Wallbreaker – The Two Things That Every Video Marketing Campaign Needs

Highlights

Introduction to Wallbreaker
Founding of Wallbreaker
Business Environment in Lincoln
Impactful Video Campaigns
Making Engaging Corporate Videos
Professional vs. User-Generated Content
Cost and Accessibility of Video Production
Trends in Video Marketing
Challenges in Video Marketing Roles
Advice for Starting with Video Marketing
Ash’s Favourite Game: Catan

Transcript

📍 Chris Barnard: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Bear Business Podcast with me, Chris Barnard, from Feedback Fans.com. Today I speak to Ash Wilks, co-founder of award-winning Lincoln-based video production company, Wallbreaker. We discuss how you can build your brand through video marketing. We go into some detail on the latest trends in video and give some practical advice on how you can elevate your business through the use of video.

📍 Chris Barnard: Ash Wilks from Wallbreaker, thank you ever so much for joining me on the latest edition of the Bear Business Podcast. Uh, you are, of course, I don’t have favorites, but I think Wallbreaker would be one of the businesses that I prefer. Uh, certainly as we go find out in your backstory, uh, people who have come to Lincoln who run a business in Lincoln, a business that has been around for, uh, around the same time as my business. And the beauty of that has been that I’ve been able to speak to you over the years, watch your business grow over the years. Uh, the beauty of things like LinkedIn, and I know sometimes we’re very critical on this podcast about social media is being able to watch people who you admire and respect, uh, make great progress in their career and with their own businesses is such a wonderful thing to observe. Uh, so you’re very welcome today to talk about, uh, video marketing in particular. We’re going to hear a bit about Wallbreaker and talk about trends in video marketing and stuff that business leaders, um, business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs who listen to this podcast can learn a lot from. So welcome today, Ash.

📍 Ash Wilks: Thanks very much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

📍 Chris Barnard: You’re very welcome. And would you like to share this story behind Wallbreaker’s founding, uh, and what inspired you to start a video creation business?

📍 Ash Wilks: Yeah, of course. I went to university in 2011 with my business partner, Luke. Obviously we weren’t business partners at the time we met there. And over the three years, we realised that we worked really well together. Yeah. Sometimes we weren’t always put in the same groups and some of the groups we were put in, it was quite apparent that people were just there to get a bit drunk and, uh, not really take the course very seriously. Obviously, we still enjoyed a drink as well as students, but we did take the coursework and the degree very seriously. Several pieces of content that got really good recognition. We won a Royal Television Society award and some of our videos were submitted into international film festivals in China and the Czech Republic and we got to go and attend those festivals and see the reaction that, uh, the pieces of content had on the audiences and it made us really realize that we had something special going on. As the university sort of year was ending in the third year, we were introduced to a lady called Hazel Donnelly, who runs New Media Links, and she was able to, through her network, find companies in the local area who wanted corporate videos making at quite a discounted rate, because they would then be made by university students. And Luke and I grabbed the opportunity with both hands. And it was a real, really great experience basically to take a brief from a client, execute it by producing a video that hits their goals and then deliver it to them and see the reaction. And that was just something that we really enjoyed the whole process. You know, we felt good at the end of it. We were able to to, you know, tick that box to that client and deliver them some great results. So when we left university, we basically thought, why don’t we build a business and do this together? We don’t want to move to London, making coffee for people for a few years, running around doing that sort of thing. We feel like we’ve got, you know, naively maybe at the time, really great skills that have certainly changed over this past decade, but we thought it’d be a waste to not capitalize on the relationship that we had at the time. And that’s what really founded Wallbreaker. And 10 years later, we’re still producing videos for companies, but not quite at the rate it would have been when we were students.

📍 Chris Barnard: How do you find Lincoln? So I’m obviously coming at this from an angle where my business originated, um, around Lincoln, uh, although we’ve sort of, you know, moved slightly away now. Was, was Lincoln somewhere that you chose because, uh, you are familiar with it from university, both of you. And, um, it must’ve had a, quite a, a startup business mentality at that sort of time when you started, right? Because we were promised as, uh, if I can speak on behalf of the people of Lincoln, that when we had the university and they built the university, that we would, uh, be able to capitalize on, um, keeping very clever, um, well-educated university students within the city. And we would save ourselves from this brain drain that gets talked about that you mentioned slightly there, right? That top talent gets attracted elsewhere. Obviously things like the, the train line to London, the direct train line coming back and things like that must have helped. But I just wondered how you found Lincoln as a business environment to grow your business in, in the last 11 or so years.

📍 Ash Wilks: Oh, I don’t think staying in Lincoln was like an active decision that we made. It just sort of happened. We enjoyed the city from being at university. I’m from Nottingham originally, which is only slightly bigger. It’s not as big as Manchester, but it’s slightly bigger. So it was like going to a smaller city for university. The community that was fostered at the university and then the business community in the in Lincoln City but also the county is very special and I think quite unique in in the UK and it allowed us to be supported by local businesses, be encouraged by them and ask for advice when things were going well or things weren’t going so well. It just felt like a safe place to stay and it’s grown so much over, you know, gosh, the 13 years that I’ve lived here now, um, and I don’t have any plans to leave anytime soon. We don’t really work a lot in the county anymore, as much as we used to. We do work more so towards the south and internationally sometimes, but I’ve got some really, uh, strong roots here and I’ve just been elected onto the board of directors for the Lincolnshire Co-op. So that’s something that I’m really excited about to contribute more to the Lincolnshire Society as time goes on.

📍 Chris Barnard: Yeah, I love that. I love that. You’ve been there. Your roots are there. You’ve moved on to sort of helping with the community, but it’s not just the community and the businesses you were working with who were starting up. And when you started creating your video production company, but you’ve worked on some pretty big, some pretty amazing brands, not necessarily Lincolnshire, but some Lincolnshire brands as well. Just wanted to see if you could give, um, an example of how Wallbreaker’s videos have boosted sales or brand awareness and the types of brands you’ve been working with.

📍 Ash Wilks: The past decade we’ve certainly produced a lot of videos for hundreds of clients that have achieved great levels of results for them. And that’s from crowdfunding videos that have helped companies raise hundreds of thousands of pounds towards their investment for recruitment videos to help companies get the right people into their business. And also videos that have increased sales for companies through ads on social media, for example. But I think one of the most standout cases I can share with you is a recruitment campaign that we produced for Stagecoach, the bus company. They had a huge driver deficit to the point where they were regularly canceling routes, customers are getting frustrated, waiting at the bus stop and the bus would never turn up. And it was having a real impact, not only on their income, but as their reputation. So we produced a TV and social media campaign that slashed the shortage that they had by 77 percent within just 18 months. And that happened by increasing clicks through to their application pages by 86 percent because over 1.6 million people have viewed the videos online and on television. And basically within a year and a half, three quarters of their shortage was completely removed and they’re able to get much more of their routes operational again, and I’m really proud that we were able to deliver such amazing results for such a prestigious and well-known brand.

📍 Chris Barnard: Yeah, I think this is something that’s often forgotten when you are commissioning things like video is that they don’t just or they don’t have to just serve one singular purpose. I think that’s a great example there where, uh, if that is helping with recruitment issues as well, and also giving you some brand awareness, uh, I think what a wonderful way to do that. We used to talk about it when I used to run the digital department at certain businesses, something I would be very keen to talk to, uh, our staff about would be, I know that we’re a digital function or a marketing function, but can you provide value to other functions in the business as well? Because if you do, if you start to help and HR was always a great place that you as a digital team could put in a lot of, uh, help actually, whether that was on the data side or whether you could, um, particularly we would be running the websites, right? And the HR sections. And sometimes you’d have the function of the HR team would input into that, right? If you could really be helpful and, and show that you can provide value across the business spectrum, that seems to be a great thing to do. Um, some, certainly something you can do with video in terms of it’s not just a sales or marketing tool, is it actually, it’s something that actually will elevate your whole brand as a business.

📍 Ash Wilks: Oh, for sure. It can even help with operations. So Gusto, the food delivery company, where they send you the ingredients and the recipes. They have a huge factory in Lincolnshire and a lot of the staff that work there, English isn’t their first language. So when they’re training and onboarding those people, they have to get someone in every time to, you know, sort of translate and show how to fulfill the process. The box comes along, you take the ingredients, put it in the box, it goes away. So we produced a video campaign that was just internal that showed the whole process. It’s called pick and press. So the box would arrive, you’d pick the ingredient for this box, this ingredient, you’d put the ingredient in the box, press the light, box moves on. There were no words in the video, it wasn’t dubbed. So that means that it was all visual. Any language, any person from any background that spoke a different language could still understand what was happening because the whole video was purely visual. And that helped save money, save time and improve communication across the business. And that’s something that was never even made public that it wasn’t put on Facebook or LinkedIn. It was just to help streamline the process within the business.

📍 Chris Barnard: Yeah, I love that and your Stagecoach example reminds me of one of my favorite memes, which was, uh, the one with the picture of the guy with the shades on is like, “I drive a 4 million pound vehicle every day.” And then you go through all these certain things that says, “and I’m a bus driver.” So how do you make in with a. In this environment now where there’s so much video available, how do you make a corporate video truly engaging and effective for a brand?

📍 Ash Wilks: I think there are two really important things to consider to make a piece of video content truly engaging. One is the use of emotion, and the second is using relatability. So, I’ll start with relatability. I think conducting thorough market research and really understanding your audience is key, because the information you gather from that really helps mould the story and the narrative in the video. People watching the video will feel like they are, they’re seen, that they feel heard, because the video speaks exactly to their pain points and the problems that they’re having, and then combining that with emotion, such as humor, for example, is really powerful at making them stop the doom scrolling and actually pay attention and watch that piece of video content, making it more memorable. And it can be any emotion to be fair, you know, excitement, surprise, even sort of tugging on the heartstrings or fear of missing out all these emotions. Make people remember the brand, making it more, more likely to share, like, and post on it. And ultimately hopefully become a customer in the end.

📍 Chris Barnard: Yeah, it hits a lot of the things we talk about on Bear Business around understanding your audience, which I think is coming back in vogue. Thankfully, I think it’s been taken for granted, particularly, uh, and I say this in criticism of people like myself who have been very much in the performance marketing business. Uh, we spend this amount on ads on our paid ads. Why we like it is because we can see that we’ve spent this, we’ve got this back, et cetera. Um, and, and so I think a lot of the times in the last, I would say sort of, that was 10 years ago, you could paper over cracks that were not knowing your audience fully, um, not knowing where they are fully, right? Because of course they’re on Google because they were then there wasn’t any sort of debate about it. They were on Google, whereas now, particularly with the changes on Google, um, the landscape is far more disparate. People are on TikTok now. People are searching on TikTok now, which is something that only I learned recently. But a lot of the tenets are still there, right? Great storytelling, particularly is making a massive comeback with video. There’s obviously been a breakthrough in recent years, particularly for video marketing due to the rise of user-generated content on platforms like Instagram, on TikTok, uh, on reels and things like that. So how do you choose when a story should be user-generated or should be professionally produced?

📍 Ash Wilks: Yeah, there’s, there’s always a time and a place for user-generated content, UGC, and professionally made videos. And I like to sort of draw a line in the sand there by saying that hero content, content that is going to be used on top, the top level of the funnel on social media that needs to grab someone’s attention always needs to be produced professionally because it number one represents the brand. In its highest possible standard. And number two, working with a video production company, they know the planning, filming, and editing required within a piece of video content to really hit the goals that are within the brief, whereas people who are in marketing know how to do that from a marketing perspective, but not necessarily from a video perspective. So that, that high level video content when scrolling is really important. The hero content we call it always needs to be produced professionally. And then this can then user generated content can be sort of split a little bit differently, whether you’re a small business or a large business. Smaller businesses can’t always afford to invest in professional video production services. So having some user generated content, such as testimonials, as long as they’re still filmed well, you still need to know how to use the phone, get a basic, you know, smartphone, tripod and clip microphone. It’s more than appropriate to film testimonials, FAQ videos, pieces like that, which we call hygiene content that are posted on social media regularly to make you really stay in the mind of your customers. Larger companies also need to be producing that level of content, but they don’t necessarily have the time, the expertise, or they experience what we call creative fatigue, where they don’t understand how necessarily to make a piece of video content creative. So I think they can, you know, tell information as it is, but they struggle to think about it that way because their expertise is not in video. So we help companies that basically have those issues by offering a subscription service where they can pay monthly to receive monthly video content, where we will take away the stress, the time, and use our own creativity to think about how to overcome any problems that they have and communicate their message effectively, basically.

📍 Chris Barnard: Historically. And I still think, uh, this belief permeates around businesses is that the cost of, uh, professional video production. And I say this, say my knowledge of this was when I used to work at The Lincolnshire Echo, um, we were very fortunate that we had a video resource. He’s called Ian Clayton. He’s a wonderful guy. Shout out to you, Ian. Um, but he, we used to do videos, for example, for clients then. And, and back then, um, a video would cost say 10,000 pounds, 15, 000 pounds. And there’s been a lot of work by video production companies, such as yourself to make packages more affordable. And actually I think it is affordable for everyone to have professionally produced video these days, which they might not be aware of. Do you want to just take us through sort of your pricing? So I know you’ve gone through an evolution yourself of trying to make, um, the pricing of professional video, uh, affordable for all types of businesses. Do you want to just talk us through sort of your thinking behind that and where the industry is going in terms of affordability for businesses?

📍 Ash Wilks: Of course, video, the cost of videos can vary, uh, because of the amount of time people that are needed. If, uh, it’s a advert, you’ll need actors, props, locations, equipment. So you can make videos for people from, you know, the low hundreds, you know, all the way up to the tens, hundreds of thousands, even millions, depending on what agency you are, or if you’re a freelancer, for example. So with, with my business the sort of starting point for a bespoke piece of video usually starts at around the 4000 pound mark. I think the most expensive one we’ve done around 60, 000, quite a high level, you know, TV advert. And then there are other services that people like myself offer where you can have regular content that is much more affordable. So we have three different packages, three, four and 7, 000 pounds a month. And that basically allows you to have all the video content you need on a monthly basis without having to constantly commission a professional company to always come in and produce content, but it can be quite time consuming to work with a video agency to produce content. And we try and take as much of that pressure as well as possible, really.

📍 Chris Barnard: I think something listeners and viewers might not be aware of as well is that a lot of the content that they see on these platforms that they assume is user generated content, which masquerades as user generated content. And my example here is Mohawk Chevrolet, who I was recently, um, sent towards. I think I heard on a podcast. Someone was like, “You would definitely love this, Chris. You’ve got to see this.” So this is a dealership in America that are, um, effectively using their staff, authentic staff in the dealership to create, uh, uh, the office type environment. So it’s a lot of these sort of cringe videos. Uh, the U.S. office, I suppose, is, is more the focus these days. So just cause you didn’t like David Brent, for example, don’t let that put you off. It’s very intelligently done, but that is very much user generated content or it looks like user generated content. That’s the whole idea of it. The sort of peep show, uh, methodology, but actually there’s a hell of a lot of professional production in that Ash, isn’t there with the editing, with the, the lighting setups and everything that goes on there. So there’s a lot of that masquerading, isn’t there that, that viewers might not be aware of.

📍 Ash Wilks: Definitely. And I think the reason for that is because sometimes you can spot an ad a mile away when you’re scrolling the news feed and it’s full of user generated content and you see a very polished, sparkly, professionally made video. Sometimes you’re like, “Oh, that’s an advert. I’m going to skip away.” So sometimes it is appropriate to disguise a piece of video content as being user generated or as like fly on the wall, documentary sort of style, like the office for, you know, for example. And we’ve even done that for one of our clients in the past, there was a company that we worked with that basically produced warranties for cars. And without being rude, it’s probably one of the most dry subjects. You can talk about car warranties. It doesn’t get everyone excited traditionally. So we tried to think of something different when coming up with a campaign for them. And we produced a six-part drama series that was a comedy, just kind of like the office really. It had an office manager, one of the employees and customers involved that used humor to really push on the pain points that customers have communicate their sort of products and services in a really subtle way that wasn’t sort of like shoving it down their throats and just made people laugh. And when those videos were even shown at the like warranty conference, um, the national one, you know, that happens every year, they’ve never had the whole room in hysterics and laughs like they had then, you know, no one usually laughs when you watch an advert for a warranty company, whereas we actually managed to use humor in that to invoke a response in the room, which is great, because they then were recognized by all of the other sort of warranty companies in the industry and admired for doing something quite different. And then also, from a customer’s point of view, achieved success from the results that the campaign got for them.

📍 Chris Barnard: Yeah, and I think it touches on the point you made around creative fatigue as well in terms of a lot of businesses would be scared to make that move, right? If you are a warranty company, you’re probably used to everyone saying, “Oh, well, you know, you’re not the sexy business, are you?” I mean, often these businesses have incredible business models, right? And they make lots of money. So they are great businesses. And there’s no reason why. They can’t be marketing powerhouses. It just seems to have been a mindset that has been inherited over time. It was like when people used to say, “Oh, why B2B is always so far behind B2C, right?” Because the B2C marketers aren’t scared, are given, are brave enough and have the courage to go for these campaigns where in a lot of terms, uh, B2B companies, particularly ones that have done well, historically, people don’t want you to rock the boat. Um, they don’t think they have to come up with this create creativity, but actually the modern world is all about this creativity, right? But also, just because you are the person who sits in that role, we’re talking about head of marketing, head of brand, it’s not just down for you to have to come up with all the great ideas, right? A lot of these times you could go to people like Wallbreaker, uh, other independent businesses and say, “Have you got any ideas that the benefit of someone coming in, having a look, coming with, um, different ideas, being able to give you the benefits, their experiences of what worked for other businesses,” right? I think that goes a long way to help convince a business that actually you can do these things. And actually the, the business benefits of you doing it are, are really massive. If you get it right, Ash, right?

📍 Ash Wilks: Certainly, the leaders of large businesses are great at what they do. You know, they, they’ve built the companies they’ve taken them from strength to strength. But understanding their audience is something they do, but then they don’t necessarily always understand how to communicate with them, especially through video. And that can be from a leadership sort of C suite level, or if you’re going into like in marketing managers, they’re in a creative space if you’re in the marketing team, but still video isn’t sort of, you know, in their skill set all the time. Convincing people, you know, so like the CEOs of companies, if, or, you know, CFOs, if they’re the people that hold the purse strings to do something different can be challenging because they, you know, been working in the industry for decades. And this sort of thing hasn’t been done before. And they see accolades, like the amount of awards that you’ve won or the amount of years your business has been running as information that audiences really care about. And yes, they really do reinforce credibility, but they don’t. The audience doesn’t care about sounding harsh. They don’t care how many awards you’ve won. They don’t care how long you’ve been trading for or what they care about is how you can help them solve a problem that they have. So when we work with clients and they say, “We need, you know, you to write us a script that says we’ve been going for 150 years and we offer this, this, this, and this,” they simply don’t care. They want to scroll past that. If you show video content that actually leans on those pain points and does it either using humour, surprise. Some sort of other emotion is going to make you much more memorable than the competitors that show the CEO sat behind a desk talking for five minutes to a camera.

📍 Chris Barnard: And video marketing, I think undoubtedly is the thing everybody needs to be doing. If you’re not doing it by now, you’re being left behind. So you absolutely need to get on top of it. So what would you say are the latest trends in video marketing? Obviously very difficult when it’s moving like a freight train at the minute. But what would you say that the latest trends that businesses should be aware of?

📍 Ash Wilks: I think one of the biggest trends that businesses should be aware of is what LinkedIn is doing with video. So obviously we all know, uh, that LinkedIn, you can post pictures, text videos onto the feed, just like any other social media platform. But what is happening is that if you press one of the videos to view, what LinkedIn is now trying to do is encourage you to scroll, just like on Instagram or other platforms. So you’ll scroll to the next video, the next video, so you just won’t be seeing any of the text or image posts, which means that your content isn’t going to be seen as much. My impressions have absolutely plummeted over the past few months as this feature is being rolled out, because once you sort of click a video and start scrolling, like we all do, you just keep going. And you don’t think to go back and start reading the text posts. We’re starting to produce videos for ourselves, for our clients that really, you know, help with this issue because they’re going to need talking to camera videos. They’re going to need testimonial videos, other ads to really lean on what LinkedIn are doing now, because if you don’t, you’ll be left behind, which is scary because talking to camera doesn’t always look natural to people. So I’ll admit, even for me, I don’t find it very comfortable and I’m having some training at the moment because I really want to capitalise on this opportunity rather than seeing it as something to be worried about. I want to see this as, “Ah, not all of my competitors are going to be able to talk to camera well and produce these videos.” So if I’m one of the first people doing that, then I’ll be right top of their mind when they’re considering having video production services for their company.

📍 Chris Barnard: And this is the new marketing era, right? There is an expectation is everything. And so 10 years ago, there was an expectation that as a digital marketer, um, you probably knew about statistics. You knew about analytics. You knew about social, you knew about all these sorts of things that just become assumed, don’t they? And so I just wanted to philosophically, uh, how you feel about where video is at the moment. We’ve obviously spoken about humor, motion, relatability has come to the forefront. Great storytelling. But I do wonder, you know, thankfully, as I come up to my, uh, almost 40th birthday next Tuesday. How difficult it must be for these people who come in now as social media execs. Um, and I say that cause we finally got to a point where it’s not the intern who’s given social media, right? They’re like, wow, actually, if we did this properly, we could do, we could probably make a lot of money out of it. Right. So it’s the social media execs doing it. But I imagine their job description was like, well, what my job descriptions when I was working in the house 10 years ago looked like, right? Where they expected you to know a lot of things. I imagine there’s a social media exec these days. They’re like, okay, we’re assuming you produce video. Want you to show us, you know, your top three reels or to show you to show us your video editing skills. I mean, these were, these were dream skills to have Ash, weren’t they? Sort of 10 years ago. And now there’s an assumption. And I just wondered what you thought about the terms of burnout and how, um, we sometimes I think expect too much from people, particularly in a fast evolving marketing trend like short form content. You know, everyone’s got to be funny. Everyone’s got to be on all the time. Actually, what do you think of it? More and more on a, I suppose, on a philosophical level, how video marketing is going.

📍 Ash Wilks: I don’t envy social media, um, interns, social media managers, executives, accounts, um, managers, things like that, because they are expected to be experts in everything social media, and that isn’t possible. Larger companies understand that. And some small and medium companies do as well. But what we do see is that as a trend in general, because budgets are tight and smaller companies can’t afford to hire several people in the marketing department is that these sort of solo, marketing people that are the only marketing role within a business have a huge pile of hats to wear. They’re expected to know SEO, PPC, Facebook ads, blog writing, video content creation, everything. And it’s, it’s way too much. One person cannot be an expert in all of those things. So what you end up with is someone who is very overwhelmed. Really probably doesn’t like their job, isn’t given enough budget to actually even produce the content well enough. And they’ll just flip and flop between job after job until they find somewhere where they actually feel appreciated and valued because the, the management of that team understand that you can’t be, uh, you know, just, a master of all of those things at once. So it is something to be really alarmed about. Uh, it is moving in the right direction. I think people are seeing that we produced a video campaign recently, actually for ourselves that we put on LinkedIn that spoke to marketing managers with those exact pain points. So we showed an actress wearing a stack of too many hats and each hat had a different label on it, SEO, PPC, things like that. And we filmed them trying to just do their daily job role. Making a cup of coffee, having a phone call, trying to film a piece of video content. And the absurdity of how huge this stack of hats was really made you think, “Wow, okay, okay, we can’t expect people to be doing all of this.” And, uh, as a piece of video content for ourselves actually went viral on LinkedIn, because we really hit the pain point that those marketing managers had. We, the comments literally in the feed where, “This is me,” you know, as a joke, but “Wow, I wish my boss could see this.” And I think we had over a million impressions within just a few weeks. Uh, tens of thousands of reactions and thousands of comments from people. And that was just down to, like I mentioned earlier, having some really good market research in there and using comedy in the video to touch on those pain points. But moving on from the success of that advert, I really do think that, companies need to be made more aware of all the, you know, the leadership of these smaller companies need to be made aware of that you can’t just hire a young person because they know how to use Facebook and TikTok and think that they can bring in loads of sales because simply it’s not going to happen unfortunately.

📍 Chris Barnard: I think I commented and contributed on that LinkedIn post, actually. Yeah, I think you’re very good at it. Obviously, with your type of background and the storytelling, you find these pain points and can hit on them. I totally agree with you. I could not be in more admiration for the people who have pain points. The roles I used to inhabit, right. Digital marketing executive, digital marketing managers. I think there isn’t a day that goes by, right. Where we see someone posting a meme of, “This is a digital marketing exec spec for 18 grand a year in London.” And they’re effectively trying to get you to run a whole department and hit insane targets. It’s a, it’s a tough way. As I said, we’re in the state of SEO podcast the other week. It’s a tough way to earn across the bread these days. Um, we don’t wanna put everybody off, particularly those people who do not have the chance of having a social media exec on the team. The people who, the great people who listen to our podcast, who are business owners themselves and are, uh, dabbling with a bit of video marketing or maybe haven’t dipped the toe in Ash. So I just wondered what advice you would give to business owners who are thinking about starting with video marketing, but might not have taken the plunge yet and maybe just need a bit of encouragement.

📍 Ash Wilks: So I think there are probably two things to consider in that area. The first one is to be really transparent and open with the video production company or companies that you’re talking to about video production. If it is the first time you’ve done it, let them know that. And also if you know you don’t have a particularly large budget tell them from the offset because they can probably still help you to some degree or push you in the right direction of where to go because when people come to me and they necessarily don’t have a budget that is appropriate for working with my business. I always refer them to someone who I know can help them because I want to help people, but sometimes, especially if it’s a exciting business, it’s in a really cool industry. We have in the past, you know, reduce the rate a little bit because it’s going to get the team’s creative juices flowing. And that’s always something that we’re always happy to consider too, or especially if it’s a charity, but being open and honest about budgets and also not having a lot of experience in video will allow the video company not to be too disappointed if you’re not able to then, you know, carry on, you know, with those services, or if you decide to film it yourself in house, they might be conscious on how to do that because we all do want everyone to be successful. And if someone said to me, “Ash, I can’t afford this, this quote that you’ve put together, I’m sorry.” I would say, “Well, fine. Not a problem. If you’re considering doing it yourself, I have a list of tips that I can give you. It doesn’t cost me anything. So I’ve already got the list. I’m more than happy to do that. I’d rather have them succeed in their own endeavor than me go, ‘Oh no, you’re dead to me now that you can’t afford that.'” It’s not the mentality to have. If you do move ahead with a video production company, I think giving them a really detailed brief is really important as well. So not only giving them a budget, but really an in depth breakdown of the audience, what you want the audience to think, feel and do when they’ve watched a piece of video content. And what the goals are for the campaign, because having all that information allows the video company to work backwards, right to the beginning to the script writing phase to really decide what direction do we go in here? Do we, which piece of emotion do we use? Do we want to use humor? It might not always be appropriate, but you could use something like surprise, um, you know, turning on the heartstrings, things like that. So having a detailed brief can really steer the direction of your video content.

📍 Chris Barnard: And is there somewhere, um, for example, if a company is on the edge, thinking about doing it, um, can they come to you for some sort of education? Is that something that Wallbreaker provides at the moment? I think the last time I met you, we were talking about, uh, obviously the subscription service to make things more affordable, but was there something you were doing in terms of training as well? Um, on behalf of Wallbreaker for people who maybe are in this, I imagine there are quite a few people who are thinking this, right? We know we want to do it now. Brilliant. Good. Get on board with the train. It’s never too late. Um, but do we do the user generated? Do we do the professional side? How would we make that work? Is that something they could come to you for and you’d be able to help advise them on?

📍 Ash Wilks: Definitely. So at the moment I have a document that gives some tips on how people can film their own content for their user-generated content. But we are at the moment exploring the, uh, the opportunity to provide workshops for companies. So people that have people in the marketing team, we would come in for the day, half a day. We’re not quite sure how long yet, but do some workshops in how to plan, film, and edit video content because you know, we want to embrace that user-generated content is certainly something that companies need. And instead of getting annoyed about it and thinking, “Oh, it’s taking work away from us.” Why not embrace it and try and help companies produce the best content they can.

📍 Chris Barnard: And this is why, as you know, even though I don’t have favorites, we do like Wallbreaker. And so thank you ever so much today. It’s been a real education and insight into video marketing, a great channel to be in. Might not have always felt this for the amount of years you’ve been going when it was much tougher, uh, 10, 15 odd years ago, but you are now there to absolutely capitalize on the great work you’ve done and the huge interest in video marketing. So I’ve just got one last question for you that I ask everybody who comes on the Bear Business Podcast, Vodcast, uh, and that is what is your favorite game? What games you like to play can be a board game, dice game, card game, video game, what games do you like to play, Ash?

📍 Ash Wilks: I think board games would be my favorite to play because you get everybody in the room. Uh, my, my favorite game would be Catan. Catan, but whenever I play that with my friends, you’re not sat on a screen with them on the other end of it. You’re sat there in person. You can have a glass of wine, some snacks. Have a laugh, uh, and think strategically, uh, which I enjoy with games. I like resource management games where you can build cities and civilizations and manage that sort of resource thing and have a bit of a fun, uh, competitive, you know, edge with it, with your friends and have a bit of a laugh. So I think that’s why I picked.

📍 Chris Barnard: You’ll have to help us just to give a bit of an insight into Catan because it’s so my equivalents, I suppose, would be risk, but it’s it’s risk, but a far more kind of strategic game where you’ve got to have sort of risk became I don’t know if you played a game called diplomacy, which was kind of, you know, risk, but you had to use your brain a bit more. It wasn’t just a dice roll. And then Catan I’d say is sort of the next one after that, right? Where you do have to be quite strategic about resources. Can you give us a bit of an insight into a game of Catan?

📍 Ash Wilks: Of course, yeah. So, um, yeah, Settlers of Catan, you have five resources in the game, ore, wood, wool, brick, and wheat. There you go.

📍 Chris Barnard: Oh, well remembered. Yeah.

📍 Ash Wilks: Yeah, thank you. On the spot there. And they’re spread across the map very diversely and you place settlements or cities on those resources. They have numbers on them and you roll the dice if your number comes up you collect that resource. But to advance the game you need to get to 10 victory points. So basically you need to think very, very carefully about where you place your settlements and what numbers, what resources, because you can’t build another settlement without a certain resource and you can trade with other people, but then they might get a bit greedy and ask, I want two wood for one ore, for example. So it is all about managing your resources. Being a bit friendly and diplomatic with your friends so that they’ll trade with you. And, uh, but also, uh, making sure you’re not too soft with your friends as well and say no, uh, and, and blocking them off from certain resources and things like that, but there’s no fighting like within risk where you have armies and things like that is, uh, a bit less, uh, aggressive in that area, but I do love the game of risk as well.

📍 Chris Barnard: Yeah, it takes me back to me misspent youth playing civilization that type of game. So you’ve certainly got me excited about it. I’ve got we do have Catan that me brother bought. He’s very much into those types of games and it lives now at me mother’s house. But usually something has fallen upon us on our Christmas Day. Someone’s burnt the turkey someone’s fallen out that we never get to play it. But maybe it can’t be this year because he’s actually off to China but I maybe the year after we’ll be able to play Catan. I look forward to having a game of Catan around your house with that red wine at some point soon, Ash.

📍 Ash Wilks: Sounds good to me as well.

📍 Chris Barnard: Thank you ever so much for being on Bear Business today, Ash. We look forward to speak to you again soon. What I’ll do is put some notes in the show notes that we’ll give the social media links so you can check out Wallbreaker, check out some of their great campaigns, some of their great award winning campaigns, find out what Wallbreaker video looks like and connect with Ash on social media. Thank you for being here, Ash.

📍 Ash Wilks: Thanks for having me.