How to capture your audience’s attention

Most ineffective, boring or downright terrible B2B marketing can blame one thing: the hubris of assuming people care about what you’re saying.

It’s this hubris that creates three and a half minute long “explainer” videos or stock-video-filled ads with copy that’s straight off the website – including a 200 word run-on sentence listing features.

Because the marketers behind this stuff assumed people cared, they assumed the audience would watch all three and a half minutes without needing to do anything to capture their attention. They weren’t forced to make any tough creative decisions. Instead of highlighting the significant few, they piled on the important many. Instead of worrying about what to cut, they worried about things they forget to add.

Never did they consider that no one cares about something until you prove to them why they should. Their hubris created a false, frictionless environment where all consumers watch all things in their entirety. 

This is why their marketing failed. It’s not that they’re dumb or unimaginative, it’s they’re not accounting for the universal truth that most people just do not care. Period. 

Instead of formulating their creative to counteract market apathy, they just copied and pasted from some sales sheet and added a CTA to the end. The resulting marking content is like atrophied astronauts who come back to Earth unable to walk out of the spacecraft, beaten by the simple reality of gravity.

How to capture your audience’s attention

To capture your audience’s attention, you need to stop assuming anyone cares. (Sad but true.)

When you operate under the assumption that no one cares until you make them, you formulate ideas that fight “apathy gravity” and stand on their own two feet.

Unlike their atrophied, attention-assuming brethren, these ideas grab attention instead of relying on it. They actually serve the viewer instead of just annoying them. You grab your audience’s attention by delivering value both in your content and also through your advertising message.

So how do you do it?

How do you stick out?

Well, we have a ton of articles like this one, this one, and this one on how to do it, but here’s the simple way:

Be like a stand-up comedian.

Say what everyone is thinking but no one has the guts to say.

An elephant in a room

Go there. And you know where “there” is.

By saying what everyone is thinking, you immediately empathize with your audience – which is what gains attention. You capitalize on the fact that everyone on this planet wants to be significant. If you give their life more significance, they’ll give you attention.

Like Zig Ziglar said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”

The best B2B ads of all time

B2B advertising has a reputation for being boring, dry, and unworthy of attention from the ad world. Not only is that untrue, but that narrative does a disservice to all of us in B2B marketing. We can and do make phenomenal work that’s worthy of recognition. 

We’ve collected some of our favorite B2B ads of all time below. Did I miss your favorite? Let me know.

HP – The Wolf

B2B is not known for wide use of celebrity spokespeople. HP looked at what everyone else was doing, and said, “But what if we brought in Christian Slater to talk about the security of your office’s printers?”

Heck yes. The main spot features Christian Slater as The Wolf, talking directly to camera and walking viewers through how easy it can be to bypass your network’s security through something as simple as an unsecured printer. Slater is perfectly cast and keeps viewers watching a 6-minute (!!) spot about printer security. 

The original Wolf campaign ran in 2017. In early 2021, HP rebooted the campaign to focus on network security for employees working from home.

Just like the original campaign, Slater walks viewers through how easy it is for hackers to make their way onto unsecure devices. This time, the rogue click comes from a teenager using his mom’s work laptop. It’s scary because it’s true.

Adobe – Click, Baby, Click

Metrics are everywhere in 21st century businesses, but are you making the right decisions based on them? This brilliant spot by Adobe features a CEO making big moves based on an increase in clicks… that might not mean anything.

This spot works because it’s entertaining, but with a real business pain point underpinning the whole thing. Taking a simple scenario to a humorous extreme to prove a point is a well-worn tactic in B2C advertising, but seen less often in B2B.

Marketing executives can see themselves as both the CEO making the wrong call AND as the lower level employees presenting bad information to the boss. The spot shows that even risk averse folks need to implement new analysis tools.

IBM – Every Second Counts

Screenshot from IBM's Every Second Counts campaign

This IBM campaign for their cyberattack recovery services centered on two dramatic short films illustrating the need for fast responses to cyberattacks in today’s fast-paced business environment.

One film, Rapid Recovery for Finance, opens with a lone employee accidentally opening a malware email attachment. Credit cards go haywire, and account balances start dropping. Can the London-based IT team restore a clean system backup before customers in the US get back to business?

The second film, Rapid Recovery for Package Delivery, starts with a business nightmare: package tracking is down right before Christmas. Twitter is exploding with angry customers. IT needs to get this fixed now.

Both films are engaging, dramatic, and effective. In just three minutes, they tell a complete story. Though IBM’s systems are the hero of the day, no character ever directly mentions it. They never have to say “Wow, good thing we hired IBM to install system backups.” Showing the IBM software subtly throughout, and ending with the logo, is all viewers need to know that if they want security, they need IBM.

Slack – So Yeah, We Tried Slack

This spot has a simple premise: What if the agency you hired to make a commercial about your product tried it first? And then make a spot about their positive experience with it?

This spot is so effective because it centers the happy client (Sandwich Video), and not Slack the product. The product and its features are infused throughout, but they’re never presented in a boring list. Instead, the viewer is ostensibly following Sandwich’s journey through implementation. 

Oh, and it’s funny. People like funny.

Dissolve – This is a Generic Brand Video

It takes a lot of guts to promote your product by making fun of people who use (or misuse) your product. 

With this spot, Dissolve promotes their video stock footage library by taking a satire script for a B2B brand video, originally written for the humor site McSweeny’s, and creating the real video version. In doing so, they make fun of B2B marketers everywhere who have created these generic stock footage videos for their companies. And yet, the whole thing is showing how beautiful their product can be.

This spot was released way back in 2014 and has over 2.7 million views. It still gets shared regularly on social media, and look at me still writing about it. The value that this spot has brought to Dissolve for years is incalculable. 

Zendesk – “I like it when he gives me the business”

Do I love this spot because it’s a reference to one of my favorite movies? Perhaps. It’s also funny and honest about how the relationship between a business and its customer can be a lot like a romantic relationship. Without quality customer service, you risk her badmouthing you to her friends, her sister, and her 41,000 Twitter followers.

Zendesk, a customer service platform, needs to convince businesses to invest in their customer service. They continued this theme a few years later with the short and sweet “Relationships are complicated” campaign.

Neither campaign feels the need to hit the viewer over the head with product features. It’s all about the end benefit: investing in that customer service relationship.

What we can learn from the best B2B ads

  1. Make your customer the hero.
    While your product might have solved the problem, it’s the client who really saved the day. Your product is the guide and the tool. The customer is the hero.

  2. Don’t be afraid of humor.
    Funny and light-hearted spots are memorable and easy to watch. Too many B2B brands think humor is somehow alienating.

  3. Put your features and benefits in the backseat. Center your customer’s problems.
    Save your features and benefits for the sales sheet. Your ad should center your prospect’s problems and pain points.

  4. A good spot has legs.
    A high-quality ad is not only memorable, but it keeps working for you. Investing in creative supports your brand for years.

How to make your B2B ads binge-worthy

No one puts on their comfy pants, pops a bowl of popcorn and plops on their couch to settle in for a marathon of binge-watching B2B marketing videos. (Let’s face it, that will probably never happen.)

The issue with most bland B2B advertising is the goal isn’t to deliver value to the customer. Usually the goal is to fill 90 seconds with as many product or service details as possible. While that seems like the logical thing to do (after all, it’s you that’s paying for it), packing an ad with details is what’s good for you, not your customer.

If you simply switch your mindset and make the standard, “will our customers binge-watch this?” instead of “how many more things can we say in the last 10 seconds?” you’ll do something few brands do: empathize with and entertain your audience.

The hubris of attention assumption

B2B marketing is usually boring because the people making it assume the audience is 100% engaged, pen and paper in hand – ready to take thorough notes.

It’s this hubris of attention assumption that leads to the perceived-logical conclusion, “if people are watching this 2 minute video, then then they want as many features and benefits as possible.” And if your audience were in Clockwork Orange-esque chairs with those eyelid opener things, this would be the best thing to do.

But they’re not.

Your audience is not even 80% engaged. Or 60%. In fact, the average retention rate for online video, according to Databox, is right around 30%.

My takeaway from that statistic is to fight for every single second of engagement through giving value to the viewer (ie. entertaining them), not packing it full of facts and figures.

Instead of assuming your audience cares, assume they don’t care. This assumption of disinterest will nudge your creative in a more entertaining and value-delivering direction. And a note on value: Value is not inserting “benefits” into your ad. Value is making your audience laugh, cry, get motivated – basically feel something. It’s not about you.

My final proof point on this matter is: name the last time you watched TV without scrolling your social feeds. Yes, even when you’re binge-watching something made to entertain you, you’re still not 100% engaged. Now what chance does your B2B ad have if that’s the case?

Avoid what people don’t care about

A great way to make your B2B ads binge-worthy is to avoid stuff people, in general, don’t care about. There’s no quicker way for someone to close your ad than to feature one or more things on this list.

Stuff your audience doesn’t care about:

  • When your company was founded

  • That your CEO is in the video

  • That all of the VPs of all of the divisions are featured so no one felt left out

  • That you’re family owned and operated

  • That you’re public

  • Actually, anything about your ownership structure

  • How cross-functional your team is

  • How best-of-breed your tech is

  • How bleeding-edge your tech is

  • Any hyphenated platitude for that matter (“game-changing,” “world-class,” etc.)

  • What intersection your product sits at the corner of

  • How customer-focused you are (by saying this you’re not being customer focused)

  • Anything about your product/service/company that doesn’t directly make their life better

  • Anything that three-fourths of your competitors say in their ads

Regarding the last item on this list, if more than 75% of your competitors are saying something, you should consider it “white noise” and not waste your time saying it. Most likely your prospects assume you do that thing everyone else does anyway.

Avoid talking “corporate”

While all of your customers show up at conferences speaking the same corporate, jargon-filled language you do, they don’t think in that language.

An easy way to test this is to think back to the last time you got drunk with a client – didn’t they drop their whole “disparate silos” speak and just talk like a human?

Speaking “corporate” requires a lot of brain power. Everyone does this to appear smarter than we are – but it doesn’t mean it’s effective at getting through to people. I would argue our greatest ads as a B2B advertiser ourselves are the ones I thought were way too silly, simple or stupid. They always win. Why?

Because of that 30% attention factor again. No one is paying full attention.

To test this – which sentence is easier to understand:

    1. Use our product and never have to worry about ransomware again.
    2. Our ransomware prevention platform takes a 360-degree approach to your cybersecurity development, implementation and operation through an always-on approach that combines multiple cross-functional team members across the entire supply chain.

To understand sentence 2 you need to read it a couple of times to understand. To the 30%-paying-attention crowd, that sentence sounds like nothing because they aren’t going to read it again. It’s just white noise.

The next time you sit down to approve an ad, ask yourself: Is this written in “corporate”-speak or human-speak? Do you talk to your significant other like this? If not, have the team rewrite it!

The easy way to make a binge-worthy ad

So I’ve told you what not to do. From here on out let’s talk about what to do.

Pick one:

  • BEAUTIFUL

  • FUNNY

  • MAKE ME CRY

There certainly are different genres/formats for effective ads but in all my years of doing this, ads that fit in these categories are usually the most memorable and effective.

Think about Forrest Gump. At any point in that movie you’re laughing out loud, crying like a baby or absolutely amazed at the beautiful imagery. If your ad can draw on all three, you win the world. Here’s a P&G ad that features all three and was talked about for years.

The first 30 seconds are babies falling (funny as heck), the next minute is cinematic “trying harder” stuff, and the final 30 seconds tears your heart out.

Your ads don’t need to draw on all three categories but MUST have one. Period. End of story.

Secret hack – Keep your place of business out of your advertising

This is a very easy way of forcing you to think outside the box with your advertising.

Force yourself to not feature your office, factory, warehouse – or whatever your place of business looks like. Why?

When you feature your place of business you are inherently centering yourself over your audience. They do not care about what your place looks like, they care about theirs.

Another reason is it forces you into more human locations. Houses, parks, cars, airplanes, whatever! Since you don’t have your place of business in your ad you’ll automatically be 100% more interesting than your competitors that do.

You have permission to be cool

When was the last time you loved something boring? When was the last time you hated something beautiful? These sentences don’t make sense because they violate what it means to be part of the human race.

So if people hate boring (by definition) and love beautiful things, why are we all pretending to be so professional all the time?

So many B2B brands think they don’t have permission to be cool. Or worse, they’re scared to be cool. But how is it that every B2B conference I’ve been to is filled with hilarious people who love afterparties the same as I do?

Your buyers are just the same as you. They are people pretending to hold it together – just like you. Just treat them like the people they really are, and you will win.

Making better marketing content – the delicious way

TL;DR

Do you want more people to consume your marketing content? Make it as appetizing and easy-to-digest as delicious pizza.

One of our clients, who runs an internal communications site for a national insurance company, once told me about their most popular post ever. Now keep in mind this is healthcare. They post stories about cancer survivors, corporate charity work, and a load of general healthcare-feel-good stuff.

Their most popular post of all time blew everything else out of the water — by multiples.

What do you think it was?

A piece about a miraculous recovery made possible by the insurance company?

A video about the staff volunteering at a children’s hospital?

Wrong and wrong.

The most popular post of all time was a <100 word blurb announcing that cafeterias across the organization would now serve pizza every day.

Pizza.

How did an article about pizza blow away other inspiring, uplifting pieces about the company making a difference in patients’ lives?

It’s simple. Because it’s pizza.

Ok stay with me. This does apply to marketing. Let’s unpack this more…

Make better marketing content by thinking about pizza

Why the best marketing is like pizza

Everyone loves pizza. It’s hot, crispy and delicious.

That’s it. The article exploded because it was something the audience naturally cared about. Not what they should care about (the making-a-difference stuff).

The pizza theory can apply to all your marketing efforts, not just company announcements. Before you make your next marketing video or sponsor your next post, take a step back and ask yourself, “Is this pizza to my audience?”

Meaning: does this piece of content serve my audience? Would they care about this as much as they would someone telling them pizza is in the conference room? If not, reframe your message because it’s not going to cut through.

So many marketers make the mistake of thinking their audience wants to watch an ad or read a whitepaper. The sad news is: they don’t. They want to watch their YouTube video, read their LinkedIn feed or check the baseball scores.

But put pizza in front of these folks and no matter what they’re doing, they’ll check it out.

Pizza is:

      • Simple and easy to understand. You don’t need a primer or any kind of introduction to the concept. “Pizza” is a schema you already understand. How can your marketing message leverage things your audience already knows?
      • Easily illustrated with imagery, text and spoken word — quickly and efficiently. It’s not called “Baked dough smothered in tomato sauce and melted cheese.” It’s “pizza.” It’s a picture of pizza. How can you illustrate your message in the fewest amount of words/images?

One other thing: even mediocre pizza is still good. In other words, your pizza-level content doesn’t need to be perfect. Because it’s in the realm of something someone would naturally like to interact with, they’ll engage anyway.

Personas, challenge statements, market research, and key differentiators are all important ingredients to making successful marketing. But you need to concentrate on assembling those ingredients into something people actually want to consume. Because the same ingredients used for a successful pizza could also be used to make something completely inedible.

Author’s note: By “pizza” I don’t mean the deep dish stuff served in my city (Chicago), I mean triangle-cut NYC pizza. Eight slices of pure heaven. 😋🍕

Editor’s note: Chicagoans who don’t have Lou Malnati’s in their regular pizza rotation are wrong.

Sleep and creativity: The most powerful creative tool you’re not using

The next time you’re stuck on a creative problem, don’t put more energy into it. Instead, take your foot off the gas and go to bed. I promise in the aggregate, you’ll get the job done quicker.

Case study: me

Every now and again I make a fun video for our agency, Umault. A few weeks ago I started another of these projects. My concept revolved around my daughters’ budding love of photography. I put my daughters in some pretty cinematically beautiful situations like sunset, blue hour, and a nighttime fire pit – then filmed them taking pictures.

My footage was pretty beautiful but once I entered post-production (editing the video), I noticed a problem: no story!

A fun video for Umault

I’ve got 4 hours of footage and my initial concept (film my kids taking pictures) isn’t really strong enough to carry anyone’s attention.

So this is when I start to do the real work.

I sleep.

I sleep and I sleep and I sleep.

I don’t open the project file.

I don’t even think about the project.

I sleep and watch TV and live life.

I do this for a whole week.

And finally, yesterday, I opened the project file.

And within 20 minutes I refined the concept and a killer story emerged.

This is no accident. This is because of sleep.

Sleep and creativity go hand in hand

It sounds a little nutty, but sleep is how I do my best work. It’s the common thread through all of the videos our clients love.

And there’s some scientific evidence that sleep and creativity might work together to boost creative problem-solving.

Sleep and creativity

I can’t help but think if my fun project was being done at some big corporation, the creative lead would never suggest the entire team go away and get some sleep. Instead, they’d double their efforts and make everyone pull an all-nighter to solve the issue.

Maybe this would work, but probably not. Most likely when the team finally did get some sleep, they’d wake up to see their solve doesn’t work. It’s kind of like when you’re at a party, drunk, and think you’re the smoothest cat in the world. Then the next day you see the video someone took of you, and you want to crawl into a hole.If you lead a creative marketing team, try this next time you’re stuck in a creative rut: give your people the afternoon off and have them assemble the next morning. I pretty much guarantee that within 10 minutes you’ll have your solution.

A world-changing idea has never been willed into existence. Ideas require time to develop.

I’m no expert, but I think sleep allows me to solve a creative problem 5–10 times faster than when I’m tired.

Now for the other type of energy, there’s Taco Bell breakfast!