The "One Video to Rule Them All" Myth: Why Your Ad Isn't Working

I recently had a well-known supplement company approach us to create a commercial. They already had an idea—a comedic gag. And honestly, it was a pretty funny concept. It had the potential to do really well.

But then they started fleshing out the idea. And as we got deeper into it, they wanted us to start adding in all these specific selling points about the product.

They wanted to cram an explainer video into a comedy sketch.

This is one of the most common ways business owners sabotage their own marketing. They think they can spend money on one video, and that single video is going to do everything they want it to do. It's going to be funny, it's going to explain the product features, it's going to build brand awareness, and it's going to drive direct conversions.

That couldn't be further from the truth.

You Can't Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

If you're going to do a gag—if you're going to take a comedic approach—you need to commit to the comedy aspect of it.

Trying to get people to laugh at a commercial is already a tall order. You are fighting an uphill battle against an audience that knows they are being sold to. When you interrupt that carefully crafted comedic timing to insert a bullet-point list of product features, you destroy the joke.

Is it possible to do all those things in one commercial? Sure. But it usually requires zero budget constraints and world-class writing.

What you don't want is to spend all this money for an ad, cram so much stuff into it, and end up with a video that isn't funny anymore. It's not a good commercial, and it's not a good explainer video either, because the ad idea is getting in the way of the explanation, and the explanation is ruining the ad idea.

Look at the Biggest Brands in the World

Look at Coca-Cola. They have the widest-reaching delivery system of any organization on the planet. There are remote villages in developing countries that can get Coca-Cola but are unable to get clean drinking water.

Coca-Cola still makes commercials. They still pay for ad space. And they pay millions of dollars per production because they know it works really well.

But when they do a gag commercial, or a pop-art commercial, or a satirical horror commercial, or if they're paying for an athlete to be featured—they stay within the lines of those ads.

They don't push the contextual boundaries of the genre because they don't want the ad to lose its value. Whether it's comedic value, star power value, or action-packed value, the genre is a method to appeal to a particular group of people. In their quest to appeal to those people, they give them what they're asking for. They don't bait and switch them. They don't betray the fans of that genre.

The Value of Reps

A lot of business owners aren't good storytellers. They're definitely not comedians. They don't have experience with comedic timing or the tone in which things need to be said for comedic value.

As an experienced storyteller, I know the fine line that you can't cross. And I know it because I've told stories that didn't land well.

If you haven't made a hundred, two hundred, five hundred videos... if you haven't had people critique what you put out and give you negative feedback... you're probably not experienced enough to know what's going to work and what isn't.

If you don't spend hours watching ads, doing the research to find out what historical ads did really well, why they made them, and how they made them—you are in no position to challenge the expertise of the production company you hired.

Stop trying to make one video do the job of an entire marketing funnel. Commit to the genre, commit to the goal of the specific piece of content, and let the experts do their job.