Why video is your startup's most effective branding channel

Part 1 of Content Brand, a new series on using content to ace your startup marketing

In the middle of the last decade, there was a lot of buzz in the US automobile industry.

A new player, Nikola, founded in 2014, had been talking up their hydrogen fuel powered vehicles. This was a game changer, because though hydrogen as a fuel has been known and experimented on for decades, no one had yet figured out how to safely and usefully harness it for everyday transportation.

Apparently, Nikola had.

Except Nikola had not released any real cars or trucks. All the world had seen were concept cars and illustrations.

That changed in 2018, when Nikola released this video.

The video, since deleted on their original channel, was called 'Nikola One Electric Semi Truck in Motion'.

As expected, it set social media alight, and set the narrative for Nikola. The promised trucks were here now, weren’t they? And they looked good!

On the back of this video and the reaction, Nikola went public in 2020.

In September 2020, General Motors acquired an 11% stake in Nikola, sending the stock price through the roof. At its highest point, Nikola, a company which hadn’t yet delivered a single car or truck, was worth more than Ford.

If you think that is ridiculous, it was. Nikola was uncovered as an elaborate and intricate fraud just days after the GM announcement.

How did some of the smartest people in the world get taken in by what now seems like such a straightforward scam?

Because they saw it, didn’t they? The cool looking truck running on hydrogen fuel. How could they know that the truck wasn't moving under its own power. It had simply been towed to the top of a hill and pushed down. Nikola had just tilted the camera to make it look like a level road.

It was an old trick, but a mighty effective one.

Nikola had understood the power of video, and deployed it to their advantage.

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Slack launched in 2013.

The pitch was they would replace email. We all remember this, because it was the story everywhere at the time: The email killer.

The PR it garnered was the aim of the provocation, and it was brilliant marketing, creating hype for a completely new kind of product. I remember being very impressed with how they had gone about the whole thing.

But that’s only part of the story.

Slack had nailed their pitch to the world. But that didn’t mean customers would turn up. It was a category creating product, and was trying to change enterprise/employee behaviour. This is difficult, and they had to do more to increase adoption and new business. So they did not stop with the PR. They thought about the prospect, and what it would take for them to immediately understand the product and its value.

And so the next year, in 2014, they launched this spot.

It’s longer than a traditional advertisement, but shorter than other content that their audience was used to seeing.

This is because they didn’t really need it to be an ad. The rise of YouTube and social media meant that Slack had real estate where they could put this up, and from where it would be picked up by its audience: Technology workers.

The video explains Slack with the example of how a small company adopts and uses it. The value is immediately clear. There’s no explanation needed, certainly not over a 30 minute onboarding call.

Slack understood the power of video too, and deployed it to kickoff a great run, ending in a $27 billion acquisition 10 years later.

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Good marketing is more often that not just good communication. If you have a clear value proposition, and you’ve put it front of your target customers without confusing them, most of your job is done.

Branding is even more about good communication. Branding essentially is a means of simplifying: Telling your prospects a story about who you are and what you do so they remember, and hopefully tell more people.

Video does this job spectacularly well, simply because seeing something is infinitely better than having it described to you. You just get it.

Both companies understood this, and showed their prospective customers what they wanted to see, a representation of the pitch they had made.

Nikola: The trucks are here and running, how amazing does that look!

Slack: Oh, so that’s what Slack is. I get it, that’s cool!

The audience bought it.

That’s what video can do for you. It is arguably the most powerful channel for branding we have.

And with smartphones and the ubiquity of high quality digital equipment, video is now a level playing field. The channel is available to everyone, from scrappy startups to big companies.

It’s time you used it too.