Entertaining your audience is no longer optional

Hey there and welcome back to Death to the Corporate Video. My name is Guy Bauer. I'm the Founder and Creative Director of UMALT, a B2B video ad agency. And today it's going to be a dose of truth. And it may hurt a little, may hurt, but I hope it inspires you. If you're a regular listener of this podcast, you'll recognize this topic, but now it's totally true. And that statement is that entertaining your audience is now no longer optional. If you've been living under a rock, there's a new platform called VO3 that launched probably mid-May, I'll say mid-May 2025, that really just hit everybody over the side of the head with a reality check that AI video is here, and it is definitely viable for at least commercial work. Then a week later, cling 2.1 comes out, and then you've got poppy.ai. I don't know what it is, but it's poppy.ai. There's these tools left and right. And what that means-- and this applies if you are a marketer inside a B2B brand. If you're in-house agency at a B2B brand, if you're a fellow agency owner like myself, who services brands, everybody now has equal access to video-making tools. It used to be that only-- there was a certain tier of production that knew proper lighting and could get production values out of a shoot. And the creative-- my former co-host, Hope Marley and I used to always describe it as people laughing at sinks. The creative is usually people laughing at sinks. And what we mean by that is we had a former client where every commercial we made for them, they were a sink manufacturer. And we would just make these beautiful, sun-drenched scenes in these sets. And it would look amazing. And every creative was just them laughing at sinks. And the client loved it. And that's exactly what they wanted. But that's when I was like, I can't do any more people laughing at sinks commercials. I have to do stuff that means something that has a story. But if you look at most ads, most ads are people laughing. It sinks. It could be people enjoying a beverage, laughing on a lake by a bonfire. But the idea of people laughing at sinks, you get what I mean by that. Those ads are now no longer viable with VO3, with Kling. With whatever, now Runway has to respond. Then there's going to be some else. Now, everyone has equal access to that very basic level of commercial, of insert product, have fun with the product, looking like lifestyle stuff, or talking into camera about the product. That stuff is basic. And to prove it, I threw into chat, GPT, the prompt, write me a 30-second video ads script for a fictional B2B cybersecurity firm. Try to make your concept a great fit for VO3 to make. So I'll just read the voiceover, and you can kind of fill in what the visuals would be. But the voiceover is every seven seconds, a business faces a cyber attack. But with Sentinel core watching, threats stop before they start. AI-driven detection, zero trust access, 24/7 humans on call. So your team can focus on literally anything else. Sentinel core, because almost secure isn't secure. Book a 15-minute demo today. And the visuals are all slow motion hero shot of an IT manager, confidently sipping coffee, while holographic graph show 100% uptime background dissolves into circuit board skyline. These are used to be special, because very few agencies and people could make them. Now AI can dream this up in a second. I can take this literally line by line, throw it in a VO3 after two days of hitting myself against a wall, because it just doesn't get it. Eventually, it will accidentally get it. I edit it together, and I have a spot. But guess what? It's now democratized. So anybody can put their cybersecurity firm into chat GPT, and then into VO3 or cling or whatever. So that same democratization is now all it's doing is making what used to be million dollar ads just table stakes. Now what's one thing that this ad doesn't have? It has a voiceover that sounds like an ad. It sounds competent. The visuals are definitely slick. What it doesn't have is a story, and it doesn't service me in terms of entertaining me at all. This is a commercial for this fictional company's Sentinel Core. And this is basically my main point, is that entertaining your audience is now no longer optional. It was only a month ago, because the number of companies that could access this level of production value was few. So you had an advantage. If you had money, you can go make a slick commercial like this and stand out that way. Well now everyone has it. Now the only way to stand out is by entertaining your audience, by actually telling a story and actually delivering value in the actual consumption of the ad. And that's it. So it's-- yeah, it's go time. It's like, which are the brands now that will break free of typical advertising? See, it's always been-- I've been saying this for years, but you were able to kind of fudge it because you can just make something really slick and high-end-looking. But now everyone has it. Anyway, I'm kind of repeating myself. That's it. I'd love to hear what you have to think. I hope this episode scares you a little, but then also motivates you, is doing what everyone else is doing is ridiculous and the worst strategy. And I'm not anti-AI. A lot of people are saying, don't use AI. Use humans. I don't think AI should be used for everything, but I also don't think humans should be used for everything. I think AI has a place, and it's a tool and all that stuff. And we can discuss that down the line. But whether you say AI or not, you must entertain. So hopefully this motivates you to get creative. And now you have to say something that's different than everyone else. And what will you say? All right. That's it. Hope you have a great two weeks. Until next time. Thanks for listening. Take care.