Dog Food Is Delicious

In the late 1980’s, Paul Maritz used the phrase “eat our own dogfood” in a memo that urged Microsoft employees to use the company’s products internally. I missed the nuance when reading about this memo and ended up taste-testing 4 different brands of canine culinary offerings, but the point eventually stuck.

At Video Brothers we eat a ton of dogfood… and by that I mean, we practice what we preach to our prospects and clients:

Your ads aren’t underperforming because of your funnel. They’re underperforming because your creative sucks.

We put our money where our mouth is and started collecting data on the ads that we served, the ads that all sit in a very simple, single-track funnel (one that you can visualize in Canva without zooming out to atmospheric levels just to get all the detail).

But before we get to the stats, let’s take a look at our recent menu of hot, fresh ads.

The three ads below were created with the sole purpose of building a solid retargeting audience for our B2B ICP.

Our goal on this currently ongoing campaign is to stop the scroll, capture attention, and delight the audience with something they probably haven’t seen before on LinkedIn… fun ads.

The Ads

"Toast"

‍This ad is fun, simple, and visually striking.

The message: Stop doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. It’s time for a change.

Scroll-Stopper: Fire. Everyone loves to watch something get roasted to oblivion with a propane torch.

"Paint"

This ad is obscure and sarcastic and delivers a hard truth.

The Message: Most B2B ads a boring… so boring we’d rather watch paint dry.

Scroll-Stopper: The entire spot is filmed in an extreme close-up (which stands out from anything else on Linkedin) and our creative director/star of the ad amps up the “weird” with his delivery of the lines.

"B2B News"

‍This ad is barely an ad… it feels like a real news clip and is quickly revealed to be sketch comedy.

The Message: B2B ads are stale, and PDF whitepapers as a means for lead-gen are as dead as Chandler’s mom.

Scroll-Stopper: A half-second clip of chainsaws powering through logs that quickly leads to an Anchorman-esque news clip is something you don’t see on LinkedIn very often (or ever).

The Strategy

The above B2B ads were specifically designed for entertainment first, followed by one simple core message. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

We’re not trying to explain everything about what we do, we just want to capture your precious and valuable attention for just enough time to retarget you again, with you guessed it… these exact same ads.

Going against the laws of the funnel, we believe that you’ll watch even more of the same ad on the 2nd go-round– and our data supports that. Further, our data supports that you’re more likely to click through to our landing page the next time, or the time after that.

The Results

Overall, we’re capturing audiences for $0.30 / per audience member at a 25% view, and our average view rate on these videos is above 45%. Compare that to average LinkedIn benchmarks and our ads are basically the Michael Jordan of ad performance.

In 30 days, we drove 1,251 conversions to our landing page, giving us a CPC of $5.74 on our $7,000.00 / month budget. The average CPC on LinkedIn is well above $15.00. Our ads are giving us massive efficiency all thanks to the creative. Creative that maximizes audience recall of the Video Brothers brand.

We also captured over 20k users in our retargeting groups, which is a large percentage of our ICP - now, we can retarget these audiences regularly with the same ads, and additional Thought Leadership ads that perform fantastically, and drive even more traffic and engagement.

Finally, these ads have contributed to the growth of pipeline over $300k - and statistically should lead to an ROI of at least 21x on our spend - not to mention, the dozens of prospects that will be in touch 1, 2, 3 months from now.

Our Dog Food Is Your Dog Food

Our first experiment doing this netted $600k in pipeline which we are still closing deals from!

The point here isn’t to brag about how awesome our ads are - it’s to demonstrate, using our own hard-earned resources, that what we do can bring value.

Keep in mind, we’re much, much smaller than you, and we likely have less than a 10th of the sophistication around the audience building, targeting, and mar-tech capabilities you have.

So, pair what you’ve got with what we do, and boom… you’re one step closer to changing B2B for the better.

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Video Brothers is a B2B video production/creative agency that makes entertaining content to help companies stand out from the competition. Click here to schedule a 15-minute call and learn how Video Brothers can help you grow your business.