Transcripts
1. Introduction: I love it when I see a brand, particularly a more conservative brand, take a little bit of risk, and create something funny. If you can make someone laugh in a business context, that's the most intimate connection you can make. It's a wonderful gift to give to your customer instead of constantly bombarding them with calls to action. I want to teach this class to help other people understand simple and affordable ways to do that. Hi, I'm Tim Washer. I'm a comedy writer and video producer and I work on the late-night TV shows on occasion, TV commercials, and most of my work is in the corporate space, focused on how to help large brands take their messaging points and convert that into a story that connects emotionally with their audience. In today's class, we'll talk about how you come up with a concept that's going to be engaging. Then from there how you develop the script and the story idea. Finally, how do you sell the idea? How do you get buy-in and get people to take a risk? They get away for some of the talking head videos and create something that's actually going to give people a lift in the day and help them remember the messaging. What I love about these approaches is you become an idea factory. You are able to take any assignment and just come up with three or four ideas right away that are going to be brilliant and creative. I would love it if after this class, everyone submits a story outline, put it into the gallery, and ask me questions. Ask me a specific question about it. I'll share some feedback and we'll see where it goes from there. Let's do it, let's get started on how to do it, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you share.
2. Developing a Concept: In this lesson, we're going to look at three different types of concepts you can come up with. The first is writing what you love. Focusing on whatever your passion, whatever brings you joy, and how that's going to lead you to a concept you can use at the office. The second is documentary. How you look at history, which is always fascinating, and find stories that will serve a concept. The third is my favorite is comedy. We'll talk about a couple of different approaches to come up with a comedy story. Let's first look at writing what you love. When I was first trying to start blogging, I was stumped on how to get into it. Then I thought about, let me write something that I know and something I have a passion for. Of course, for me, that's cheeseburgers. What I thought is, can I connect this idea of different cool cheeseburger joints in New York City with a comedy outing, like with a place whether I was going to go see a show or perform in a show, and then just share a few interesting facts about how to get a job writing in comedy along the way. That's what I did. No this was not just for a tax write-off, so I could write off my cheeseburgers, but I did that for a few years. I'd go in and take photos of these places. I'd do some interviews, sometime with different people from different comedy shows, and share their insights, and we'd do that over a cheeseburger. That gave me an editorial calendar. I could plan out my cheeseburgers over the year and think about the different comedy events I wanted to attend or go to or where I was performing and then talk about the cheeseburger. Then I did it outside. I went to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. Of course, I had an elk burger at the place. But then I told the story about how Stephen King came up with the idea for The Shining and shared all that, took some cool pictures. It began to get some traction and actually get re-posted. You don't have to force things too much. Just talk a little bit about what you like about whatever it is that you're passionate about, and then share something that you've learned, that your audience can learn and offer some nice media. Take photos of the place and you're done. Write down a passion or maybe two passions that you have, or go to your Instagram feed and see what do I already post about most? Think about, okay let me take this topic. This is my topic, mountain biking. I'm going to write down a few things. Let me start with asking questions that I would have about mountain biking getting into it. Write down three or four questions on what that is, and then answer those and then start doing the post. You can start with just a photo and a short caption, 20 words. Just start there and then take that to a blog post, and then take that to a video with some cool B-roll at your next event. Just get your phone out and shoot some images that's interesting to watch and then narrate it and you've got a video. There was a time when I was at Cisco where I was trying to get some of our larger clients to come do a video with us. The larger the client is typically the more difficult it is to get approval to use them as a reference just because there's layers of PR and legal. I didn't have anything to produce. I thought, "You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go down to the Maritime Aquarium in Connecticut on Long Island Sound and shoot a video there." What I did is I reached out to the Director of Communications and said, ''Listen, can I come, I want to make a video. I want to talk about how you guys use Wi-Fi and the wireless network to better serve your members.'' I'm basically doing his job for him. The Director of Communications and that's important because I know he's going to be a champion for this idea. But I also know I'm going to have some amazing stories and amazing visuals. You want to think like a cinematographer as well. I'd be interested in the story. It's going to be fun for me to do. I get a friend of mine to come and shoot the video. We go down there and we get to all these beautiful pictures, and then of course we interview the Director of Communications on camera and just have him tell the story for us. Then it was so easy to cut together because he was excited about it, talking about how they're using social media and how the wireless network lets them do this. We hear these fascinating stories about sharks and octopi and all other things. It was so easy to do. It ended up being a great video just because the visuals were so compelling. Now we got that up, we put it on our YouTube page at Cisco. Then for a couple of years, every time Shark Week came up, we ran that as our top story on both the cisco.com page and then on the YouTube page. It gave us some great content that lasted for a long time and it cost me almost nothing except a small check to hire a buddy of mine to come and shoot it. The reason I love documentary is because there are stories in history that are always fascinating. I love looking at stories of invention, that moment that inspired the pioneer to come up with the idea. We all as humans we love hearing how people failed and how they persevered because that gives us a grace with our failures. It gives us hope, we're still going to come up with something great. Find out what those stories are in your industry. The big inventions and dig into how they came about. You want to look at people who can tell you this information, start doing your research on your own, but then also look at maybe keynote speakers who speak on this topic. Reach out to your industry association and ask them for leads for speakers or some people you can talk to. If there's a museum that covers some of the inventions in your industry, that's great. Go there and get started and dig into some of the key inventions that started it all. It doesn't have to be spot on to your business. If you're a brand new web business, there are industries that came before you that made your business possible, such as Telecom. You can look in those things. Look at authors, look at bestselling books, and reach out to authors. They're always trying to get exposure to pitch their book. They're often willing to just speak to you for free and get an interview and you can ask them to even record it themselves with their phone or record them over Zoom. It's not the best thing to do, but it still works and tell the story that way. I hope everybody in this class is going to produce a comedy. Here's why. No other genre has the potential to build brand loyalty, like comedy. People love to laugh. Even if you think your brand's not funny, your customer is going to love to laugh. I always encourage people to give this a try. The objection I get most of the time is well we don't want to offend anybody. If you start the comedy on, focus on the point of what is your customer's pain point. Build the comedy from there or behavior that needs to change somewhere in the supply chain for your customer. Build the comedy from there, and then it's productive. The other thing is, you build empathy with your customer and rapport because they see that you understand what their problem is and you're making them laugh instead of pitching your product. That goes so far into creating loyalty with the customer. Take that problem and what you'll do is exaggerate it. You just heighten that problem. What would the world look like if this problem went unchecked? Just keep exaggerating it to almost the point of Armageddon and talk about what the consequences would be. That's really a formula for writing any comedy script in the business world. It works out really well. Now you can also do a mockumentary, which is one of my favorites. I'll take that problem, or I'll look at maybe a product and I'll put it back on a way that here's how we could solve an ancient predicament with our product. At Cisco, we had a product that improved Wi-Fi by bringing cellular in. We said, if we had this back in Rome in the Colosseum, we could've saved Julius Caesar's life with a telemedicine application. We just told that story of what it looked like. You just drop in without explaining anything, you drop in that product in the middle of that story of Julius Caesar and you tweak that a bit and you have a comedy. It's really plug and play, is pretty simple to come up with. After Caesar had been stabbed 23 times, the coroner determines the cause of death was stabbing. Historians concluded Caesar's life could not have been saved by telemedicine because available bandwidth would have been hogged by spectators at the nearby Colosseum. Newly discovered evidence suggests a different turn of events. During halftime when spectator streaming was at peak demand, the Colosseum's IT guy, leveraged an advanced capability known as network slicing. It quickly partitioned a dedicated bandwidth stream, connecting the on call surgeon, and saving Caesar's life.
3. Juxtaposition Exercises: To get some some of these comedy concept, I want to dig into juxtaposition. Actually, this is a way to just become an idea factory about whatever you're going to produce. Juxtaposition is a way to just generate a ton of ideas and just a handful of minutes starting with a blank page so you're not staring at that forever. You need two words to lay down side-by-side and see if you can find a pattern that connects them. You can go to random word generator, and put nouns and two nouns, and just take whatever those come up with. Now, I'll give you the example that we did at a conference in San Diego. I got the suggestion of circus, but circus down and then you come up with different things. The word associations. What do you think of when you think of circus? Clowns, creepy, Stephen King, The Shining, it always comes back to Stephen King for me. The second suggestion we got from the audience was bacon. I wrote that down and we just brainstorm together as a group. Pigs, farmer, tractor, and just tossed out all these ideas. You write as fast as you can. You try to keep your pencil or pen on the page and just keep scribbling. There are no bad ideas. Then you sit back and you can list these out and see if you find an idea that connects something from the circus area over here to something from the bacon group. Here's what we came up with. We thought, all right. Here's the script. It's in the morning is dawn. We hear a tract coming up over the hill and it stops, and we just see the silhouette of a farmer get out. He takes off his hat and boom, there's big rainbow, afro pops up and then he turns to the side and we see a profile shot in the big giant clown shoes just walk off. Then another farmer gets out and another farmer gets out and another farmer. We're basically playing off this idea of clowns in a circus and what that would look like. It's just a silly idea that took us five minutes to come up with. If you do this enough, take five minutes every morning, get up and have a cup of coffee or tea, and go to random word generator, come up with two words and just experiment and play with this. I promise you, after 21 days, you're going to be so much more creative. You'll start coming up with these absurd ideas, and you'll see patterns everywhere. It's probably going to annoy the people around you, but you're going to be healers. Now here's a juxtapositions shortcut. I know you guys are all busy, so I'll save you the time. You don't have time to write circles. That's what you're saying and I get it. You can do some shortcuts to prompt different parody ideas by simply taking a famous story that most people know, Paul Bunyan, whatever, a legend, a myth, Greek mythology. Then taking your company's product and fitting it in as the solution is the hero of that story. The narrative format of any story is of course there's going to be a problem or an obstacle that the hero has to overcome, and you're pitching your product is an anachronism. You're going back in time saying this is how we solve the problem with our new product. We put this back in the story of Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships. We showed how being able to use bandwidth better, they were able to actually recruit all of these sales sailors to come and rescue Helen of Troy. Because they were able to transmit a better picture where you can see her beauty, and that got all the guys excited to come and willing to row boats. Paris, fearing retaliation for taking spotters, Top Model decided to recruit an army, knowing men would enlist to fight for Helen's divine beauty. He broadcasts her profile photo. However, his route to run on an ancient standard, DOCSIS 2.5, limiting him to sending a low-risk JPEG. It didn't draw a crowd. The Trojans launched a single thing. Of course it's absurd. It's ridiculous. That's what makes the humor work. There's a link in the gallery of a video my buddy, Todd Wilkerson did. When The Force Awakens came out, he created this video where he took the Sith Lord and forced him into a very boring task of waking his daughter up for school. It created like a 15-second video and it's hysterical. In a month he had over 400,000 views just on Facebook alone. There has been an awakening. Dad? Can you feel it? Stop. Can you feel it? Stop, get out. Yes. Giving joy, Iterate. Your anger has made you powerful. Wakey wakey eggs and backy. Breakfast in five. Get out. Right. Now, I want you to see how easy this is to use. Think of one of your favorite stories, a myth, a movie that you like, write that down and then come up with one of your products or services that your company offers to be the hero of that story. Then we're going to dig into specifics of an example, and you can just follow that formula and put this together.
4. Crafting a Story Structure: This lesson is about how to craft the story structure. We're going to look at it in an example of a voice of the customer story. Whenever possible, get the focus off of yourself and off of your product and onto how you make a difference in your customer's business. There's empathy as people watch that, they're able to see how you can make a difference in their business even if it's a completely different industry. The narrative structure is you have a hero, you have a problem that hero faces, an obstacle, something they have to overcome, and then the outcome. Those are the three acts, basically, and they don't always have to come in that order. The first act, I like to open with a problem and pull people into the drama of that problem. You want to try to find interesting video, we talked about cinematography. You want to find a way to get in some beautiful shots. We have always been obsessed by continuous improvement for our people in terms of health and safety, efficiency. So we have this constant aim at improving things in every area of our business. We have the ability now to obtain information from pretty much every piece of equipment we have in the mine. It differentiates it from 1997 because when you go back in time, you had to wait about 30 days to obtain certain set of information. Now with technology, we have the ability to give the decision-makers the information in near or real-time. Technology has allowed the mining industry to really advance the security of the workers under them. In '97, were you still working with canaries? No, in '97 there was no canaries. There were no canaries. In this case, the customer's problem was their number one expense was how much they had to pay pushing 1.2 million CFM of clean air down into the mine to get to everybody so all the workers down there could breathe. Breathing is an important thing. Cisco came in and we said, "Look, instead of having to fill the entire mine with clean air and oxygen, let's use Internet of Things, put microchips on everybody's helmet and find out exactly where people are and only push air to where it's needed." We called it ventilation on demand. We were able to cut the cost in half, which saved them a ton of money. Every time in every area, it allows us to send the exact volume of air that we needed, where we needed, and when we needed. A mechanized operation like ours, we normally required about 1.2 million CFM of air. Today we're using about 650,000 because of the VOD. My first project when they got me here was to implement the ventilation on the mine and the tracking system. But unable to do that, we had to put Wi-Fi access point pretty much everywhere underground. By doing this, I can go underground with this iPad and I can add all the information I need sometimes to make decision or make call or just get my email or send email. Can you play Minecraft? I don't think so but I know there's some page or web page that are blocked. We don't want people to use. No Netflix? Yeah. Okay. Tell me about this box here on the jeep. The box works with this application which we call MobileView. In order to track either a vehicle or a human, we have to install what we call an RF tag. Inside that box over there, there's a machine tag because we need to know, for the ventilation on demand, if the diesel motor is running or if it stops. Let's say I jump in the vehicle and I start it up so now the engine's producing carbon monoxide, so we need more ventilation in order to clean the gas produced by the machine. Think of one of your customers where you solved a pretty significant problem, a problem that you can quantify and write those pieces down. Here's what the case was before we got involved, this is what the cost was or what they were losing in customers or loosing in business, the opportunity cost. Then you can talk a little bit about the process, here's what we did. Then the end is the outcome, here's how much they saved, here's much more revenue they have by improving the customer experience, things like that. As much as you can quantify that and give specific numbers, the more compelling it is as far as a case study in convincing other people to do business with you.
5. Writing a Script or Copy: In this lesson, we're going to talk about the secrets of writing a great script. It's all about putting yourself in your audience's shoes, and being a good steward of their attention span. Just think "What's going to keep them interested in this story?" and that should drive every decision you make, every line of dialogue, every image you put in there. There are some simple steps you can take, some things you want to do, some things you'll want to avoid, that will make all the difference in the world with your script. Think about a question you can create in your audience's mind, how do you create curiosity? That should be part of the title, that should be incorporated in the thumbnail that you put up, just in every step. Always think am I continuing to pull the audience forward in my script, and keep arousing their curiosity. Pennzoil Place was built in 1975. What we have done, is we've taken the infrastructure of Pennzoil Place and raised it to a higher level than any other building in the CBD. How many windows do you have in the building? Combined, both towers, you've got a little over 21,000 windows. How do you clean those? We've got a new intern. This building is glass and aluminum. It's a great design, but when it was built, energy was not a big issue. We've made this into the one of the most efficient buildings in the nation. Show, don't tell. If you can eliminate any piece of dialogue, and instead of explaining something and showing us that in the story, it's so much more powerful. You want to have as little dialogue as possible. Anything you could do to illustrate a point, you're so much better off. That captures the imagination so much in such a more impactful way. Always think about interesting cinematography. What's going to be a fascinating shot? Keep in mind, the shot doesn't have to be exactly what's being shared in the dialogue. It can be something different, that helps move the story forward. But look for those interesting shots that are beautiful, and also create more curiosity. Within seven minutes, typically, we can shed up to 20 percent of the building's load. You can't raise any temperature two degrees in the building, people will notice that. You're cutting back power by half a point here or there. The whole combined effect of all that power being reduced is where you get your low shed. But if a tenant's late on rent, you could raise their temperature, 10,15 degrees. At least, yeah. As marketers, we often are drawn to superlatives. This is the best, this is the greatest, this is a breakthrough. Get rid of the superlative and actually make the case for your product. Give the evidence in the story to your customers, your audience, and let them make that conclusion on their own. It's so much more powerful if they arrive at that conclusion on their own. If you ever have a superlative in your script, try to replace that, try to take that out and say, how can I convince them of this case versus telling them this is the greatest? Any claims that you have, any marketing claims you're going to make, get rid of those too, they're so boring. In a video, let the customer tell the story that again proves that claim for you. Instead of using marketing lingo to make a boast, let the customer prove that case for you. Exposition refers to whenever you're explaining something in a video. Now explaining how the process works, that's of course necessary. But if you're going to explain how a process works, I'd use a visual to carry that story along. Use a illustration that shows how that works. Now be very careful about redundancy. Redundancy really slows the story down and brings it to a halt. If you're giving a piece of information to the audience, stop and think, have I already given this information to them? Can the audience figure this out in another way or can I communicate this in another way. Instead of having somebody say their name and their title, I use a lower third. I just put the name and title right down there, and then I jump in to the middle of the story when they're talking. That just gets away from all that slow introduction stuff that makes a video drag at the very beginning. Always push yourself. Is this information necessary, and can the customer pick it up from another piece, another stimuli in the video? The golden rule in maintaining energy is to keep it tight. So less is more. The shorter you can make your video, usually the better, almost always. So keep it as tight as possible. Now we'll dive into how you get a video produced on a shoestring budget.
6. Producing Your Idea: In this lesson, we're going to look at a couple of different approaches to producing your idea on a shoestring budget, or in some cases, no budget. Even when I was at IBM, often I'd have to do videos with no budget. You get scrappy and figure out ways to pull them together. Now, one of my favorite approaches is reaching out to a college professor. This can be done remotely or somebody nearby. Find somebody who works in a communications college, or if there's a film school, those are great places to go and find a professor who teaches like seniors, because they're going to be a little bit more advanced. The college kids have access to all this amazing camera equipment and they are also desperate to put something on their real. They're really looking for work and some opportunity to create a video and a story for a real client, so it's a wonderful opportunity for them. Often you'll have people say yes, we will do an internship for you for no cost at all, but find some budget for them and treat them. Maybe come up with a deal where you say, "Hey, I want to make a video for us. If we end up putting it up on YouTube, then we're going to give you guys a $500 donation or whatever." Let them run with that. Partner with an improv theater. Again, you can do this remotely. The one that I liked the most in New York City is the Magnet Theater. Reach out to them. A lot of improv theaters will have a business group that does corporate work. Give them the guard rails, like okay, stay away from religion, stay away from profanity, stay away from making absolutely sure we're not poking fun at any particular group of people, and then give them free rein and see what they come up with. They can actually write a script for you and also shoot the video and do it for dirt cheap. The world is full of freelance artist. You can go to a site like Fiverr and explore there and see if you can find an artist. Just keep in mind, you get what you pay for. I've been hit and miss on Fiverr sometimes. If you know someone who's already used a site like that, ask them and see if they may connect you with some artist who you know will do a good job. Now let's talk about resources if you want to produce something yourself. Keep in mind, you can do it without using video. You can also do a lot of work just creating a slideshow, getting a bunch of still images, some of your own still images, or just doing a search online. You can go to videohive.net. That's a great resource I use quite a bit. You can also go and do a Google search on images. Then under type of images or usage rights, you can find one of Creative Commons and just make sure they have a genuine Creative Commons license that you can use and there's no cost to it. But you can get some images put together, do a narration, find a music track. I like Pond 5. That's another great resource to find music and sound effects and there are also a lot built-in on your computer as well, like in iMovie. If you haven't played around with the Mac yet, play around with iMovie and see what you find. PowerPoint even has built-in stock images that will work. Now let's take a look at how to sell your idea.
7. Selling Your Idea: All right. Let's talk about how to sell the idea and convince people to do something new. Keep in mind everybody gets nervous about doing something new so you need to be gentle. Appealing to the ego always works. If you're trying to get a general manager interested in a video, find the competitor that he or she hates the most, then go find a cool video that that competitor has done and then show it to the general manager. I promise you that you'll get some budget very quickly. That always works. Reduce risk immediately by just saying, "Hey, this is a video we want to show internally." The first comedy I did at IBM, I said I'm doing this for a sales meeting. There was no threat of it being on YouTube and getting negative comments, it was just for the sales meeting. Once I showed it there, people really liked it and they said, "All right, we need to do another one and let's put this on YouTube." I remember early on trying to pitch comedy at IBM, I used to show statistics. I found this research I was so excited about on how many other brands expected to use comedy in the next year. That's ridiculous, nobody wants to see a pie chart. What you have to do is go find a funny video and let them have that experience and laugh at it and say, "Why aren't we doing this?" It's critical to find the right champion. Look for an executive who, one has a political capital to get a crazy idea pushed through, and who also enjoys taking risk and creating the next bright shiny object. Once you find someone like that who might be a good champion for you, understand his or her interests, how they're measured on success. Figure that out, also find out what they're most excited about whatever initiative they're trying to push forward this year, and then figure out a way to create a funny video or a documentary connected to that initiative. Then you're going back to that executive saying, "Hey, I know this is big for you, this new green technology pushes big, I have an idea that might help. Men, it's hot as Haiti's in here. New guy. One of the challenges is expectations. Look, all disappointment comes from mismanaged expectations. When you mention a video, somebody's going to say, "Yeah, we need a viral video and we need millions of views." Because the only videos they've heard about are the ones on the news that have gotten millions of views. Tell them," Listen, our average number of views on YouTube is 200 views per video. That's the entire marketing team, by the way, watching that. We want to beat that, that's what we're going to try to do is beat 200 views." That becomes your goal, outperforming your current average on YouTube which should be pretty easy to do. The other thing you want to do is get them prepared for negative comments. This is the Internet after all, where billions of angry people can post anonymous comments. Go find a video that they love, that everybody agrees is amazing and scroll down until you find the negative comments there and say, "Look, even these great videos that you love are getting negative comments." They'll say "That person is an idiot, let's go ahead and try. Let's get out there." Because you will get negative comments. In the corporate world, you're going to have to go before the committee. That's just what we do. We got weekly interlocks with committees full of people who have no idea what they're doing so this part of this process. Do not take a comedy script and send it to a committee and say, "What do you think?" Very few people can see something on a page and understand what it's going to look like. Instead say "Absolutely, we want to run it by a committee." Go to the committee to say, "Hey, these are the topics we're thinking on covering on social media. Can you let us know are these the right ones, do we leave anything out or there are any we should add. " Then you've gone before the committee, you've gotten their input and then you'd go off and keep the committee smaller when you want to get something new approved. Sometimes that should just be you and the executive. There's an inverse correlation with the number of people in the committee and the creativity of what you produce. There's just a law of physics. Now, you will always have people particularly in marketing try to cram a bunch of messaging into your video. "Hey, it needs to say this and this." What you do is say "Absolutely that's important, we want to cover that. What we're going to do is create a compelling video that's 30 seconds that will drive people to a blog post that we would like you to write however you want to. We want you to be the author of the byline of this post and we're going to bring an audience to it." Just experiment. In the next few weeks, experiment with a couple of these items, a couple of these tactics. To see how it makes a difference of moving red lights to green lights and getting you to try a new video, getting you to produce something new. Once you start building a little bit momentum, even if you say, "Hey, we're going to watch this internally first", you start to earn trust with people and you get to do more and you get more budget and you start having more fun with your job and maybe you even get taller. We can't verify that last claim.
8. Final Thoughts: Let me leave you with this thought. Every video that I produced at IBM, they got publicity or broke records. I was certain it would be the video that got me fired, and I'm not exaggerating. Expect fear. There will be fear when you try this, but I got to tell you, man, it changes your life. You will have so much fun doing this. Like we said earlier, please take some time, write a concept and an outline and post it in a gallery. Look, you've got a supportive environment here on Skillshare. You got these people who are going to cheer for you in route for you, and I'm going to get involved and give you some ideas. Thank you so much for tuning in and I really hope you take this risk and you start moving outside of your comfort zone. I hope this is just a starting point for other areas in your life where you're willing to take more risk and try something different because it's so much more fun this way.
Tim Washer, Comedy Writer/Keynote Speaker
