Buttery Smooth Explosions
Digital video ads
Buttery Smooth Craftsmanship [Digital Video Ad]
What’s up man.
Today’s newsletter is a follow up my recent newsletter on dreamy video production. That newsletter focused on a short cinematic video trailer I created for a local eight figure business in Florida, to support the launch of a new machine line they carry.
That project was tricky because it was an industrial, physical product line with no existing footage to use, and in person access to the machines was logistically impossible. I had to create something magical, from nothing.
The cherry on top was that these new machines cost up to $2 million a pop. More than most houses and super cars.
The Project
Same client, new project.
One of the Eurotech VPs had the bare bones of an idea to make some sort of video ad the was a call back to those old mattress commercials from the 2000s. The ones where someone is jumping on a bed, and a real glass of red wine on the bed doesn’t spill no matter what.
Wine spilling all over a bed is a quick way to cause permanent damage. While simulated for a commercial, the stakes would otherwise be high in a home environment. Like who wants to ruin a $3,000 mattress?
Premium mattress maker Tempur-Pedic was the originator of this commercial design, and even decades later, everyone remembers these commercials. You remember them because they were compelling and they worked.
The videos visually demonstrated the extreme build quality and practical difference of these mattresses compared to competitors, and your own mattress at home. The understanding was rapid, even immediate, and easy to understand for everyone.
The commercial communicated that our mattress is badass and the other ones suck. You should buy this one.
The Eurotech VP had the genesis of a great idea for a creative ad in the CNC machine industry, but lacked the creative vision to execute and bring it to the finish line. Which is where I came in.
The Challenge
Eurotech usually only had a few machines on hand, at most, and temporarily. The few that they would have were actively being worked on and engineered for specific customers to make specific parts for their business.
So getting access to one to film on was a bit tricky, but not impossible like the new Toro line that was in fact impossible to film.
Further, several safety mechanisms had to be disabled to even make this possible in the first place. The machines normally wouldn’t even run when opened. After some brief arm twisting, an engineer was willing to make it happen.
Still though, the original wine on a mattress commercial featured a junk mattress that actually had wine spill all over it to show the contrast in products. None of Eurotech’s machines would actually do that, which is astounding and a testament to the engineering quality from the Italian manufacturer Biglia. Their machines are built like a brick shithouse, which is unusual for CNC machines, many of which are cheap knock offs from China and India.
Not surprisingly, only German competitors rival the Italian machines in their industry. So if you want top quality you’re going to pay for it, and it’s going to be European (with Japanese software, naturally).
Which is to say this made getting my hands on a junk machine to film problematic. Even further, the glass actually falling would be dangerous, this isn’t a mattress. It’s an industrial machine spinning tools at thousands of RPM. The glass would absolutely fall on 90% of CNC machines, even running at a fraction of the 10,000 RPM this machine was capable of and actually ran at for the commerical.
In fact if you’ve ever wondered why cheap entry level handguns jam a lot, and expensive ones don’t, this is part of why. Whether it’s a gun or a car, they are built with parts manufactured on a CNC machine. Those parts have to be machined with precision accuracy down to a fraction of a millimeter, across thousands of the same parts being made each week, on the same machine, over and over again all day.
Cheap firing pins, for cheap guns, are made on cheap CNC machines that vibrate a lot. This is one major reason (of several) that the guns are cheap, and subsequently, they malfunction a lot. Inversely, handguns that cost more, do not have these problems. The creation of the parts - and the CNC machines they choose to accomplish that - are a big part of this process.
That over filled glass of champagne balancing perfectly, right above a tool spinning that fast, is absolutely eye popping to engineers in their industry who haven’t seen their machines before. Most machines would spill the wine idling at 1k RPM or even less.
The Ad Design
What I chose to do was improvise using generative AI at the front. A mock machine is setup to fail, explosively, dramatizing the contrast to Eurotech’s extreme build quality and impressive display of that in real life.
It’s deliberately over the top and comedic in tone, to setup the elegant champagne on a machine in action. The tonal change is sharp, fast, and obvious.
In other words the ad communicates that competitor machines suck, and our machine is rock solid smooth to a degree that is almost beyond belief.
The comedic beginning of that ad also does something very critical for the viewer, which is that is spikes emotion. This acts as a hook for the prospect, spiking their buying temperature in the right direction.
All the best ads in history have done this. They land a strong bump to your emotions and capture your attention for some purpose. If they don’t do this, then they do just about nothing. You quickly forget them, buy and do nothing.
My (sort of) famous CPTSD ad did much the same.
This ad took me 5 minutes to make in Photoshop. It generated over $10,000 in gross revenue with zero ad spend. Just organically posting it on social media.
That ROI is astounding and directly speaks to ads that just work. That hook and capture attention, while spiking emotions. This alien ad is both powerful and hilarious, perfectly conveying how toxic relationships feel for men after they implode into a million pieces. It’s like having your brain or guts ripped out by an alien.
The setting being a romantic sunset on the beach is the chef’s kiss.
The opening to this video ad worked much the same way. A powerful, over the top hook, that conveyed something real, and actually got people cracking up laughing.
The Response
The ad was super polarizing, but ultimately won everyone over. They had never seen anything like this in their industry, and it was once again above and beyond what they had in mind.
Critically, at the first showing of an earlier draft, the Eurotech team actually burst out laughing. Which is how most people respond to it. It puts a smile on your face.
Which is good, we need more funny stuff in the world. Business can be fun, and at certain times, it is the most effective pathway to take anyway.
To the extent it doesn’t undermine the core message of an ad, you want people laughing with and enjoying a video ad. You want it to be so good they watch it again, and share it with a friend or colleague in the same business.
Which is exactly who this ad is for. Engineers and managers at businesses that need and buy CNC machines like this. Guys on the ground floor who are hands on operating older competitor machines that need to be replaced or upgraded. Guys who will immediately understand how impressive and rare it is for a CNC machine this big to operate this smoothly.
These guys won’t make buying decisions in 8 and 9 figure businesses, but they have direct access to executive teams who do. A sale could easily contain multiple machines and run an invoice over $1M. For sales that big you want engineers for the customer on your side, advocating for the purchase. Which is exactly what this ad does, functioning as a sales tool for the salesmen selling high end equipment.
Your Next Ad
Recently I’ve opened up this side of my life for professional services on a per project basis. If you want powerful videos ads like this for your business, I can create them.
I work exclusively in Adobe Premiere Pro for videos and have been editing in Adobe almost non-stop since 2012.
If you want to work with me on your business you can reply to this email or contact me here with some basic details.
For in person video I can do a lot solo, and I also have teams available to bring in for larger projects like live events.
Thanks for tuning in.
/s/ Anthony Dream Johnson