The Art of Funny Sales Videos (Use This Today) | Joseph Wilkins MMP #035

The Art of Funny Sales Videos (Use This Today) | Joseph Wilkins MMP #035 Joseph Wilkins: Most of our campaigns, we're creating like a dozen or more versions of that video to test which hook works the best, right? Because that's the most important part of your video. Spend 80% of your time and effort on your hooks because it doesn't matter what happens after five seconds. If no one's watching it because you haven't grabbed them by the hook, nobody cares because they're not there. They're not around to watch it. Unknown Speaker: You're watching The Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Kevin King: Norm Farrar, another episode of The Marketing Misfits. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. Happy 2025. You know, I've had, we've had several people that listen to the show say they, they love the banter and stuff that we do back and forth. And this is totally unrehearsed. I had no idea what I was going to say. I wasn't, I'm like, wake up this morning, taking a shower going, Oh, what can I ask Norm on the pocket? It's just, it's totally spontaneous. And we've had several people say they really, Like that, you know, they listen to the episode because they like the banter and how we do things and that's an authentic thing and that's hard to do when it comes to whether it's comedy or just giving stuff out. But that's what people in this whole AI world I think are craving now is to be entertained and to be authentic. Do you agree? Yeah, you know I was talking to Kelsey my son at Christmas about this and So many fortune 500 companies get it wrong. They try to force this look of authenticity or creativity or this influencer creator feel and And they miss it completely. You know, I don't know if you've been seeing these commercials, but it makes me gag half of these, you know, so-called scripted influencer commercials. Have you seen these? Yeah, yeah. I've talked about something like Chick-fil-A, I think is one, that's horrible. Yeah. Runs good football games. I don't know if you get that up in Canada, but yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Being authentic, bringing a little bit of humor into it, I can't wait to talk to our guests because this is what he does. I think a lot of people are afraid to do humor because, we'll ask our guests about this, because they're afraid they're going to offend somebody. Or be off their brand messaging. I was just at a Kill Tony show. I went to Kill Tony's here in Austin. Big huge comedy Joe Rogan started his mothership here and earlier this week I was at one of his shows which are hard to get tickets to but it was just the comedy was just crazy off the hook and like I was like man some of this was like just so inappropriate of what they were saying but I loved it because it was it was real and it's not woke or whatever and I think that's a problem that a lot of marketers are struggling with right now when it comes to Creative, especially when it comes to video, is how can you get attention? How can you be funny and entertain and not offend? I say maybe you actually should offend because you want to offend those people out of your circle. It's going to be interesting to see what our guest today has. We've got Joseph Wilkins on the podcast. He'll introduce himself. He runs a company Funny Sales Videos and some of you may have heard of the Harmon Brothers which are really famous. They did the Squatty Potty commercials and they did a whole series of different things. I think they're actually based in Utah also where Joseph is, but Joseph's company actually will do it at prices that we can afford and actually do it I think even better. I think on the podcast, he told us that he's got some sort of deal that he's going to do. He's got a mission if you stick through the podcast about where he will actually help some of our listeners for free brainstorm some ideas around We're creating comedy because you might be like, how do I do this? I'm not a comedian. I don't know how to write jokes. I don't know how to do this. He's going to, I think, make a special offer where he actually might be able to help all of our listeners out. I'm excited to see what he has to say. I'm ready to take some notes here because I think we're going to learn something today, too. I just want to clarify something. You said the Harmon budget. Then you said that we could afford. Is that the Kevin King of Ford or the Norm Farrar of Ford? Joseph Wilkins: There's two different things. Kevin King: That's the dragonfish of Ford. I don't have the island and the Caribbean like you do. Oh, okay. Yeah. The private driver and the private plane on call 24-7 that flies flies you wherever you want to go uh i don't have all that so but i was talking more about me or dragonfish uh okay well why don't we bring in joseph let's do it. Here's my job. Welcome, Joseph. Hey, guys. How are you doing, man? Good. Good. Joseph Wilkins: I'm doing great. Ready for 2025, whatever that brings. Kevin King: I know. Whatever that brings. It's an exciting time to be alive and to be doing marketing, I think. Joseph Wilkins: It is. Kevin King: You've been doing this, I think, a while. You've been in the video space. Both Norm and I have some background in video as well, I think not to the extent that you have. You've been doing this like 25 years or something, right? Not necessarily funny videos, but in the video production space. Joseph Wilkins: Yeah, exactly. Probably even more than 20. So in 2000 is when I really started my video production agency, which is called Pro Creative. And we did like TV commercials. In fact, our first real project that let me quit my corporate job was the Little Giant Ladder infomercial. I don't know if you guys have I've heard of that but did about 200 million in sales and so that was my very first foray was doing infomercials and short form TV commercials and boring corporate videos that were probably all meddled with at some point. But yeah, I basically started out just doing anything and everything to learn the trade Taking messaging and trying to convert that to a sale and, you know, TV was the way to do it back then, but things have changed so much since then, which is why we launched Funny Sales Videos about seven years ago. Kevin King: So, are infomercials still, I don't watch enough TV late at night or whatever, but I remember 20 years ago, infomercials were the thing. You turn up at about 11 o'clock at night and sometimes even on the weekends instead of, I remember when I was a kid, you'd turn, the TV would go off the air. It would just go to those bars or whatever like at 11, 11 a.m., 11 p.m. After the national anthem. Yeah, after the national anthem, yeah. And then Infomercials started buying up some of that space and the TV stations, oh wait, we can actually make some money off of this dead air and it just exploded and I actually dabbled in that space 25 years ago a little bit. was studying it and tried to actually do Argon oil. Before Argon oil was a thing, we were going to try to do infomercials with that. And I remember like Girls Gone Wild, those are that video series, and I was studying Crush it with all these these videos and then there's the guy that's little classified ads in the back of Magazines, I think he killed himself when he went to jail for fraud or something. But yeah, there's there's all this stuff and so now but that's shifted on Most of that it still exists, but it's a lot of it is shifted online And so you but you cutting your teeth on that old-fashioned Way where you your hands are almost tied behind your back compared to some of the analytics and some of the things that you have now I would think that would be a major advantage Yeah, yeah, I mean it wasn't about branding. Joseph Wilkins: It wasn't about you know looking good Sometimes the uglier things were the better they sold you know it was it was literally about if my clients spend a dollar on television Does that phone ring? You know, this was before, I mean, you know, the internet was coming up, but there really weren't sales pages. It was called this 1-800 number. And so all we knew is if the phone rang and the sales came in, the customer would continue to spend. But we didn't, you know, we weren't pushing for branding or multiple impressions. It was a one shot, 28 and a half minute Pitch the either worked or it didn't so yeah very different world i like the idea this is. Kevin King: Just history repeating itself, full 360, because what you just said, you know, some of the times the rougher or the unpolished were more effective. Well, think about creative. Like, think about the creators right now. Joseph Wilkins: Yeah. Kevin King: It's the unpolished, you know, just sometimes the ugliest videos or the worst quality are the ones that generate the most sales. People don't want that polished look, at least coming from creators or influencers right now. Joseph Wilkins: Yes i mean i see it as two different buckets i see it as the stuff that you immediately know this is. You guys were talking about it in the intro. Sometimes, companies try to blur the lines and get in trouble, but it's either totally user-generated content where production quality is out the window and it's just filmed on your iPhone, which by the way, we would have killed for 25 years ago. The technology inside these phones is just mind-blowing. It would have cost $100,000. To have a camera that even approached what you have in your phone. But anyway, there's this rough content, but I still think that there's a place for, oh, I get it. This is a produced ad, but how it's produced, how it's written, how it's executed is worlds away from this just turn on your phone and talk. I think there's still one and our results show that there is still a place for both of those, but I think there's a line and you shouldn't try to straddle close to that line once. You need to be one or the other. That's what I've seen. Kevin King: Hey, what's up, everybody? Kevin and Norm here with a quick word from one of our sponsors, 8Fig. Let me tell you about a platform that's changing the game for Amazon sellers. That's right. Unknown Speaker: It's called 8Fig. Kevin King: On average, sellers working with 8Fig grow up to 400% in less than a year. 8Fig offers both funding and free tools for eCommerce growth and cash flow management. And here's how it works. 8Fig provides flexible data-driven funding tailored to your exact needs. You know, they could fund anywhere from up to $50,000 all the way up to 10 million. 8Fig gives you free tools to forecast demand, manage inventory and analyze cash flow. Visit 8Fig.co, that's 8Fig.co to learn more or check the link in the show notes below. Just mention marketing misfits and get 25% off your cost. That's 8Fig.co, 8Fig.co. See you on the other side. We talked about this in the intro as well and that's that brand messaging. So how do you balance that humor with the brand message so the brand is happy but you're selling product? Joseph Wilkins: Yeah, that's a great question that I could talk for hours on but my short answer is a lot of companies hear me talk like I do quite a bit of speaking. They hear me talk and they come up to me afterwards and they say, I don't think my company is funny or I don't think my product is a serious product and my answer is always the same. With probably two or three exceptions, I think every single company has an opportunity that they're missing if they don't at least test using humor. My philosophy is if the more boring your company, the more boring your product, the Bigger the results will be if you try to do something that's more edgy, that's more risky, that's more along the lines of the videos. We try to keep our videos fairly safe as far as pushing too many boundaries. That's just our philosophy is we want to hit a mass audience. Straddling that line is definitely a hard thing, but I always say, if your product is historically boring, your competitors aren't doing something like this, so you should. And you still need to stay on brand and there's ways to do that. We're not talking about, you know, throwing everything out of the window. We're talking about how do we still communicate the same core brand message, whatever that is. And it's actually not even a brand message. Our videos are designed to do one thing and that's convert a sale. And so maybe some of that brand messaging doesn't apply because you're not trying to put out a brand message. You're trying to get a response just like the infomercials. Really, you know, that Snuggie or that ShamWow, you know, they're not trying to impress you. They're trying to sell you. Our videos are along the same lines where we're basically trying to make you like us and by the nature of the kinds of videos that we do, it does improve brand recognition and prepare somebody for a multi-touch approach if that's the case, but our goal is zero to sold in three minutes or less. And so I say to everyone, if you haven't at least tried it, you'd be amazed at some of the brands that have come to us saying, you know, we're a really boring product. I mean, our most successful video of all time has half a billion views on it. And it's the most boring product I can imagine. Laundry detergent. Kevin King: Well, look at what Geico has done. Yes. Going way back. The cavemen. I think they started this whole humor trend with insurance. Joseph Wilkins: Yes. Kevin King: Then, Emu and Doug, or Doug and Emu on Liberty. Joseph Wilkins: Flo and Boring. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, you got Flo. Kevin King: You got Holmes doing the State Farm stuff. They mixed some humor into there. You got, I think, Dollar Shave Club. That was definitely on brand, mixing humor, where he's going through the warehouse and doing all this. Crazy stuff. So what is it about humor that actually helps, that helps sell? I mean, can humor actually, and on the flip side of that, can humor actually not, can it turn off people from buying? I mean, do you? Joseph Wilkins: Yes. Kevin King: What is it? Why is it humorous? Is it because it's memorable? You're like, because you got a laugh, because it's a feel-good moment, and it's these endorphins that come out like, oh, here's my credit card. That was funny. Or what is it about humor that actually Get you that zero to sell in three minutes that you said. Joseph Wilkins: Yeah, so this may sound a little arrogant, but it's humor done right. There are so many people that try to do humor and end up just looking silly because it's not funny. Like if you think about it, what's the most expensive advertising real estate in the universe? It's the Super Bowl. What percentage of Super Bowl ads are humorous? 95%. But they spend months creating that spot. Like, to me, that's the Christmas morning is waking up and I don't watch this. I don't even know the rules of your football. I know the rules of my football, but that's another discussion. I watch those ads. I study those ads because those are the biggest agencies that are spending the most money. They've been preparing those ads. The Super Bowl finishes and the ad agencies start on next year's ads. They know that the best way to communicate, to cut through, and ultimately to sell is to use humor if done right. But, you know, we can talk about how we ensure that humor is done right as opposed to done wrong, but I think it's just as everyone loves to smile, everyone loves a story, everyone loves to laugh. And so I think that's why humor is so effective, is it just hits us in a place that most messaging doesn't. Kevin King: What is it when a comedian, you said done right, and some people you mentioned that they tried and they just looked a fool. Yes. Isn't that like a comedian? Even Jay Leno, he used to go out and do gigs when he had the Tonight Show on the road to test new content and to test new things. So when it comes to In the infomercial world back in the day, and I'm sure it's still this way now, before you launched the infomercial nationwide, there's five markets. There's some city in Illinois, and there's some place here that's represented, and you would test it. You do a little test, and then you would tweak or decide, oh, it didn't pass this test. We're not going to roll this out. This is a failure. Do you do the same thing when it comes to- Yes. Funny videos? Joseph Wilkins: Yes. I mean, to your point about Jay Leno, off topic but I think really valuable, I just watched a documentary last night about Steve Martin. It's on Apple TV. I highly recommend it. I had no idea for 15 years he was a In other words, he wasn't funny. It shows his journey of how hard it was to get to where he was. After 15 years, he almost gave up, but that emphasizes my point. What we do and what I recommend anyone listening does is not think that they're funny. Not trust that they're funny. In fact, I even I've hired some, I won't say their names, but people that you would recognize from writers on big time TV shows. And guess what? Their first drafts are not funny. In fact, multiple drafts still not funny. The way that I describe, the only way that I know and if somebody else has a way that works better, you know, I'd love to hear it. But the only way that I know to guarantee that every video that we produce is funny and we also need to determine or define what funny is because funny to me may be totally different to funny to you. And so we're not talking about creating an ad that's funny to everyone. I mean, I have teenage kids and I can't even understand half the language that they use. Right. It's a totally. So if so, if I'm producing a funny sales video that targets tweens, I'm totally removing myself from the writing process. I'm going to go and I'm going to hire people who are that age in that demographic or at least have experience for that demographic. The way that I know to write comedy is the Saturday Night Live method. What they do, and think about it, that's the eternal nightmare to me. Every Saturday, you've got to fill an hour of airtime with hilarious content. How do they do that consistently? It's the wisdom of the crowd. It's not one writer. They literally lock themselves in a room for a week with 20 top talent comedy writers to get that comedy every single week. So what I do and what I recommend anyone that's listening to this that wants to try this is to find at least, hear me, at least five different comedy writers. Now, how do you find comedy writers? Easiest way is to go to Fiverr. There's plenty of writers under the comedy section. Now, are they all good? No. I've spent the past five years weeding out a lot of the really crappy ones. But, you know, our mantra is that every single script that we write must go through at least five of our best comedy writers. They don't write the scripts. They don't write the stories. So we have about eight writers on our team for every video that we produce. So there's the story writer, there's the marketing copywriter, there's me who supervises the whole process, then there's about five freelance comedy writers that we have on our roster. Some of them live on cruise ships. Some of them are just stand-up comedians that during the day they're traveling from city to city and at night they're performing in clubs. But it's going through multiple revisions with multiple people saying how can we make this better, what's not working, what needs to improve. But again, you've got to write to the audience. So if it's a SaaS product, we're talking high level comedy that has to resonate and we test. We send our scripts to, in most cases, we ask our clients. To get a small sample of maybe five to ten people who represent their client base so that we can send them these scripts as we're writing them to say, is this funny? Does this connect with you? Because it's a totally different experience if the demo is different. A young teenage eCommerce product is going to be totally different. Kevin King: So over the last three, four years, there's been a change. We don't have to get into politics, but you have to worry about affecting people. Like just say this, the woke culture. So humor, and this is how I feel over the last four years, you couldn't offend people. And if you did, you got canceled. So how do you stop that from happening? So it might be completely funny, but 5% of those people might get offended. Does that come into effect? Are you trying not to offend? Joseph Wilkins: Yeah, it does. And I would say, I mean, personally, I love, I think it's harder in the world of comedy It's harder to be someone like Jerry Seinfeld or Brian Regan or Nate Bargatze, these people that are funny without being super offensive. To me, that's a much harder thing to do than to just come out and be very offensive and be very crude. I think it's much harder to write stuff that is just as funny to a huge audience without going to certain places. Now some customers, they want to offend a certain group of people because they know that that's not their target. Those people are never gonna buy from me anyway so I can offend them. But we've found if you skate as close as you can to the edge without going over, you'll appeal to a mass audience and that's really what our videos are designed to do. But sometimes we actually make fun of our audience. I can think there's one video that we did where it was for a recyclable phone case. The demographic was people that were environmentally conscious that didn't want to buy a plastic case that's going to end up in the landfill. That was the USP of the product is that it was a recyclable product that you could throw in your compost and within, I don't know, a year, it's broken down. We did this really funny ad that basically made fun of We're TreeHuggers. It was so obvious that it didn't really offend. I don't know that I'm super answering your question because what we try to do is think how can I be shocking, how can I be funny, but how can I still stay on brand and not get canceled. Ultimately, sometimes you have to say, I know that some people are going to not like this. Actually, that helps the algorithms. People don't comment on videos that they like, typically. They comment if they object to something or if they want to complain. That really helps the algorithm share it to more people. I remember one of our very first videos, we had a witch in it. Wizard of Oz kind of stereotypical green face and she threw a bucket of water. A bucket of water was thrown on her and she melted, right? Super innocuous, so non-offensive. You would not believe how many complaints we got from people that were in Wiccan. Literally, we got comments on that video that they were going to put a spell on us as producers, which I thought was hilarious and really helped the algorithm because not only were they complaining, regular people were saying, you're off your rocker. What are you talking? There was this debate online that really helped our video add that virality twist to it. Sometimes it can really help you. Kevin King: Sorry, Kev, but just going down this rabbit hole, and maybe not on the comedy side, but I want to get your take on just alienating your audience. You take a look at the two big ones. There's a bunch of others, but the Bud Light and the Jaguar completely alienated their audience. What are your thoughts on that? Why would somebody go, wow, this is a great idea. Let's do something completely 180 and not address our audience. Joseph Wilkins: Yeah, I mean, to me, the Bud Light, I don't know what they were thinking. That clearly to me was just like, I would never have thought of doing that. I think that Jaguar is a little bit different because they're trying to appeal to a different audience because clearly what they were doing wasn't working. And so when things aren't working, everything's on the table. My philosophy is you can't, in this kind of a video, it's suicide to really lean into it. Now, if you're making light of something, I think that's different than just completely alienating them. Kevin King: I see stuff on TikTok now. When I'm scrolling through TikTok, old clips of married with children or all in the family or Sanford and Sons. This stuff is freaking hilarious and it's offensive. You know, Al Bundy talking about fat people in shoes and coming in all this. Unknown Speaker: Watch yourself, Kevin. Kevin King: You're too big. You're too this. You're too that or whatever and just all the sexism and everything. I'm like, man, this was accepted back then and now it's not. So how do you evolve? Do you have to stay current with the current trends? And what if you have a video that you shot 10 years ago, you know, and then someone resurfaces or 20 years ago resurfaces, oh, this brand, you know, used to make fun of blah, blah, blah, and they bring it back to life. How do you deal with the evolving times culturally and stuff? Joseph Wilkins: Honestly, I don't care. I'm not going to worry too much about what's going to happen in 20 years time. Right now, I'm just trying to get my clients to improve their ROAS. Let's be honest. Our goal and what we do best It's when we have a customer who's running ads, and we should be honest here, we don't create viral videos. Viral videos really don't exist anymore in the way that they used to. It used to be, and you mentioned one of the poster childs for this, Dollar Shave Club is a great example of somebody who was first to market, they'd never been done before really, did a big viral video that went ballistic. These days, you do that exact same video, nobody's going to see it. What we do is we create videos that when you spend a dollar to promote it on Facebook, on YouTube, on Instagram, or whatever the platform is, that it's going to return $2, $3, $4. You repeat that multiple times and you get millions of views because it's profitable. It's not about creating a video that's organically going to go viral even though our videos do get a lot of virality. Again, it's that snowball that starts with paid ads. Kevin King: And now a word from one of our sponsors, one of Norm and I's favorite tools, Stack Influence. Are you looking to quickly boost new Amazon product launches or scale up existing listings to reach first page positioning? The influencer platform StackInfluence can help. StackInfluence pushes high-volume external traffic sales to Amazon listings using micro-influencers. And guess what? You only have to pay with your products. They've helped up-and-coming brands like Magic Spoon compete with Cheerios for top category positioning, while also helping Fortune 500 brands like Unilever launch their new products. Right now is the best time to get started with Stack Influence to crush it during this holiday season. That's right, Norm. Sign up today at stackinfluence.com or click the link in the video below and mention Misfits, that's right, Misfits, M-I-S-F-I-T-S to get 10% off your first campaign. Head over to stackinfluence.com right now. Joseph Wilkins: But ultimately, you know, it's about how can I increase the return that my clients are getting right now. And honestly, I'll tell you, working with huge brands is a nightmare for us. I'll just be honest. There's one brand, I don't know if I should name them, but we definitely are way more affordable than most companies, but this is still a three-month process. One video It's three months to produce it because remember we're going through you know about a month of scripting with all of these writers and comedians and you know you don't ever want to take that cake out and taste it until it's fully baked and so we don't ever want to produce a video until it's fully ready and then we go through you know a super We look at a hundred actors before we pick our main character. We'll bring multiple of those into our studio and test them to make sure because the script is the most important, the delivery of the script is the second most important. There's a process. Then back to your earlier question about testing, most of our campaigns, we're creating a dozen or more versions of that video to test. Even after we've done the focus grouping, to test which hook works the best, right? Because that's the most important part of your video. Spend 80% of your time and effort on your hooks. Because it doesn't matter what happens after five seconds. If no one's watching it because you haven't grabbed them by the hook, if you've got a special effect or a celebrity or something that comes in at the 10 second mark, nobody cares because they're not there, they're not around to watch it. But you're testing all of these different versions. But ultimately, once you've got that video, I'm sorry, my brain's not working. I forgot the question. Kevin King: I was going to ask you, what are a couple of the videos that I may have seen or campaigns that you've run that you can talk about that you guys produce? Joseph Wilkins: Probably the biggest one is True Earth. That's the laundry detergent. That one has, between all of the videos, about a billion views. They absolutely skyrocketed their sales. They were a company that was fairly new, fairly young, weren't in many of the bigger retail stores. After we launched our campaign, all of the big box stores started calling them saying, ìPeople are coming into our stores asking for your product by name and we need to start to sell it.î That's one of the bigger ones. We did a campaign for HelloFresh, the meal delivery service. It was actually one of their new brands that they released called Chef's Plate, basically just a lower priced version of HelloFresh. We did a campaign for Hooked on Phonics, the, you know, Your Child Can Learn to Read. I mean, dozens of very small brands. We really prefer to work with smaller brands because in larger organizations, that's what I was talking about, in larger organizations, there's tiers of approval and, you know, that can just get Quagmired really quickly. If you've got one person in that approval chain that is stuffy and doesn't think that it's funny or thinks it's too edgy or thinks it doesn't fit with their brand, we really love it when we can just work face-to-face with the founder, the entrepreneur, or just the marketing director who needs to get approval from the founder. So our real sweet spot is Companies that are emerging in the eCommerce space that have a really great product that just need to put gasoline on the fire. So a lot of the brands that I'd throw out, you probably wouldn't have heard of. Kevin King: So I can guarantee that our listeners right now are saying just what we said at the beginning. Kevin was talking about, well, you've got the Harmon budget and then for us, we've got our budget, the Dragonfish budget. What kind of price are we talking about? Because if you talk about these brands that you're talking about, I can't imagine them being anything an Amazon seller or eCommerce midsize brand could even afford. Joseph Wilkins: Yeah, and that's why we tell the super small fish that are just starting out, that aren't spending. I typically tell people, if you're spending $10,000 a month on digital ads, it's worth working with us. If you're spending less than that, it's not worth spending, because again, this process takes three months with a dozen or so people on our end, and our pricing fluctuates depending on what kind of video, but Again, if it's in the range, it's tens of thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars. And low tens of thousands of dollars. Kevin King: So that's not bad. And if the entry is $10,000 in ad spend, I mean the bar is fairly low. And if it's tens of thousands of dollars, yeah, that's not bad at all. Joseph Wilkins: And we tell everyone that can't afford it. That's why we created our free ebook. It's called How to Produce a Funny Sales Video Without Hiring Us. It'll go through every single one of the steps and you can download that for free at FunnySalesVideos.com forward slash ebook. We just tell anyone that can't afford us. Just make sure you follow these steps, but it's still a lot of work and it'll take a lot of time, so what do you value, your time or your bank account? It just depends on where your priorities are. Kevin King: It's also experience. Joseph Wilkins: Yeah. Kevin King: Yeah, but one of the things that you've brought up so far that I've never really thought of, and that is multiple writers. So going and getting multiple people to take a look at it, acting as different titles, like having different titles, but re-looking and re-looking and fine-tuning. That's one of the things that I'm taking out of this interview, which is, I've never thought of, I've been, I've shot a ton of video before, and I've never really done that. Joseph Wilkins: If you think about the show Who Wants to be a Millionaire, there are three lifelines. There's 50-50, phone a friend, but the most valuable one is ask the audience. The wisdom of the crowd always beats even if you've got the most brilliant person. Like I said, I've worked with some pretty brilliant people. It's never as good as bouncing that idea. Think of it like going through a refining process and if there's eight steps rather than just one and if every step says, how do I beat this up? No judgment. It doesn't matter. Nobody thinks that their ideas or their jokes are precious. No. The end goal isn't to be funny. The end goal is to make a sale. Now, the humor is the currency to earn the attention that will hold that customer while we tell them a story that's gonna lead to a sale. And so it has, yes, it does need to be funny to get your attention, but it doesn't need to be funny for the sake of being funny. So if there's a joke that's at the expense of the sale, it has to go. And so every one of those writers is looking at how do I make it more funny, how do I make it more, you know, retention, you know, juice on it so that I keep that attention, but ultimately how do I elevate the product, whatever we're selling or the service that we're selling to be the hero rather than the butt of the joke, if that makes sense. Kevin King: So are these direct response writers or comedy writers first? Joseph Wilkins: Both. So we start out and this is all outlined in my eBook. We start before anything and this is the free service that you mentioned at the beginning of the show. The hardest part sometimes is just staring at a blank piece of paper. Where do I start? Where we start is a brainstorm of terrible ideas and that takes all the pressure away. If you say I'm looking for 50 bad ideas, like let's say here's a water bottle. Let's say I'm making an ad for a water bottle that we're selling on Amazon. Where do I start? Well, let me think about, okay, so a water bottle is needed in a desert, or a water bottle is something that somebody in a drought wishes that they had, or a water bottle is something that someone on the moon has to have a special water bottle. Those are really terrible ideas, but if I go through and come up with 50 terrible ideas, guess what? At least one or two of them will be good ideas. And now with the invention of ChatGPT, this is even easier. You can go to ChatGPT and you can say, okay, I want to create a funny video and here's the product and here's a link to it. One of the huge things that we always do is reading customer reviews because that will tell you more than the client could ever tell you about why people actually buy that product. You just brainstorm all of these different ideas. Ultimately, what we do is we distill that down to the five best ideas that we then present to the client. That's the first step. We're trying to figure out what's a fun story that we can tell that positions that product as the hero. Kevin King: You narrow it down to these five. I'm fascinated by how the writing process goes. Like what Norm says, do each of those then go and write on their own? Do they write a script for each of those five? Do you sit around and brainstorm and then mix everybody's ideas together and one guy takes the lead and okay, I got it, let me write it out and then everybody else critiques it and adds their, oh, if we change this word, if we change this or how does, can you walk me through how that actual creative process works? Joseph Wilkins: So we start out in the virtual writer's room. So our writers are all over the country or all over the world sometimes. We say, okay, here's the product. Here's the website. Here are some customer reviews. Just get a brief reference of what it is that we're trying to sell. I should back up. We never create branding. If a company comes to me and they sell 10 products and they say, I want a funny sales video about all 10 products, I say no. It's got to be one product. Singularity of message is key. Now, you can upsell, cross sell in the funnel once you've got the click. That's fine, but the video needs to be so laser focused on solving one problem. We brainstorm 50 ideas and then as a team, and typically that's my role, is to take all of the great ideas out and distill it down to the five that I will then present to the client. Obviously, I give my opinions, but the client gets to pick. Yup, that's the one. A lot of the time, the problem is that clients are like, ìI love three of those. I don't know which one to produce.î Sometimes, we do multiple. We just actually signed a contract with Go High Level to produce two different videos because when I presented, they were like, ìWell, I can see two different angles.î Anyway, once we select the concept, then We do start out linear. So there's one writer that takes the concept and he's the marketing copywriter that puts the skeleton together. Not funny, but it talks through how this concept is going to present the product as the hero. And then we'll have a couple of other writers that come in and say, okay, well, that's the skeleton of the script. Now, how do we create more of a story? So this is more of a, you know, a copy, a creative writer, not funny, but just creative. And it has to hit All of our videos follow the story brand Donald, is it Donald Miller? You know, a problem that then we show the solution, why that, so we start with a character who has a problem. We then bring in a guide who shows that person what the solution is to their problem. Then we show the magical transformation when they use that product, show why their life is better, and then we back it up with social proof because anyone can tell you something, but you got to prove it, and then we resolve concerns Present a compelling offer that has a low barrier of entry and get them to do whatever it is. Click now to buy the product or get a free sample of the product or get a free e-book about the product or whatever it is. So the process goes through from marketing copywriter to creative writer to final on the story and then we send it to our five comedy writers who all at the same time are attacking it and beating up each other's ideas. So it starts out linear and then kind of goes a little haywire and then I, as the project manager on pretty much every script, I get the fun job of saying, okay, here are 50 jokes, but we don't have time for that because we've got to tell the story, which one served the story the best, and those are the ones that survive and are added to the script. Kevin King: Now a quick word from our sponsor, Levanta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it. That's right, Amazon sellers. Do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings? Meet Levanta, Norm and I's secret weapon for driving high-quality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing. That's right. It's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN, Wirecutter and BuzzFeed just to name a few as well as top affiliates, influencers, bloggers and media buyers all in Levante's marketplace which is home to over 5,000 different creators that you get to choose from. So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits. But you said earlier you spend about 80% of the time on that creative hook. Joseph Wilkins: Yes, well multiple creative hooks. Kevin King: Yeah, so how do you come up, how do you do those creative hooks? What's the process on actually, do you write the whole script first and then come back and like what can we pull out of this and how can we succinctly do this in five seconds and get their attention? Or do you start with, like some people say on YouTube, create the thumbnail before you even shoot the video. Other people, when they shoot the video, they go, what are we going to call this or how are we going to make the picture? But the most successful people, like Mr. Beast and stuff, actually create a thumbnail or do the sketch of it, the layout of it, design of it before they actually go shoot the actual video. Joseph Wilkins: So typically, I wish I had an A, B, C answer. Typically, we will do that with hook number one. Okay, so that's that's the main hook that we think is the most Likely to get the best watch through, the best click on rate, all of the metrics that the marketers are going to use when they run it. We will spend a ton of time figuring that out first before we write the rest of the script. However, most of our campaigns will do four different hooks and the other three will typically come Not always, but typically come from an unused joke or something that one of the comedy writers will put in that we don't use or it may come in the middle of the writing process. I mean, the creative process for us is very nonlinear, like some of our best ideas come almost as the video is finished and we're in the shower and I or someone on my team have an idea and the crazier, the better sometimes. I don't know other than to say yes, we definitely spend the majority of our time to begin with thinking about that opening hook, but then other versions will come in as the process goes. Ultimately, it still amazes me which hooks do better. There's a story that the Harmon Brothers talked about. By the way, we're good friends with the Harmon Brothers. I went through their mentorship program many years ago and learned a ton from them. One of their big campaigns, Loomy, I heard the story that they spent a million dollars on some big special effect that they brought some stunt people from Hollywood and they shot someone out of a rocket or something for their opening hook and they thought that that was going to be the best opening hook that they've ever done. And it ended up bombing and they cut it out completely because the metric showed that, you know, the retention curve plummeted at the beginning and they started with much more boring opening hook and it worked much better. And I've seen that time and time again is when we create those four different versions, you know, most of the time I can have an educated guess, but, you know, I'm always surprised at some of the, you know, stuff that performs much better than what we originally thought would do the best. Kevin King: In my past life, I dealt with tons of brand managers and some would go with the flow, some would, like you were talking about earlier, it would just be headache after headache after headache, especially with the bigger brands. So what What happens when a brand manager is hesitant about using humor in their marketing? How can you convince them to give it a try? Joseph Wilkins: Well, we really don't take on a client unless they're willing to go for a ride. Literally, I've turned down multiple clients who wanted to do a campaign, but I either just didn't like their product. I don't want to promote anything that's snake oil, right? So, get rich quick stuff or products that are clearly not stuff that I wanted to run. But then there have been cases where people are just like, you can do it, but you got to be safe. We don't want to Push it like some of the other videos that you've done. I can kind of get a spidey sense of what a client is going to be like to work with. So I definitely have to have an element of A big element of trust, and I actually have been surprised at how many clients that I work with are just like, you know, we hired you because we were seeing your work. We want to be very hands off, do your thing. And I love that. But I also love when clients are like, hey, we have some really creative people on our team. We want you to work hand in hand with them. 100% love working either way, as long as they're like, yeah, we understand that this is going to be like nothing else that we've ever done. They just need to trust the process. Kevin King: Speaking of flipping from the brand side, what is something that solo influencers or creators can do? My chef is doing some live cooking videos and my trainer does a few things and then Norm's Ausha has a company that does some social media. It's a smaller company. He goes on and pitches some products. If they wanted as a solo person without the big budget, they're not doing the $10,000 in ad spend, so they can't come to you yet, but they want to kind of get their feet wet doing this, trying humor, what would you recommend to someone at that level? Joseph Wilkins: Well, you might not like my answer because I tell people, Again, you've got to do it all the way or not do it at all. Now, that doesn't mean hire us. It doesn't mean hire someone else. It means go through my eight steps in my eBook which will take you, if you do it right, it'll take you, you know, A couple months, if not more, to produce one campaign. Companies have asked me before, well, how do I distill this down? I do videos every single week or every single day. How do I use this in that? And I still haven't figured out a good answer because if you don't go through the process that I've explained, I think you come up with stuff that really shouldn't be put out there if you're trying to do humor. If you're not a naturally funny person, which I don't consider myself to be, I think I can recognize humor really well, but I'm not one of our writers for that reason. There's some people that are just naturally genius. They can just get on the camera. I mean, you were talking earlier about how your banter is something that people like. Awesome. Not many people can do that. So if it doesn't come naturally, my recommendation is don't try to force it unless you go through the kind of process that we're talking about. Kevin King: So today, or even since COVID, TikTok. So the rise of this short form content like TikTok, has that influenced how you're producing your videos? Joseph Wilkins: No, it really hasn't. Because back to what we started with, I'm a firm believer There's more than two buckets, but those are the two main buckets that come to mind. It's the user-generated, simple, unproduced content, and then there's the highly produced content that takes a while. Has it impacted our business? No, because we just see ourselves as you've got an arsenal of different tools in your marketing tool belt, and we're just one of them. I don't tell people this is what you should do. I say this is one of the things that you should do because there are some people that just don't respond to these kinds of videos but do respond to those kind but in reverse. I was reading an eBook. Actually, it was Alex Hormozy was talking about how he delivered his content in four different ways. And it was equally like he would do an audio podcast, he would do shorts, he would do long form and he would do something else. I can't remember what it was. And people like to consume media the way that they consume media. They won't change their habits. You just need to reach out to them in all of these different ways to get the most likely chance of reaching the biggest audience. Kevin King: Real quick, we don't have much time yet, but can you just go run through the bullet points of those eight steps? Joseph Wilkins: So there are eight chapters and I'll really quickly run through each one. So step one is discovery. Know your customer. Read lots of customer review. This is all in step one. Identify your top five selling points. Identify two objections and know your competition. That's the research. Before you, you would never write a letter to a friend and then decide who to address it to as you're walking to the mailbox. But so many people they do all of this work to create these videos but they don't really think about who these videos are speaking to. So knowing your customer is number one. Step two is brainstorm. Create a brain share. You know create a group of people that you can bounce ideas off. Throw out as many ideas as possible. Remember there are no bad ideas and create a document with five high-level ideas. We've already talked about that. Step three is scripting. Use your best concept. Ask yourself, does the script have a relatable character? Entertain your audience to keep them watching. Create the hero's journey. Fill your script with enticing hooks. The hook at the beginning is super important, but you gotta continually hook people every 20 seconds or so to keep them watching. Okay, step four is adding the comedy. You gotta find funny people. No jokes are better than bad jokes. That's really important. Test out your jokes. A joke to one person is not Funny to another. Okay, step five is the production. Choose the right actor. Find a great crew with great equipment. Pick the right locations. Improvise. Let things come into the script that weren't on the page while you're filming. Most importantly, have fun. Okay, step six is editing. Don't let your viewers ever get bored. Speed things up. Be open to hard edits. Edit multiple versions. Step seven is testing. Does this video actually work? Find the retention curve and see in testing where are people dropping out so you can edit it differently and test it again. And step eight is forget going viral. We're not creating a video here that's going viral. We're creating a video here that's a money printing machine, like a vending machine full of $100 bills that only cost $20 to use. How many times do you want to use that machine? Those are my eight steps. You can read all about it at FunnySalesVideos.com forward slash ebook. Kevin King: So are most people that ask once they get to that final step and they put the video out there to the world, what happens if they just hear crickets? Do you go back to the drawing board and re-edit or just throw in the towel? Unknown Speaker: Yes, yes. Kevin King: What do you do if it's crickets? Joseph Wilkins: Well, so... Kevin King: Do you put more money behind it to try to get more people to watch it or I mean, what's the approach? Joseph Wilkins: So, a course that I highly recommend is the Harmon Brothers Launching Ads. I think it's called Launching Ads that Sell or Launch Ads course. We're a creative shop, so we don't run the ads. We work with agencies that do that. So, we believe in being specialists at what we do and working with other agencies that are specialists at what they do. But to answer your question, If you've done the production process right, you'll have a dozen or so versions of the ads and so somebody who knows how do I test this to have statistically significant data that says this version is working better than this version or this version we're losing people at the 22nd point or this version we need a better hook or whatever. A really good digital marketer will be able to look at the retention curve of that video and see where are we losing people. Do we need to cut that out or do we need to re-edit that section or do we need to change the offer? So yes, there is still a lot of work after you've launched it if you have a really good person who understands the difference between you know different people's opinions and multiple people's trends that are saying this needs to change. Kevin King: Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of The Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm? Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast? Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time and it's just me on here? You're not gonna know what I say. I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. Unknown Speaker: Yikes! Kevin King: But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of The Marketing Misfits. Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm. So other than going viral, what's the biggest misconception businesses have when they're putting together a marketing strategy? Joseph Wilkins: I think it's that, you know, doing traditional stuff is what you should do. I think most people don't really think about I mean, let's be honest. You mentioned Jaguar earlier. That is a great example of somebody, right or wrong, love it or hate it, got a ton of exposure. I mean, we're talking about it. They're getting free advertising. Why? Because they did something that nobody else even saw coming. Liquid Death, Dollar Shave Club. I mean, there are so many different examples that we could talk about. And so when somebody sits down to do their marketing strategy, it's what am I not thinking about that normally is the difference between brands that kind of do what they've always done and brands that really skyrocket. Kevin King: It's good to be a misfit in other words. Joseph Wilkins: Absolutely. Kevin King: On that note, I think we're at the end of the podcast. There's one question I always like to ask our guests and that is, do you know of any misfits. Joseph Wilkins: Actually, one of my partners in crime, I don't work with him, but he owns one of the agencies that run our ads. I think it would be a great fit for the podcast. His name is Parker Kreinen and he runs Ricochet Digital. He could probably answer a lot of the questions that you asked about what do we do with the data once we launch these campaigns. I think he'd be good to have on the show. Kevin King: Oh, that's fantastic. As my phone rings. The fade out music. I thought that was a part of it, Norm. We just got some new fade-out music. Awesome. Thank you, Apple. Okay, so any contact information? How do people get a hold of you and that eBook one more time? Joseph Wilkins: Yeah, so the eBook is FunnySalesVideos.com forward slash eBook. Obviously, go to FunnySalesVideos.com and see the videos that we've produced. And then going back to the offer that you threw out at the beginning, if anyone is currently running ads, send me an email. Give me a link to your product page. And we'll set up a free consultation where me and my team can include you in our weekly brainstorming session. And we will actually come up with three different concept boards for three different ideas for a potential funny sales video for your product. It takes us about a week. You know, I'm paying my team to do it. So this isn't a gimmick. This is a real offer. But send me an email at joseph at funny sales videos calm and And and we'll we'll fit you in well, that's fantastic Kevin we got anything that we can send Joseph. Kevin King: I've already thinking about sorry had like four ideas in my mind when I Quit listening to him when he said if you're spending $10,000, I'm like, okay, what can I send him? What can I send him? Like I was like, well a newsletter actually where I'm spending over $10,000 a month in Facebook ads right now promoting a newsletter for the Amazon space or and we've got plenty of stuff in Dragonfish Working on dog products and all kinds of cool stuff that I think could be really cool. Joseph Wilkins: Cool. Kevin King: All right, sir. Let's do it. Well, Joseph, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing today. This has been fun. Joseph Wilkins: Yeah, it has been fun. Thank you for inviting me. Kevin King: We're going to have to have you back as well. Hopefully, you know, you're… Ashley's done one of our videos for us and then we… Oh, yeah. Joseph Wilkins: There's a case study on the billions of dollars that it created. Exactly. Kevin King: I can see that. Exactly. We're going to be his new record. Forget this half a billion views. We're going to get a billion views. Exactly. First day. That's right. Thanks for being a guest. I'm going to remove you and then we'll come back and talk to you in a sec. Joseph Wilkins: Sounds good. Thanks, guys. Kevin King: I love that whole creative process. I love the whole video. I mean, both of us have big backgrounds in video. I did television. Production for a while, you know, we had stuff on all the cable channels and putting out DVDs and the whole nine yards. And I still to this day, you know, just creating testimonial videos for the stuff that we do or just creating the videos from a BDSS or something, you know, I enjoy that whole process of putting that together. And I know you do too. You have a background on it. So when you combine that with humor, And the intent to actually sell, I think it can be super powerful, just like Joseph just explained. Yeah, my video background is more in home video, you know, from the kids, you know, from being one until, you know, right up to now. So, that's my background. I thought it was that sex tape that got leaked. That's not me, my friend. The guy with the white beard? And there's some code zeros on the end, on the end table. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, yeah. Kevin King: That's it. I could have sworn that was you. All right, we're going to cut this. I can feel my face turning red. That's it for today. Kevin, let's close this out. Yeah, so if you like this episode, make sure you go and check out Joseph's, what he said there, funnysalesvideos.com forward slash e-book and grab his e-book. Also, hit the like or follow us on this channel if this is your first time listening to this. Hit that follow button on Spotify or Apple or wherever you may be listening to this or if you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to subscribe to the channel so you don't miss anything because every Tuesday, a brand new episode of The Marketing Misfits comes out. And look also, if you haven't yet, depending on when this comes out, we record these in advance. There may be a link somewhere around down in the notes that says subscribe to the newsletter. We have a newsletter version of the podcast as well. So just like Joseph's saying, you might like To get stuff in a different medium and go back and check out the rest of the channel. There's a lot of great content. We started this podcast in April of 2024 and we haven't missed a week in that process. So check that out and you can always go to marketingmisfits.com. Man, you always gotta, is it .com, .co, .net, what is it, .co? It's .co, yes, .co, you got it, you nailed it this time. Finally, man, after almost a year, I can finally get that thing right. MarketingMistakes.co. All right, everybody, thanks for joining us. I know I learned a ton today. We will see you next Tuesday. See you next week.