EU226: 8 Steps to Making a Funny Sales Video with Joseph Wilkins

eCommerce Uncensored - Email Marketing | Facebook Ads | Social Media Marketing

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Joseph Wilkins is back on the show! Joseph was a guest on our show in episode 190. He is the founder of a video production agency, FunnySalesVideos.com, that creates funny, viral sales videos that have generated millions of views across social media platforms.

In this episode we discuss Joseph’s eight steps on how you can create viral videos for your own business.

Joseph has a new ebook called “How to Produce a Funny Sales Video Without Hiring Us”. You can go over to this website funnysalesvideos.com/ to grab a free copy. You can also check out some of his videos over there.

This is a direct transcript. Please forgive any grammar or spelling errors.

You’re listening to e-commerce uncensored with Kevin Monell and Jason Caruso.

Kevin: Hey everyone. And thank you for joining us on another episode of e-commerce uncensored. My name is Kevin Monell and I’m here with Jason Caruso. Today, we’re joined once again with Joseph Wilkins. We had him on our podcast episode 190, and we had him on with our buddy Ryan McKenzie, who with Joseph, created a really funny sales video. And that’s his company, FunnySalesVideos.com.

Jason: Right. And Ryan’s from Tru Earth so you’ll hear us talk about Tru Earth, and that’s Ryan Mackenzie’s company. Um, Kevin, I was just thinking about uh, Joseph, and the one thing that I like about having him on is that you learn something. It’s not just about how, you know, like everybody wants to come on podcasts to promote their businesses, but with him, it seems like you learn something. It’s like, he’s trying to teach you something. And if you happen to be in the market for a funny sales video and you can afford it, great use him. But for the most part, you know, he’s just telling you or teaching, or sharing, um, you know what he does to create a funny sales video. And I think that’s, you know, something that separates him from maybe some people who are just trying to get their company out there.

Kevin: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, he doesn’t hold back. He lays out the process exactly as he does it as an agency and, you know, go out and try it on your own. And if you can afford it, come hire him. But if not, go do it. And he says, you can with, with your equipment that you have available to you, cell phones and things, but in this podcast, he goes over those eight steps that he uses as an agency to build these viral, and I say viral lightly because he doesn’t really like to refer to it as viral, um, but these funny sales videos that he creates that I love.

Jason: Yeah. I love him too.

Kevin: All right. Enjoy this interview with Jason Wilkins from –

Jason:no, no, not Jason. Joseph

Kevin: Sorry. That’s your name? Yes, Joseph Wilkins from FunnySalesVideos.com. Hey Joseph. Thank you so much for joining us today. How are you doing?

Joseph: I’m awesome. How are you guys?

Kevin: We’re great, man.

Jason: We’re great. And your, your video looks like it’s syncing a little better with the audio of that.

Joseph: Yeah, my, uh, it’s some kind of sync issue, so yeah. But most people, most people probably can’t see it if they’re listening to the podcast.

Jason: So we’re really, we’re really excited to have you back, man.

Joseph: Yeah, it’s been awhile.

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. And then Jen, and then like our, our podcast producer, she got COVID. So like I told her to reach out to you and she didn’t because she was like deathly ill. And then I reached out and, uh, yeah, I mean, we’re really excited to have you on man. I mean, we, we’ve kept in touch sort of on, on Instagram. Um, I’ve seen your videos all over the place. Um, if you guys don’t know, Joseph Joseph is from FunnySalesVideos.com, he’s done some stuff for some big names. Like, why don’t you tell them Joseph, who you’ve been working with?

5:00

Joseph: Um, well, I mean, over my career, big names like LinkedIn, Chevrolet, Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s, but lately, since I launched Funny Sales Videos, um, our biggest client by far, as far as the success of the campaign was a Tru Earth eco strips. Um, I think one in three people in America have seen that ad. So, you know, maybe, maybe one or two of your listeners have seen it. Um, but, uh, I think last time we were on the show, With Ryan that first Funny Sales Video campaign had done close to 15 million views. Um, I was just chatting with Ryan last week and it’s about to hit 47 million views.

Jason: So he still has that original video.

Joseph: Yeah, he says it’s still running. I don’t know. You know, I mean, we’ve done now – I think I’m currently in production of our fifth or sixth video. Um, but, but I think he’s rotating through those videos. Every time I talk to him, the number’s higher.

Kevin: Well, it’s funny because it’s funny because when I first posted the, our first podcast together, I had written up a little podcast notes and I was like, Joesphs gotten hundreds of millions of views. And you were like, whoa, it’s it’s, it’s, it’s around, it’s around this number. It’s more like 50 million. And so now we got, we got this.

Joseph: It depends if you, if you’re counting TV views. Oh, it’s in the hundreds of millions.

Kevin: Well, the reason why I bring that up is cause you messaged us on Facebook that you like It’s time. I’m at the a hundred million million mark. It’s time to open this back up again.

Jason: So why dont you tell us really quickly for those who didn’t hear our first, um, interview, why don’t tell us. A little backstory about what you’re doing now and how you got into this. Because that was interesting to me. I mean, for me, I saw Dollar Shave Club and that was like hilarious. And since then, Joseph, they’ve kind of gotten away from these funny videos. I don’t know why.

Joseph: Well, they were bought oh, they were bought out. Okay. Unilever bought them, you know, any, any time big business gets involved, you know, there’s layers and layers of management. Yeah. I love working with small businesses because you know, you talk to the decision maker rather than the, you know, the, the panel of decision makers that you don’t get to talk to.

Kevin: Yeah. That was one of the worst things that we ever got involved with. Like some of the corporate corporate offices where like, we walk in as an agency and we’re like, oh, this is just not, this is not good. We got, gotta get out of here. Yeah.

Jason: So just tell us a little bit about like, how you got into this and, you know, uh, I think you you’re, you’re, it’s very interesting that the way that you went, right? Like the Harmon brothers are like the guys who did the Dollar Shave Club.

Joseph: No, they didn’t do Dollar Shave Club. No that, so that guy, the owner of the company, and this is one example where the owner actually did a good job doing his own video. We typically don’t tell, we tell people don’t do – don’t try that. But he was actually a sketch comedy improv guy in college, started the company and came up with the idea himself. But it was roundabout the same time that Harmon brothers were launching Poo-Pourri I believe that was their first big hit off. Yeah.

Jason: And you, if I remember correctly, because I’m already screwing up facts, but you said that, you know, uh, some guys like Russell Brunson, they’re spending a million dollars on a video or excuse me, $300,000 on a video. And you’re like, I want to do this, but make it kind of affordable for like, the everyday business.

Joseph: Yeah. So, I mean, my background is for 20 years, I was just, I started a video production company. We were super, super small. I mean, I bootstrapped the whole thing, buying equipment pieces, as I could eventually buying a studio, bringing in a team. Um, but you know, over 20 years we worked with some big brands, but we still wanted to keep our prices affordable to any small business. So when we started seeing these big elaborate productions, I just kind of looked at it backwards and say, okay, if my budget was this, which is, you know, kind of what my clients at the time could afford, how would I reverse engineer and get something that looks close to that But there is nowhere near that price? Um, and so that’s when we started Funny Sales Videos about four or five years ago, and it just so happened that it was right around the time, about a year later, that the Harmon brothers opened up their online university, which we are, you know, drunk all the Kool-Aid, you know, purchased every one of their courses. Um, in fact, I was on their podcast poop to go just a couple months back. Talking about the success that we’ve had because of the training that they gave us. So, you know, we kind of mixed the scrappiness of what my old production company used to be with all of the gems that they gave us. And that’s why, you know, a lot of these companies like, you know, Tru Earth paid off their video within a few hours of launching it. That’s how low the production cost was.

10:00

Jason: Wow.

Kevin: Like I’ve seen, I’m sorry, Jason. Um, cause I, we were talking about some of the other videos that I’ve seen and I was like, oh, you must’ve done this one or you must’ve done that one? And you’re like, no, that’s not us. That’s them. And they paid this, this exorbitant amount of money, but there’s, I don’t see any difference. The production value is the same, the entertainment is the same. So what’s the secret?

Joseph: That’s the ultimate compliment. Kevin, thank you. I, I don’t know what the secret is, but, but I, I had Harmon brothers on my podcast a lot. So I now run a podcast called, everyone’s doing podcasts, right. Um, it’s called How to Make a Video go Viral.
And I had the, um, director of Harmon brothers university on our course. And he publicly said that they basically start at half a million dollars for hero campaign, which is what we do for less than a 10th of that. Yeah, the answer is I have a very, very small team. Most of them are freelancers, um, and you know, my fingerprints are on everything.
So I’m, I personally direct every video you’ve ever seen. Um, so I don’t have these crews and crews of people. I, I was kinda surprised when I’ve been on some bigger sets and there’s, you know, a hundred people, 50 people. I’m like, what in the world are they all doing? You know, we have four or five people and that’s, that’s how we roll.

Jason: But how do you, because like, you know, we’re in that, you know, everybody wants a scale. Um, and I get it, you know, this is not something maybe you can scale because of the different levels of, you know, I guess the production that’s involved, but like how do you then remove yourself from the business? Right. And not work in it and work on it.

Joseph: So this that’s the answer. A lot of people ask me and my my answer is genuine. I don’t want to, I never want to be a big chop shop. I love my work too much, and I’m too much of a perfectionist to give it all up to someone else. I mean, eventually one day I’ll retire and then maybe we’ll have that conversation. But right now, you know, all, it’s kind of a blessing and a curse because I get to pick and choose which clients I work with ‘cause we can only take on so many. So right now, you know, I’m, I’m not looking to this big agency with, you know, tons and tons and tons of staff. And so that’s, that’s kind of the niche that I fill.

Jason: But then what about like, you want to go on vacation for a week or two, right? How do you make that happen if you’re editing?

Joseph: Oh, I’m not editing all the videos and all your assistants. And I have people that do what I’m saying is you, you have a creative director that follows every step of the process. So, you know, I have writers, I have comedians, I have editors, I have collaborators, I have sound mixers. These are mostly people that work as freelancers. You know, work for them, but it’s just one step of the process, but you always need somebody that has the vision from the very beginning and sees it through to the end. That’s the creative director. And that’s the role that I fill. But any one step in that, you know, there’s multiple people that are touching it. I’m just kinda looking at it from a big picture, making sure everything passes the sniff test before it moves to the next step.

Jason: Got it. So I want to tell you an, uh, this is an interesting fact. Um, so Ryan from Tru Earth-

Joseph: yep.

Jason: Um, he’s, he was on the podcast with you, but he did not know that… Is her name Tabitha, the blonde?

Joseph: Taletha.

Jason: Taletha. He didn’t know that she was a purple mattress actress as well. Did you?

Joseph: Yeah. Um, I didn’t know. I found out after.

Jason: Yeah. Yeah I saw her on TV. I’m like, wait, this is, this is the Tru Earth girl. And I said to Ryan, like, dude, like, you know that the girl in your videos is on, is doing like purple, uh, commercials? He’s like, no, I’m like, well, she is, it’s pretty crazy.

Joseph: Yep. Yeah. There’s a lot of production companies here in Utah. For some reason. I think it started around, you know, the Harmon brothers and other people, either that have worked there or within were inspired, there have done spinoff agencies, you know, like, like us. Um, and there’s a lot of production that happens here. And so you will see the same actors in different people’s videos. The interesting thing is when these actors get asked to do videos for competing brands, that’s where it gets interesting. Then you get into, you know, exclusivity contracts and all that fun, legal stuff that I try to stay out of.

15:00

Jason: right. All right.Cool. Um, so have you have any more questions before we move on?

Kevin: No, no I’m ready.

Jason: Okay. Joseph. Why don’t you tell us you, you created this ebook, right?

Joseph: Yeah.

Jason: And I don’t know. Um, Are you into like reading books, like marketing books? Are you, are you into that stuff?

Joseph: Sure.

Jason: So I’m reading a book right now from, let me get you his name, but he’s the guy. Have you, uh, you know, the guy, you know, Gym Launch.

Joseph: Haven’t heard of him.

Jason: Uh, okay. He’s he is Russell Brunson’s largest, uh, funnel. like he has.

Joseph: Oh, okay.

Jason: Yeah. And his name is Alex Hormozi. Okay. And he has this book called Hundred Million Dollar Offers and he talks about how he’s created like hundred million dollar offers. And he has this strategy, which is pretty interesting. And he basically says, look, I want to work with brands that are doing over $3 million. So three to $10 million. I want to work with those people and then everybody else can have my stuff for free. So what he does is he creates like these downloadable Books, eBooks, whatever. And he basically uses them to kind of, you know kind of, weed out the people that he wants to work with and then gives a lot of value to the people that are not quite at the level that he is at. And he uses his eBooks, his downloadable stuff, um, and some of his website stuff to do that. And I, I kind of liken what we’re about to talk about to that, right? Like when we first spoke, you were like, I’ll give, I’ll give you guys like the eight steps to creating a funny sales video. And I’m like, why would he do that? Like, if, but it makes sense because the people who want to go do it themselves, let them go do it. The people who want to hire a professional to do it, let them hire you. Right. Kind of like the idea?

Joseph: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, there’s two reasons. Number one is, as I said earlier, I mean, I’m not BSing. And literally for the past 18 months we’ve been booked out. I couldn’t take on another client because of the success that we had from Tru Earth and referrals that came from that. And so I said, well what am I going to do to all these companies that call up and say, we want to work with you. I should at least give them something that will make them successful. Go hire another video production company, maybe, but use these steps. And then when you get a taste of success, you’ll want to come back to us and say, okay, I did it 50% of the way now let’s see what happens if I do the whole thing and have you take the whole thing on. And so really what I’m doing is I’m just building a list of contacts of people that are trying what it is that I do, Seeing some results, ad in a lot of cases, just like you said, they’re not companies that can afford 30 to $50,000 for a video.

Jason: Which is nothing.

Joseph: Which, you know, in my world is nothing, but to the average small business owner, that’s a chunk of change. Um, but in two, three years time when they’ve grown and, you know, we may not be busy that time then if the stars align we’ll work together. So, you know, definitely it’s, it’s both of those things.

Kevin: So why don’t we, why don’t we go through this list? And you said it was like a, what is it? is it eight, eight steps to producing a funny sales video? Is that basically what it is?

Joseph: I mean, the ebook is called how to make a funny sales video without hiring us. You can download it from FunnySalesVideos.com, just scroll down to the bottom. Um, and basically it goes through the eight steps.
The first step. Is research, understanding who your customer is, understanding their pains, understand, you know, it’s marketing 101. You don’t want to sit down and write a script until you have a very clear picture of who it is you’re writing to and the best way, or one of the best ways to do that is to read as much as you can from those people. So reviews is the perfect place to sit down and really get into the minds of the customers. Yes, Demographics and data, all that is great. And you want that, but on top of that, you know, that won’t give you specific stories. And so a lot of people say, especially with Tru Earth the number one comment we saw was. I love that video because that lady is like me, or I want to be friends with her or she, I just connect with her. And that’s because a lot of the lines from Tru Earth’s video were literally taken from people writing their reviews, you know: I’m sick and tired of this. I love this. I hate this. And so we took all of that and put it into the script. So the first step, before you do anything, the more clear you can be the batter.

20:00

Joseph: We had one customer that came to us that had like a Five page PDF on exactly who their customer is, what she looks like, what she does on an hourly basis, what radio station she listens to, what coffee she gets at Starbucks. I mean, when you get down that granular, you can really connect. Now, you know, you don’t want to get too target that you exclude other people, but doing your research before you even put pen to paper is critical.

Jason: I want to just say something about that. ‘Cause our last podcast we talked about. Um, I don’t know if you’ve read this book, uh, Copywriting Secrets.

Joseph: Yes.

Jason: Okay.

Joseph: Yep. In fact, I think I know that guy.

Jason: Jim Edwards

Joseph: Is that one of Russell Brunson’s friends?

Jason: Yeah.

Joseph: So they hired us to do a video and I worked with him personally.

Jason: Jim, Jim Edwards.

Joseph: Yeah. I… it’s funny. I don’t know his name, but I recognize his face. I’ve been on zoom calls with him.

Kevin: He’s got a big beard doesn’t he?

Joseph: That’s right. Yeah.

Jason: So this book I have to say is, for me, one of the, uh, biggest, you know, it’s interesting because I don’t, I don’t mean to jump around, but this, this, this book, right. This copywriting book basically takes every one of the big copywriters, like, uh, like Halbert and Eugene Schwartz and all these guys, and they kind of like put it into one book and basically helps people like me who are trying to learn copywriting and the biggest thing in these books is what you said. It’s researching, knowing who you’re talking to, knowing what their problems are, knowing what they like, what they dislike, and then you can write your copy around solving those problems. And it sounds like that’s exactly what you do for these videos, because you have to know who you’re creating these scripts for. And basically you’re creating copywriting scripts.

Joseph: Yeah. I mean, we literally won’t take on a client unless they either can send me a link to at least a hundred reviews. Whether it’s Amazon, Trust Supplier, wherever, and I’m not talking filtered views. I want to hear the good, the bad and the ugly. I want to hear what, why don’t you buy, what don’t you like about it? So that I can address that in the video, nobody is going to buy something with a non unresolved objection. So if your price is too high, you’ve got to tell them why it’s high and why that eventually is going to save you money because you’re not going to have to buy three of them because it’s so good that it won’t break or whatever it is. And so creating that list is, is so, so key.

Kevin: And I can confirm that that’s actually this process that we’re talking about right now, these eight steps are actually the process that you do as an agency, because we had a client that we were going to work together on a couple of months ago. Things didn’t work out at the time and they’re still in order, but the first thing you asked when we got off the phone was like, send me an Excel document, send me a download of all your reviews. So this is actually, I can, I can, uh, confirm, I can vouch for these steps for sure. So this is good.

Jason: Yeah. And I was, I wrote like we did this $40,000 in two days, uh, podcast that we just did. Um, I was writing the sales page and every time I told these guys, like I was done with it, I wasn’t. Because I was researching, I was going on Amazon and looking at reviews. I was trying to hit all the points that people… The best place to look honestly is like the three-star reviews ‘cause they tell you exactly why they don’t like it. And they’re honest, they’re not just like, oh, Hey Jim Edwards, he sucks one star review. It’s like, like, look, I really love the book, but there were some things that I wish it had. And these are the things, and now you can take those things and address them in your copy.

Joseph: Yeah. And every, every now and then it doesn’t happen on every campaign, but every now and then you will find the funniest comments, like literally pee your pants. I couldn’t have thought of that if I had a team of writers, you know, trying to come up with that. And so you steal those, you can use those. That’s the great thing about comments. Is that they are public. And so we will lift those or, or really bad complaints that’s obviously just, uh, you know, uh, a Karen that’s that’s, that’s got a bee in a bonnet and you can make fun of them. I mean, people like love that kind of stuff. So anyway, being transparent sometimes, you know, using bad reviews will show some authenticity that, you know, you’re not trying to paint this glossy perfect picture that everyone loves it. Of course, there’s going to be someone that doesn’t love it. Anyway, I’m going on.
So, Step two, real quick brainstorm. This is the key one that most people they’ll… they’ll sit down and think until they come up with one good idea. Well, guess what? That’s the last thing you want to do? You, you need to go through, we typically will go through 50 bad ideas to get to one good idea.

25:00

Joseph: Now, what do I mean when I say brainstorm, I’m just talking about who is the character in my video and what’s their problem. And, and you’ve got to create creative worlds and fun, visually arresting things that will make people stop scrolling because the first part of your video, first five to 10 seconds, is the most important part. It’s gotta be visually arresting, curiosity peaking, shocking, whatever you want to do, as long as you don’t do anything that will get you flagged.
Um, but you know, come up with, you know, I don’t know, let’s say I’m selling these scissors. What’s 50 different scenarios in which there’s a world where these scissors can be sold. Well, I don’t know, one could be Edward Scissorhands and he has a problem that his hands have gone rusty. And now we can’t open his hands. I mean, that’s a really bad idea. But there’s one of 50. Now let’s spit out another 49 before we even start to judge. And in most, you know, really where you get the best ideas is where you have a group. You’ve all watched, who wants to be a millionaire. The best lifeline is always ask the audience. The more people you have to throw out ideas the better. So, whether that looks like your company staff meetings, or whether that’s, it looks like an online virtual writer’s room where you get, you know, writers on Fiverr and Upwork and these freelance sites. And you get together and create a document that you put these ideas on. So typically as an agency, we’ll come up with our five best ideas and then present them to the client and tell them which one we liked the best. But ultimately it’s not you that should pick it. It’s your customer avatar going back to step one. So ideally what you want to do is create a brain share of typical customers, and that could be your current customers, you know, pick 10 customers that love your product,offer them some free stuff for being part of this brain share and just use Survey Monkey or Google sheets to get their votes on which concept they liked the best.
Then you take it to step two once you’ve picked that concept, which is scripting, and that goes through three phases. Phase one is the marketing copy points, which is stuff you and I do every day. But then you really need to bring in a great story writer, script writer. This isn’t a marketer, but this is somebody that can take that, you know, Edward Scissorhands that has rusty fingers and the copy points and build a whole story around that because that’s a good concept, but that’s not going to keep someone’s attention for three minutes.

Now it’s still not funny, but you’ve now got a script it’s about a three minute script that goes through these different phases: opening hook, problem, solution, offer, overcoming doubts and credibility, offer again, and then finishing with a funny outro. That’s kind of the structure for every script that we do.
Um, and then finally, the third step of the scripting is we always bring in at least five professional comedians. These are people who write comedy for a living. I think I’m pretty funny, but I’m not a comedian. You and your dad probably thinks he’s pretty funny, but we don’t want dad jokes. We want funny, clever jokes and it’s also gotta be relevant to the audience. There’s a big difference between humor that goes into a SAS video for a B2B CXO compared to a video for a tween acne cream. Right. So you’ve got to have the right writers with the mindset, or at very least, you’ve got to test that writing on that customer avatar with those surveys. Um, so, you know, we, we typically have at least eight writers on every script and that’s the longest part of our process. At least two months from yep, we want to do a video to here’s a finished script, ready to produce.

30:00

Kevin: I think one of the most important things you said there was, and most important things for people to hear is for like, the business owners to like get out of their own head and start to realize that like what they, what, what they think is good or will, uh, affect the business is it relevant? Like it doesn’t matter what they think. We have so many of these businesses that we work with and like, they’re not their customer avatar at all.

Joseph: Amen

Kevin: And they decide what’s going in their ads. They decide what the creative is going to be. And it’s really hard.

Joseph: The wife, the wife’s opinion. Don’t you love that one. My wife doesn’t like the logo.

Jason: Yeah. I mean, the other thing is dude, like, it’s funny because. I’ve been on the marketing side for a very long time. And the one thing that I haven’t taught myself until recently is copywriting. And what’s funny is that you’ve basically just outlined what a sales page, like should like the formula that you use in a sales page. It’s the same exact thing is what you’re doing, which is so interesting to me because before I got into this copywriting thing, none of it made sense. I’m like, I don’t understand these formulas. I don’t understand how these long form sales pages even work. Like how are they used. Basically, it’s following the same formula that you just laid out, which is very interesting.

Joseph: Yeah. I mean, marketing is marketing. Whether you deliver it on a billboard, in a video, or an email, it’s the same fundamental principles.

Kevin: Right.

Joseph: So I always tell people if you can’t afford to do it right, use this e-book and do the steps yourself with two exceptions. Number one is the writing. You gotta, you gotta get the right people on the bus to write it. And you’d think being a video production guy for 20 years, I’d say the other one is shooting it. That’s not the case. The other one is the actors. Don’t try to do it yourself. Yes, Dollar Shave Club did it, but he was, he looked like he, he was not a professional, but he actually was, he was, uh, uh, like I said earlier, he was a stand-up comic in sketch improv comedy groups in New York, from what I remember. But, you know, if you’ve seen any of our videos, if you’ve seen any of the Harmon brothers chamber media, you know, these agencies that do these great projects that get, you know, so many views and more importantly sales, they are that effective primarily because of their writing and then the delivery of that writing.
You can take a crappy phone, um, you know, as long as you don’t mess up the lighting too much. And these days, most phones are way better than what I paid $50,000 for my first camera 20 years ago. I mean, everyone’s walking around with a 4k camera in their pocket that automatically adjusts lighting, does beautiful, um, framing and, uh, in a lot of the shots that I’ve seen. But if you don’t have a great actor that can deliver the lines with the right timing, with the right emphasis, it’ll all drop flat. So. What a lot of business owners don’t understand is that it’s absolutely free to audition actors. It doesn’t cost you a penny. You don’t have to hire them unless you’re in love with them.
So on our typical video, I’ll use Tru Earth for example, we probably looked at least 50 different actors before, actresses, before we pick Talitha. So, what we did is we would get, we would, I sent out an email and this is what I do almost weekly. I’ll send out an email to the top three or four talent agencies here in Utah. Um, so far, you know, most of our clients don’t have the budget to fly talent in from LA, but we have a really good pool here in Utah, but whatever your state, whatever state you’re in, you likely have talent agencies near you. Send them an email with the script. Don’t give them the whole script to audition, pick out maybe three paragraphs, enough that you can get a feel for whether or not they can pull it off. And then, especially in the days of COVID, most actors have a setup like we have here where they’re used to doing at-home auditions with their phone or laptop or whatever, and they will send you their audition. And so we watched through maybe 50 auditions, then we’ll call back virtually the top 10, maybe, maybe the top five and we’ll do a live demo because I want to say to them, okay, can you do that faster? Can you do that slower? Can you put the emphasis on this? I’m looking to see if they’re directable. Um, and I’ll also look to see what do they bring that I didn’t write on the page, you know?

35:00

Joseph: And that’s why I really love to hire improv comedians, people that have experience not only on camera, but live on, on stage and doing this comedy because a lot of the lines, in fact literally this morning, I sent a text to Ryan. We shot a video for him last week and my favorite line wasn’t scripted. It was Taletha again. And she just came up with a line off the top of her head. She was joking, but the camera was still rolling and it was just perfect. And so you gotta be open. Don’t be so focused on getting the script.
Yes. You’ve got to get what’s on there, but allow your actors time to also give you something else. There’s a reason why they’re paid pretty well to do what they do is because they have a skill that you don’t have.

Jason: I think she I think, um, this is just my opinion. Like I think she was perfect. I can sit there and watch her. I am like intrigued just by the way, just like her, like how she talks, how she moves. Like, I feel like, I don’t know what it is about.

Kevin: Perfect. Sarcastic. Yeah.

Jason: She sounds, she seems like she’s really liked that in person. Like, I don’t know, whatever it was. I feel like she was perfect.

Joseph: She kind of is.

Jason: Yeah. So I, I feel like she was awesome. Um, can you just real quick, uh, Run down each step, not explain. I just, I just want to recap of the steps,

Kevin: I wanted to talk about the actors just real quick. Cause I’m, I’m curious about that. Um, cause you said it’s free to like see them or audition them. Is that like, if someone was like, well, cause we’re talking about people doing it without you, right. Basically what this ebook. What are, what does an actor cost to have like a video like this?

Joseph: that’s a hard question. It’s all over the board because you’ve got union versus non-union, Utah is a right to work state. So we don’t have unions here, but in LA and other, you know, New York there’s unions that say you cannot hire actors unless A.) you’re paying certain amount and B.) you also have to be a union company. Um, so I, I don’t know anything about that world and I’m glad I don’t, but you know, it, it just, it just depends. There’s, you know, actors that will work for a few hundred dollars, actors that will work for a few thousand dollars, and a lot in in-between.

Kevin: Yeah. Cause I feel like, cause that’s, that was interesting to me, the fact that you could just audition, you can just call up or reach out to a talent agency and just get a bunch of actors to audition for nothing.

Joseph: You want to tell them two things. You want to tell them what, what you’re willing to pay. So, cause you know, you don’t want to waste their time auditioning an actor. if you’re thinking you’re going to pay $200 and they’re thinking I’m going to get paid $10,000. So you always want to state upfront how much you’re going to pay, and then you want to state when the shoot is because actors are book and they only have one commodity and that’s their time. If they’re booked on a feature film or some other commercial on the day that you’re filming, you’ve just wasted their time. So just as long as you give him those two things.

Kevin: Okay. Gotcha So why don’t you yeah, do what Jason said. Why don’t you, why don’t we cause you like, you got to a point when you like zoom through everything. So let’s go, uh, let’s go back.

Joseph: Step one. Discovery. Doing your research. Step two, brainstorming. Step three, scripting. Step four, adding the comedy. Step five, production, which includes the auditioning, the filming. Step six is the editing. Could talk about that for hours. Editing is so critical. Timing when it comes to comedy. Timing is key. You can have an actress deliver the same line and you can edit it one way and it’s funny. Edit it a different way and it loses all of its comedic timing. Um, a good editor can actually make up for a bad performance. Um, a lot of the time, I’ll let you in ona couple of secrets. I will take the audio from a different take and put it over the video of another tape, sync them up and make it line up. There’s all sorts of things. You want to speed it up, cut out breaths. Nothing will sink your video faster than if people get bored and people don’t get bored when you talk too fast, they get bored when you talk too slow. So speeding things up, cutting out pauses.
Step seven is testing at every level, but you know, definitely before you release a video, we typically will produce three different opening hooks. So it’s the same video with three different opening five to 10 second attention grabbing, um, you know, clickbait basically is what it is. It’s trying to get your attention and we’ll test which one works best before we spend a significant budget on the winner. Um, we do the same thing with offers. Three different offers with a lot of our clients and tests Which gets them through to the sales page. We’ll do long versions, shorter versions. We typically find the longer versions outperform the shorter versions, which is counter to what most marketers will tell you. But again, people don’t get bored and click away because it’s too long. They’d get bored and click away because it’s boring. And so that’s our job to keep their attention.
And then step eight we’ve already discussed I think, is forget going viral. Don’t think that because you’ve followed all those seven steps that you’re going to get a viral video. It’s not about going viral. It’s about increasing that ROAS. It’s about going from a, you know, a breakeven or a 1.5 to going to a 2 or a 3 or a 4, um, if you do your job right, you will a certain amount of virality, um, you know, but it maybe 10%, no more than that. Typically that’s what we see across the board. People will share it, but it’s all about creating a video that, when you fuel it with a paid ad, will bring you more money so that you can continue running ads. None of the videos that you’ve seen lately that have millions of views when organically viral, they’re all paid ads.

40:00

Jason: You know, what’s interesting is that, you know, attracting just people isn’t it. A lot of marketers are a lot of people think that, you know, they look at the numbers like, oh, 70,000 people on your email list. Oh, you know, a million, you know? Yeah. When you get a million people watching your video, you’re going to get a wide range of people watching it. But really the trick. And I I’m, we’re learning this now, Like we have a 70,000 subscriber email list and the truth is. Really the buyers are really the only ones that keep buying. the people, if they haven’t purchased in a year or two, they typically don’t buy and they’re almost worth nothing. So the point is, is like, getting the right eyes on the video is much more important than trying to sit and create, you know, a viral video in my opinion.

Joseph: Yes. It’s about conversion.

Jason: Right. And –

Kevin: And –

Jason: I’m sorry, I was just gonna say, we’ve seen this with Tru Earth. I don’t know if people listening are not familiar with Tru Earth, I would check them out. But this video that you did following these eight steps eight, right?

Joseph: Yes.

Jason: Okay. Um, if I, you know, I’m not, I don’t mean to, to, to, to minimize how what happened, but it can really change everything for you. for, for, for, to Tru Earth. It put them on the map quick. You know, like, you know, he’ll tell you that, you know, I don’t think he would argue. That fact is like, no, this video really did it for us. I mean, obviously they had a business, obviously they had all that stuff, but I don’t know anybody who knew about Tru Earth before their first video went crazy.

Joseph: So they did have a previous video to the one that we did that was incredibly successful. I mean, it does help that number one, they have a fantastic product. Number two, they have a fantastic mission. And also it’s the kind of thing that people want to share because they want to be seen to be doing good. And so I always tell my clients, in fact, the Harmon brothers say nothing sells better than the truth. So, if you were out there selling, you know, snake oil, no video is going to help. You got to be, especially in today’s world of transparency. You’ve got to have a great product.

Jason: That’s number one. Yep.

Kevin: Now, one last one detail I wanted to ask you about is what do you do with the sizing of the videos? There’s so many different channels, Youtube, the story ad, Instagram square. And I always get caught up in that a little bit, trying to make sure that like, we have different videos for different placements. Is that something that you focus on too? Do you have a story version of your videos?

Joseph: No, So with most of our clients, they are either going to be going on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. That’s just been the lion’s share. We’ve done some for Snapchat and Tik Tok and Pinterest, but we, basically, every video that we do, and this is super important, going back to step five, when you’re filming, do not make the mistake of looking at your viewfinder, and just looking at your viewfinder, cause your viewfinder will show you a rectangular, horizontal image.
You cannot show that on a mobile device and have the same impact because of how small it becomes. So you have to crop. So what I have on my monitor, I have a big square in the middle. So I’m seeing the edges, but I know that those need to be non-critical real estate, because those are going to get cropped out.
Every video that we do, to answer your question, We’ll export them in a widescreen version with no subtitles, and then we’ll export them in a square version with all the subtitles burned in because if the square version is going to go on mobile and 80% of people won’t have their sound on, um, and then we’ll do a long version and a short version of each. So we ended up with four videos that pretty much we will put on any platform. And so far, I haven’t had a client that has said we really need to focus on this other platform. So that’s my answer.

Kevin: You’re so you’re not what, you’re –

Jason: sorry. Um, one more question, before we let you go, Joseph, um, has iPhone or Android figured out audio yet? Because you know, you can create a high quality video with an iPhone, with an Android, but I’ve always felt like the audio is really the problem.

45:00

Joseph: Are you talking about the listening listener’s experience, the speakers? The headphones?

Jason: Yes. Like, like, do you go into a zoom? Do you go directly into the phone? What would you for the, for those people out there who can’t afford –

Joseph: oh, you’re talking, recording.

Jason: Yes. Recording a video on the iPhone.

Joseph: Yeah. That’s, that’s really the difference where the rubber meets the road between doing it yourself and hiring professionals. You would, I mean, it’s like me, I don’t have a camera near me or else I’d show you. I would, you know, I have a $50,000 camera. I would never put a microphone on that camera.

Jason: Right.

Joseph: I have a boom operator who’s paid by the day to hold a boom directly over the talent so that it’s just like, you know, you can’t see it when you’re watching YouTube, but you know, just barely out of frame. That’s the only way to get good audio.
I mean, look at us right now. We’re six inches away from our professional condenser microphones. Why? Because we care about audio. No phone is ever going to get you good audio. Even if you were to do that and pipe it in through the little phone jack, it’s still, it just doesn’t have the pre-amps and you know, I’m not a sound expert, but you know, you, we, we would never rely on a microphone inside the camera, which is essentially what you’re doing when you’re dealing with those devices.

Jason: Yeah. Somebody told me, and I don’t know if it’s true anymore with 4K and this hot, these high depth stuff, but I read somewhere that people will, and I don’t, you can tell me if this is still true, people will forgive you and watch video…

Joseph: Yes.

Jason: …that is not the best. But if the audio is bad. Yeah, they won’t, they won’t even, they won’t even give you a second.

Joseph: Yeah. Yeah. You think about when you go to the movie theater. The sound is 50% of the experience. At least. The emotions, you know, whether it’s a suspense, a horror film, a comedy, whatever, it is so underrated. And I mentioned it earlier. I will not put out any audio that hasn’t been processed. I have a guy in Nashville, Tennessee who processes all of my audio, even if it sounds, I mean, I have, you know, some expensive speakers here. It sounds pretty good to me, but when I get it into his studio and he really, you know, goes in and dissects it. He specifically will tune the audio for YouTube or for Facebook because that’s, he knows that those platforms deliver it in a certain frequency that I will never understand. Um, but yes, audio is, is a huge, hugely overlooked part of video production.

Kevin: And 80% of people watch the video without audio and just read subtitles?

Joseph: That’s what I’ve heard. Well, to begin with, I’ll go, Our goal is within 10 seconds I’ve piqued your curiosity enough to turn the sound on, but I still will run all the subtitles and you don’t want to let YouTube or Facebook auto generate those things. Do- Never make that mistake. So we have, you know, my graphic designer that actually is in India. He’s one of my – he has worked for me for many years, but, you know, he’ll, he’s very, very good at You know, knowing how many words should be on the screen at any one time, typically around seven words, any more than that. And it’s, the text is too small. Um, making sure it’s on a nice, solid colored backdrop so that you can actually read it, the difference between a serif font and a sans serif font. You know, all of these things go into it. And if you just try to auto generate that, all of that’s out of your control.

Jason: Awesome man. So where do they go? Where do people go number one, to download that PDF? What’d you? I know you said something in the beginning.

Joseph: Yeah, you just go to FunnySalesVideos.com, scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see it.

Jason: Okay. And if, what if, what if people do have the budget and they want to work with you? I know that I know you’re packed, but how do you right now we just finishing up two big projects.

Joseph: We just got hired by another one. You know, just give me, shoot me an email, [e-mail].

Jason: Awesome. And, uh, yeah, I mean, we, we plan on using you, we talked about why we haven’t done it yet, but. We can vouch for you, man. Like we, we love your stuff. Uh, Ryan has nothing but great things to say about you and we actually recommended you to one of our, uh, one of our big clients.

Kevin: So I look forward to working with you, man. It’s gonna be fun.

50:00

Joseph: I mean, I, I got to come back to, I only do 50% of the work. I can create the best video in the world. But unless there’s people like you guys on the other end that know what to do with that video, what to do with the click, how to, you know, turn it from a loss lead to an upsell and a cross sell and put them into remarketing files. That’s stuff I don’t understand. And so you got to have both parts of the equation or else you’re just wasting your money.

Jason: Yeah. And the other thing is that, um, you know, one thing that I think as I’ve matured in marketing, that I, I’m starting to realize, is that nothing lasts forever. Yeah, I don’t care how good it is. I don’t care what it is. Um, it gets worn out and, uh, I wish I would’ve known that many years ago because I’ve always felt like there’s just like this magic thing that happens when you have this one kind of goat sorta speak. Right. But really it’s a constant thing. It’s a constant testing. It’s a constant trying things and yeah, you may stumble across something like Tru Earth did, or some of these other guys. But they didn’t stop there. Right. They have four more videos. Right, right.

Kevin: Ryans not stopping for sure. Right

Joseph: No. He’s not now.

Jason: That was awesome, man. Uh, we, we love having you and, uh, you know, I, I feel like, uh, you know, I don’t know anything about this side of the business, so I love hearing it because it’s just, it’s one of those things that doesn’t make any sense to me, but I love watching. I love watching, um, what you guys come, come out with in the end and, uh, you know, it’s, it’s just so much fun to see uh, how, how much attention these videos get.

Joseph: Okay. I’ll give you – I’ll end with a sneak preview of my next video that we just, I think we’re launching it next week. It’s for a portable urinal and guess who it stars.

Jason: Kevin.

Joseph: Taletha.

Jason: Oh my God.

Joseph: We hired her again, it’s the, it’s the first time I’ve worked with her for another client. Um, I told Ryan I was doing it and she nailed it. I mean, it’s it, it starts – so talk about opening hooks. So it’s, the whole story is for, you know, your old age mother or father who can’t make it to the bathroom late at night.
That’s basically the premise and it starts with Taletha carrying a por- a full-size porta-potty into her father’s bedroom. We had it shipped from Texas. It took two weeks to get there and it arrived the night before the shoot. We were sweating bullets, but anyway, that’s a really fun one that I’m excited to share with you guys.

Jason: Yeah, we got to see it when it’s done. That’s awesome. And we, we, we follow your stuff and we love it.

Kevin: yeah man, that’s awesome. Thank you so much, Joseph.

Joseph: Thanks for your time guys. This was fun.

Kevin: Really great guy, man. It was really fun to have him back on again. And, um, it was nice to, you know, uh, hear the structure that he goes through ‘cause I think like last time we had him on with Ryan, it got kind of muddied a little bit in the actual true, Tru Earth discussion. So it was good for him to come on and, and go over. That really step-by-step. So that was, that was really cool.

Jason: Yeah, he’s just a good guy. You know, he was one of those people that, um, you know, you’re, you’re happy to talk to. He’s he’s honest. He, he doesn’t hold back. I really liked him.

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. So thank you guys so much for listening as always, you can check us out at ecommerceuncensored.com. We’ll talk to you guys real soon.

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