Here’s the transcript

The Harmon Brothers method is finding out where you're at on that timeline. And we are live. And today we have a very special guest, Benton Crane. Thanks for having me on, Ruben. Excited to be here. And at the end of this video, you're going to see me kick flip off this staircase on this skateboard. If anyone is qualified on how to make a video go viral, it's them. They've amassed over a billion views across all their videos, and they've helped generate over $300 million in sales. A whole bunch of really successful Internet campaigns that all have the common theme of we're blending the world of direct response marketing with branding and humor. In traditional branding world, they look at infomercials and go, gross, I would never do that to my brand. And then in the direct response world, they look at branding and say, oh, you can't even measure that. It's all just fluff. I think if you stand back, you can see wildly successful companies in both of those worlds. Direct response can drive a sale. It can drive an immediate ROI. It's trackable, combine it with the great things about branding character, story, emotion, humor, making it memorable. You can package those two into one world. It's a really powerful combination. Fenton, the CEO explain what the Harmon Brothers method is and how we can all leverage a little bit of branding, humor and direct response to create videos that convert timeline from obscure startup to household brand. The first half of that timeline is build an economic engine. You have to have an economic engine that allows your business to operate profitably. The second half of the timeline is all about the brand building. The Harmon Brothers method is finding out where you're at on that timeline and implementing the right strategy at the right time for your business. So if you're a brand new startup and what you want to do is focus very intensely on sale, then it's time to start to scale it up. And so then you might go into a simple sales video where you essentially repeat that sale that you developed, word of mouth, repeat it in video form, and start to scale it up. And as you grow those sales, you're growing that economic engine, and that takes you through the next phase of growth. So that allows you to create the brand character, the brand voice. You can make it memorable. You can make it funny. We call it a branded conversion video. There's a time and a place for all types of marketing. The thing that's really interesting about the content that the Harvard Brothers has created is that it comes off as really fun, entertaining, almost comical pieces. But the reality is that if you peel back the onions, they're a completely data driven company. In fact, Benton has a background in economics. I studied economics in college and became a little bit of a data gee. I ended up consulting in the intelligence industry of the various three letter agencies. And when I joined up with the brothers, that kind of set the foundation for Harmon Brothers being both creative minded, but also very data driven. We always have data feeding the creativity, and then we have creativity feeding the data. Loads and loads of AB tests that go into all these campaigns, constantly getting new learning, so it's not just happenstance or luck when the next campaign becomes successful. 1 billion views, over $300 million in sales. I mean, these are talked about being data driven. There's a tremendous amount of experiments that they do for the titles, for the format, for the type of videos that they create to figure out which one is going to convert the most. But the only ads that scale into the ten, 5100, 200, 300 million View club and Drive, that type of awareness and those type of sales are the ones that you put a dollar of ads into them and you get back a dollar 50 in new revenue, or whatever that metric is for that particular business. Once the economic engine is there, then it can fund all of those efforts to that daily strategy of posting on the different social media platforms. It's not an overnight thing. You're not going to start posting and start seeing the results the next day. It takes time. It's a slow build, really pays dividends. One year down the road, two years down. The economic engine needs to be in place to be able to sustain that over the long haul. And as long as there are consistent sales coming in the door, that is the economic engine that then enables them to put that long term branding strategy in place. During my podcast conversation with Benton, I realized that they're practicing what they preach. They started out creating content that was direct response, focus, and that was completely ROI focused. They've grown into more than just an agency, more than just a production company. Now they're an education company. They've got a podcast which is rated a top 50 in the business category. They've got a great book called From Hoop to Gold and they have the Harmon Brothers University. So if you're a writer, comedian or filmmaker, make sure Harmonbrothersuniversity.com I remember the first time I saw the squaddie potty commercial and I was blown away. It was such an outlandish, out of this world concept to think of a unicorn that was pooping into ice cream cones. That video really changed my mindset on how to create content that really can captivate people's attention, entertain them, and also educate them in the process while still being able to monetize the whole effort. Trying to map out the journey that your customer needs to take from I've never heard of you. Very top of the funnel all the way through, down at the bottom of the funnel, where they know you, they trust you. They've had their concerns overcome. We've built credibility and they're ready to close. And essentially we try to break that up into snippets of content that take them through that journey. Imagine you start out some short video clips that are focused on what do we believe? We show that to a pretty broad audience. We track the data and see, okay, who is engaging with this content for up to 20, 30 seconds. Those people. We want to remarket the next video to them. The next video might be future objection handling, or it might be some belief management. What does your customer need to believe to become a customer? And then eventually we're going to get down into problem and solution and features and eventually credibility reviews, that type of stuff. They get to the bottom of that flow and they're so warm and they're so ready, you can convert them. Extremely low rate. Most companies don't start there, right? Most companies just start on a simple sales video and they take their customer all the way from I'm going to grab your attention, illustrate that I understand the problem. Here's the solution. I'm going to give you a call to action. Then I'm going to come back, build the credibility, overcome concerns, and give you a call to action again. And just starting with that, simple sales video is usually enough to capture the low hanging fruit in the marketplace. To get that economic engine started, we're getting our low hanging fruit, but we need to get a bigger cross section of the market. That's when you go into the more advanced strategies where you're layering video content on top of video content. Here I am at one of Hollywood's first film studio locations. This is a great metaphor for pioneering production and creation within video. Right now, we're living in an era where video content is helping scale some of the biggest companies that we're going to know in the next ten to 15 years. Just like where I am now, this is just the beginning. Here I go. I'm going to kick Flip off the staircase. If you want to check out the full podcast, click the link in the caption. And thanks to Benton for being on the podcast. 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