not. But it is something that those audiences are more used to. And it’s just about doing it in a way that’s going to be good for you and for the audience and for that host, it’s sometimes hard to have a host who is used to doing content in their way for their audiences on their own production schedule with their own workflow.
Brandon Arolfo:
That’s what makes the content so good and so unique. And then sometimes when they partner up with a network like us who had other priorities and who need to whittle in X, Y, and Z because of educational purposes or because of grant stipulations, or whatever it is, it can get a little hard sometimes for that host who’s been used to being on their own for so long to sort of adapt to, but that’s sort of the risk that you take, but I do think it easier strategy to build audiences on YouTube would be to use a host. I’m not saying that’s the only way to go though.
Andrew Whipp:
Awesome. So I’m going to jump into one of the questions here from the Q&A at the bottom of Zoom that Andrew was just talking about. It came about halfway through the presentation from Kevin and he was asking when researching communities, do you interview community members? And I think just as an additional layer to that how are you kind of going out there and analyzing and figuring out what your audience is and what they might want?
Brandon Arolfo:
That’s a great question. That’s a great question. And PBS in many ways takes that super seriously. It depends for us on the digital side. It depends on the show. It depends on our goals. We started the show recently with KLRU in Austin, Austin PBS called Say It Loud which is a great show. It’s about black history, black culture, it’s a show that needed to happen. It was a show that is funny. It is a show that is dealing with some heavy subject matter. And we knew that we didn’t want that show just to become a new YouTube channel, we wanted to actually be effective. We wanted to be representation of the community.
Brandon Arolfo:
So we held a few different, with the help of Austin PBS, we held a few different like, let’s say panels, and a few different community events to play the episodes, two to make sure that we were on point and to make sure that even during the development process, we were reaching out to different communities like black cultural connection and other communities to make sure that in developing the show, we were hitting on topics that were relevant and weren’t cheesy and and we’re actually going to be not redundant.
Brandon Arolfo:
Also PBS takes great care to do and we participated a few times in this as well different focus groups and focus panels, obviously, you’ve got focus groups whenever you’ve got the new season of Downton Abbey or whatever to look at, but we use focus groups a lot. Before we may publish a large miniseries on digital that it may be a kids oriented program or another show that may be sort of out of our wheelhouse. We’ll create a focus group derived from specific communities that are a part of the PBS universe to make sure that they were accurately doing that content. So it varies, but we do try and interview and talk to as many community members during the production and then during the at least the first few episodes after we launch to make sure that we’re on point and then we’ll check in every now and again.
Andrew Whipp:
Great. And I’m also going to take this next question from the Q&A section at the bottom of your Zoom, it comes from Andrew, said on YouTube, are you seeing growth in viewership on TV devices, as opposed to desktop or mobile and is that changing any of your strategy or content, and I will relay one kind of anecdotal factoid along this. I know when Quibi launched about seven weeks back, one of the biggest complaints was that you couldn’t have it on your television that you could only watch it on your phone. Saw a lot of coverage in the media about that. So I thought this question from Andrew jumped out at me.
Brandon Arolfo:
No, it’s great. It’s great. And I mean, like when I’m at home, I might be watching YouTube on my phone, but I’m definitely going to display it on my Apple TV or on a bigger device. But we see the biggest growth area when it comes to YouTube viewership specifically is in desktop and mobile. I don’t know for sure if it’s being projected from a phone or a desktop on to a television set, let’s say on traditional television set, but we see our most viewership increase on desktop and recently the last year or so it’s been on mobile devices.
Andrew Whipp:
Cool, cool. I brought up Quibi and I believe, I don’t know the exact dates. I know HBO Max is launching relatively soon-
Brandon Arolfo:
It launched today.
Andrew Whipp:
Today. Yeah. So today and you have Apple TV, you have Peacock is launching soon, or it already has launched from NBC. So there’s a lot of new entrants there, a lot more so than there was for years and years now. We’re in a little off topic here. But what are your thoughts on the streaming wars?
Brandon Arolfo:
Look, I mean, I think it’s harder and harder for… I think it was disparate before, I think it was several different things that we as audiences could select to view I think now obviously with the streaming wars and everything is sort of going back to the way it used to be in a way. It’s like we got away from being three or four massive or five massive networks or whatever it is. And then it became super disparate for years, and now I feel like it’s going back to conglomerates I feel like obviously Disney and Fox have obviously joined together for Disney Plus and that’s only going to get bigger and vacuum up more stuff and now with Peacock, NBCUniversal that is now several different things merge back together I think we’re going to have a return in a way to the way it was before when it comes to content being aggregated together and only coming from a few specific sources.
Brandon Arolfo:
And for PBS it kind of sucks because a lot of our content on the broadcast side is coming from, we can’t necessarily afford right now because the streamers are paying such big prices on Netflix or whoever might, may be Apple TV or Apple Plus, sorry, whoever it is, it’s harder for us to compete from dollar perspective because we’re probably, meaning we don’t always have the money to compete with those who may be just vacuuming up content right now.
Brandon Arolfo:
So yeah, that’s kind of my thought on that. And the good side on us on the digital side, our content is original so we’re still sort of doing our thing. But on the broadcast side, we definitely feel a little bit.
Andrew Whipp:
Yeah, I can definitely imagine that. I mean, one of the questions that I just saw in the Q&A to pivot a little bit, another great one from Andrew, that I think is super pertinent. And a question that we’re always asking is, do you find that there’s any benefit to regularity, to creating appointment viewing? So releasing at a specific consistent day and time? Or do you think that doesn’t really matter at the end of the day?
Brandon Arolfo:
No, I do. I think frequency on a platform if we’re talking about YouTube, or even Facebook Watch, or hell even even our OTT play, I think that there is a lot of value in frequency. I think that when you get all frequency, when you get off a publishing schedule, you should let people know, be it if you’re on YouTube in the community tab section, if you’re on Facebook, it is the first comment, whatever it might be, I think you need to let them know, “Hey, look, we’re going to be pausing for a while,” because there’s already just so much content. And there’s already so much out there and it’s not like a regular primetime schedule block, daytime schedule block, kids day block, it is all over the board.
Brandon Arolfo:
So the more that you can help organize your audience and get them organized as when to expect the next video, the better. And plus the platform realizes that you’re doing that too. The frequency part.
Andrew Whipp:
Cool, I want to talk about measurement a bit. And I’m curious, what tools, what software you use for that? How do you measure success, especially if you’re starting out a new show? What are some of the metrics that you’re looking at and what software are you using to analyze that?
Brandon Arolfo:
So it depends on the platform. So I’ll just talk about YouTube because it’s got what I think is the most robust set up in platform tools. You’re bowing down, obviously to what YouTube finds important when it comes to metrics. Obviously, like I said, you also got to get what you need as far as your organization is concerned. And then you’ve got the whole money part to deal with too. And I think when it comes to in-platform metrics, when it comes to like YouTube dashboard, it’s always important to be looking at, like I was saying, retention rate’s really, really important. Where your subscribers are coming from is important, how your videos are being watched is really, really important.
Brandon Arolfo:
And from a competitive analysis and I’ll say that we use, so when it comes to other YouTube videos, like if I’m looking at Eater or Vox or Viacom Digital Studios, we use software, we use software called vidIQ. I don’t know how many people may be familiar with that. But it allows you to sort of do a 30,000 foot kind of deep dive into what other YouTube videos are doing or to what other channels are doing as far as tagging. As far as their optimization is concerned, as far as what they’re using for, I don’t know, any other SEO stuff and vidIQ gives videos a score of how it’s doing when it comes to the title isn’t too long, or whatever it might be, so that you can sort of see what other like-minded or competition is doing so that you can sort of do something different or you can steal from them, and maybe use similar tags as to what they’re doing.
Brandon Arolfo:
I think it depends on the platform again, but like internally, we’ve got our own CMS system, we’ve got our own internal metrics that we find, that we look for, for success. One thing that PBS uses because so much of our content is windowed on the different platforms, we’re using an average minute watched sort of stat metric across all content. So if one of our shows that’s on broadcast is also appearing on OTT, it’s also simulcasting on to Facebook or on to YouTube or wherever it’s going. We’re going to use a data point that’s the average minute’s watched across all the different platforms with unique users. So it kind of depends on the platform. And it depends on what we’re trying to prove from the metrics?
Andrew Whipp:
Definitely, yeah to have that data has to be an enormous help in kind of curating your content, making sure it’s headed in the right direction, and it’s reaching the people that you want it to reach. So I think that that is all the time that we have for the webinar today. To everyone who joined us, thank you guys for popping in. We hope you had fun. I hope you learned a couple things along the way. I know that our team always leaves with ideas. And we hope that these presentations did the same for all of you. And finally, an enormous thank you to Brandon for sharing his time and his insights with us. Thank you so much, Brandon.
Brandon Arolfo:
You got it. Thank you for having me.
Andrew Whipp:
Absolutely. And once again, we have a number of webinars coming up. So keep an eye out. Next week we’ll have Carter Hansen, the VP of content programming at VidCon. And Gregory Littley VP of social strategy and content at Elite Model World who will be talking about virtual events and viral activations on trending platforms like Tik Tok, so thanks, everybody for joining and we’ll see you next time.
Brandon Arolfo:
Thank you.
Create Video Content that Drives Organic Growth
With people stuck inside, video streaming services like Netflix and YouTube are grabbing all of the attention of content-hungry viewers. As these media giants dominate the market, it might seem impossible to generate organic growth for your own video content. Traditional video production strategies are no longer possible, but consumers are still demanding content.
The rush to adapt to this new landscape of video content has led a lot of brands to push out video content on every available platform. But many marketers fail to ask themselves: who is this content for? Without a clear organic growth strategy, all you’re doing is relying on luck to make your video go viral. To make your own video content break through the noise, focus on increasing organic growth by targeting your audience’s needs and interests during this time.
One major leader that’s emerged in this space is PBS Digital Studios. With over 9.7 billion minutes watched and 84% of its audience spanning ages 18 to 49, PBS’s video content has seen enormous organic growth through digital transformation. By taking their traditional broadcast content and adapting it for YouTube audiences, PBS has been able to stay connected with its viewers during the pandemic, while also continuing to expand their reach.
Be Specific
Before you start churning out content, take a second to consider the purpose of what you’re putting out onto the internet. Are you showing support for your customers? Offering a useful service during quarantine? The internet is overwhelmed with content – focus on quality rather than quantity.
It’s great to have a video production team that can churn out content, especially during this shift to virtual work. But, in order to be successful, your content marketing strategy needs to be specific.
For consumers today, there’s no apparent lack of content. From streaming services, to your favorite beer brands, video content is being produced non-stop. Don’t try to capture the attention of every consumer that’s spending time on the internet right now. Instead, be specific and focus in on your target demographic. Once your video content team becomes specific about its target demographic, the content itself will be more pointed toward organic growth.
For example, Green Buzz has been producing weekly livestream videos for Stand Together’s new #GiveTogetherNow campaign. This new campaign was launched in the wake of the coronavirus, and its use of celebrity hosts – including former NFL player Dhani Jones and National Geographic photographer Jimmy Chin – and livestream optimization has allowed them to successfully target their audience.
Make a Dedicated Plan
After you’ve narrowed down the audience for your content, your marketing strategy can expand beyond the creative ideation of the content. Consider distribution strategy: which platforms does your target audience engage with the most? Try to get a sense of what your target audience is attracted to, while also acknowledging the volatility of consumer trends during this rapidly changing period.
According to the New York Times, the coronavirus lined up with a 15.3% increase in traffic on the YouTube webpage, and 4.5% decrease in traffic on the YouTube app. This data highlights important information about how consumer viewing trends have shifted during the pandemic. Viewers are moving away from consuming content on apps, and have taken to consuming content on desktops or larger screens.
This consumer insight suggests that your video content plan should be tailored to full-screen viewing. Consumers may have longer attention spans, or at least looking for more immersive video content.
Encourage Conversation
Your strategy is in place and your content has been optimized. Now, it’s time to put your content out there. Publish your video content on all of the relevant platforms for your audience. But, your work isn’t done yet. Well-optimized content is great, but in order to encourage consistent organic growth, you need to foster an interactive online community.
Offering a space for conversation will improve your brand awareness, while also showing a more human side to your marketing content. However, the feedback you get won’t all be congratulatory. Having a space for open conversation opens the door for negative responses – but don’t be afraid of constructive feedback or criticism. Ultimately, this type of immediate feedback is useful in guiding your content strategy and staying connected with your audience.
Additionally, the more active you are in these online communities, the more tuned in you’ll be to what its users want to see. Speculating about what content will be successful based on statistics is a great starting point, but it takes continued conversation with your audience to ensure organic growth.
Stay Tuned In
In such a rapidly changing global environment, it’s more important than ever to stay tuned into what your target audience needs most. Plus, with no clear image of what our “new normal” will look like, many brands have turned to sharing their own executive insight. For example, marketing leaders at top brands like NASCAR and Make-A-Wish have stepped up to share how they’re continuing to adapt throughout the coronavirus pandemic.
Plus, Head of PBS Digital Studios Brandon Arolfo shared his company’s own insight into how strategic content creation can allow brands to accelerate growth during this time. In collaboration with Green Buzz Agency’s webinar series, Brandon discussed “Content Creation that Powers Growth and Digital Transformation During COVID-19.” Learn more and stream the full webinar below.
As the economic and social environment around us continues to change, it’s crucial to continue seeking new insight. From consumer needs, to high-level business strategy, staying connected to the ideas and minds within your industry will provide guidance in such an uncertain time. And remember – the best organic marketing strategy is born from a combination of educated insight and thoughtful innovation. Successful video production teams lead with data and creativity.
Emily Herman, Marketing and Communications.