Kevin Barber

Kevin Barber

Kevin is the Creative Director of Vybrary. He has created videos for some of the world's leading brands, like Gatorade, Budweiser, Mastercard, and Forbes, been featured by Ellen Degeneres, and has created video campaigns that have generated 30 million views (of a single video, alone!) for small businesses-2-3x-ing annual revenues. He has also taught Film & Media at Pace University and regularly holds commercial workshops in NYC. He currently resides in Nyack, NY.

Subverting Genre Expectations for Maximum Video Marketing Impact

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What is Genre-Playful Content?

“Genre-playful” refers to the process of subverting established content conventions that specific industries traditionally employ in their marketing efforts.

This process of creating a genre-playful video typically involves:

  1. Researching the established norms of an industry
  2. Determining the most popular types of videos the major industry players use in their marketing efforts.
  3. Exploring the exact opposite forms, and starting the ideation process from that foundation. 

It also encourages borrowing genre conventions from other forms of visual storytelling to be melded with this opposing form.

Example 1: Subverting the Automotive Industry Norms: Smart Car

Ok. Let’s clarify the abstractions. Consider one of my favorite examples from director, Daniel Warwick, who directed this spot for Smart Car.

What stands out to you?

In a way, the structure and visual conventions all match your typical SUV commercial. But, by highlighting a vehicle that is out-of-place in this wild environment, the commercial emphasizes how well suited it is for its actual purpose–to be the ultimate urban vehicle.

It isn’t the car for everyone, but it’s the perfect car for the right driver

The video is genre-subversive in that it takes a well-known car-selling strategy and does the opposite to highlight the benefits of the product.

By daring to make fun of its product, Smart Car more perfectly hones in on its target audience. It simultaneously strengthens its positioning, branding, and becomes memorable amidst the sea of exchangeable car manufacturers. 

Example 2: Blending B2C & B2B Audience Messaging Conventions

Genre-playful video strategy doesn’t need to embrace a dramatic departure from norms. Sometimes it can involve a simple shift by addressing a less-targeted audience via their natural channels.

Traditional Heavy Machinery Marketing Model: B2B

Prior to working with larger brands, I worked as the digital marketing director for my family’s manufacturing business, which makes machines that clean beaches. 

Traditionally, the process of selling large, municipal equipment follows a very traditional b2b sales cycle, with long extended demonstrations and customer attention required to land a sale.

Marketing videos focus on how the machinery solves a very specific problem for other businesses or governmental agencies by being feature-rich and story-light. 

Take, for instance, the following example of CAT tractors:

Genre-Playful Approach: Incorporate B2C Messaging Techniques

Instead of taking this traditional approach, we positioned the business as a concerned, environmental cleanup solutions company, which had a larger b2c appeal.

Our approach focused on generating an emotional & social resonance, instead of a purely practical solution.

Even though the average beach-goer would never spend the $50,000-$70,000 on a machine and weren’t the end-user, the environmentally-beneficial and ‘weird niche product’ angle showed potential for expanding our reach beyond traditional b2b channels.

One of the Facebook content aggregators around ‘unique tech,’ In the Know, found this message positioning to be relevant to their tech-inquisitive audience and posted our videos on their page.

Within several days, the video had amassed 25 million views. Our business’s qualified leads increased 10-fold, doubling gross sales by the end of the year.

By creating awareness through b2c channels with the environmentally-beneficial position of “We’re here to save the beaches from trash,” instead of directly targeting municipal employees with a traditional, feature-heavy b2b video, we blended the genres of technical product video with philanthropic micro doc. This unexpected placement and blend of messaging and audience segments led to huge gains for our company

Why Are Genre-Playful Videos Effective?

I believe genre-playful videos are so powerful in the awareness stage of inbound marketing funnels, because they surprise the audiences, which entertains them, thus fulfilling one of the three major pillars of engaging storytelling.

As consumers of stories, we’re trained from a young age to expect certain archetypal stories to results in certain outcomes. This skill is embedded in us as part of our society’s collective memory. Marketers then tend to borrow heavily from this collective memory and drill us with these conventions until they’re cliche. 

However, by creating videos that set up the expectation of a normal genre or archetype at the beginning of the video and then deliver a different result (or simply starting with the different form), they surprise the audience, which provides a sense of enjoyment. 

If they enjoy your video, they are more likely to share it, to show others how they discovered this unique point of view (and make others believe the sharer’s POV is equally unique). 

This can be seen in both our examples. The Smart Car ad establishes with the music and our collective knowledge of car commercials that this car is going to be an off-road beast. And then it goes about proving the exact opposite. It subverts our genre expectations. 

By adopting a genre-playful approach to your video marketing campaigns, you increase your odds of standing out among your competition. See how we helped Young Leaders Elementary leverage a genre-playful video strategy to amass 100,000 views in two days.

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