Hello, friend.
Several weeks ago I got a personal invitation to a film premiere.
The invitation said I'd been "handpicked" to attend a VIP prescreening of a documentary short that set out to capture the zeitgeist of a post-pandemic world.
Following the premiere would be a live panel Q&A with the film's stars. Also, they'd be sending a swag bag with merch. Popcorn. Candy! (Me: Please please please make it Junior Mints.)
None of that would be surprising if I were, say, the editor of the Hollywood Reporter and the invitation came from some studio's marketing department.
But it was surprising because it arrived one unremarkable Wednesday afternoon in late May, just as I was closing out an unseasonably sweltering day in my Tiny House office. It came not from a studio exec but from my friend Tyler Lessard, who heads up marketing at Vidyard, a B2B company in Toronto.
A B2B marketing team producing a documentary short is not as common as I wish it were. But it's not totally weird, either. In 2015, InVision produced a
full-length documentary on the power of smart design that put that company on the map for many designers.
So the fact that Tyler produced a documentary short isn't why I'm telling you about it.
I'm telling you about it because of the way Tyler & team launched and marketed the marketing—turning a new program release into an "event," and then seamlessly linking live/virtual components to make it a party. Even while the US/Canadian border is sealed tight; even while the pandemic is still making a lot of us think twice about attending a party.
There's a lot I love about the approach: The slow marketing rollout. Creating momentum for more content. Seeding an account-based marketing play...
But I'm getting ahead of myself—I haven't even told you about the film yet.
* * *
Premiere day. June 23. I'm in my shady Tiny House Office, not a dark movie theater. But I have the swag and snacks. (Chocolates—darn good, even surviving sweating customs through Canada; popcorn—kinda stale TBH. Zero Junior Mints. Sad.)
The movie starts. In over 16 minutes,
re:connection tells stories of how real people connect with others in a remote world—and what it all means for the future of business as the world becomes less remote again.
It features a collection of neuroscientists, marketers, business leaders, and one 82-year-old TikTok star named Steve Austin who goes by
Old Man Steve and has 1.7 million followers. ("I don't know why my friends say they don't get it," Old Man Steve said about TikTok. "It's easy.") <---
Love that.
Vidyard is a video platform for sales and marketing. And video is, of course, one way that we've all stayed connected with each another in the past year and a half.
But the marketing team wisely avoided getting Vidyard-centric. They kept the film focused on its bigger idea: "It's really about inspiring people with what's possible and to think differently about human connection in the virtual age," Tyler told me later.
The film was good. But let's look more closely at the launch strategy as a road map for any marketing campaign.
SLOW + EXCLUSIVITY. Tyler could've easily decided to roll this film out with a big cannonball in the deep end, creating a big splash designed to hit as many people as possible, as fast as possible.
Paid media. Influencer seeding. Ads that follow you around Google like a stalker about to be hit with a restraining order. Social posts up the wazoo... You know what I mean.
But nay-nay, friend! Instead, Tyler chose a slower, more strategic route focused not on lead generation but on real connection: Personally inviting 500 VIPs (customers, partners, media, friends) to a private viewing and Q&A discussion with the film's stars; and shipping swag to underscore the exclusivity and relaxed party vibe. He invited 500; 100 came to the party.
The default in Marketing is to go for volume, not depth. But a slower burn maintains heat longer than a quick spark.
ON-DEMAND + LIVE. The documentary was obviously not live, and it was highly polished. But your prerecorded anything needs a live component as a trigger for people to actually show up.
The panel discussion and live Q&A was that trigger. And it also became an opportunity to create more content—featuring audience questions and the stars from the film—as well as to gauge how the whole project landed. "It was a single point in time to bring them together for a live discussion that we could record," Tyler said.
