How One Agency Turns One Shoot Day Into 50-Plus Video Ads (With Connor Lewis of Studio Lewis)

Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Look, I hear about AI agents every single day on the internet in the Exo 5 community, but it's confusing. It's a little bit overwhelming, which platform should I be using? Which agents are actually worth building? How do I even set this up? There's a lot of noise out there. It's kind of hard to tell what's actually going to make the job easier, versus what just can be another thing to manage. Or is this just a cool little thing some guy wrote about on LinkedIn? Well, Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. You can build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. This is really smart. They also just launch virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that can learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your whole website optimized. Humans, that's us of course. We still get the final say over these robots, but this seems really useful. This is worth leaning into right now, right? Agents have so much potential and using AI in a platform like Optimizely for the stuff that eats your week. So you can get more time for the strategic thinking and actual fun parts of your job on into that. Let's make marketing about the craft of marketing. Again, I think there's something there. So go and check out Optimizely right now. See how their AI agents can help you with your B2B marketing operations. They purposely built this for B2B marketing. This is really cool. Optimizely.com/exit5. That's Optimizely.com/exit5. Go and check out their agents. Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Webflow. Webflow is a website platform for the "agentic" web built for modern marketing teams to build fully custom sites that perform in AI search. No developer needed. Your website isn't just your homepage anymore. It's actually the first thing an AI agent is going to read about your company and from there, decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer. Before a demo, before a sales call, before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists, which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams used to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI search, govern your content, and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them out at Webflow.com/4/exit5 that's Webflow.com/FOR/Exit5. You're listening to the Dave Gerard show. Connor, welcome to the pod. Connor Lewis from Studio Lewis. Very creative name. Toria. I'm good. I'm good. It's busy here right now. Video seems to be popping off, which is great. Video is popping off. Do you think it's tied to AI in any way? I don't know. We've had a lot of people who have tried AI ads and then come to us and been like, can you fix this? But I'll talk a little bit about how we use AI in our process. It's certainly not out of it. Let's do it. I've jumped way ahead. Let's introduce you to our listeners, to our viewers. Connor, who are you? Who am I? My name's Connor Lewis. I've been doing videos since I was 16. But more importantly, I've been doing SaaS videos since I was 20. I worked at an HR tech company called The Predictive Index, led a video team there, figured out what worked in video and then branched off of my own when I was 26. Now I'm 30. I know way too much about software video. It seems to be the niche I've fallen into or my main quest as I like to call it. What was happening when you were a 16-year-old? Were you the kid in high school that always had their camera on them? I love that you asked that. I wanted to be a YouTuber when I was 16. Now I don't. It's too much work. Also, I was editing video game montages. People would pay me 20 bucks to take their clips and make it into this dopamine fuels video game montage. I started as an editor, actually. Oh, that's hilarious. Are they still live? I'm not telling you that. We don't need to go down that rabbit hole. Okay. Okay. I will not share the list. Yeah. Okay. Taking that to the grave. Okay. Well, today, your sweet spot is B2B videos like SaaS company ads. What kind of clients are hiring you guys? Yeah. We're lucky to work with some of the big ones now. Click up, Zapier, Hrafts. Those are the ones that I list and people are like, oh, I know those. But also a lot of series A and series B companies. We work on really big-scale projects that are like six figures and try to get a ton of assets. We work on really small product launches that need to be scrappy and just record the founders. So somewhere in the like series B to series D realm is where we usually stay. And so those marketing teams are usually what like 20 some people? Usually less. Less? Yeah. Marketing teams are scrappy these days. I swear. I love it. I think anywhere from like three people to like one is kind of like the marketing team realm. Some smaller marketers. But yeah, less so these days. Got it. Okay. And you've produced 800 B2B video ads. Is that right? Yeah. And counting. That's crazy. That's actually crazy. Usually when you are working with those marketers, the team, talking about the team, like who are you working with? Typically on the team, is it if it's like a team of three are all three involved? Is it the demand-gen person? Who is your point of contact? Depends on the size of company. If it's a larger company, usually I'm in contact with demand-gen. So like, click up their head of demand and paid creative is like a person I basically report to and collaborate with. On smaller teams, it's directly with the head of marketing VP of marketing. They usually have like a big brand vision and know the product really well. Know the customers really well. So and they're wearing a lot of hats. And my goal is to take as much off their plate as I can versus demand is like super focused on optimization. So different projects to be honest. Cool. And you know that drive. And I think you were like about to make your first hire. Is that right? And now you're not you're not like a two-person operation. It sounds like you're you're quite a bit larger. How many people work at Studio Lewis today? Full-time just three. We've kept it really lean. But we pay, I don't know, upwards of $50,000 a month to subcontractors. So we have a bench of people that we love. Like flexing in and out. And pretty much know our process. Yeah. I found that the best creatives work for themselves sometimes. So we've kept a lot of people on our bench and just like constantly hired them. But we do have an in-house person now. Her name is Iris. She's incredible. She's the best producer you've ever met. And she's a project manager too. We're thinking about hiring someone else near the end of this year, which is exciting. How do you think about your specific role? I assume you all wear like upward of 20 hats. But yeah. If you were to say, okay, I am the blank person. What would that be? At this point, I am like the executive producer/creative director. And I'll explain those two hats really briefly. Executive producer, meaning I'm coming up with budgets, coming up with strategies and plans and doing a lot of pitching. Like most of my job is walking people in software companies through a workshop that gets them to scripts, that gets them to a pitch. And then from the pitch, they basically decide, do I want to work with Studio Lewis? Or do I want to take these ideas and run? And then the second one is creative director. So I'm super involved in briefing crews and making sure that the creative stays solid, looking at props books, looking at wardrobe, looking over the edits and leaving comments and frame.io. And then the last thing I do is I'm a content creator. So I make LinkedIn content. So I kind of switch between those three hats mostly. Have you always been a creative person? I had Shlomo Genshin on the show a few weeks ago. And we talked about like where creativity comes from. Are you someone who's inherently creative? I think of myself that way. Yeah. I love music. I played the bass guitar. I was in a band for five years. I hosted like house shows. I also got into oil painting. So I was really into that for a while. I started in photography, specifically landscapes. And I've even printed some of them out and they're around the house now. So yeah, I've just always been your creative through and through. I've been very right brand, which as we scale, I'm realizing the weakness and the strengths of right brands and pulling in left brain people actually to kind of get the operation underway. So but yeah, I would say I lean more creative. Something that I think is interesting to about you is you before you went out on your own, you were working in a SaaS environment. Yeah. How do you think that has shaped the type of work you're doing today? What do you think you bring that an agency that like started out as an agency is maybe missing? Yeah. I think we bring an understanding of like how software companies go because I was on that marketing team. I had to beg for budget. I had to fight for every video idea. I had to push executives to do something risky, which is really hard, by the way, especially founders are very, it's their baby, you know. So every piece of media that goes out is very sensitive. So I just understand the political intricacies, the structural intricacies and the budget intricacies that comes with software. And then from like a creative perspective, I know what converts people to become software users. It's different from consumer ads. And we don't even make consumer ads. We literally just do software because it's what we know. That's interesting. In what way would you say it's different? Well, it depends on if your product led or sales led, I'll start there. But in sales led software orgs, a lot of times your goal with video is to like build trust, build brands. Or sometimes convert down funnel. So customer testimonials work really well in sales led orgs. I know that they're quote boring, but boring is working just to say. If your product led, if you have some kind of freemium model, your goal is to get them to sign up, click up Monday.com. Those kinds of products can make it a math game, to be honest, on ad networks. And that's kind of what it's become. And there's really good formulas, which we can talk about to get people to convert to free. And then from free to paid, which is a whole separate funnel. Let's talk about it. Well, you say that a script is what kills an ad or makes it great. So I'm excited to deep dive into what makes a good ad. It sounds like you've got some examples and frameworks to share. I do. Let's dive in. Maybe let's start with some examples. You can walk through what's working in those examples what's not working and we'll voice it over for anyone who's listening. I can do that. I'll show you I'll show you three examples. Oh, heck yeah. I think that will do. I'll pull them up now. Okay. You should see a canvas green right now. I sure can. Okay, cool. I'll start with this. So these are slides for those listening and not looking. These are slides that I used at my talks when I go to conferences because examples are really helpful for understanding what's good and what's bad. But we'll notice is that I kind of have this script format at the bottom here. So what you'll be watching if you are watching is basically a video plane and then we're seeing what block of script we're in as the script plays out. So it kind of makes you think about the product marketing behind scripts. It's all very formulaic Monday.com is the first that I'll show you. These guys are the kings of YouTube. Genuinely they spend so much on YouTube and most of their acquisition comes from this channel and they're really good at it. And so it's valuable to learn from them. I'm kind of spoiling it. This is a good or bad ad by giving them that intro, but say let me. Here we go. I'll play it. It's hard to rule over an entire organization. But with Monday.com work OS, any team can cross collaborate and now we're much more on point. Now I have everything I need to run my teams from marketing to sales to inventory track. And that's a reason to celebrate. Silly, right? We should narrate for the folks listening. We should narrate. Yeah, it is Silly. It's not what you would expect and describe what we're looking at. And then I'll share my thoughts. And then I'm very curious to hear your thoughts as someone who like comes up with these types of ideas. Yeah, we're looking at a Viking using a laptop in the woods with the Vikings in the background like his Viking teammates. And he's sharing about how to lead his Horde of Vikings using Monday.com, which is really fun. But Connor, do you think that Monday.com's ICP is a Viking? Like, why would they do this? I know. That's so crazy. This shouldn't have like got the green light. How did this get approved? I don't know. Obviously it's a metaphor for teams and it's something that catches you off guard because you're expecting to see an office environment in every single freaking software ad. And certainly I still pitch a lot of office environments gets they work. But to break kind of like the expectations they give a Viking metaphor, which is really fun to watch. You know, the props are hitting the the wardrobe is hitting well. Music is really on theme and to spoil it. This is a good ad. I do like good ad bad ad. This is a good ad. And the reason is there's the brand mentions within five seconds. I think sometimes as marketers we're allergic to mentioning our brand because we're like, well, we don't want to make it too heavy handed, which is valid. But you're paying for these ads. Right. Most people to be honest, even if they're great are not going to watch the whole ad. So you should get free impressions by getting your brand mentioned in the first five seconds. It works really well. And it increases the conversion rate of ads. If you're doing like an organic LinkedIn video short, you can do something that's fun and you don't have to mention your brand, but you're putting real spend behind this. So get your brand in there. Really clear simplified product shots throughout the whole thing. Like even though we're in Viking land, like we see over his shoulder and we can just like it looks really clean and easy to understand. Like if you've never seen Monday.com before, you're like, oh, this is a project tracker. And then they subverted creative norms, which is great. We talked about that a little. And then the last thing I want to mention is the script itself is one of the best performing scripts in software ad history. And it's repeated time and time again. It's start with the pain point. In this case, it was. Rule over is interesting. The more relatable and specific the pain, the better. And so in this case, it's very broad-based pain so they can probably use it for a lot of verticals. And then mention the brand name and then go straight into features and benefits. So like here's what we can do with this software. Here's what it allows us to do. And that hooks really well. So this is like the ad that I show people that's like if you're looking to do something quintessential, kind of go in this direction where you want this script format, try to subvert creative norms and get product shots in there. And then the brand mentioned in five seconds. What does subverted creative norms mean? Well, it's what we're talking about with the office. So like most people expect a software or software ad to be in an office. The fact that it opens on a Viking and makes you curious about like where this is going. That's what I mean by subvert creative norms. Okay, got it. You're creating like a slippery slope from the beginning. Where is this going? What even ad is this for? Yeah. But you find out pretty quick that I feel like as a commercial watcher that annoys me where 30 seconds in I'm still wondering is this going to be an ad for a computer? Is it an ad for an allergy medication? Like I just I'm so lost. I like that they don't leave us wondering too long. I'll show you an example that kind of goes into that vein, which is a Zapier video shout out Zapier. Love the team there. And they're okay with me sharing this. So I will share it now. I want to automate, but you don't know where to start. Try Zap's wild Kiwi workflow. Just open and pour to activate Zapier AI powered workflow. Automate as fast as you can type. Zap AI in a can. Got it. Let me guess. This is not a good ad. Yeah, you're right. And it's kind of what you were talking about, right? Where it's like they're clearly subverting creative norms. Like they're doing something really cool. It reminds you the champ wow guy, like from a brand perspective, really, really cool and interesting and like kind of funny, especially if you get the reference. And just to voice it over, it is a man with like a can that says Zap and it looks like an infomercial and the whole time we are left thinking that this is an ad for like almost like a beverage product. Maybe like an energy drink. Yeah, exactly. And like sure enough, the plot was a little bit lost in the sauce. You know, like the creative brain is there, but we don't walk away knowing what Zapier does. If you are already a Zapier user, this is probably a pretty good ad because you're like, oh, yeah, they're doing something fun. But if you're trying to acquire new users, this doesn't really teach anything. And it's an example of like a brand video that's gone too heavy brand and hasn't brought it back to product education, which is the core of any ad. You want to educate people on what problem your product solves and how it does it. And so yeah, that's just the example. So is there a place for something like this? Like if I'm maybe, I don't know, trying to upsell an existing customer or I don't know, like I guess is there ever a time where this would make sense or not really? This is a fun social video. I think that it builds brand character. So like I'll give you a non B2B example. Jeep, like the car company has a lot of commercials that don't even sell offers on jeeps. They just sell the idea of freedom. Like most jeep ads are like the American flag and people returning from war and an eagle. And they spent huge super bowl dollars on that last year. And like that's a play by them to associate the brand Jeep with freedom. And when I look at this ad, I'm like, oh, Zapier is trying to associate the brand Zapier with goofy, zany, funny, interesting, culturally relevant, you know, all these words. So that is probably what I would say this accomplished. And there is a time and a place for that. I think at Zapier size, in fact, you could probably make an argument for that. I'm just again, it'll probably work better on folks who already know it's Zapier is. Otherwise, they're like, why is this sham wild gun in front of my face? Right. Why? Why is sham wild on my LinkedIn feed? Yeah. That makes sense. I do have one more example that I could show, which is kind of classic. This is like an ad that usually, so right now we've shown a lot of human examples like ads with actors in them. Right. I'm going to show one last ad, which doesn't have any actors in them. And if we're going to talk about it a little bit, so I'll play this one. So what did you think about this ad? Just an area where we saw it was emotion graphics for text-heavy product launch video by zoom info to launch their marketing OS tool. I mean, it was kind of speaking about the benefits and showing off the features a little bit. I think this ad was pretty good. Considering no actors, it's clear. I like that there aren't a ton of buzzwords. I feel like the in-app kind of screenshots have been simplified a ton. I can kind of tell what's going on. Yeah, probably written at like a grade 7, 8 level, which I like. Yeah. I think in general, am I like drawn to this sort of ad? Probably not, but there is a place for it. So I'll give it like an eight out of 10. What do you think? Yeah. I think it's an okay ad. Okay. I kind of have it somewhere in the middle where this is the classic product launch video. Like everyone makes emotion graphics videos like this that kind of launch product. And that's probably my only problem with it is that it's not very memorable. It's not going to stick in your brain. It's something you or champion will share upwards. Like they'll probably share it with their boss and be like, could we get this? Here's what it does. Oh my god. And a boss would probably approve it. It is a safe ad. It's the color blue. It's so safe. No one is going to be like, whoa, this is too spicy. Are you sure we can run this ad? And I think for that exact reason, it's not that memorable. Yes. It's like the Salesforce of ads low kids. Like no one's going to get you in trouble for getting this ad. Yeah. It was very brand-forward in the beginning. And like if you're showing this on a YouTube ad, for instance, people are going to see this and be like, okay, I'm skipping this as fast as I can because it's trying to push something on to me. It's just like the feeling it gives you very motion graphics for no human beings. But here's the thing that you pointed out really well is that the product language is clear. It's written at a like the copy is so strong. It's really good copy. It's really good design. It flows really well. The motion is interesting. And it shows a little bit of the product without getting too complicated in the end of the week. weeds. So that's where I'm torn on this ad. I'm like, we've seen this a billion times before, but it is effective at doing what it's meant to do, which is educate buyers. So would I run it as a YouTube ad? I test it, but it probably wouldn't do too well. Would I make it at some video for other parts of the org like the sales team? Hell yeah. Sure. It would do its job. I'm curious when I work, like I love that you do these, I think you're calling them script blocks underneath. Like you're almost like breaking down why the ad is working or not working. When we see an ad and it doesn't resonate with us, what is usually missing or off about the ad for someone who isn't analyzing it? Conor Lewis style. When it's not resonating with us, I mean, to break it down to its very simple core, it's like is the ad empathizing or does the ad understand you? If you're getting shown an ad chances are that marketers spend a lot of time thinking about your pain points as, you know, a head of marketing, for instance, in your case. And did they get it right? Is the pain point landing as it's specific enough that you feel like it was made for you? Is the situation, the funny situation that they put you in relatable enough? All that comes from empathy towards pain and empathy towards value props or benefits. So it's customer research and product language at its core. I say this all the time. All ads are copyrighted and like if the copy isn't good, if the customer research isn't good, then you've just made something generic and it's gonna relate to no one and that's when it feels like kind of meh. Is copywriting something that you deliberately sat down and tried to learn or trying to get better at and like master your craft over time? Yeah, I'm definitely trying to get better at it. It's not something somewhere I started. I started in editing like we talked about. Right. But every time a client hands me a video script, I have to basically cut it in half because you just don't have a lot of time in video. 30 seconds is not a lot of time. You can say maybe 50 words and so how do you, what 50 words do you say is basically copy? You know the saying, if I had more time, I would write a shorter letter. Yes, who said that? I freaking love that quote. I don't want to misattribute it but like someone really smart said it and it's so true and I think about it probably like once a day because AI is so verbose. You ever try to ask AI for like, I don't know, V1 of anything and it's like 5,000 characters and you're like, whoa, you're doing way too much. Or you're like coworker hands you an AI document and it's like 10 pages and you're like, I'm not. Yes, you're like, please respect my time. I'm not reading all that. For real, it's actually a problem. And so like there's power in being concise, which comes down to copy right usually. Totally. By the way, we're on this topic. I'll say that I recommend people test image ads before they operate into video because you can get a lot of reps, quick reps and they're easier to make. And at the core, most image ads are talking a copy about a pain point, copy about a benefit or copy about a feature. And that all translates really well to video once you've learned what works. If someone wants to get better at copy writing, where do you send them? Where would you send them? Oh my god. There's a lot of good copy books out there. I think for ads specifically, I do my friend Shlomo who was on this podcast is really good at image ads and we talk up together all the time, take his course. He's spent so much fricking time on that thing. It's really good. Or just DM him to be honest, he'll probably shoot the shoot with you. He's awesome. He's so brilliant. I love how his brain works. What's the most expensive bad ad that you've seen where you can tell a lot of money went into it and it just is not hitting. Oh my god. You're asking me to call someone out right now. Yeah, we can believe it out, but I'm curious. Give me a sec to think about that. I think there's been a lot of sales force ads that I'm like, why did we make this? It's super brand. Even the sales force Mr. Beast partnership, I'm still trying to understand that one, it just felt like such a weird match of ICPs. I'll talk about that one. I mean, it's just like a very public example. So it feels like they definitely spent like many millions on that, especially to get any kind of partnership with Mr. Beast. But if you think about Mr. Beast's ICP, like they're young, they're probably in their high school. Yeah, like most of them are probably in high school. And I know he's trying to mature his audience a little by getting on Amazon and doing game shows and things like that. But right at the gate, I just thought the partnership was really weird because there's just a mismatch. So like the partnership was weird and then the creative itself looks really expensive. They did a lot of AI production on the backgrounds. I can tell, but I wish I had it up with me. We can show it on the screen maybe now, but there's like helicopters and freaking vault and the sweepstakes for people to find the vault somewhere in the world to win a million dollars. And it's like, if this is a product video about Salesforce, we've taught nothing about Salesforce. And maybe you don't need to. They're so big. But okay, then then it's a brand video. Then we're trying to associate with Salesforce with something like we talked about earlier. What are we associated with Salesforce with there? Mr. Beast, money, sweepstakes, like I've learned nothing about Salesforce from that campaign. And it just seemed like a massive marketing blunder spend thing. And you know, maybe they have so much money that it doesn't matter. But I remember seeing that and being like, I do not understand the goal here. I'm just going to let this die softly. And I think it has like, we've talked about since it came out. Well, like overlay the video or something so people can can watch and check it out. Yeah. Let's talk about script blocks because you've like productized or created a framework from this. And I think it'd be really helpful for marketers to break it down. Yeah. I can go into my process a little bit if you want. Like yeah, let's do it. Okay, cool. I'll share something on the screen and narrate it to viewers. You're seeing behind the brains of Connor Lewis, studio Lewis here. So these are script blocks. This is the thing that I kind of, I don't know if I invented it, but at least I codified it because it's how you get to the the outlines of each script. So like eat these are scripts. I know it looks messy, but right now what you're seeing is like a use case that we're basing something around the pain points here, the feature here and the benefit here. And this creates like the outline of script. Like if I go to this tab over here, you can see that like, it's the same thing. I'm just laying it out in posted node form so that everyone can kind of talk about it. And where is that coming from? Where is what coming from all of this? Like the pain the feature are you sitting down with you're showing click ups example? Did you get in a room virtual or in person with a click up team and you're just riffing on what is the pain? Are you like going through their gong calls? Like where do you start with something like this? Gong calls yes. Also with smaller companies will hop on with like the head of marketing, the CEO and product marketing and maybe like a sales leader. And that that's a really good perspective committee larger companies. It's like demand team, product marketing team, sales team. But like three people in a room plus me basically talk about this and nail down the product messaging. And so I'll talk about click up because again, they're just here. And what we do is like, okay, click up has 10 million features that you can talk about, right? There's like chat. There's calendar. There's timekeeping. And honestly, we talked about that being one of the things that we have to address. I always boil it down. I'm like, okay, you if you're a super product and you can do infinite things, it's not going to teach anyone anything. You have to show people a use case that they make someone to download it now or makes them curious enough to hop on a sales call to you if you're sales led. So I always say limited to max one feature per 30 seconds. And so I was with the click up team and I was like, hey guys, where do we want to start? Like which features are most important for you to push right now? Click up brain was one of the things that they talked about. Super agents was another thing. And then this idea of convergence, the magic of having all of your tools in one foundation. Hey, it's me Dave. This episode is sponsored by Zoom webinars. Zoom webinars lets you host polished, engaging webinars that actually drive pipeline. We recently switched to Zoom webinars for exit five live. I don't know if you've seen this. It's been everywhere. I think our conversations about webinars, everyone's talking about webinars right now. Let's do great webinars. That's what we're talking about, right? I've been super happy since we moved over to Zoom. Just really the high quality. It just, some of it feels different. Our webinars feel professional and polished. Our media team shout out to Merissa and Rhea. They've been putting a ton of work in behind the scenes to get this thing right. And it really helps us run these exit five live sessions and put on a performance. This is not a webinar. It actually feels like our performance and the results have been there. Our attendees and our teams been really happy. The platform gives you everything you need to run a real event from branded registration, built in promotional tools, live engagement features, and post event follow up that helps you convert attendees into pipeline. That's a difference between hosting a meeting and running a great event. If you're a BDB marketer with a webinar program that needs a reboot or you're thinking about building one, you should go and check out Zoom webinars, right? You know Zoom, but go and check out the webinar product. And come to one of our upcoming exit five live sessions every other Friday. It's two Fridays a month. You can see it in action. Check them out. Check our sessions out. I think it really gives a good example of what you can do. Go and check them out zoom dot com slash exit five. That's zoom dot com slash exit five. Hey, it's Dave. This episode is brought to you by compound growth marketing. They're a full funneled demand gen agency. Look, I personally hired them twice. I think I was the very first customer before I was even a thought leader just when I was a VP of marketing, a real marketer back in the day, right? CGM was one of the best agencies that I've ever hired. I think that's because they understand the job. The founder John came from this background knows what it's like, knows the life of a marketing leader. And they help high growth cyber security and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They offer the combination of AEO modern paid advertising strategy and a dedicated go to market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by a former VP of marketing. Like I said, John, he really gets this space. I think that matters. By the way, for B2B tech companies, CGM has a special offer for people who listen to this podcast. You can get two free sessions focused on media planning to learn what channels are driving the best ROI. How much you should be investing in demand capture versus creation and how to invest up funnel effectively. Hey, this is a really smart offer. So go check it out compound growthmarketing.com/exit5. Go check this out. Get some free help. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. Bye-bye. And so that is where we started. We went into this board and like nailed those three down as our focuses. Now the focuses are different with some of the new projects we're doing, but I'll just keep on this example. And then we backed into, okay, for ClickUpBrain, what kind of pain problems do they solve? Like struggling to keep track of where that message was? You know, you can just ask ClickUpBrain. I'm chasing approvals from all these people. Oh, well, brain can auto-approved things based on certain parameters. You know, I'm switching between tabs all the time. Oh, well, what if everything was in one app? You know, convergence. So now you're starting to create all of these different scripts just by creating these blocks. We actually did it with the exit 5 team too. And so I'll show you the exit 5 pain points and features. So this works with like non software too. I guess you can call exit 5 software, but it's more community. Totally. And so like some of the features we highlighted were online community, member matchmaking, IRL events. Just high quality members is like a feature of exit 5. And so what are some of the pain points that we're talking about there? I want IRL connection. I have a ton of responsibilities, suddenly, and I need help. And we'll actually like write down how customers say it in the blocks too. So like we just raised a series A and I need to double the team holy shit. Classic problem that I had of marketing might face. So once you do that, you can start to create these kind of like outlines. And so like the classic software I'd like I talked about is pain future benefit. That's just the starting point. So you bring the posted notes in here. You have the customer language in front of you. And then you can get super creative. Because I think what happens so often with ad agencies, especially as they like prioritize creativity above anything. And then we end up with these weird ads that don't really teach you anything. So if you start with the core, if you start with pain future benefit product marketing really, then you can get crazy on top of it. You can you can, you know, have shy of love show up and on a helicopter as long as you're talking about a pain point in the script and showing off a feature and doing that stuff. So in a 30 second ad, you've got pain future benefit. But then some of them have more colors. They get more complex. So what are you layering on here? You want me to share more secrets? Yeah, please. I love sharing secrets. Okay. So I'll share these versions real quick. So I'll go through a few examples. There's a positioning ad where the pain is all about a competitive alternative. So it's very similar. It's just like you're calling out a competitor pretty directly. Doc, Doc, go does this a lot with Google and privacy. That's probably the most clear example I can think of. Benefit focused ads are super common too. You don't always have to show pain. If you show the promised land, you're good. Just remember to show, just connect the promised land to the software. That's what I always teach people is like don't just say increased revenue. You know what I mean? Show how the software gets you to finish a task faster so that you can do more of that task so you can increase revenue. You have to work your way to that benefit. Right. Connect the dots for someone. Yeah. Yeah. Arguably you probably don't even need to say increased revenue. They will get that on their own. You should save that screen time for showing what the product actually does. There's a few other brand ad vibes. I could talk about brand ads, but that's probably going to take a whole episode. And then there's stuff like social proof. There's ways to structure customer ads that are around benefits brands and social proof. When I say a social proof script broccoli, I'm mostly talking about like how much what were the results? What was their experience working with them? It's just like storytelling. And then I've got some some stuff for launch videos too. But again, I think it's going to take us too much time to get through. So there's many like flavors. What I'm seeing is there's no like one formula. There's a number of formulas depending on what you're doing. And I assume these map to like where you're at in the funnel as well. They do. And it's worth testing each one. So normally when we do ads with companies, yes, we're going to do a classic software ad most likely because those have just been the most successful for us. But we'll try positioning on. Let's get a feel good ad in there. You know, let's do a quick overview ad. And that's more explainery and down funnel. And that way you can actually see what works. And at what point in the funnel they work. Because if you're doing ads right, you're dividing your ad sets by funnel stage and you're doing a lot of retargeting. And I'll just tell you now, testimonial ads are really good in the bottom of funnel really bad at the top of funnel. So just an example of like, you never know what's going to work at what stage in the funnel. You should test them. Okay. For top of funnel, if you let's say you're like just starting out your video ad strategy for top of funnel, you can't go wrong with blank formula. Okay. I mean, it's probably going to be the classic software. I'm sorry. I know I talk about this one a lot. If anyone walks away with anything from this podcast, it's to just the copy this formula. Pain feature benefit, baby. And I'll do that. I'll do the 30 second version, which is pain brand feature. Okay. If you're truly a new software and you're I haven't done video ads yet, no one knows you. So really put your brand in there. Like for the love of God, don't try to be coy about it. Just put your brand in there. And then get a ton of different pain points and test the hell out of them. So like, don't commit to one pain. If I'm a CRM, don't commit to like forgetting to reach out to my prospects on a follow up email. That's just one of like 15,000 pains that I could try. So one thing we'll do is do hook alternates. So get the same ad with the same actors, but do five or six different takes for the first line because it's basically free on set. You can just like, okay, take two of new line, take three new line and just get like five or six different pain points at least per creative and then see which pain works. And it's like, this is the formula I would recommend, but that's the strategy I would recommend for an early stage. Okay. I'm cringing because I'm thinking of all the ads we've recorded where we had the opportunity to record multiple takes of the intro and just did not do that. And man, our budget could have a lot gone so much further. I'm sure a lot of it. Like someone is listening to me to to this and saying, oh, same. And I feel seen. Hopefully I'm not alone in that. By that invisible person. Yeah, that invisible person. I'm talking to you. I hope you're also feeling the pain with me because staying. Yeah, we've done a lot of in-house ad recordings and we've recorded. I know you're one of that your suggestions is to find a shoot day and record multiple ads in one day. We should talk about that so that someone's not not making an even worse mistake, which is like scheduling someone's full day and then not maximizing that. How do you get like the most out of a shoot day? I'll show you our exact schedule. Here's like a product launch schedule. Also, I want to address what you said earlier. I didn't do the hook thing for like five years. All the entire time I was in a house and then the first year I started my business. I didn't do that. And then I stumbled on it accidentally. I was like on set. Let's just try this because the client was having second opinions about a line. And then we were right and we had three different tests out and we were like, oh, it was the pain point we didn't expect. And so I was like, we should just do this on every shoot because you think you know your customer, but you don't know what works and adds until you test. I had a question about ads that are just animation versus ads that have humans in them. Do you have the data? Like what is the data showing? Does it matter? Do you need a human in the ad for it to perform well? So the answer to that is complicated, but I'll give you like a TLDR version, which is sure. This is what the data shares is that humans will disarm people a little better, like new people to the brands. So if people have never seen your brand before, a skit, a human, a UGC influencer, they'll kind of disarm folks a little bit and not have them skeptical at the gate about the ad. And then depending on how the creative does, it'll go from there. The animation based ads are better for folks who already know you, folks who are you're calling out a problem very directly in the first line of copy and it's relatable. And so they'll stay, but just understand that if you create a motion graphics-based video, it's going to read as an ad right, right up front. And so it's good to just be up front with it. It's good to put it as a retargeting layer. It's good for launch videos on LinkedIn, although sometimes launch videos starting the founder or some product person are a little better. The TLDR is if you're going to a cold audience, I would go with human means and it doesn't have to be high production, right? You can just do like iPhone stuff too. If you're going to a warm audience, they kind of just want to see the product and like just tell me what it does. Okay, cool. I know your brand already. I'll download this if this solves my problem. That makes sense. How do you decide iPhone or high production? Start iPhone, go towards high production later. Also, that's the basics. The complex is that it's channel dependent. So don't do an iPhone video on YouTube pre-roll. It's just not going to work. YouTube creators are so good these days. Like the quality of their videos is like you're watching TV. And so the the ad should match that quality. Right. Same on CTV. But if you're on meta, like what do you see when you scroll meta? You see mostly people like smaller creators using iPhones, even big creators use iPhones. And it's vertical first. And so your ad should look like that too. When in doubt, be feed native. That's what I always say. So if you're advertising on it meta, what a meta video looks like. If you're advertising on YouTube, what do YouTube videos look like? Go for it. I like that. All right, let's get into your schedule. Here it is. Honey, it's a work in progress. Oh, holy heck, this is intense. Yeah, I know it's a lot. For those listening, I'm showing like this very pink graphic that I think I'm going to turn into a white graphic. So it's not so loud. But essentially, I want to just showcase how we structure a product launch because that may be the most common SaaS event that we have. spark a video. It was like, oh, we're launching a product. Let's, let's make a video for it. Classic. And so I want to challenge you or anyone who's listening on this and say, do you just have to film a launch video on that day or could you pull off more? If you're booking executive time, if you're booking a crew, if you are, you know, spending all his money, get more stuff. Crews are hired for either 10 or 12 hour days. I'm going to show a 12 hour day, just based on that, trying to fit more in. But you could just cut two of these ads and still do a 10 hour day. But essentially, like, this is the role of everyone at the bottom here. So this director, camera department, set design, executive talent and actors. And then this is what they're doing throughout the day. So 7 a.m. everyone's just getting ready. 8 a.m. the directors put it, giving notes on performance and blocking to the executive for the launch video while they learn lines, camera departments doing adjustments. And then we're shooting the launch video for the first three hours. And if you've made the launch video complex enough that it takes more than three hours, you probably don't need to. Most likely depends on your idea. You can go big and do like a launch video that takes a whole day to film. But what if you just time blocked yourself to the morning, right before launch, eight launch and then started to get people working on an explainer for your new product? You know, a launch video should look very different than an explainer. Explainer can just be a talking head straight to camera. Here's how the product works. Boom, go into motion graphics. It's very straightforward. It goes on the website and it's really good down funnel because people just want to learn what it is. Very good for champion education too. And then wow, you're already on set. What if we chose another corner of the room to shoot a few direct to camera ads? I know I only blocked out an hour for each of these ads to be clear. I'm not suggesting like skits or anything that requires a lot of shots. I'm just recommending direct to camera ads. Like the ads that you see on Instagram, it starts out. Are you ahead of marketing that's too stretched too thin to even eat lunch? Well, do I have a product for you? Those kinds of ads still really work. Are they going to be as good as these skit-based super creative ads? No. But you're just testing stuff here. And so if you put five direct camera ads with different copy into the same ad set and test them against each other, you'll learn something that you otherwise wouldn't have learned from this day if you just did the launch video. So I'll share this schedule with you or anyone who wants, but yeah, this is a typical 12 hour shoot day for our product launches and how we try to handle them and try to get the most out of it for single day. This is great. And you walk away with six seven creatives. Six ads, one explainer and one launch video. Got it. Yep. And you recently did, I think I was seeing on LinkedIn, you did a shoot day where you were like broke your own record for how much creative you got. What was that number? It was inscribed. We got 56 ads in a day. I'm pretty sure. Stop. Okay. So someone listening, thinking, I can't get this number. Yeah. How does that even work? Right. Well, let me be clear. That is six unique creatives in one day, split into 56 ads through those hook alternates that we're talking about and those time alternates. So when I'm writing scripts, I'm writing a 30 second version, a 15 second version and a six second version just by default. Six seconds. Yeah. Yeah, six seconds for YouTube pre-roll. Wait, say more for over right like right before YouTube video rolls, the little like tiny ad that you see got it. Yeah. It's almost like a video graph. Like there's six second ones you can barely get seven words in. And so you're like, yeah, you're just it's a vibe more than anything or a key message of the campaign. Right. But anyway, so you can turn each unique creative into nine different ads by doing three hooks of 30, three hooks of 15 and three hooks of six. So three, three, three, nine all rolling up into this one, like hero script is what I would call it. And that way you turn each ad into all these little testable ads on that have these minor variables tweaked and you can learn from that. I love it. I've said the word learn a lot today, but it's because like ads are the best testing ground ever because you're literally spending money to get them impressions. So like, yeah, yeah, 100%. Like you're you're paying the learn you get information. It's never for nothing. Even if the ad doesn't work, you've paid to learn that it doesn't work. Yeah. Which is a positive for a marketer. That's how I rationalize things that don't work. We learned that it didn't work. And that's better than not learning didn't work. Yeah. Okay. What you just described the three, three, three, that same thing exists for packing. And it's called the Sudoku method. What? Tell me more. Yeah. If you're just looking up, yeah, if you're ever going on a trip and you want more outfits, you can do this Sudoku method. We'll link it in the show notes unrelated to B2B sass. But like, oh, so you paired the same pants with like three different tops. That's exactly right. Yes. And you get all these variations of outfits. And what you've described is just the Sudoku method, but for ads. But for ads. Yes. Oh my god. Can I use that? Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Literally you just described the Sudoku method. I hope you do a packing podcast personally. So I can learn because I panic. It would be six seconds. I'm going to drive next week, Dasha. And I'm panicked about what to wear. So this would help me. Okay. Maybe I'll do a LinkedIn post about it. Beautiful. This Sudoku method for drive. Oh my god. Please. I'll repost it. I don't care. Okay. Okay. Deal. I'll send it to you. It sounds like you need some help. Yeah. I think I do. Okay. Motion graphics. We kind of talked about them. Yeah. How are you dealing with motion graphics? Specifically I'm curious. So claw design does motion graphics to some extent. Are you yay? Are you nay? Yeah. In general. What is your your vibe when it comes to motion graphics? And what's your read on using AI for motion graphics? Yeah. It's almost my read on using the eye for video in general. Okay. Well, then let's take it there. I'll answer the first question which is how is claw design for motion graphics? Right now it's kind of junior motion graphics level. I would say it can get a really good V1. It's great for storyboarding, which I'll talk about in a sec. But I don't think it has the level of polish or care that motion graphics videos deserve. That said, you can't always afford that polish or care. So yeah. I know that's a nuanced answer. But I would hesitate to publish anything directly from claw design. That said, I think it's a really good like tool to get everyone on the same page. But what the creative is about which is exactly what we do with ads, by the way. So we don't make AI add creative. I don't really believe in AI add creative right now. I think it's uncanny. I think it's a little disingenuous to especially like AI UGC. That is so weird. And why are you getting these fake influencers to talk about your product and call them real influencers? So weird. Yeah. And so if that's the first ad people see and it's an AI ad, what impression do you think they have of your brand? It's distrust at its core. We've seen that based on LinkedIn released this feature that says this looks like AI Slop. You can flag things as looking like AI Slop. And that's just like an example of this overall consumer sentiment towards AI video and AI content in general. That's like pretty negative. So if you're going to make AI video ads straight out the gates like to post, you better be damn sure that it looks that you're either like straight forward with it being I've seen AI like watermarks at the bottom being like this is an AI ad or it's done so well that you can't tell. But all that said, AI has a really really important like role in the process right now for us, which is visual storyboarding. So when we're pitching concepts, we it looks like this. These these are not actually filmed. These is this is created via three. But we want everyone in the room to understand the visuals and like the story beats that we're talking about. And so and the camera movements even that we're talking about. And that's not always easy to describe to people who don't like no video too well. And so what I'm showing on screen right now for those listening is there's a script on the left that's like a basic script that we do for approval. So we like do a script V1 that's more of an outline. And then on the right, it's like a few AI frames that we've exported that kind of capture the vibe of the video or the most important moments. And that's really important. So I would think of AI as like this tool for getting everyone on the same page, doing a lot of the busy work like contracts with editors and stuff like that. But please for the love of God, not yet at least don't go straight to the feed with AI video. It's too big of a risk. And I don't see that changing in the next few years. I think also we as consumers are getting smarter at identifying AI content. And so yeah, just keep watching that like the consumer landscape change and the sentiment on AI video change because this might be out of date in a year. But that's where I'm at right now. Yeah, I know that makes sense. What's your suggestion to someone who reports into a CEO or a CMO who sees your request for a budget for a production with real actors. And it's like, you know what, Dasha, like I feel like we could do this much cheaper with AI. What's the talk track? That's a classic classic. I think everyone gets asked that. Just show them an example of an AI video gone wrong and how people reacted to it. You can show them the Coke commercial with a Christmas Coke commercial. Or the comments on the Coke commercial. Yeah. Most importantly, the comments. Because I think founders ask this a lot. They're like, just make it with AI. They don't want their products looking crap out in the market. They're spending money to pump this crap out. Let's not make it crap. Let's make it really good. And so I think your argument needs to be around. Let's amplify something that makes our brand and software proud versus spending money on something that we just called in. And hopefully they understand if they don't, you have a bigger problem that's I can't quite help with. But you might be able to help someone get budget approval. So when you were on the other side of this working for a SaaS company, you said you would have to fight for budget to get some ads created. Yeah. What have you seen? You work with a lot of clients. What have you seen really work? when someone maybe has to fight a little extra hard for a budget for a video ad. Yeah, we still do this a lot, like most people want to make videos, like one of the things that got into marketing for it, but it's hard to fight for that line, and the first thing I recommend is to fight for the problem, not for video. So like nobody funds, we should do video. They fund like we lose deals at stage three because prospects can't explain what we do to their boss, or we lose deals with cybersecurity companies because they don't think that we work well with their industry. And so, well, we should make customer stories showing that we work well with their industry, or we should make an explainer video that shows exactly what we do in 30 seconds so that someone can share it upwards and get approval. These are problems that are business problems as opposed to like a want, which is like a want video. Yeah, we all want something. So frame it as a problem. That's like my first suggestion. I have two others, which I can talk about really quick. Yeah, go for it. And then I'm curious to get your take on, like what is the production budget someone should be asking for? Like what is reasonable, maybe at every stage of your journey? Like I'm experimenting to, I have an ad that's really working, I might maybe want to take it up a notch. Let's talk numbers. Love numbers. I even have like a, I have a visual for this too. I have so many visuals. You have so many visuals. I'll share two other strategies that have worked really well for us with asking for budget. And then I'll get to the numbers. The first one is cost per asset, not cost per shoot. So frame it as we are getting, you know, 22 videos for $40,000, which you could frame it as like it's $2,000 video, which is a lot better deal than being like, you know, this $40,000 video shoot that like sends warning flags. Don't be shady about it. Obviously be upfront, but emphasize the fact that we're going to get a lot out of this and not just for one lightning strike to use a marketing term. And then shelf life. So most media spend evaporates the day that the campaign ends, right? But a brand film or, you know, an explainer sits on the homepage in sales decks and onboarding for even employees. And even on booth like event booth screens for years. So try to stretch how this video will be used and tag in your local executive producer on strategies to do that because it's my whole job to figure out how to fit the video into as many places as possible. Any agency you work with will want to help you sell this across the line. It's their job. And so if they're going to what they do, they'll help you come up with strategies on how to maximize a video because the last thing anyone wants is to like spend 100 grand on a single video that just dies on the feed. That's like everyone's fear. I'm pretty sure. So yeah, that gave me chills. And then budget. Let's talk about budget. I'll show you really quick. So I think it's good to contextualize this in the crew anatomy. So I'm a producer at my core. So I think about crews all the time and what talent is needed for what video. But it looks like this excuse the figm aboard. I'm designing these for LinkedIn. This one's not as pink. So it's nicer to look at. But essentially what you're looking at is like three of the core videos that we make at Studio Lewis. It's video ads, customer stories and product launch videos. And it's the crew that we staff for each thing along with the cost of each crew member what their job is and what the total cost range should be for these things. This is based off of doing this for a long time and trying to be very reasonable about costs. It's like our goal as an agency is to make good video production affordable. And so you'll see here that like we want to pay people well. Like we're paying a DP, you know, $2,000 a day for a commercial production. But they're putting a lot of prep hours into it. They have to do a lot of work on the day. So let's make sure to pay our crew well. But for to answer your question, customer story on average costs between 10 and $15,000. I think if you're getting lower than that, you should just double check the quality. Maybe you are getting something great for a great deal. And that's awesome. You should stick with that vendor. Or if it's too much more than that, then are they making this customer story needlessly complex like right with efficiency product launch somewhere between 15 and 25K video ads are the biggest range. And I apologize. I know everyone on like really specific numbers and video ads problem is it just depends so heavily on the creative like we can be at a freaking masquerade with 70 actors and that's going to cost a lot different than like three people doing a skit at a conference table. So generally 35K to 80K is where we quote and that's where we're trying to get like 50 ads usually ish like plus or minus 15. So somewhere in the range of like 35 to 70 ads is like our goal in every shoot. And usually it's a one or two day shoot. So it depends. But this is a starting point. You can run your agencies by this. I'll share this as well. And you can kind of understand like where the money goes. I think that's the most important thing is sometimes it feels like a black box like you're just depositing $40,000 into this little agency. And where does the money go? I don't know. Well, here's where the money goes. And you can check to make sure that all these things are on your set. Because I really do think that they're necessary for each of these videos. Yeah, this is great. Thank you for demystifying this. I'm sure people listening are wondering what ballpark is reasonable. So this is great. Yeah, we are super transparent about pricing. So I love it. I love that you didn't get this. You didn't ask me for your email. You just said, let me. Yeah. We have a pricing page with numbers on it. Can you imagine as a service agency? That's wild. But I'm sure it also saves you time. That's the thing. Like you're not getting people that are not qualified or can't afford you, which is like time saving for you. You don't just screen people out. Makes a ton of sense. Okay. Connor, before we exit, five questions for you. Rapid fire. I'm ready. You work with your now wife when I met you. Yeah. It was girlfriend. What is something that you learned working with your spouse? Create a deliberate separation between work and home. Otherwise, your conversations will bleed together all the time. Love it. Who is your marketing mentor/inspiration? They don't need to know they're your mentor. This is so cheesy, but I love Christina Lee. I think she just has her heart in marketing and social and understands people in a really unique way. So I looked at her content all the time. Love it. Companies crushing it with their ads right now. Humble brag. Click up. It's crushing it with their ads. Check them out on YouTube. Outside of our clients, look at ramp. Ramp is doing some really, really cool ads right now. And they're creating these huge integrated video campaigns that hit social ads. Everything. So look at ramp. Ramp is great in Spowe across the board. Not even just ads. They're careers page. Oh my gosh. So good. Wow. So good. Yeah. I love ramp. I love following what they're doing. Something that you wish you could go back and tell younger Connor who is still working and B2B SaaS making ads. You can do it because I was thinking about going out on my own for like a year or two and it sucked the first year, I'll be honest, but I have confidence in yourself and the deals will come. The money will come. Chase your dream. I love that. Okay. Something that you're still figuring out. How to manage my stress. I'm working on that. I'm transparent about this with most people. I have anxiety and sometimes that it's hard as an entrepreneur to manage. And so I'm trying very mindfully to log off at 5 p.m. trying very mindfully to not overwork myself. And that is this year's goal. That has not been my goal the past three years. And it's I've burnt out a few times because of that. Yeah. Got to make some grass touching. I hear you for real. Okay. You are a content creator. Where should people find you if they want to see some of the content they are creating and putting out? Find me on LinkedIn. I make videos, infographics, freaking breakdowns, text posts, photos. I talk about all things B2B SaaS video production. Mostly around ads, but sometimes I talk about customer stories and product launches too. Yeah. Give me a follow. Shoot me a DM, say hi. Say hi. All right, Connor. This was great. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I will see you in a few weeks at Drive, pumped to see you again. Yeah. And yeah, thanks for coming on the show. This was awesome. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit five. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website exit five.com. Our mission at exit five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. There's no better place to do that than with us at exit five. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group. 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