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Make a leveled up video ad for your audience
Justin Sardi: Hey, what’s up, everybody. Justin Sardi here, CEO and co-founder of www.tubesift.com. And we have a really awesome piece of content lined up for you today. We’ve got my buddy, Stockton, on here, and we’re going to be talking all about… I’ll let him do a little intro, but he’s behind Full Time Filmmaker, which is an awesome course and community (to level up video ads). And we have actually been using it internally at TubeSift. I can’t recommend it enough. We’ll actually link to it below this and we’ll get into it in a little bit here.
But he’s going to be talking all about: do you need to have a high quality production video for your video ads? Does it make that big of a difference? And then, also talking a little bit about what you can do to spice your video ads up, make them perform a little bit better.
Yeah, man. If you want to tell us a little bit about yourself, a little bit about what you do, and then we can dive right in; that’d be awesome.
Stockton Walbeck: Cool. Yeah. So I’m Stockton Walbeck, brother of Parker Walbeck. My brother Parker, he traveled the world with a YouTuber who… At the time, when YouTube wasn’t very big, DevinSuperTramp was a YouTuber who was traveling the world, filming these crazy videos. And Parker was fortunate enough to get hired by him, and he’s joined alongside him and started going around the world, filming all this crazy cool contents.
And after a couple of years, working with him, he broke off. He found out that there were thousands of people all around the world who wanted to learn how to film really cinematic, fun content. So he broke off, built a course called the Full Time Filmmaker. We’ve grown that now to little over 16,000, 17,000 students worldwide. We’ve been able to scale that past $12 million, or so, in sales, and so it’s done in the process of teaching people how to film. We’ve also had to teach ourselves how to market that course on the filmmaking. And so, it’s been this fun experience of: we are catering to filmmakers, and so we have to hold our ads to a standard that most people can’t really achieve.
So if you’ve seen any Full Time Filmmakers ads, we spend two to three weeks filming, editing, scripting ads because we’re appealing to filmmakers. We want our results to be… We want people to want to emulate our results. And so, we hold our ads to really high standard of filmmaking quality, right? And so, I’ve been over-marketing for the last three or four years for Full Time Filmmaker: scripting, editing, and filming a lot of those ads that you see on both YouTube and Facebook. So I focus primarily on YouTube ads; that’s my bread and butter. But yeah, glad-
The 5 Second Rule
Justin Sardi: Nice.
Stockton Walbeck: … to be here and lots to learn about how to make ads more cinematic… or your ads more cinematic, your videos more cinematic.
Justin Sardi: Nice. And yeah, after this, I’ll ping you. But I’d love to get a couple of those URLs and we can maybe share some of those ads [crosstalk 00:02:58].
Stockton Walbeck: For sure, absolutely.
Justin Sardi: And yeah, we’ll definitely link to the course because, like I said, we’ve been using it internally here at TubeSift. And even just before this call, we were just talking about it. I basically started having my video guy go through it, and the previous ad versus the one where he has actually gone through the course, I was like, “Dude, this is phenomenal. This is way better.” Even just a few of the things have made a huge difference. So yeah, let’s go ahead and jump right in.
Stockton Walbeck: Yeah. So I’d say, what I’ve found with video ads… So we actually ran a couple of A/B test a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to see… I wanted to answer the question: how important is it that my video looks aesthetic, right?
Justin Sardi: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Stockton Walbeck: Really cool editing, lots of animations, really good-looking studios, a nice camera, good microphones: how important is all those garbage? Do I need it? Can I be like Tai Lopez and just film on my iPhone with a car in the background, or do I need some of these cool-looking things? And so, we ran an A/B test on that. One of them was just me talking… or us talking to the camera. The other A/B test that I made, the thing that we tested, was a full-blown production, really high production, really well-edited video ad. And it was like everything across the board was two times better on the well-edited version.
And so, what I learned after getting twice as good cost per clicks, twice as many sales, twice as many leads from that ad is that production does matter on your ads, but the scripting, the copywriting of your ad is, by far, the most important part. It’s what you’re saying in there that is driving the people. But as far as video tips within ad creation itself, we live by a rule that we call the five second rule. It can be anything; three to five seconds is where we try to stand. But you want to have something on the screen that’s visually appealing, right? Because people lose attention really quick and need something to be on there that’s grabbing their attention. And so, there’s a lot of different ways that I like to hold people’s attention videos.
How to make your ads more engaging
One of the best ways is what’s called B-roll, right? So if I’m talking to a camera, that’s A-roll. This is my face, but my face gets boring, unless I’m really animated and I’m really charismatic, and I’m just fun to watch and listen to, right? Most people aren’t that way, and so you want to put B-roll. If I’m talking about a mountain, show this really cool drone shot of a mountain. If I’m talking about… whatever you want to put, B-roll of what you’re talking about. And so, in whatever case you can, B-roll really supplements what your viewer is watching.
The second that I really like to do in my video ads is we add a lot of texts and animations. So people like… There’s a lot of visual learners out there, and so just saying is one thing. And they’re hearing audibly, but they also want to see it visually. And so, if you can supplement what you’re saying audibly with visually, with really important texts… So important things in your ad that you’re saying to really draw attention to what is painful, or importance, or value-adding, right? Words like free and painless, seamless, whatever. We have all sorts of tools that we like to use. A lot of editing tools that you can find in Full Time Filmmaker as well, but there’s all sorts of stuff that we throw in there that we throw into our edits to make texts look more fun and appealing and engaging.
And then, I’d say, lastly, it just comes down to pretty basic things, like a good song. My rule of thumb is it needs to be something that I can tap my toe to. I’m a big music guy. I love music. And to make an ad engaging, or a little bit more engaging, I like to have, obviously, a song in there that I can edit to, cut well to, and that makes me want to tap my toe. And then, I add sound effects to everything in the ad. It’s crazy how big of a difference sound effects make. When you go and you look at some really high budget, really high production videos, sound effects and just audio is half the battle. People think it’s all about video, but audio… what you’re hearing is half of the viewing experience. And so, I go in and I have lots of sound effects.
Do you need high-quality equipment for your Video Ads?
And a lot of people aren’t going to ever really want to get that deep into filmmaking, like a lot of your audience and your people. They’re probably not in the boat where they’re like, “Hey, I want to download Premiere Pro. I’m going to just learn how to edit like crazy,” but a lot of people do. There’s a healthy balance of both types of people. You can hire it out or just yourself, and that’s fine, too. But if you’re wanting to do it yourself, I’d say, some of the most important things to look out for video ads are: B-roll, the texts that you’re adding, try and add some animations to it, the sound effects, and the music. But-
Justin Sardi: It’s funny you mentioned that. We just finished up shooting some ads for an upcoming webinar, and Brady sent them over today, our video guy. And he’s been going through Full Time Filmmaker and, literally, he added a bunch of sound effects to all of our testimonials popping up, and things like that, and did the whole text thing, highlighting all the key points. So I’m sure you probably talk about that in-
Stockton Walbeck: Yeah.
Justin Sardi: … Full Time Filmmaker because he definitely put all those. And he sent it over, I was like, “Dude, these are way better than our previous ads.”
Stockton Walbeck: Yeah.
Justin Sardi: So thanks, dude. Yeah, I’m glad you talked about that a bit here.
Stockton Walbeck: Yeah, no, it goes a long way for sure. It’s small things, but these really small details can sometimes take a little bit of time. And the more you do it, the easier it gets. After A/B testing it and putting hundreds and thousands of dollars behind these A/B tests, it’s clear that the more engaging ones always tend to win. And what makes an ad more engaging? A really good B-roll, a really good copy; I’d say that’s the top. Again, copy and copywriting, that’s always king. But after that, what they’re seeing has to be engaging, holding their attention, retaining it, and the things that help supplement that are sound effects, music, B-roll, and animations.
Don’t make this mistake
Justin Sardi: Nice, man.
Stockton Walbeck: A common mistake that I see people make when they first get involved with video and making these things and wanting to get involved in video making is they think they need to have really expensive gear, a really cool mic, a $10,000 camera, big lighting systems. Those things help, right? But in the course, we go over a lot of how to… You can accomplish results that look like it costs $10,000, $20,000, and yet it was all under $1,000 budget, right?
And so, you don’t need to break the bank to create cinematic shots. It’s more about the know-how, even just this whole set of vibe going here, right? There’s science behind everything. The blue backgrounds contrast with my orange skin, right? The lighting is positioned in a certain way. And everything supplements in a way to create a cinematic looking image without having to spend a whole bunch of money. So that’s one of the bigger mistakes, or misconceptions I see people make in the filmmaking world. It’s the know-how; it’s not the equipment. And if you can get it down, it can absolutely, greatly enhance your ads like it has ours.
Justin Sardi: Well, thanks, man, that was an awesome content. And like I mentioned a little earlier, that’s something… or just a few minutes ago, whatever. We’ve actually been implementing some of these things and I’m sure people will probably see some of these ads coming up that we’ve been doing. But yeah, just the whole… the text, the sound effects, all that. Even me just watching the rough draft before it went public, or before we rendered the video and all that, I was like, “Dude, this is a huge improvement.”
So, thank you, guys, for putting out such awesome content on that. And everybody that is interested, we will link to Full Time Filmmaker below this video, either in the description or on the blog post, depending on where you’re watching it. But I really can’t recommend highly enough getting into this. It’s a phenomenal course, and you have a community as well, which is really cool, along with some kick-ass discounts on… So were actually like, “Oh, we need to cancel some of the software we’re using and sign-up through these guys so we get a discount.” So yeah, man, thanks so much for coming out and I really appreciate it.
Stockton Walbeck: Thanks, Justin. I appreciate it, man.
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