Commercial Investment Real Estate November/December 2018 | Page 40

Humor Is a Double-Edged Sword
Michael Bull, CCIM, built a studio for his “America’s Commercial Real Estate Show.”
Tactical Advantages
Using video to promote your expertise requires a differ-
ent approach than making a property video. You are still
selling, but indirectly. It’s true regardless of the industry in
which you work.
“Nobody likes being pitched to,” writes Peep Laja,
founder of CXL, an Austin, Texas-based marketing edu-
cation service. “Your promo video has to be way more than
just a sales pitch.” He notes that a promo video he made
early in his video career in January 2009 for a fitness product
lost half of its viewers after only 20 seconds, and all but 15
percent of the viewers had fled by the 1:32 mark. The reason
he says it fared so poorly is that it was a “pure sales pitch.”
“Short and sweet” is the term that applies to videos you
can find on YouTube starring Alec Pacella, CCIM, man-
aging partner and senior vice president at NAI Daus in
Cleveland. His video segments, dubbed “Daus You Know,”
are simple clips running just a couple of minutes long. In
them, he shares market knowledge about a recent interesting
transaction or property deal, or even explains the unique
wrangling that resulted in the owners of the Chicago Cubs
buying nearby rooftops. He never needs to pitch himself
directly; his videos show him demonstrating his expertise.
Humor can be a great way to engage your audience. Laja
highlights a commercial video from Dollar Shave Club in
which the company’s founder walks through his offices
and warehouse, poking fun at his competitors and giving
a hip and snarky explanation for how and why the shaving
products service does things the way it does.
But not everyone has the same sense of humor. Dollar
Shave Club’s video is fun to watch, and indeed millions of
people have viewed the video, which effectively commu-
nicates the product’s qualities. However, some people are
put off by the swearing and its irreverent tone, unmoved
even by the man in a bear costume who can’t catch a box
thrown at him.
Spread the Word
Finally, spread the word about your videos. Bull and
Pacella make use of social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn,
and Facebook to promote their videos; you also can
post them to your company website and include them in
email newsletters.
Social media makes it easy for others to market for you.
Share the video on your social media accounts, and encour-
age any guests on the program to do so as well.
Make Something Viewers Want to See
Have a definite plan for what you want to do in a video,
but you don’t necessarily need to have a script. When Bull
started his TV work, he spent a lot of time scripting. Now,
he pulls together his guests on a general topic — say, office
space — and plans the discussion around what is most
interesting to them and what they can talk about without
having to do extensive research. Then the video features
him speaking conversationally with them “about things
that are in their strike zone,” he says.
Pacella, too, has moved to a more informal setup for his
short videos. In his early videos beginning in late 2016,
he sat at his desk discussing a topic; he saw those vid-
eos as an extension of a blog or a newsletter. But those
early videos came across as scripted, so now he writes at
most some bullet points on a notecard and mostly ad-libs
his presentation.
38
November | December 2018
Maryann Mize, CCIM, positions herself as a local market expert.
COMMERCIAL INVESTMENT REAL ESTATE