Breaking silos in video marketing: Integrating data, creative, and digital with SnapShot Interactive

Transcript

Jessica Gondolfo:

Hey guys, welcome back to the show. We have an awesome guest with us here today. Sean Whitmore, the Director of Digital at SnapShot Interactive, is taking us through the changing landscape of video marketing and how to break the silos between data, creative and digital. So hey, welcome Sean.

Sean Whitmore:

Cool, thanks Jessica. Glad to be here.

Jessica Gondolfo:

Awesome. So Sean, who is SnapShot and what do you do there?

Sean Whitmore:

Awesome. Yeah, we're a full service digital agency covering web SEO, performance marketing, branding and creative production. We kind of use a 360 model agency of record model with all of our clients, so in that little boutique, but we work with both B2B, B2C clients across industrial behavioral health and even the wellness industries.

Jessica Gondolfo:

That's awesome. So I'm really excited about this episode. I just think there's so much going on right now that makes this so relevant. So let's just get into this data, how it plays into creative, how it plays into digital. From your perspective, what role is data playing in creative today?

Sean Whitmore:

Absolutely. I mean, data, KPIs, points of measurement are crucial in understanding if you're creative is resonating. Oftentimes advertisers, brands will have an idea of what their customer wants to see, and the data will definitely illuminate possibly a different story, which will then effectively change, influence and redirect your story as needed through the creative storytelling you're trying to do. So in terms of the data, I mean everything from hard KPIs like conversion, conversion events, attribution along the funnel with creative in mind, knowing that some of the creative might be very top of funnel, really more for that first interaction with your customer and then all the way down to how's it engaging at an aggregate or a higher sample size, even with click-through rate and other metrics like that. And then tying it back through AB testing or other types of testing from individual pieces of copy in a headline or specific imagery comparing against itself. I know the evolution of AB testing is definitely dynamic and ever-changing right now, but still trying to use the data and tools you have available in order to create these tests to generate insights to then go back to your creative team to continually to elevate and iterate on your content.

Jessica Gondolfo:

Can you walk maybe some tangible examples of times that you've seen or maybe that we're witnessing today where the data is telling a different story than maybe the creative was meant to and how that kind of intersects with each other?

Sean Whitmore:

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a couple of brands that we were working with that one of them in particular was almost like a go-to market kind in a go-to market phase, almost a little bit of a very well nurtured possibly well also funded startup. And so we kind of had to generate demand, so we really had to tackle the idea that people have, they don't know about us. They might not even know necessarily about the product, the product offering or even where it fits currently in the market. So we have to educate the consumers there to do that. And how do we do that? We have to do that through traditional campaign strategy and content. So we have to create, we had to actually help architect the brand tone, the brand voice, the brand, the mission statement, and even the positioning statement a little bit with creative.

And then we had to find the channels of where we wanted this creative to live, and then what on those channels would resonate the most in terms of the content types, static imagery versus motion or gifs or videos, reason to believe content versus transactional reason to buy. And then making sure you had all of your lower funnel tactics there ready to capture the demand that you're generating up at the funnel that you don't expect when you put those ads out there that the people who are seeing them, who you're trying to educate and influence that they're going to buy right then and there. So those have been ways that we do it so that we've seen it will be over a six month timeframe. No one's even searching for these products or these brands when they're at this early stage of building their brand awareness. So you can have a branded search campaign running that's not getting any traction but has been running and then suddenly six months down the line, you see it start to really perform and generate a lot of traffic as you've been kind of educating consumers all along the way from when you started. So

Jessica Gondolfo:

Yeah, you touched on a couple of things here. So one was kind of, I want to say the way that consumers are absorbing content today and just a general change that we've seen in that environment. So are you seeing things from, are people more inclined to engage with things that are video or that are smaller clips? How are you seeing that change in the market?

Sean Whitmore:

Yeah, absolutely. We see this a lot and we have a lot of these conversations around this around content strategy really even when we're talking about creating marketing calendars, but also where the channels make the most sense with our current customer base, and we see this a lot in the industrial space, construction equipment dealers, their customer base is pretty well understood. It of course evolves and changes over time, but it's kind of their current customer base and where they're at are in kind of direct conflict or it's kind of the opposite of where we've seen a lot of the growth and the stickiness of content from TikTok short form videos that you now see on YouTube shorts, both platforms, even TikTok with everything that's going on, even politically, they're growing rapidly mean, and Google is investing in YouTube shorts as a dedicated channel within YouTube pretty heavily.

And all of those channels are really leveraging the advent of this short form, very specific DIY production style that we've been seeing for the last four years during really the rise of TikTok, especially during the pandemic. So we see that a lot. So we recognize the two things. One, even some of the industrial clients we work with don't even TikTok for their own reasons or are not allowed to because they have government contracts to some degree. So we start to think YouTube shorts, but then we start to think about, well, if this is going to be much younger demographic, then we got to start thinking about the campaign strategy. We start to iterate and evolve the goal, the marketing goal, to tie it back to a business goal. For example, some of our industrial dealers, they want to recruit a lot of new tech positions and a lot of them are 18 to 19 right out of high school, and we see it in the data. They use YouTube shorts all day. So that's actually a whole campaign strategy we're doing with hr, recruiting, using digital and creative and specifically the type of creative on a specific channel with all of those data pieces kind of informing it.

Jessica Gondolfo:

You touched on something when you and I spoke last week that I kind of want to get into how you convince leadership in companies that maybe have a more traditional sense to take these risks and to connect with audiences that maybe are a little bit outside of their, let's say, buying audience for instance, you're saying for the recruiting process, right, they're going to be a little bit different. And you said something that was really interesting to me, you said unhinged is in, and I feel like that is leaning back to the traditional media and how that is changed. So I want to hear your thoughts on this.

Sean Whitmore:

Yeah, I personally love that we actually worked in the really, really internal facing phrase on hinges in that is something that me and my creative department and my creative director talk about quite a bit. It actually really roots back to exactly as you said, traditional marketing and high production value content has been so prevalent for so long across just about every single digital and non-digital channel that I believe from a psychological standpoint, even a sociological standpoint, that it's kind of created this sterilization that I call the sterilization of the car commercial effect, where it's just like car commercial comes on, kind of exactly what the next 30 seconds of your life is going to feel like. So honestly, because it creates the same kind of, I would say effect every time with slight differences, slight variations I've seen over time when any time it actually does really change, it's almost a talking point in and of itself that I think it kind of lowers engagement over time.

And we can see that specifically with how people have engaged and how people's attention spans have kind of resulted as the difference between a car commercial and TV compared to the engagement rates of a TikTok video on obviously TikTok and the short form content, two completely different styles of production. One right now is objectively much more engaging and increasing higher ad recall than anything before. And another example, there's a lot of real world examples of this too that we can point to very some recent real world examples too, but actually I think it goes all the way back to the Squatty potty unicorn ad. It's to truly go back and someone on my team has actually never seen it before. I told 'em about it because it's close to nine years old, I believe now eight or nine years old, and it's just a truly unhinged kind of idea from the get go, but that's why it's so sticky and why it's so viral and why that still has an incredibly high ad recall.

And so that was where I think it really started to kind of take shape. Then liquid death's entire business model is a little kind of, and marketing strategy is unhinged, so they kind of wrote the playbook and there is a great how it's made a podcast from the owner and founder of Liquid Death highly recommend how he breaks it all down logistically because it's very much true from their content now with they just released an anime called Murder Man, and it's just like a lot of these things would be very just like out there, the brand safety has been thrown out the window. And so that's kind of the whole idea though, because it's very topical right now. People are really craving for something different. You can see this in other pieces of content and the data that backs it up. Just recently, Conan O'Brien was on Hot Ones and I love Hot Ones.

I've been watching it since season one, very engaged. The whole idea is a little unhinged too, interviewing while eating spicy Wings. So I actually didn't even think about that, but that's also another kind of reason for what we're talking about here. But then Conan O'Brien comes on and he's gotten about almost 10 million views in about four weeks. I think maybe it's two weeks. I don't exactly know, especially whenever this podcast comes out. On average though, hot Ones videos, these interview videos get maybe one or 2 million views over a two week, four week or even life of their video. He's gotten close to 10 million. And I remember when I saw it, it was 48 hours I think around that range after it came out and it already had three to 4 million. And that video, that interview gets increasingly more unhinged. Conan O'Brien looks increasingly off the wall throughout it until the end.

There's memes about it, there's gifs out there, check it out. And that really, I think is because of the virality of word of mouth and someone seeing something like, oh my God, you've got to see this in it to their friends. And it kind of balloons because people want to see this. So that really brings up the whole idea around brand safety and how do you maintain your scale and Apple, a Coca-Cola, for example, while still trying to do something different and also staying competitive too. We're actually, Jessica and I are actually chatting right now a day after Apple just released their iPad Pro commercial where they're crushing it very, very well produced ad, aesthetically provocative, very much so. I'm sure that it very much from concept to production was done with a lot of love, care and detail and technical perfection to be honest, to match even the quality of the iPad Pro product line itself. But it really, really immediately had a negative backlash because it just features a lot of analog and creative tools and memorabilia for some people being physically and literally crushed to be replaced by an iPad that really didn't resonate. But sorry, Jessica, go ahead.

Jessica Gondolfo:

Is that because do you feel the market is craving authenticity and that for them was really shocking? Is that why I saw you sent me this and I had not seen the ad yet, and now of course it's like everywhere that this is having so much backlash and at first I didn't understand the backlash until I had really gone into it, but I am wondering, is that where people are just craving authenticity inside ads and videos?

Sean Whitmore:

Absolutely. I think you really are kind of encompassing the thesis of this too. Not just that the content should be weird and cause a double take, but I think the reason why that's coming from an engagement standpoint right now is everything else has felt so sterile for so long so that when someone does do something different, it just immediately gives you pause and then you want to engage with it. But then from there, the stickiness and durability, I think when you use that strategy is then you've got to back it up with authenticity, the fan, the customer, the potential customer, the end user needs to feel like you're trying and that you're almost saying, I know this is an ad, but we like our product. And then it becomes authentic and genuine, and then I really think that the fan and the customer is going to be more engaged with you and build that brand loyalty quicker and effectively, your brand equity at scale as well.

I think what happened with Apple, and I think that they probably were a bit blindsided by the backlash, I'd imagine they were. I think the fact that they probably didn't think they did anything wrong, and from a conceptual standpoint, it would probably seem totally fine in the pre-production, but clearly the internet didn't think so after it was released. So it's a little bit of a reconciliation of where people are at right now and what we're actually creating today, and then eventually kind of reconciling those two points to find that middle ground to create engaging content. That might be a little weird to start, but that is really, really, it's working and it works better because it's authentic, it's genuine, and maybe it's also taking risks.

Jessica Gondolfo:

The risk versus reward is actually what I just want to say to you. Apple is such a household name and they really are, A lot of people look up to them for their incredible ads and their flawless design, so they're almost a gold standard. So when they put something out, they definitely have more critique on it. But then you get to these brands that you mentioned like Liquid Death that were just coming out, Squatty Potty that were just coming out that really used this kind of unhitched content on, and it was like risk versus reward. So how do you establish, what is your risk tolerance and at what point does it cross a brand safety line or do you advise your clients maybe that you are taking a risk on a certain channel? What does that look like, especially in a channel mix?

Sean Whitmore:

Definitely. Oh, there's a couple of different ways to do this. I'd say especially with in the industrial space right now where it's very sensitive, even in the behavioral health space, which is a space where we don't really kind of apply this because it's a very serious space sensitive, and so there's obviously a little bit of, you'd say context, you got to apply to what we're talking about here in terms of who your customer is and your client as well too. But in the industrial space, we know that we got to do this because there is a lot of staleness from even the manufacturer's level. They're not exactly sexy products, so no one's ever had the care or even the marketing investment if they did, to try to make it as sexy as possible or try to be just engaging. And so we're using the short form content, the vertical video content as a foot in the door to try something different with specific customer bases mind. Because there are some areas where even if you're in the industrial space, TikTok could be a really good channel. YouTube shorts could be a really good channel. Snapchat could really speak to the demographic or customer base that you're looking for in this specific campaign segment or business segment. But it's having those conversations and not doing a blanket or carpet bomb or shotgun approach where you're just trying to get ads on channels that are popular. It's got to be a little bit more intentional than that. Yeah.

Jessica Gondolfo:

Does it matter if you are doing this with a paid ad intention or an organic intention of how you're testing them or what you're testing? I would assume if it was a YouTube short, actually correct me if I'm wrong because I really don't know that you would probably do more of a paid on there, and then obviously if you were doing something with TikTok, it could be organic because TikTok is essentially a search engine, right?

Sean Whitmore:

Yeah, it could be both. So it depends on the content, the messaging and kind of what you're trying to accomplish. Both could be the same content could technically be leveraged on both paid and organic versions of both of those channels, but it really does depend. Again, you don't want to kind just templatize it and cookie cutter it, but you might create a brand new tech recruitment, excuse me, creative, like a 15 to 32nd vertical video that's speaking to the benefits of working at this dealer. All these things, the pay, the competitive nature of it all, work-life balance, all of that. And then that might be just organic, and it could be just on TikTok to your current follower base, but it could also be we want to put some ad dollars behind it so that we can not only see if we can get more applicants, we track that and track that against a return on ad spend or some type of digital ROI for the recruitment side of the business and then tie it all kind of back in that way. So yeah, a couple of different ways. I think that you can do it depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

Jessica Gondolfo:

That's actually kind of roping us around. Cause I feel like we went through more of the data and creative and I think that we can kind of come now into that digital. What is your measure of success? What KPIs are you looking for and how long are you typically willing to let something sit in the market for you to understand if it needs to take a new correct, a new creative direction?

Sean Whitmore:

Yeah. Oh, there's a couple of different ways to do it. Yeah, measuring creative fatigue is definitely something that I think has gotten a little bit more, I would say it's gotten a little bit more, there's a more common sense around it now in terms of best practices. So you need a strict data point or time period to know you've got your historical performance of your account, you've got a bunch of different comparisons. You can make the similar creative that you've been running, but in general, you want to refresh your creative in a dynamic capacity that speaks to your customer base and the rate of which they interact with your business. And that's going to be different for every industry, every vertical, and almost every business to some degree. On the e-commerce side, having fresh creative on a consistent basis as every two weeks, for example, possibly even entire campaigns with fresh creative every two weeks, that's really ideal.

But then smaller companies might not have as much of a budget or the ability to invest that amount into creative. So you've got to kind of work with what they can do. So maybe it's more of a quarterly refresh because they do quarterly campaigns, maybe it's only a couple of moments of time in the year. And so you really try to just try to work kind of with what they have available and then try to elevate it from there. And then in order to how you can do that, whatever the budget is, you've got to be very intentional with your campaign structure and how you're reporting your KPIs, especially if you're doing a channel mix and you're doing try to full funnel marketing. There are some channels that should not have any direct conversions attributed to it because they're at the very top of the funnel. Building that awareness, generating that demand ideally. And then the ones where it's lower funnel might even be less creative focused because it might be more of your Google search, maybe your e-comm, shopping ads, things of that nature.

Jessica Gondolfo:

What split are you doing on budgets in terms of that very top of funnel? I'm not expecting conversions here and we are trying to push people in to see conversions. What does that budget split look like? Normally

Sean Whitmore:

I'm doing the classic marketer response. It depends. Yeah, it

Jessica Gondolfo:

Really does. That's my response a lot. It's okay.

Sean Whitmore:

It really does because it can change across the vertical. For example, one other industry, I forgot to mention, what we actually really specialize in less from a paid and or specifically digital creative, maybe specifically in terms of digital creative ads, is actually banking. And in the banking space, it's really interesting because there's actually rules and regulations around how you can market and who you can market to. There's actually a federal, I believe it's federal regulation for banking marketing. That means that if you put any money towards your marketing, you have to make sure your marketing to every income level basically forgot the name of the bill. But basically you can't only target the wealthiest people. There's a so that inherently creates guardrails and or a standardization of how you're going to market, whether it's digital or non-digital. So starting from there, it can really tell you what you're needing to be doing.

So with that one, it really comes down to channel weight. So what is the weight of a channel for a specific tactic and or segment? For example, whether it's banking or even other industries benefit like this industrial too, a digital campaign or a billboard might not do as well as a direct mailer because the conversion rates can be so much higher because it's basically a physical piece of mail going to a physical address as someone that you most likely have identified to be a pretty qualified potential prospect. And so that's the consideration there for very specific individual segments. So yeah, I would say it depends, but it also means that you have to be very intentional with each one of your channels. I wouldn't be recommending if you wanted to push, let's say get more, let's say what's a good sell, more bulldozers and the person who's typically got the purchasing power at a construction site or whoever to buy a bulldozer, they might be 40 to 55. They might be in that range, let's just say. Right? I will never recommend going to TikTok if we're trying to target this specific demographic, but maybe we have some content that we are putting towards a YouTube shorts where it might apply, not necessarily, or another piece of content on another channel where it does apply, and then you can share it organically on your TikTok even if the 40 to 50 you

Jessica Gondolfo:

Pay for it.

Sean Whitmore:

Yeah, even though, yeah. So it's kind of like being intentional but also kind of being cost effective as well. We always try to say that content is the future. We do very content forward, so don't really try to waste any content if you have it, if it's content you like. So that's kind of our philosophy too.

Jessica Gondolfo:

No, it's a fair philosophy because people are spending a lot of money on content creating these videos, whether or not they are very budget friendly or they're extremely high production, there's a lot of resources and time and effort that goes into them. And doing it on one channel is not going to be an effective play for you over time, which is I think why we talk a lot now about how are you measuring attribution and what does mixed modeling look like and how are you putting weight to those different channels for conversion, which is pretty popular now.

You've been a Supermetrics user for quite a long time. So I would love to know in your role that is touching just so many things across marketing for your clients, how are you using supermetrics today?

Sean Whitmore:

Yeah, we use Supermetrics to power. Pretty much it's the engine and infrastructure of all of our analytics reporting that we've developed. So me and my team have experienced doing a lot of data visualization even before here at Snapshot Interactive, but we keep it simple for our clients. So Supermetrics keeps it really simple for us, to be honest. I've used it since before you guys had data blending and connectors and provided branded Google Sheet templates that were super helpful to marketers just figuring this all out as it was kind of developing. So you've kind of always been a partner in that regard and a SME in that regard of how to report on this data. But really the data blending feature is definitely something that really excited us to be able to blend different sources that don't speak to well with one another natively that before my career might've required some junior data science level work, it really enables me to basically just click a couple of buttons and get what I was having to spend hours and Excel doing before, or having to create and maintain a bunch of templates to kind of plug and play data after exporting it for reporting.

So it allows us to create a dynamic one sheeter that an executive who, the person who has the purchasing power of their marketing and is responsible for their marketing goals and meeting those goals gives them that one sheeter that they're looking for, that they can just log in, get what they need, change the date range around, and that's all powered by Supermetrics. So yeah,

Jessica Gondolfo:

That's amazing. I love hearing that data blending is huge right now. It is definitely probably our top use case in terms of people just historically having so many challenges because a lot of these different tools don't have really easy blending features or the way that they are giving data is not concise across, there's no standardization on it. So no, that's really awesome that you are using it for that today. What do you think the business impact is of Supermetrics for you and your organization? You mentioned the reporting time.

Sean Whitmore:

Yeah, I mean, it just allows me and my clients to be able to quickly just go in and get the data that we're looking for that again, a lot of the clients, oddly enough, and this might sound strange to some marketers, they'll actually come to us when they're looking for insights in their marketing and they actually are not asking, how did Google perform? Or how did our Facebook ads perform? Or meta ads or Snapchat ads or LinkedIn ads. They're actually asking, how did my marketing campaign perform? So we've actually developed our dashboards to do that. So it goes in there and there might be Google and Meta and LinkedIn or Stack Adapt or any of these other channels feeding in there into the actual data stream, into a data card, so to speak. But it's actually an aggregate of all of it. So you can find that distinction.

Some clients do, but most of our clients are looking for how their marketing performed. They're almost channel agnostic. They're expecting us to know what channels to be on, but they're just trying to look how much did I spend and how much did I get in return? And even with B2B, we try to provide that in some type of dynamic fashion and reporting tool. So it's really allowed us to spend less time gathering the data and then visually on the data, even if it was in a PowerPoint, we're just taking that and actually talking about what the data means and strategizing on what we can do with the data. It's allowed us to talk more about the recommendations and what we should do or how we should pivot or how should we evolve or optimize our campaigns.

Jessica Gondolfo:

Those recommendations. I'm guessing coming full circle will come from what data is telling you for your creative and your digital strategies.

Sean Whitmore:

Exactly. And also the trends in the market when something happens where if it's like Conan O'Brien on the hot ones or Kanye West during the Super Bowl with his ad, you got to start thinking about what's almost like the ad recall. And some of these things are, I would say almost if I had the data say they most likely would be statistically significant in the difference in engagement rates, an ad recall, people are like, what Kanye? What as we kind already have been watching him. So it's kind of having that qualitative pulse check on how people are engaging with content right now that you should take back as a data point really and work from a creative standpoint. Well, what do you think would resonate then? Because still very qualitative at the end of the day, even if you're trying to come up with every KPI to prove your point.

Jessica Gondolfo:

No, that's fair. I think trends is a huge one, and there are a lot of people who do things with Google Trends as well with Supermetrics to kind of understand what's happening there, which that was an interesting use case for me when I talk to a couple clients on it. But I do, I think it is one of those things, you kind of have some idea of what's happening in the market. Here's the data that shows it, here's the creative direction and content direction we can go in, and then what is that channel mix that we want to use for this campaign? And then how are you measuring that campaign? So this, Sean was so awesome. I love all of these examples. I could geek out 'em all of this marketing all day, but I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the show. Of course, thank you. And teaching us a little something.

Sean Whitmore:

Yeah, of course. Thank you.