The Top 3 Things that Internet Dogs, Cats and Babies Teach Us About Today's Best Video Marketing Practices

Let’s face it: the internet is littered with dogs, cats and babies, and not necessarily in that order. The intellectual in me posits that the sheer amount and popularity of nonsensical online waste explains much of what is wrong with society today. With how many dogs, cats and babies can we amuse ourselves before we agree that, as a species, we have too much free time and too few meaningful agendas in our lives? Alas, that’s a topic for another day.

Today’s topic will focus on the age-old adage that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. After all, as marketers, we’re trying to sell to the hordes of aforementioned viewers who are simply delighted at the drop of a cat – or, hat, rather.
And, let’s face it, the fact that those potential consumers are stationary, at a computer, for inordinate amounts of time, is enough to whet the whistle of any advertiser out there.

So what are the top 3 things that internet dogs, cats and babies teach us about today’s best video marketing practices? To answer this, I created a video in which dogs, cats and babies dance to the latest Ariana Grande donut-licking montage. Just kidding, I didn’t do that. But I’m sure someone else has. Instead, here’s a series of good ol’ fashioned words strung together into sentences (the horror!).

1. Almost every human being on the planet will forgive ‘cute.’ What that means for marketing is that if your ad is cute, the hard sell will be forgiven. Not only does this mean viewers will sit through your ad, but it also means that viewers will hold your brand in higher regard if the ad demonstrates a cute factor. This is cold hard science.

2. People dictate viewing habits, not brands. We see lots of brands make beautiful pre-roll videos that get deplorable viewcounts (here, defined as viewers who watched videos all the way through). Why? Because the brand designed the video for itself, not for the viewer. Viewers like dogs, cats and babies – haven’t you been paying attention? If you want serious engagement online, bust out your chew toys and get those strollers strolling! This is a long way of saying, examine the trends and design your video marketing assets to fit the audience.

3. Brands come second to entertainment. This is one of the tenets at GEM, and it’s an important one. Today’s best brands are media companies or entertainment companies (see: Red Bull, GoPro, Chipotle Mexican Grill, BMW, etc). [http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2014/08/08/why-brands-need-think-entertainment-companies-not-just-publishers] It behooves all brands to think like entertainers who cleverly link sales into the act. Florida Georgia Line and Celine Dion understand this; people come to be entertained, and purchase their t-shirts as a secondary action.

So, the next time your fellow C-Suite Exec comes up with a brilliant idea for marketing, it’s your job as the CMO to remind them that, much like the news is written for fifth graders, valuable marketing initiatives must be geared towards what’s trending today. For now, it’s dogs, cats and babies. Perhaps tomorrow will see the rise of complex war novels, discussions of interplanetary discovery, and shared efforts to combat global warming, terrorism and political scandal.

However, for now, meaningful topics that need intelligent human solutions are simply going to the dogs. So, don’t fight it – embrace it, learn from it, and unleash the power of cute.

In the time it took to write this blog post, about 900 hours of cat videos were uploaded to YouTube.

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• Advertising
• Digital Marketing
• Video Marketing
• YouTube