Last week Guy and Hope attended the B2B Marketing Ignite USA conference in Chicago. The sessions followed several common themes, which illuminate the state of B2B marketing in 2022:

• You need to build a brand. Now.
• Building a brand is about more than revenue. It’s essential to attract the best talent.
• Brand building is your moat to protect yourself from competitors copying your features and benefits.
• B2B buying decisions are emotional, and brands that deliver can generate more loyalty than even the best B2C brands.

For more on each theme, listen to the full episode or read the transcript below.

(Bonus: See any familiar names among the Elevation Awards winners?)

Learn more about Guy, Hope and Umault at umault.com

As B2B brands focus more and more on brand awareness activities, we’ve noticed that many of them do not have an established or consistent brand voice. They want to make more content, but lack the framework needed to ensure all the content has the same voice. 

In this episode of “Death to the Corporate Video,” Guy and Hope discuss:

• What a brand voice is
• Why it’s essential for building B2B brand awareness
• How to create one (or check if you have one)

Before you think, “But wait, we have a brand voice. It’s definitely a line in our brand book” and skip this episode, ask anyone who creates content for your brand what it is. If they don’t all give you the same answer, you don’t have a brand voice.

Oh, and listen all the way to the end for a surprise announcement.

Learn more about Guy, Hope and Umault at umault.com

You know you’re an agency founder when you go to Disney World for spring break with your family and return with a deeper understanding of effective B2B marketing. 

In this episode of “Death to the Corporate Video,” Guy and Hope discuss what B2B marketers can learn from Disney World, including:

• Get people in the right mindset to buy your product.
• There’s nothing wrong with giving people what they want.
• Prospects should leave every interaction with your brand in a better mood than they entered with.

Here’s the Hubspot spot we talk about in the episode, which was also named one of the best B2B ads of 2022!

Learn more about Guy, Hope and Umault at umault.com

One of the most common requests we get from prospects seems harmless. “Here’s a video ad my competitor has,” they say. “We want to make one of these for our brand.” This simple request has the potential to start the whole video engagement off on the wrong track.

The most effective video ads do not have a lot of comps out there. It’s scary to make something new or to put your own spin on an ad format, but game-changing campaigns only come from original creative.

In this episode of “Death to the Corporate Video,” Guy and Hope discuss why it’s harmful to start your project by trying to copy someone else, and how you should start your project to improve your chances of success.

Learn more about Guy, Hope and Umault at umault.com

Much like the laws of physics, video ads are all subject to a handful of immutable laws. In our experience, all successful video ads have followed these laws. Break any one of them, and you set yourself up for failure.

The 7 immutable laws of video ads

1. You can't edit a bad idea to be good. And you can't edit a good idea to be bad. 
2. All videos need to have a distribution strategy and a release plan.
3. Subtlety is for amateurs. 
4. Video is just a medium for a message. 
5. No one will notice the things you notice. 
6. The success or failure of your video ad is not based on the production day. It's all what happens on paper beforehand. 
7. There are no asterisks or pharmaceutical disclaimers at the end of a spot. People will only judge based on what’s on the screen.

Learn more about Guy, Hope and Umault at umault.com

Ah, a plain potato. Full of nutrients and yet so boring. In his book Alchemy, Rory Sutherland uses the potato as an analogy for hiring practices: It’s better to hire several people with complementary skills instead of one jack of all trades. 

While reading the book, Guy was struck by how the same analogy applied to B2B marketing videos. Too many B2B brands are still making one video and hoping it will do everything. And they’re about as satisfying as a plain baked potato.

In this episode of “Death to the Corporate Video,” Guy and Hope break down:

• The problem with potato videos
• How to tell if your B2B marketing videos are potatoes
• How to fix them if they are, and how to make sure you don’t make potatoes moving forward

Learn more about Guy, Hope and Umault at umault.com

In Wistia’s State of Video 2022 report, survey respondents were asked what new types of video content they planned to create this year. The number one answer was Original Branded Series. 

Interestingly, only 7% of respondents had made an original branded series in the past. That made us start thinking: Why are B2B marketers suddenly interested in original branded content? And how does someone even get started with it?

In this episode of “Death to the Corporate Video,” Guy and Hope dive into branded content for B2B video marketers. Listen to the episode to learn:

• The difference between original branded content and ads
• What types of original branded content are available for B2B brands
• How to get started with original branded content
• Possible pitfalls to avoid

Branded Content examples

Apple at Work - Escape from the Office

Salesforce - The Story of Sales

Umault - Trapped in a Corporate Video

Learn more about Guy, Hope and Umault at umault.com

Yes, we know we’re already two months into 2022, but we have high hopes for this year. In this episode, we discuss our 22 wishes for B2B marketing in 2022. Read the quick list below, and listen to the episode for more details.

Interested in our wishes for 2021? Revisit last year’s episode.

Umault’s 22 wishes for B2B marketing in 2022

1. Stop thinking of making a video as a goal in and of itself. 
2. Everyone should read B2B Institute's 2030 B2B Trends: Contrarian Ideas For The Next Decade report.
3. More asynchronous video messaging and fewer camera-on meetings. 
4. Morph your marketing KPIs to allow you to have more time to do brand-building marketing. 
5. Bosses, start to give marketers more time to make things good instead of pushing quick returns. 
6. “Not boring” B2B is soon going to be standard. This year is the time to invest in creative marketing.
7. B2B brands stop seeing emotion as a four-letter word. 
8. Develop confidence in marketing's role in the company. You are important!
9. Make distribution a clear part of your B2B brand's video strategy. 
10. Make some smart work. 
11. Attend in-person conferences again. 
12. Make everything shorter.
13. Stop using that stock footage of a robotic human hand to represent the future. 
14. Rethink gated content. Give away your content for free. (And check out our video “The Stalking.”)
15. Social media marketing isn’t free. Start investing in it properly. 
16. Use creativity as your secret weapon in B2B marketing. 
17. Focus more marketing efforts on wide and out of market prospects. 
18. You need to ask yourself, does anyone care about this? Don’t be a “no one” meme.
19. Think about ads and marketing as a strategic asset.
20. Every ad can be a Super Bowl ad. Make some Super Bowl ads this year.
21. Hug more people this year (with their consent, of course).
22. Stay healthy and have boundaries.

Learn more about Guy, Hope and Umault at umault.com

Super Bowl LVI was about the Rams, the Bengals… and the commercials. In this episode of “Death to the Corporate Video,” Guy and Hope discuss the best and worst Super Bowl ads in 2022, and what B2B marketers should learn from them.

A few key takeaways:

• Keep it simple, stupid. You only have 30 or 60 seconds. Make sure you aren’t trying to cram too much in there.
• Say your brand name. Integrate your product into your spot. Make sure your product couldn’t easily be swapped out for another. If I can swap the logo out at the end for a competitor, chances are people aren’t going to remember which crypto company made it (for example).
• Make sure the audience knows what your category is and, ideally, your value proposition. Especially in B2B, don’t assume that everyone knows what you do, or that anyone will take the time to find out. Make sure you tell them during your slot!

Learn more about Guy, Hope and Umault at umault.com

Our plan for 2021 was to release a new video ad for Umault every month. We met the goal, but how did our campaign do?

In short, spectacularly.

In this episode of the podcast, Hope and Guy discuss our 5 key takeaways from a year of monthly video ads.

1. Don’t make ads focusing on your competitors. Focus on your client’s competitors.
2. Plan for the year of video ads upfront, but leave room to improvise.
3. We saw no correlation between production cost and effectiveness.
4. Distribution plans are everything.
5. You can make effective ads that don’t hit on your RTBs (reasons-to-believe).

Here are some of the video ads we released this year:

Disparate silos of cereal - Corporate jargon parody

We can't make your kids listen to you

The Stalking

Cookieless 

Learn more about Guy, Hope and Umault at umault.com