Key Benefits of Building Brand Affinity With Video

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Chris Lavigne, Director of Video for Wistia, explains how marketers can build brand affinity for their companies with video– regardless of budget!

Danny:

Hey, so let’s jump in today’s episode. I’ve got a very special guest today. I have Chris Lavigne who’s the Head of Production for Wistia. Chris, thank you so much for joining me today on IndustrialSage.

Chris:

Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited to chat all things Wistia, video, brand, and beyond.

Danny:

I’m super excited. So anyone who listens to IndustrialSage knows that I’m a total video dork but for those who aren’t familiar with Wistia please let them know who you guys are, what you guys do.

Chris:

Yes, so Wistia is a software company up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We make software that helps folks build their audience through brand affinity. Primarily our big thing is video hosting. We have a suite of tools like channels that let you host your videos, almost like a YouTube but for businesses. So you put it right on your website. You don’t have to worry about any of YouTube’s ulterior motives, their ads, their related videos that are actually to your competition, all that stuff.

Danny:

Awesome, all right. So interesting word you threw out, brand affinity, through brand affinity. So I want to jump into that in just a minute. Before I do that though I want to just get to know about you a little bit. So, all right, so you’re Head of Production. Tell me a little bit about, how did you start in video?

Chris:

Wow, well you’ve got to go way back–

Danny:

Take me back!

Chris:

I’m not going to bore you, I’ll spare you the details but I always had a camcorder when I was growing up and I actually got into video because it was an easy way to get an A in school. If you made any type of a video when I was in elementary school and middle school it was an easy A because you were editing tape to tape. I had my camcorder and then a VCR and I was editing linearly like that. But then I found out that I actually kind of had a knack for it and I loved it so I studied video in college.

I hustled my way doing wedding videos and building up my gear throughout high school and college and doing some product videos actually for some folks that are- my family’s in manufacturing, so some product videos for some manufacturing companies locally. And then I ended up freelancing doing more of those product videos, testimonial videos. And that’s actually when I found Wistia through one of my friends. He was very early at the company and he was saying, “Hey, I’m working for Wistia. It’s this video software and they don’t even have the video on their website. You should come up here and meet the company.”

So I traveled up from Rhode Island with all of my gear to Cambridge in February of 2011 and I walked into this company and it was my first experience with a startup. It was so interesting and casual and I’d never seen startup culture. I’ve always been around manufacturing. I thought that if you wanted to have a job in video you’d have to be at a TV company or out in Hollywood. So needless to say I made a quick video on spec for Wistia, kind of just like a tour of the team. I called it the “Meet the Team” video and they loved it. They put it on their website and what’s crazy is they noticed more deals coming through almost immediately. People wanted to see who they were about to do business with. And things snowballed from there and I ended up joining the team full time.

I fell in love with the work I was doing at Wistia, fell in love with the company, and I’ve been here ever since.

Danny:

That’s awesome, so all right. So funny thing, when you were doing what we now know as linear editing: did you know that that’s what that was at that time?

Chris:

Oh, absolutely not. I thought that that was just the way that you edited video, tape to tape, that was it. And then I happened to go to Sears with my mom. She dragged me to Sears and I was killing time by playing with the first iMac DV which had a very early version of iMovie and that was my first experience with non-linear editing. I was like, POOF! blown away! “Oh my god–”

Danny:

“What is going on!?” yeah.

Chris:

“I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time!”

Danny:

That’s hilarious, so no. Yes, because I remember kind of a similar story and I remember doing that, doing the whole tape to tape thing. And then years later even after getting into non-linear editing and all that stuff I remember hearing the term, “Oh, non-linear.” I’m like, “Non-linear editing, what is that?” And then they go, “Oh well, it’s when you…” I’m like, “You mean the thing I was doing when I was a kid?” That’s hilarious, okay, that’s super funny.

Chris:

Oh yeah. I think just the way that computer technology, what it did for video production as a whole, introducing non-linear editing, we’re seeing that now happen on the camera side too. Because even when we were getting into doing non-linear editing the cameras looked like garbage that we were working on. They were eight millimeter cameras, maybe miniDV, but they were SD. They were still clunky. They had big batteries. You could never get a wide enough shot. Forget about any kind of depth of field.

And then camera technology caught up to it when you had the Canon 5D and even the iPhone. These things look incredible. So what’s crazy right now is technology has enabled such incredible creativity because everyone has the power to make a really incredible-looking video and edit a really good video with nothing but their phone right now and that didn’t exist even 10 years ago.

Danny:

Exactly, 100%, which I think is a good foray into what I wanted to talk to you a little bit about because there’s a great connection there. And that is you guys have launched your, I guess we’ll call it the episodic content, “Brandwagon,” and I think you guys started that a couple months ago from what I understand. And I think that the piece of what you were just talking about with the technology shift and the ability for everybody- they’ve got a phone in their pocket, they can create content, is that it’s like opening up this whole new foray and a whole new way of thinking about, A: producing content. Like you can, and the average Joe can, and the average Joe probably should now. So not just can but should.

And then it’s opening up this whole new thing like, “Well what should we be doing? What should that look like?” And I think that what you guys are doing with “Brandwagon” is really kind of where things are going. But for those who aren’t familiar with what… can you maybe tell what you guys are doing with that?

Chris:

Sure, well first off, yes thanks, thanks a lot for the kind words there. “Brandwagon” is almost like a talk show or a “Tonight Show” but specifically for the marketing and creative audience. So the show is essentially our CEO Chris Savage sits down with some business leaders and marketing leaders. We have the CEO of a marketing software company, HubSpot. We have the CEO co-founder of Harpoon Beer, a myriad of other guests. And he basically picks their brain about what they had to do to build up a really awesome brand, brands that companies all over the world look up to.

And so it’s this talk show format but we also couple in some of the kind of the gag and the shtick from “Tonight Show.” So we have a through line where because the show’s called “Brandwagon” we actually were able to convince our company to let us buy an old station wagon, a ’91 Volvo in just pristine condition, and the show kind of follows us kind of turning that wagon into almost like a “Pimp My Ride” version of a company car where we just mod this thing out with a bunch of video accoutrements and it’s great. It was a lot of fun. The whole show was a lot of work but boy, it was a lot of fun and it’s been getting received really well.

Danny:

That’s awesome- So a station wagon, that’s pretty darn cool. That’s actually, that’s a pretty neat part of your culture. I guess I have a really from the outside perspective looking in you guys look like you have a really fun and cool culture that you’re able to kind of transmit through that.

Chris:

Yes, thanks, and that’s not an act, that’s not. That is we try to have our outsides match our insides. And we found that for our brand it’s important for us to be ourselves in everything that we do. Video obviously has an outsized impact on how people can perceive your brand. And actually speaking of brand too one of the things that “Brandwagon” kind of brought up for me and one of the key takeaways that I was able to get from this was actually from Mailchimp, their Chief Creative Officer, Mark DiCristina. And he said something along the lines of that… Your brand is not something that’s owned by you, that your brand is actually what people perceive of you. So you’re in control of your brand but it’s not owned by you. Your brand is actually just your audience’s perception of you which I thought was really interesting.

Danny:

Yes exactly, and we have the ability as marketers to be able to shift that perception. We can press these buttons, whatever to do to help to kind of shift that but yes, that’s 100%. That makes a lot of sense.

Chris:

Oh totally, I mean it would have been easier for us to do a talk show format with “Brandwagon” and just have it be Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia sits down with another person. Get a multi-camera shoot, wham bam bam bam bam, thanks, see you later, and that’s it. But instead we built this crazy set behind us. We have a live studio audience. We brought in an animal handler that had exotic animals. We had a chinchilla and a porcupine walking around on that desk. A giant cobra snake out there. We bought this ’91 Volvo and spent all this time and money transforming it into the Brandwagon. That attention to detail and that… personal touch we hope adds a lot to the effectiveness of the show.

Danny:

Yes, so on that note I mean there’s a couple things I want to ask you on that. You guys have been doing it for a minute now and I think a lot of organizations, I think that they naturally kind of resist and they struggle with saying, “Hey, we want to make this investment and we want to do this because there’s this three-letter acronym called ROI that is very near and dear, and it can be very difficult to track success.” I mean what have you guys done in order to do that or what does that look like for you guys?

Chris:

I mean, for us, I think a lot of it comes down to trust and that trust works two ways. It works from the company trusting the creative team and the creative team also trusting the company. I think that trust is earned over a period of time. We didn’t make “Brandwagon” as our very first video. We didn’t commit to 25 30-minute episodes, 10 episodes coming out weekly. That was a serious investment in time and resources. We didn’t commit to that overnight. That was after literally almost a decade of using video and seeing its effect both qualitatively in the comments and the responses we’d get but also quantitatively in the data, specifically in the viewing data.

And Wistia, we obviously are using Wistia to host all of our videos and deliver and distribute all of our video content and we’re able to track engagement. We’re able to track fall off. We’re able to track play rate and trends over time. And so that ROI is actually tied to that quantitative data as well as the qualitative. The qualitative is usually if people aren’t talking about it on social or if people aren’t responding positively to a video we feel like maybe something’s wrong and oftentimes it’s because it’s lacking any type of personality.

Danny:

Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I think what you said, something there is really insightful. I think a lot of, and you said it I guess maybe two times in a couple different ways but one was talking about, hey, you could do just your average interview, whatever camera, multi-cam boom boom boom edit, be done, but you interjected this element that is a lot more engaging.

And I think where I’m kind of driving at is just getting a sense of that ROI relative to engagement because video is a very broad term now, even video in your marketing. “Hey, we want to do a video.” “Okay, well, I mean… there’s a million different things that you can do here.” And I think that there’s a big challenge of saying, “Hey, let’s just do something that’s really conservative and we’re not going to go over here and where we’re worried, where we’re afraid.” And I think trust was a really, was a big word that I heard there that they trust you guys to be able to do that.

Chris:

Well I mean yes, I mean it’s just not enough to just ship a video. You need to be able to stand out because everyone’s doing it and it’s not enough to just get views on a video, right. You need real engagement. And one of the key pieces of data that we look at specifically with things like “Brandwagon” or our mini-series called “One, Ten, One Hundred” is hours watched, hours spent with the brand. And we were absolutely astonished with the amount of time people have spent with the Wistia brand through watching “Brandwagon” and through watching our other series, “One, Ten, One Hundred.”

And it’s not enough to just grab people’s attention. You need to hold their attention. And that’s why we think episodic content and longer form content and stuff that maybe even makes your viewers wonder “I can’t believe somebody’s actually making this for me! Who would make a talk show just for marketers? Who would make a mini-series about spending $1000, $10,000, $100,000 on the same video for video people?” That seems crazy in today’s “Game of Thrones” world where it’s like you’re just trying to get as big of an audience as possible. No, sometimes it’s all about engaging those niche audiences.

Danny:

Yes, exactly, 100%. Know your audience and go deep. And I think that one thing that you mentioned there as well is the whole long-form content which I think is a little bit, I think a lot of people have been predisposed to it needs to be shorter, like short, short, short, short. So this whole notion of going more long-form what have you guys discovered with that? Because that is kind of going against what you might think from today’s social marketing or social media standpoint and core content, better engagement. What have you guys found?

Chris:

I mean it’s all about the platform in which you’re making videos for and what your end goal is with these videos. If you’re putting a video on your front page and you’re just trying to give potential customers or prospects a view of what it is your company does and what you stand for I don’t think you should put a 40-minute video up there. It needs to be short. It needs to be punchy.

Similarly, if you’re putting a video up on let’s say Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, the things that are historically you’re competing with all kinds of other attention grabs, maybe you shouldn’t be throwing something super long and that doesn’t actually have a hook on there. But if you are making something for a niche audience that they’re going to look at this and be like, “I can’t believe this content exists,” you have a little bit more of a license to go deeper on that because you’ve already captured their attention. It’s not about trying to capture attention and hold it. You already kind of have an attentive audience there.

And then it comes down to, how long can you retain them there? How many hours can you get with these people to interact with your brand? Because if somebody’s interacting with your brand for hours on end they’re probably going to have crazy strong affinity for your brand. They’re going to turn into a superfan. They’re going to recommend you to other people.

I actually think there’s a shift that’s happening where it’s almost going back to the word of mouth thing. You don’t know what to trust because you see all the same polished-looking video. Everyone has the same product video online. You don’t know what to trust so of course you’re going to go back to this word of mouth. I’ll trust the thing that my friend or my colleague or a family member tells me is awesome. I think that’s happening with content. I’ll watch the piece of content that a friend or a family member or a colleague told me is really awesome.

Danny:

So would you be suggesting then with that that maybe the ability that long-form content has that you’re able to form better, maybe deeper relationships from a digital standpoint over the long term? Is that kind of what you’re driving at there?

Chris:

I think so. If you’re making the right type of content it doesn’t need to be super flashy as long as it is hitting the right target of your audience. Yes, I think ultimately if you can win an hour spent with your brand I mean I think that’s an incredible indicator for success.

Danny:

Yes, no, I mean I agree 100%. So there’s a term that I’ve noticed that you guys have been kind of putting out in your marketing and on your webpages and whatnot. It’s this idea of brand affinity marketing. What is that?

Chris:

Yes, brand affinity marketing is basically the belief that your marketing materials should be doing as good of a job as possible to build affinity with your audience. And what I mean by that is that they are going to, even if they’ll never be a customer or they’ll never be one of your clients that they still recognize you as the leader in your industry. And because you’re going to, in this day and age you’re looking for these referrals.

Everyone’s looking for what they should be doing. They’re actually going back to these word-of-mouth referrals. So if you can create an audience of true fans that have crazy affinity for your brand we think that that is going to be the best way that you can market your product or service, your company most effectively in 2019, 2020, and then beyond.

Danny:

That makes a lot of sense. I wish I’d asked you that question earlier on! Because everything kind of builds on top of that. No, but that’s great. I mean so I guess one other thing I want to add relative to that, maybe talk to me a little bit about the whole, and this is a couple, like maybe what, a year or two old but the whole “One, Ten, Hundred” video series you guys did with Sandwich. What was the idea behind that? And walk me through the backstory on that.

Chris:

Yes, so “One, Ten, One Hundred,” probably the most important project I’ve ever worked on in my career I think to this day, it spawned from us just wanting to work with Sandwich Video. Sandwich Video of course is like the de facto software product video company out in Los Angeles and we had wanted to work with them for a long time. And we pitched Adam Lisagor, the owner of Sandwich Video, on this idea because both of our companies kind of share the same admiration for creativity and constraints and strong brands. So we pitched him on this idea that, “What if we give your team $1000 to make a video, $10,000 to make a video, and $100,000 to make that same video? What kind of stuff would we learn about the creative process and how budget impacts the final output and where that point is of diminishing returns?”

And they were so excited about the project. And so we kind of started on this journey of not just getting them to make us three videos for our software but we also wanted to go behind the scenes and see how this whole story unfolded. So while Sandwich Video was making those three videos we were actually out there in L.A. capturing documentary-style footage behind the scenes. And then we came back to Cambridge and kind of wrote and shot the rest of this mini-series called “One, Ten, One Hundred” that kind of shines the light on creativity and creative constraints and how budget affects your video quality.

Danny:

That’s awesome. What were the results? What did you guys discover in that?

Chris:

So we discovered that kind of unsurprisingly it all comes down to the creative and the creative people that you have attached to your project. And it was actually extremely inspiring to see what this Hollywood director was able to do with $1000 using nothing but an iPhone to create a video. He leaned into the constraints and created an engaging video for $1000. Similarly for $10,000 it was really interesting to see that giant uptake in production quality as you start adding people to your project and different specialists. And then with the $100,000 video you see that Hollywood gloss, that big budget, big national TV commercial look.

And selfishly it was really awesome for us to see what that looked like at Wistia, to see Wistia video would look like for $100,000 but the thing that remained the same across all the videos, it’s you can’t just throw money at a problem, especially a creative problem and expect that to fix it. It all comes down to the creative people that you have on your team.

Danny:

That’s awesome. There’s a great quote. I get all the ads on Facebook for MasterClass and all this and I think there was one with Hans Zimmer. So he’s the big Hollywood composer. He’s done all the big Nolan films and all the–

Chris:

Oh I know, I’ve seen him live, incredible.

Danny:

We actually went live as well I think a year ago or two. He was doing that tour so maybe, I don’t know. Maybe I don’t know if that was the same one or not.

Chris:

So awesome, yes, yes, yes.

Danny:

It was amazing but I digress. So he’s got on that MasterClass ad I think it was him and he talks about, he said, “Creativity is not restricted or constrained by budget. The creative process happens up here in the head.” And I think that really shines light on it. You’re talking about having constraints and so, “Okay, we are going to shoot a video on an iPhone or we’re going to shoot it on, you know. We’re going to have a huge crew and we’re going to have all kinds of compositing and all kinds of work and whatever.” And that, I love how you said it’s really that creativity and the people there, that that’s really where that’s what really matters at that point.

And I think to that point I think what you guys maybe were trying to, you guys have communicated, especially what I’m seeing with “Brandwagon,” and whatnot, it’s like that you, that creativity and the ability of creating all this content relevant to the technology that we have and the access that we have is that everybody has that ability to be able to create. And we should be creating especially for if we kind of go into this whole brand affinity marketing piece, that’s the ability. It’s a unique opportunity for brands to be able to leverage the technology and the access and to do it creatively.

And so there shouldn’t be an excuse, I guess should I say, like, “Oh, we only have an iPhone,” or, “We only have a whatever.” No, you can work around those constraints. And actually I would argue and I think from our standpoint and from our experience has been, we’ve actually had, some of our most creative stuff has come out of lower budgets because it’s almost like here’s the box. How can we really stretch that? And there’s solutions that popped up that we otherwise wouldn’t have thought about because oh, well that’s not a problem, it’s whatever. But now it becomes– a challenge becomes a great opportunity.

Chris:

Totally, yes, I mean a lot of creativity is problem solving and when you insert some of these constraints your problems get different and you can use access different parts of your brain. But one thing I will say to that and to people thinking about making more content, grabbing their phone, opening up their laptop, using their webcam to make content is kind of know where your brand kind of what your brand demands there. Somebody like Nike or Apple, their brand doesn’t really allow for that type of production quality. Even though it looks pretty good it needs to be intentional. I mean you see Apple using their own phones for that. There was a holiday “Snowball” ad. There are definitely exceptions to that but there needs to be kind of a minimum point of entry on the production quality for what’s good enough to put out there.

Danny:

Sure, totally, yes.

Chris:

Just because you can doesn’t mean that you absolutely should. But I do think the principles that we try to communicate with “One, Ten, One Hundred” that creativity always wins I still do believe that to my core.

Danny:

That’s awesome. So all right, my last question. What’s next? What is next for “Brandwagon” or what’s the next big thing that you can share with us that’s not?

Chris:

Yes, well at Wistia we are really excited to keep moving forward into original content. We have some shows that we’re working on that are in development right now that we’re really excited about. We’re going to take a lot of the stuff that we learned about building this studio and all the stuff that we learned about creating episodic content and we’re hopefully going to share that with the world and influence the next 2020 slate of shows that are coming out of Wistia. But we’re really excited about what we’re cooking up over here.

Danny:

Awesome, well listen, I’m really excited that you were able to join me today on this episode. Thank you so much for your time. If anyone would like, you know, the best way to learn about you guys, obviously go to Wistia.com and I’m assuming we can find “Brandwagon.” Does it have its own URL or it’s up on your website somewhere?

Chris:

Yes, if you go to Wistia.com, if you go to Wistia.com/series you’ll see “One, Ten, One Hundred” and “Brandwagon.” You can find me on Twitter. My handle is @crlvideo. But yes, thank you so much for having me. This is fun.

Danny:

Awesome, thanks so much, Chris.

Chris:

See you.

Danny:

Awesome, all right. So a lot of things that, a lot of takeaways that I have for sure and I think one of the big ones is we were talking about this element of creativity and that it really doesn’t have restrictions per se but it’s really making sure that we have the right creative people for creating some of these things. I think long-form content was another big thing that I pulled away as you look to do brand affinity marketing.

So I think Chris has got really onto something when he’s talking about how he’s seeing that a lot of, you know, we’re seeing this word-of-mouth effect happening a little bit more. You’re inundated with messaging and ads and video content and all the like. And so the opportunity is to be able to align your messaging, align your content maybe in a long-form standpoint where you’re able to develop more ongoing relationships so that maybe your customer isn’t necessarily ready to buy today but six months from now or 12 months from now or three years from now, whenever that is. But they say, “You know what? This company is awesome. They’ve shared all of its value with me. I’m learning a lot from them, and they are the experts and we are totally going with them,” or “I’m going to recommend them.”

So I think that’s a really great opportunity that we need to be thinking about as we move into 2020, as we look at 2021, as ways to be able to really differentiate yourself and to do things, something that’s different and something that your competitors quite honestly in the manufacturing industrial space most people are not doing it so it’s a land grab. That’s your opportunity.

So if you liked this, listen, we’d love a like, share, comment on social media. If you have any questions we can answer them for you on IndustrialSage.com/questions. That’s all I’ve got for you today so thanks for watching or listening if you’re on any of the iTunes or podcasting stations. I’m done rambling for today. I’ll catch you next week with another episode of IndustrialSage. Thanks for watching.

 

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