The Power of Video Marketing: Super Bowl Ads, Influencers, and More
In this episode of Notes from Video Village, host Dan Lichtenberg chats with product marketer Christine Zalocha. From viral videos and Super Bowl ads at GoldieBlox to micro influencer marketing at tech startups, Christine explores how to leverage different types of video for various purposes, highlighting the advantages and challenges of each approach.
Note: This is a podcast transcript and is best experienced through the audio version above. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me a little bit about your career and your background and how you got into marketing to begin with.
Christine: My name is Christine Zalocha.
I did not start out as a marketer. I was working as sort of a Jill of all trades in the magazine space early on in my career. And at that time, magazines like Glamour, which is where I worked, were trying to figure out how to convert all of their magazine stuff to digital formats. I just happened to be there around that time interning, freelancing, and helping them bring everything online. I actually produced some of my first video content there.
They sent me to the U.S. Open, and I thought, “Wouldn't this be really great if we turn this into some video segments for Glamour.com?” because we were just getting the dot-com off the ground. And I stuck around in the publishing industry for a minute, couldn't decide what I wanted to do.
I had one of those moments where I was like, this isn't really like the Carrie Bradshaw life that I had envisioned for myself. It's a lot more brutal. It takes forever to climb through the ranks, and it was very much Devil Wears Prada at that time. Nobody was really leaning in.
And then I took a brief break while I wanted to figure out what else to do with my life. And it led me to working in the toy and gaming industry for Hasbro and Mattel. I worked on brands like Trivial Pursuit, Cranium, and then I had another totally different career pivot. But it was related to toy and gaming with a company called GoldieBlox located in the Bay Area. GoldieBlox just had a video go super viral on YouTube in the early days before a lot of brands had even thought about going on YouTube. And I said, “This is the company that I want to go work for.” Turns out that my former boss from Hasbro was the CMO of the company and had me come out. And I became their Head of Marketing. That's really where I learned the power of video marketing, because we had built our entire company on our videos being highly engaging and going viral.
We had several videos go viral while I was at the helm, so that was our only marketing strategy was to make these tentpole videos. We would do one a quarter anytime we had something launch, and we would engineer it to try to go viral. We used to write a press headline and figure out how we could get a video asset that would get us that press headline, essentially. We would use the power of social media at the time, and we had a huge community that we had built up of all these fans and all these women that were very supportive of our mission, which was trying to get more girls interested in engineering. We ended up doing several million dollars worth of business just off of YouTube videos going viral.
Dan: I remember all those GoldieBlox videos. That was awesome.
Christine: And then, I wanted to leave the toy and gaming business altogether. I wanted to get in the tech space. I was living in San Francisco, and I went over to a company called Credit Karma. I think it's one in three Americans has a Credit Karma account - it's probably more now. But I had taken over as their Head of Social Media. They didn't really have social media at the time, and they were trying to figure out, “How do we talk about money on social media in a way that's relatable to people?” My go-to tactic there was to adopt video at the company, and we wanted to make money less taboo.
We wanted more people talking about their finances. We wanted to help people make financial progress possible. And so we would do a series of videos and a lot of tests. We started out on Facebook and we had done a lot of tests with different video campaigns. We ran into a lot of challenges because when you work in the financial space, there's a lot of restrictions about what you can and cannot say.
And I didn't know if I could get something in the finance space to go viral, but alas, we had another video that had gone crazy viral that we had made for like no money. It costs a lot of money to make a video and it's a lot of investment, especially for small brands.
But if you work with somebody that has done it a few times and you have a lot of belief in what you're doing, I think sometimes you can really kind of make a lot of magic happen, especially with these social platforms who are all pushing short-form video right now. I think that should be everybody's strategy right now if you're trying to figure out what to do in the video space as a marketing team – focus on short-form video, reels, TikToks and YouTube shorts.
And you can typically do variations of all of those across those channels. I think that's the move right now. At the time at Credit Karma, we were so really focused on the Facebook video and we had some really good tactics to get videos to go viral even for less than $20,000.
I worked with a really famous video maker – Karen X, who has a million plus followers now and is very well regarded in the creator space. She's directed several amazing projects since then. I've been really lucky to have connected with her early in my career, and we've partnered several times over my career. And I think that's another big lesson is that when you work in marketing, it's important to build these relationships early on and keep your partners really close to you and try to bring them to places with you, because you just have an understanding and a creative way to work together.
And there's a lot of trust that needs to happen when you're working and spending a pretty big budget on video marketing.
Early on in your career, what were some of the big things you learned about making videos?
Christine: I realized that when you're trying to do something that's never been done before, we didn't know if that was going to work.
I think it's really important to trust your gut. We were looking around what was happening in the YouTube space and we had kind of a good system. There was a tight group of people who worked on the videos. The company wasn’t that big - we were 12 people. And I think early on, work with a crew that you very much trust and have a great point of view.
Start with a headline. Everybody will call it “start with a hook”, which everybody says in video marketing now. If you're working on TikTok, they're like, “What's the hook? What's the opening hook?”. But if you think about it from “What would be the dream press headline that you would have for your company?”, start with that hook. Then try to build your storyboards and everything around how you're going to tell that most effectively.
Also, I think early on what I learned is know which platform you're going to be on, which one you want to be successful on and focus on the best practices of that platform.
We were in the early days of YouTube and didn't care about any other platform. We wanted that to be really successful. I think the mistake a lot of marketers make early on is that they try to be in every single channel and oftentimes they'll tell their video people, “We want this for Facebook and we want it for LinkedIn, and we want all this.” Focus on getting one channel up and running and doing it really well. And then figure out how you can use that asset in the right way for the other channels, because every channel has its unique properties that you need to adopt for it.
Dan: I think that's really smart. A lot of our clients will be like, “The audience is this and we want it to be for everybody else too.” What if you can only be successful with one audience? And then from there, figuring out what platform and instead of just being like, “We're going to make a video that is just successful everywhere.” That never happens.
Christine: I think that you may bring up another good point – Know the persona that you're going after, know your audience, niche. Especially today, more than ever, because the algorithm just serves content based on certain niches now. So it's never been more important than to really understand who you're going after.
At GoldieBlox, it was so clear who we were going after. We were going after moms with daughters who are ages four to six years old. And we wanted to make stuff that we knew was highly shareable as in you were going to send this to your friend and that was a form of currency like “check out this cool video”, “doesn't this make you feel so good?”, “women should be engineers”, and so on and so on.
Walk us through the next few stuff around your career.
Christine: I started working at a company called Aura, which at the time was not doing so great, to be honest. They were with two former heads of Twitter, and they were making a photo-sharing app, so they were not only creating this privacy photo app scenario, but they were also giving people the ability to display it. And so I joined the company as one of their earliest marketers there. I ended up staying at the company ‘cause I just loved it so much.
But what I'll say it’s where I made the biggest shift. Not making videos myself, but coming up with a way for people to create videos for me and do it at scale. Video influencer marketing was becoming so big. And I think you had to figure out how to train these people or brief them as their own kind of video production companies to create videos for you, but then also use their audience as your distribution channel.
So that was a completely different way of marketing, and honestly, we didn't have the budget or the resources when I started at Aura. So we use Instagrammers and YouTubers. TikTok wasn't that big of a thing, and it was just starting to come up. But it definitely gave us all the video assets we needed until we could actually get a proper video shoot up and running. Because as you know, a video shoot can take several weeks and to even get to pre-production or production a lot of times.
We were able to take the high-production stuff that we were doing and marry it with the low production stuff, which today still seems to be the winning formula for a lot of video creative being successful.
I think people want to be able to relate to video content more now than ever. And we really had to show off the beauty of the product because they were $300-400, these frames. And I don't think a UGC video shot on the phone was really going to be able to deliver that. But we also wanted the relatability of somebody just talking very natural and conversational that would connect with people.
So oftentimes, we would have people at the very beginning almost coming in like a UGC person. I'll use the term like just a regular mom talking about the frame very casually. And then we would cut to this beautiful footage that we'd shot of a frame showing how the product worked. A lot of times too, because of the technical functionality of it, we needed to show the app itself. And that is really difficult for somebody who's just an influencer to show off the beauty of the app interface and how easy it is to use.
So we were able to just assemble a lot of the parts together. And that seems to be truly what was the winning formula.
Then you worked at a company that just did video, right? FitOn?
Christine: I just love working at startups, and I love taking startups from zero to one. And I had the opportunity to join FitOn, which was an amazing fitness app run by the former people from Fitbit and the entire product was video content based.
We were really a content studio in a lot of ways. That was the first time I'd ever really worked at a company where the foundational product was workout videos or was video. So we had to make all this content. This all happened during COVID. A lot of stuff was remote during that time, so we were doing a lot of remote shoots, and we constantly had to roll out new video content.
We eventually became the number one fitness app, which was amazing. We had 5x more downloads than Peloton during the pandemic. We were absolutely crushing it and then the trick for me was how do we take this video content that is very formulaic and very class-like – it was all the same studio right? It was like somebody working out in a studio – and then how do we turn that into marketing assets to get people to download the app.
A lot of times you're on set shooting video for another production that's totally unrelated to what you need for marketing. But we would show up on set and we would just take our iPhones, and we would find moments in between takes. And we would have the trainers do selfie-style videos and talk about a topic. We'd have things that were trending right now on the Internet for social media content, and we'd have them jump in and do some of the TikTok trends that were going on at the moment.
And so we were able to figure out ways to just sort of hack the system and use this UGC selfie-style video that was becoming very popular at the time to be able to extend the life of those shoots.
Dan: That's awesome. That's something I see a lot with our clients, like we're making this big production for them, but then they're like, “Can we just grab a handheld camera and do like an ad for this or, or just like a social shout-out?”
Christine: Totally. I can't stress that enough. We would do this a lot with celebrities as well, because we had a lot of celebrities. That's really how the company grew so quickly. We had celebrities like Gabrielle Union, Halle Berry, Jonathan Van Ness, as our ambassadors for the company.
We also had the D'Amelio’s who basically were the most popular family on TikTok at the moment who obviously knew a thing or two about video. So it was really fun to work with them as well, figure out how they do social, and watch them do their thing. But I would shoot a lot of these videos with celebrities in particular, and we would shoot it on the main camera and then I'd say, “Okay, let me jump in and I'm going to help you do a selfie video.” And a lot of times that selfie video, I would have 10 intro lines that I would want them to say. I’d capture that content on my iPhone, and then I would marry that with the main cam footage.
So I'd put the hook in front of the main cam footage that we would get. That was the high-production stuff. And that was one of our most successful formulas or I should say download conversion.
Tell me a little bit about Inflection AI.
Christine: Inflection's been an interesting one because I think with AI and people still unsure about how AI is fitting into their lives, I think we have to carry the extra duty of explaining AI to the average consumer of how they can use AI.
I think everybody knows of ChatGPT, but there's just so many different ways that you could use AI in your life beyond just getting an answer to a question or helping you with your workflow. And so we've had the unique challenge of trying to show our differentiation when people already have this idea of what AI is, or maybe they just have no idea.
So we're doing the education of it, of just AI in general. And then we're showing how accessible AI is to people's lives, and so we use a ton of video content. As you can imagine, we do a lot of product videos, because we want to show off the interface of the product and we want to show how easy it is. We are on 13 different platforms at the moment. And so we obviously need to communicate how all these different platforms work with an AI. And for example, you can just DM us on Instagram, or you can DM Pi on Instagram and have a full-on conversation with an AI. Or you could have a conversation with us on WhatsApp, or you can download the app.
And so there's a lot of ways in which we need to communicate where we are. So that's one type of video that is really leaning into product explainer videos. But the other tried and true has truly been TikTok and YouTube shorts. Social media video has been a great way to make AI accessible to more people.
And we wanted to reach everyday people because our product is just so helpful. I think that's the best playground and best place to reach people.
Dan: That's cool. I wouldn't even have imagined your company to engage much with social media. So that's really interesting.
Christine: Not a lot of AI companies actually are really out there doing a ton with social media influencers. I mean, it's a new space. It's also like, “How do you even advertise an AI?” And I think we're working our way through it just like everybody else is. We obviously have some competitors in the space.
ChatGPT has obviously grown super viral through word of mouth, but you have CoPilot and Claude. We're definitely in an interesting space, and it's been really fun to watch all the AI companies trying to figure out how to explain product.
The one I've seen the most is the AI pin. Have you seen these videos? Somebody wears an AI, it's like a wearable AI pin, and they just talk to the AI by tapping on the pin, and they've been doing a ton of video marketing, so I love reading the comments, because people also have a healthy fear of AI.
And so I think you have to be really careful when you're kind of explaining all the things that AI can do in your life, because there's going to be a lot of backlash too.
Dan: It also seems based on what I was looking at with Inflection is your positioning the company a bit more as a B2C company than maybe open AI, which is more like selling platform to other companies, which is interesting.
Christine: I think the world of AI is super wild because everybody is building their own model, as you know. So to demystify it a little bit, and I definitely don't have an AI background, so I had to learn a lot of this. Majority of Inflection right now is engineers. So I think we're about 50 plus or so, mostly tech people.
We have two marketers on the team at the moment and one creative at the entire company. So anything you see out there, that's usually us being very scrappy still and just trying to figure out what are the best messages and ways to help people understand AI a lot better.
Can you think about any time when you or someone else, maybe on a marketing team of yours use video ineffectively and why and how, and how would you go back and fix it?
Christine: I think the way that people have used video ineffectively in my experience is not understanding which platform they are going to put the video on. Everybody used to go in with, 'I'm going to make this catch all video and I'm going to shoot it 16 by 9'.
And then they realize when they get the footage back and try to shoehorn that footage into social. It gets nothing because at the end of the day, people need to understand that if you won't watch this video content on your own social media feed, there's a really good chance that no one else is going to. I've dealt with a lot of CEOs in the past who've really wanted this commercial and then they're like, “And you can use it and post it on all your social channels.”
That is the number one Don't when it comes to just marketing in general is trying to think about your campaign from top down. I think the better way now to think about a campaign is social media assets can totally become your commercial. Nowadays, it's always make sure you can shoot it for 16 by 9 because you never know when your viral TikTok can become a TV spot also.
I think if there's any other lessons, like surefire ways to fail here at marketing, one I will say that I see a lot. One of the things I always tell marketers is especially for social. Do not forget captions. A lot of these channels the sound is automatically off a lot of the time. Make sure you put a lot of effort into your captions. And you wouldn't believe how many times I watched somebody's video and I'm like, “I can't believe they didn't add captions.”
Dan: Right? It's like you spend $100,000 on this video and then you don't spend an extra $500 or $200 to get captions. Makes no sense.
Christine: And do nice captions, do something a little bit different. I think a lot of people just use the in-platform captions, but spend the extra money to just have a motion graphics designer for the day, make some beautiful captions and intro cards for you.
What advice would you give to someone managing a big budget for the first time and to someone transitioning to a smaller, scrappier budget?
Christine: This is such a great problem to have. I feel it's a rare problem nowadays. But I would say really have a lot of trust in your production company. Do your due diligence, really make sure you understand the deliverables that you're getting. Make sure you have a really good, strong brief in the beginning, and strong storyboard, and that you feel really in partnership with your production team. Also, make sure that you are a part of the post-production process, which I feel is the most important thing.
Make sure you get your post people on set and involved in the project as well as early as possible so that they can understand how they are going to edit it for you and also understand the platform. Find people that you really trust and that are really going to work with you and that are going to go the extra mile to get you all the cut downs and the edits that you really need.
I also think you don't have to go with a big city company either. I know there's big markets like New York and LA, but I've found some really great companies in smaller markets that you can find more affordable options to work with.
But I would also tell marketers when you start getting really big budgets for videos, just make sure you're on set. I don't know how many times marketers will not show up to their video set and they're like, “Oh, these people have totally got it,” but you need to be there. You need to watch because you wouldn't believe sometimes you shoot all this footage and you have a lot of trust with this big budget company and then a logo wasn't presented the right way, or they talked about the product in the wrong way, or they said the word of the name of the company wrong even. So, you've got to be very careful. And so, I think being around and being part of the process is super important.
If you don't have a large budget, and you're working in a scrappy budget, everybody loves the term scrappy nowadays, like “Can't you just do it for 5k or 10k?” I would say my biggest piece of advice is to go all in on social, go all in on short-form video. And try to lean into something that's a little bit trending for yourself and just follow the best practices of the channel that you're going to be on. If you don't have a big budget for video, you probably don't have a big budget for distribution.
So social is your best chance, especially a platform like TikTok or YouTube where you can really lean into social search nowadays. So everybody is using TikTok and YouTube now as the new search engine. And so think about how you're naming your video. Think about the captions of those videos and think about these keywords that you want to come up for your brand and make sure you incorporate them into the video script itself.
And you will be surprised at how many people will discover your video through search when they are looking for your product.
Dan: A lot of times I see they'll put a big budget behind the actual video production, but then they'll just kind of like, click upload. And “Yeah, hopefully people see it”, but no, there's a lot more work to do.
Christine: Yeah, I think thinking about your distribution and then thinking about the production is the way a lot of people should be doing it. And I'm sure you obviously agree with that. Basically, probably advise a lot of your clients to think about that, because they just think, “I just want to make something really nice.”
And it feels like it's checking the box, but what's the point of it if no one ever sees it, right?
How do you typically measure the success of your videos? Do you have specific KPIs or just qualitative measurements that you look at?
Christine: I always look at the engagement of a video. How many high-quality comments did you get just about the specific product or service that you're offering in the video? I think sharing is still the golden metric. Did people like it enough that they were willing to send it to a friend? I mean most people are bookmarking and sharing videos these days.
I think you can feel really happy about your video if you see better than your benchmark average. I won't give a number because it really depends on what are your internal benchmarks and trying to beat that. But everybody who works in video should be less focused on view count as social tends to inflate view count a lot. People will watch three, four seconds of it and it counts as a view and you feel really good about it initially. But if nobody's actually really watching it and engaging with it, be really mindful that that's not a marker of success.
Dan: So to measure engagement, you're looking at the comments and then just the average time viewed or something like that?
Christine: I like to see that people are at least getting halfway through the video as a good benchmark. Where were we before with other video content and are more people engaging? And just making sure we’re using an engagement rate metric.
Dan: That's not something I hear a lot. I mean I hear that everybody wants things to be shareable, but I don't hear people actually like saying, ‘This is how many times it was shared.’
Christine: It sounds so much cooler when you go to your CEO and you're like, we got 50,000 views on this video. And some CEOs get really excited about that. Or leadership gets really excited about that. I'm definitely the one that's like, “Look at the 50 comments we got about people that are so excited about your product and people are really connecting with it” and that's what we should be caring about.
Dan: It's true. We make a lot of B2B videos and not a lot of people see it anyway. So like, what's the point of looking at views when it's only 10,000 is the most you're going to get, but the comments, it's so interesting to see. I remember we made a video for an AI company and one, one person was like, I use this video to explain to my daughter how AI works. And I was like, that's pretty cool.
Christine: That is super powerful. Those are the ones that keep me going as a marketer, comments like that.
Have you seen any videos recently or any marketing campaigns that you use that you feel are especially interesting or effective?
Christine: I'm very excited about this role-playing style video where one person plays multiple characters in the video. So it really came from a TikTok trend where somebody is pretending to be this one character and then they jump over put a hat on and then they talk in a different voice. I feel that's such a good way to explain a product or explain a service or the personification of a service, like somebody acting the service as a human and how frustrating the service can be. This is such a good one for a B2B company to have somebody be the personification of a frustrating experience with a digital product and have somebody embody the digital product.
I think that's such an interesting trend for marketers. I saw this woman the other day, her name is Marta Puerto. And she created this amazing video for LinkedIn where she was talking, and she couldn't get any job interviews and she was a product marketing manager. I looked at the people that did the video and I was like, she must know somebody cause there was a very well-known production company that did the video, and I think it became a passion project for them. As a marketer yourself, you still have to market yourself to get a job and it's especially true in this job market and video content can open up a lot of doors.
How has the role of video in marketing changed throughout your career? You mentioned using video on social media early on—what other major changes have you noticed, aside from new platforms like TikTok?
Christine: I think there's been this democratization of video to use such a buzzy kind of word right now, which is that if you wanted to do captions, it was really difficult.
There's a lot of caption apps now out there. If you want to use a prompter, like a teleprompter on your phone for your video, you can do that now. I edit a lot of my videos myself. Now, I use a product called InShot, which is such a great hack for marketers. Because it's literally just sliding and getting your edits done.
So when I have to do really quick edits, or even when my production company sends me video edits, I'll sometimes just take them into my phone and make slight edits myself. And I think there's just some really great programs out there that have made editing a lot more accessible to use.
I think the other big thing that's come up is a new job in the video marketing space in general, which is remixing content. Everything requires video content nowadays. And you really need somebody at your company who is thinking about, “Okay, you made this video. It doesn't just go away.”
Like you can continue to remix and use this asset. And I think that's such a good reminder to marketers in general is that. It's not one-and-done anymore. Keep that asset. It becomes part of your content library, and you can always keep resurfacing it and reusing it. Like there's just so many different use cases for it.
So I think that's really changed a lot where you would, every year you do one big production shoot and then you would never use that content again. Now you can reskin it a million different ways and just keep doing different flavors of it and it can live and be one of your most popular ads for years to come.
What do you see as the biggest trends and technologies that will shape the future of video marketing? How can businesses leverage these changes to stay ahead of the curve?
Christine: The biggest trends in video technology. Obviously, I'm going to say there's AI - it’s like one of the biggest trends, right? So I think you probably do this as well, but I use Pi all the time to help me brainstorm script ideas and storyboards.
I use Pi to help me write captions a lot for the videos that I'm posting on social media. That's just made the creative process that much better. And I'm sure that you use that as well to script and come up with like video headlines or you have one really good script that you love and you can feed it into like a platform like Pi and have it come up with five different script ideas for you to just kind of get. And I'm not saying it's perfect. You still need a creative at the helm to be able to figure out what's a good and bad script and what works for your company and your messaging, but it’s such a powerful tool. And I think I'm so happy to have AI now to be a brainstorm partner because being a creative and especially being one of the only two marketers with the company right now, I rely on AI to do so much brainstorming.
I think that's just like one piece of technology. I think that people in the world of AI too, we're going to see even more of a push towards authenticity. So you want people to have real connections with you. And I think the more that you can put your actual customers into your marketing and in an unpolished sort of way, I think is going to be the way through because there's going to be so much stuff that's generated that you can tell is generated by an AI video company. You're already kind of seeing it in a lot of ways and you always scroll past that content, because those platforms feel very formulaic right now. And they'll get better, like the Soras of the world and stuff will get some better content, but I think you can never beat the real-life connection that you can have with just somebody talking at a camera and telling a great story.
Any other trends or anything that you're paying attention to?
Christine: I'm paying attention to obviously the TikTok ban right now and whether that's going to take effect and which platforms benefit from all of that. But I'm really obsessed with this trend of people telling like 20-part series right now on TikTok. I love hearing somebody just talk and be real and being able to make these sort of documentary-style videos about their lives.
And again, it really comes back to, do you have a great story to tell? Can you tell a story? And it's such a great reminder that it always does come back to the power of story and a great script and having somebody be able to help you tell it in the right way.
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What is Notes From Video Village?
On a film set, a “Video Village” is more than just a corner of the set where clients watch their vision come to life—it’s a space where ideas spark and partnerships flourish. Over the years, it’s also become an unexpected hub for video marketing insights, especially for B2B. Inspired by these conversations, we’ve launched Notes from Video Village, our first-ever podcast.
Join Dan Lichtenberg, Founder and Creative Director at Slow Clap Productions, as he sits down with marketers to share insights on all things video. From personal career journeys and content strategy to tips on producing everything from broadcast commercials to social media reels, we dive into what makes video an unparalleled marketing tool. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, join us to level up your video marketing game.
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Slow Clap is a San Francisco Bay Area based creative video production company united by a desire to create short-form web content with staying power.
We are filmmakers that came of age in the internet era. And we apply the same rigor to web video that the filmmakers we most admire apply to their films. We want viewers to watch our content over and over, the way they would with their favorite movie or TV show.
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