Foreword

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. And great things are not accidental, but must certainly be willed.

Vincent Van Gogh

Manu Srikumar, Founder and CEO, guch

We have always been bullish about video and when we started MOV, we always wanted to bring together people who were really excited about the use of the video format in communication. Our entire premise of building a product like guch, initiatives like Mad Over Videos, and tools like Final is centered around the fact that enterprises need video and this need is exploding & we can help enterprises and video professionals get this done with the use of technology, guch has seen initial traction in 2020 and we are excited to grow & build the product further in 2021. And to help this happen, we are working hard to build MOV into the best community out there for video marketers.

Thanks to each one of you for truly embracing the Mad Over Videos podcast & helping it grow. Our team has burnt the midnight oil to ensure we bring you a lot of relevant content and when we see the relationships that we have been able to build over the last few months, we know our efforts have not gone waste.

The year gone by has been hard for everyone and we sincerely hope 2021 brings more excitement. We are already seeing green shoots of that and we wish you all a fantastic 2021! As we go into 2021, we want to supercharge our efforts around MOV to build a fantastic community of leaders who are excited about video as much as we are. We seek your participation and support.
Cheers!

Manu Srikumar,

Founder and CEO, guch

Snippets
Ernie Santeralli
Multimedia Content Manager at ActiveCampaign

Ernie Santeralli shares his experience in inside-sales where he spent a year as an SDR at Active Campaign. Talking and engaging potential customers gave him a clear picture of the problems that people were trying to solve and the ways they would talk about it.

Often, marketers might think about their solution, product, or service in a certain way, but what they don’t necessarily know is that their intended audience is talking about it in a completely different way. That’s why getting to know the language and the voice of the customer is very important. It would benefit both the sales and marketing teams, if
there was an exchange program where you could see what it was like on the other side because that becomes crucial
when you’re formatting your marketing campaigns, to know exactly what problems you’re trying to solve, and how
the people are talking about that problem.

Doug Tidwell
Senior Technical Marketing Manager at Redis Labs

Doug shares his opinion on how to get your messaging right when it comes to communicating complicated ideas about your product to your audience clearly. Product demos are a great way to show that your product is
great. As you try to put that demo together, you will find a number of places where things are just unnecessarily complex. You really need to push back on the product team, make the product information crisp and simple, and basically be an advocate for your audience, to make life simpler for them.
In terms of terminology, that can be a tough one. Because the marketing department tends to be a little closer to product development. Product development and marketing will say these are competitive differentiators. And that’s valuable information, which shows us how we’re better than the competition. But that doesn’t mean those are going to be equally valuable to the audience. Let’s say your product has feature X, and the customer says, ‘We couldn’t care less about feature X’, that’s really good for you to know. You would not want to show feature X. So having that feedback, and the interaction with marketing, sales and the product development is vital.

Notes n Quotes

When you humanize the brand, through people whose lives it’s touching every day, or when the customer says that he was able to help solve one of humanity’s greatest challenges, it just helps people understand the impact of what the brand does in the background.

Shonali Chakravarty, APAC Communications Leader, Lenovo DCG

I believe the core role of a marketer is to create a hook that tugs away at the core emotion, which makes the buyer take the next action or purchase a product. That’s the heart of marketing.

Abhishek GP, Head of Global Demand Gen at Freshworks

Partner marketing with small businesses does not only help that particular client of ours grow, but also helps our business grow because it’s someone else talking about us. You want to get them really ingrained into your product, utilizing it fully and bake, seeing the benefit. Their customers are going to become your advocates, and that’s going to help you grow.

Eric Dreshfield, Partner marketing manager at ActiveCampaign

If you’re a tech-savvy company, recall value is very important to you. Among thousands, your content has to stay with them. A groovy, nice video conveying the right things in a short time will do the trick. The aesthetics or just the ad impresses them, and with that, the core values are conveyed.

Utkarsh Awasthi, Head of Customer marketing- GEB at Freshworks

MOV Spotlight

The need for creative solutions and ideas is skyrocketing each day as businesses realize the importance of video marketing. With over a million hours of videos being watched on social
media every day, it’s necessary to stand out. And Tim Gray does that quite literally. As a Motion Graphic Designer, Tim Gray is producing high quality ‘disruptive’ videos for social media.
Tim’s ideas are fresh and quite ingenious, to say the least. His videos ‘disrupt’ your social media feed by having characters step out of their frames to greet you. Plus, they are designed to match different social media feeds. For example, to join the festive spirit, Tim designed a video of Santa rolling out of the fireplace to twerk for us! The video frame was designed to match LinkedIn’s UI.
Making the naughty list, isn’t he? Well, not for us! Tim’s creativity has certainly placed him in our spotlight!

Weaving Human Stories from Data

Recently, Spotify released its Wrapped 2020, an annual throwback depicting user’s in-app usage data. Their 2020 edition which garnered attention from all corners of the world, was their most notable one yet. Since its inception in
2015, Spotify has been making waves in the world of marketing. Wrapped is a well-executed idea on how companies can transform their data into human stories.

Human beings connect through stories. Stories are emotional and help people build long-lasting relationships. Data and graphs, on the other hand, though valuable, are objective and detached from human sentiment. Spotify’s Wrapped campaign builds a story around the relationship the user shares with the app, showcasing not just their favourite artists or songs, but the valuable time they’ve spent with Spotify.

2020 Wrapped for Podcasters: Your Year on Spotify

Coupled with aesthetically arranged graphics and stunning data visualizations, Wrapped 2020 narrated a story to each user about the unique relationship they shared with Spotify. They made use of specific in-app usage data to show how music plays an integral role in their lives. One of Wrapped’s sections noted particular dates where the user listened to songs on repeat, perhaps reminding the user of an important event.

This personalized narration notes the valuable time the user spent with Spotify, cementing their relationship and the idea that Spotify provides a unique service one can’t find elsewhere. In a way, Spotify becomes a tool that helps users understand themselves better. Their app usage statistics are transformed into the story of a journey that takes place over a year. Wrapped’s release too, comes at the end of the year, making it emotional for users to witness their growth and look back on how their year went by. In addition to lists featuring top artists and songs, this year Spotify quizzed its users about their music habits. It is as if Spotify were saying, we know you better than you know yourself. This reminds the user how their time and investment in Spotify has resulted in a personalized experience that is unmatched. Spotify regularly outdoes itself in terms of curated playlists and recommendations to its users. Wrapped is the cherry on top, like a gift to its users for the festive season.
Wrapped isn’t the only time Spotify used hard data for their campaigns. In 2018, Spotify created a billboard ad campaign called ‘2018 Goals’. This series featured witty ads based on listener data like, “Dear person who played ‘Sorry’ 42 times on Valentine’s Day, what did you do?”

MOV Toast

MOV LeadHERs with Scindia Balasingh

MOV LeadHERs | A Formidable Force.

For all the years I’ve worked as a corporate professional, I’ve always wanted to carve out a space for women leaders to be celebrated, and to empower my fellow women through it. I’ve come across incredible women in the field whose work I admire and look up to. But It is disheartening to know that women are underrepresented in leadership and management roles. And while I, personally, have had the good fortune to meet many incredible women in business, I believe we need to mobilise the cause further and help women connect to such a community, and cultivate our potential together.

LeadHERs is a podcast where I hope to bring together empowered women leaders and discuss their journey, challenges, ups and downs and their thoughts and actions. Not to forget, how as a tool, video has helped them in their careers.

Years ago Virginia Woolf wrote of ‘A Room of One’s Own’ where a woman could go to think and ideate. However, at LeadHERs, we open up this space to a community of women where we can honour, celebrate each other’s work and empower one another. It is a space that will transform us into a formidable force.

I hope this new journey with LeadHERs will be as fruitful for other women in the workforce as it is to me.

Scindia Balasingh, Host, LeadHERs.

Testimonials

The community Mad Over Videos by guch is a really great opportunity to connect people who are all doing amazing work, but maybe don’t know that they can talk to one another. I had a really great experience on the podcast, as it was my first live one. I felt like I was just having a conversation with a good friend versus being in a podcast, interview kind of space. For you guys to pivot so quickly into the podcast space, create new ventures and new opportunities to connect, you guys are doing a great job. I definitely would help contribute to more experiences in the future.

Amanda Stoneall
Senior Social Media Manager, Dashlane

Mad Over Videos is a fantastic community of video experts, and video focused professionals who are using video, day in and day out. This community features professionals who will come, network, share thoughts, ideas and best practices for videos. We came up with different ideas and topics to discuss, as we went along the conversation so it almost felt like I was speaking for a cup of coffee. This is a fantastic team, very enthusiastic, and most importantly passionate about video, as the name suggests, ‘Mad Over Videos’. The way you guys are approaching this, there is an immense opportunity to create a platform, which will enable video professionals to expand their horizons, understand things, learn different things from each other and network.

Vinit Mehta
Head of Sales, Indian subcontinent,
Brightcove

I would first like to thank and then congratulate you guys on producing so much quality content. This community gives practitioners like us, basically, a lot of good content to go through and understand internalise and then use it in our business, in our scheme of things, in our use cases. I think that is extemporary. If we can all come together and learn from each other, I think there is a lot of scope and learning to be unlocked, so I look forward to being a part and unlocking a lot of greatness and potential you know across different segments, industries and companies, and probably executing it.

Utkarsh Awasthi
Head of Customer marketing- GEB at Freshworks

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