Video Campaigns That Don't Suck

The mistake is universal: We focus on our business's needs, not the audience's needs. We try to push our revenue goals, new tech, or low churn rates, but the audience is only interested in their own life.

The solution is the A-C-E Framework—a three-part guide to creating video content that is instantly catchy, highly retentive, and drives real results by putting your customer, the true hero, first.

1. A is for Audience Want

The first step is reversing your perspective. Your needs (like hitting quarterly revenue goals) are best solved by solving your customer’s needs. "It's business 101." If you capture that solution in your marketing, people will line up and pay you.

You must focus on what the audience actually wants—their lived experience and their personal goals.

🏥 The Doctor's Office Test

Imagine a doctor’s office building a new facility. The brand side wants to highlight:

The cutting-edge new technology.
The providers with up-to-date training.

But what does the audience (the patient) actually want?

"If I'm going into a doctor's office I'm having an issue with my health that I want solved so I can get back to doing what I actually want to do."

The A-C-E Shift: Stop making a generic medical video about new equipment. Instead, tell a story where the doctor's office is the gateway to their best life. "So rather than having some video that highlights all of those brand-side things what we want to do is tell a story where the customer feels like we're the gateway to their best life, their healthiest life." You’re trying to remind them that regular care keeps them "having a zoom call with their grandkids or mountain biking or hiking."

🏨 The Hotel Test

A hotel chain opens a new branch. "The concern of your customer is how does this hotel get me a better experience in that region."

The A-C-E Shift:

The campaign shouldn't focus on the clean sheets or continental breakfast; it should focus all on the adventure and the experience that can be had by staying there. The hotel should be the backdrop, a necessary place to sleep, because the customer is "there to experience the experience not the hotel."

2. C is for Conversion Moment

Once you've aligned your narrative with the audience's wants, the Conversion Moment is where you genuinely align those desires to your brand.

The Conversion Moment says: "I see you. I hear you. I feel you. I know what you want and the conversion moment is where you can align those genuinely to your brand."

This moment must be subtle, strategic, and real. It should pay off and demonstrate that your brand gets the customer.

For the Hotel: “If you want to have this experience so that you can travel the world and see your family, book with our hotel.”
The Warning: "This moment has to be really strategic because if it feels forced if it feels fake all of the trust we've built to this moment is dead."

It has to fit in naturally based on the solution and story you've already established.

3. E is for Emotional Core

The Emotional Core is the authentic, human, and relatable underpinning that surrounds your entire video campaign. It’s what gives the whole thing wings.

In mid-to-large organizations, it can be easy to forget that you are just "a bunch of humans doing a thing for a bunch of other humans." But the fact remains: "human beings connect with human beings."

If you tell a great story with a perfect conversion moment but miss the emotional core, the whole thing will feel "dystopian at worst and flattened tone-deaf at best."

The Cheat Code: The Ground Floor

To find your emotional core, you need to tap into the real, human moments happening on the ground floor of your business. "This is why being really tapped into the ground floor of your business especially as a marketing team is the cheat code for this."

The cheat code is finding those amazing, seemingly incidental human moments that occur because your business does what it does best.

Ask yourself: Which story is more compelling?

“We have a four-and-a-half-star rating and our bedsheets are clean.”
“This is where you can reconnect with your family.”

Focus on the stories that are happening in your organization every single day.

The ACE Summary

Creating effective video campaigns requires shifting your priorities away from your internal metrics and toward your audience's life.

A - Audience Wants: "What does my audience actually want? What's the story they're actually trying to tell and how am I helping them with that story?"
C - Conversion Moment: "Where do we come in is the supporting role that helps the audience the actual hero of the story win and get what they want?"
E - Emotional Core: "What's the emotional core to our business that's driving all of this and creating the space where these stories can happen?"

"That's it: audience wants, conversion moments, and the emotional core. ACE for short."

If you can figure this out, every part of your marketing will get easier.

Drew Loewen

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