Zendesk’s Charming Product Video

Earlier this week, we published our manifesto on why fun videos rule. We’ve been making an effort to feature others’ exemplary video content on our blog, highlighting the many different ways that smart companies approach video marketing, and one fun video that made its way into our hearts and Twitter feeds was Zendesk’s “Why Zendesk?” clip. The video crafts an engaging story while also showing off Zendesk’s customer support product (in a way that’s not too in-your-face). If you haven’t seen it yet, seriously, give it a watch.

The Inside Scoop

Matthew Latkiewicz, Creative Manager at Zendesk, shared some background information on the video with us:

The idea and the production

The idea came from distilling down why Zendesk does what it does — behind all the features and the marketing and the UI and the technology, Zendesk wants to make the relationship between companies and their customers better. And by better, we mean more human.

So we had that phrase — have a better relationship with your customers. From there, I wrote the script about that relationship — rather than talk at you about how great and powerful Zendesk is, we decided to just show how Zendesk facilitates that relationship.

And then the style/humor stuff: I am so tired of software marketing videos that follow the “You have a problem. What if you could fix that problem? Well with Software X, now you can!” model. Zendesk makes business software, but that shouldn’t mean we have to make boring shit.

We want to make stuff that has emotion and humor and sincerity built into it. More of that human stuff I talked about above.

The production was low budget — just me, a DP we contracted with, a production designer, a makeup artist and our actress. We shot for three days at our office, an employee’s apartment and a local coffee shop. The guinea pig was improvised on the day of the shoot. It is an awesome guinea pig.

The results

From Wistia’s stats: The page where this video is embedded has been loaded 52,394 times by 43,834 people. 94% of these people played the video a total of 46,828 times and spent a total of 1,371.2 hours watching it.

On average they each watched 72% of the video.

And then anecdotally, I get requests every week from other companies asking who made the video because they would like to do something similar; customers mention it; our sales team uses it when talking to prospects; prospective employees mention it as a reason they would like to work here.

The Takeaway

We at Wistia are big advocates of the power of fun video for business and we think that Zendesk is onto something here. What do you think? What are some of your favorite business videos that manage to have a fun time while keeping their message strong?