The best b2b video ads have these three things

Welcome back to Death to the Corporate Video. My name is Guy Bauer. I'm the Founding Creative Director of UMALT AB2B Video @Agency. And today we're talking about the three things that the best B2B video adds all have in common. Before we get into it, I just have a quick announcement that I'm super excited about. I am making a feature film. The first feature film in my life, they always say right what you know. So my main character, I think, it changes day to day as my confidence wanes in my screenwriting ability. But I have, there's a 90% chance that the main character is a B2B marketer that then goes on an adventure. If you want to follow along, you can go to the UMALT YouTube page and there's a playlist. Guy makes a movie and I'm documenting the journey on the YouTube page. I'm usually doing updates once every couple weeks. So follow along there. All right, so let's get into it. The three things that the best B2B video adds all have. Number one is characters with a point of view. When I go through all of the best B2B video ads, there's always characters with a strong sense of either purpose, belief, or just general aura. And it's those point of views that drive the spot forward. Sometimes the point of view could be antiquated and bad, like representing the old way. Sometimes it could be representing the new way. Usually it's the new way in the old way, clashing. If you look at our Google Himer spot, you've got the Google Himer guy wants to blow up universal analytics. And then the woman in the spot is questioning him the entire time and basically saying GA4 sucks. If you look at our Pac Bio spot and all these spots are on on our website, umalt.com, UMAULT.com. If you look at our Pac Bio spot, all of these people have these wacky ideas for how to sell long read DNA sequencing machine. Their point of views are what drives the story forward and creates reason for you to watch. So if you look at your B2B video ad and you don't find characters with strongly held convictions, I would, uh, you know, take a step back and think about what can we add to these people? They can't just be normal people. Okay, so number one characters with a point of view. Number two, oh boy. And this doesn't even apply to only B2B video. As this is any video ad is one message, just one core message. One, not two, not three. I love when I see briefs where there's like 42 key messages. Nope. Those are not key messages then those are just messages. You get one message. The best ads B2B or B2C only say one thing. There's maybe supporting points, right, that are related to your brand or its mission and all that stuff. But the best B2B video ads focus on just trying to say one thing because that's a lot. Most people don't care about your B2B brand. They don't care about your video ad. It's actually interrupting them anyway and they want to skip out of it as soon as possible. So for you to try to cram two, three, four, ten things in there. Nobody's watching your ads. Well, most people aren't watching your ads. And then the people that do watch them don't watch with a pen and paper. They're not taking notes on everything you're saying. They don't care. They want to get out of it as soon as possible. Even if it's good. So one message, one message, that's it. And the best way to let this come through is actually go watch, go on YouTube and type in palms from dust to gold. I love this spot because the most of the spot you're like, what the heck is happening? And only at the very end when their core message comes in, does everything make sense? And they're literally one message. And the message is quite boring. And so I'm going to, before I spoil it, I'm going to pause here, go watch palms from dust to gold and come back. And I'm about to spoil it. All right. And the message is simply, we're renovating. Think about the normal way to announce a renovation. The palms casino is now renovating with over 230 rooms with fresh dining experiences. That's the normal boring way to do it. And what palms did was made a completely visceral, so emotional, the embodiment of renovation. But it really is just one thought that they baked into there. Oh, and then by the way, the beauty of the renovation comes along for the ride and the the essence of their brand and the naughtiness and all that stuff. Those supporting messages come along for the ride, but they are focused on just that one message. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant work. Love it. All right. So number two, one message, just one, not two, not five, not forty. One. All right. Number three, conflict. So because you've baked in a B2B video, I had with characters with a point of view, those point of views are now going to clash. If your spot does not have conflict, there's just no reason for me to watch person, verse nature, person, verse, person, all the stuff you learned in the seventh grade, you must have conflict and the easy trick way to do it is to build in characters with conflicting points of views. There's other ways to do it obviously, but if you look around in your spot and there is no conflict and everything just works and everything is great, you've made a paper towel head. You must have conflict if you want people to watch. All right. So that's it. The best B2B video ads have these three things in common. Number one, characters with a strong point of view. Number two, one message, just one, and then number three, conflict. People that are against each other or against something else, some kind of issue or against nature or whatever. There's a ton of them. All right. So that's it. Thank you very much for listening. I'll see you next time.