A company record, on their own numbers.

And every marketer who sees a figure like that has the same two thoughts in the same order.

“How did they do that?”

Followed by: “Could we do that?”

Then: “No, it would never get internal approval and would just end up looking cringe.”

So let's deal with that one first, because it is the only thing actually stopping most of you.

Nobody copies your failure

Ryan Todd, who runs social at Currys, is straight about how they got here. They go viral regularly, in his words, after years of failure.

Nobody quotes those years. Nobody can. The flops got buried by the algorithm the same way everybody else's did, and the only people who ever saw them worked at Currys.

That is worth sitting with for a second, because the fear is always disproportionate. You are imagining a bad video going everywhere. Bad videos go nowhere. That is what makes them bad videos.

The advantage is administrative, not creative

Which leaves the real reason Currys are ahead, and it is not that their staff are funnier than yours.

Todd's framework is CATS. Creative, audience, trends, speed. The one that matters is speed, and his own slide spells out why. Get strategy, senior buy-in and tone of voice locked in in advance. Set yourself up to react.

He persuaded the marketing director once, up front. Approach, tone of voice and the line all agreed before anybody picked up a camera. So he is not sitting three months in approval waiting on a single video.

The trend window is days wide. Your approval process is weeks long.

You cannot be fast if you are getting permission. Only if you already have it.

Three things to fix before you go near a trend

1. Get the tone of voice signed off once, not per video. Have that conversation with your director now, in the quiet, rather than in a panic on a Thursday afternoon while something is trending.

2. Agree what you will never do. Boundaries are the thing that makes senior people comfortable saying yes to everything inside them.

3. Set a turnaround target and be honest about it. If nobody can get something out inside 48 hours, you are not in the trends business and you should stop pretending you are.

None of those three require anybody to be funny. That is rather the point.

Then make room to be wrong

Todd's team has two words for this. Hear me out.

Hear me out is the start of an idea that sounds mad, or sounds terrible, or sounds like it will get somebody sacked. Quite often it is terrible. Occasionally it is the best thing you make all year, and you only ever get that one if the bad ones are allowed to exist without anybody rolling their eyes.

Cringe is not caused by trying something weird. It is caused by trying something odd that nobody in the room felt able to challenge first.

Cast for the job, not for authenticity

Todd is honest about his own gaps. Atrocious on camera, over thirty, most trends go straight over his head. He reckons he understood about five per cent of his own Gen Z script. He did not go and learn the slang. He built a team around the gaps, and when Currys wanted a Barbie parody he went and found a colleague in the store who was actually called Ken.

We do the same. Andor Technology's own engineers on camera, one of them slapping a colleague in the face. Real shop staff from around Ballymena starring in a Christmas advert. Workhuman's people playing up to Brady Bunch titles.

On that Andor shoot we also used actors.

Because the point was never amateurs only. Some roles need a professional who can land the same line on the ninth take. Ken worked because Ken was the joke.

Either way, somebody wrote it first. Real people are not a substitute for a script. They are a casting choice inside one.

Where it actually pays off

A tone of voice does not stay on social. Currys' brand advertising runs under a platform called Beyond Techspectations, made with AMV BBDO. Crews, directors, professional actors, colleagues turning up out of a vat of baked beans and out of a cow costume in a field. Different budget entirely, same tone, and still built around the staff. Aisling Lancaster, their head of brand and advertising, calls colleagues the brand's “key point of difference from our competitors”.

That is the real return on the boring sign-off work. You are not just unlocking cheap phone footage. You are deciding what the brand sounds like everywhere, so the expensive productions get easier too, because nobody is starting from a blank page and arguing about tone three weeks out from a shoot.

One question to run over your next five videos

Would I watch this if I did not work here?

If the answer is no, do not post it. Nobody else is watching it either.

Most B2B video fails that inside the opening sentence, usually somewhere around “we are delighted to announce.”

Entertaining does not mean saying nothing

The obvious objection to all of this is that a funny video does not sell anything.

Todd's approach on the main accounts is platform first. Draw the eyeballs with whatever works on that platform, then run the Currys message underneath as a sub message rather than the headline. The video is entertainment. The product is still in it. Nobody is reading the back of the packet at you.

That is the bit B2B has backwards. Most corporate video leads with the message and hopes somebody watches. Currys earn the watch first and let the message travel with it.

Footnote

Gina Keiner, Director of Product Marketing at LinkedIn, reckons most B2B buyers are now millennial and Gen Z, that video is their preferred language, and that they trust peers and creators well ahead of brands. She also says less polished content outperforms the polished stuff.

One caveat on that. Unpolished is not unplanned.

The Currys video looks like it was filmed between customers, and more or less it was. It also had a script, an agreed tone of voice and a turnaround measured in hours. Rough is a finish. Sloppy is just sloppy.

So yes, everyone is copying Currys at the minute, and nearly all of them are copying the wrong half. The funny employee is the visible bit. The permission is the part that makes it possible.

Putting your staff on camera works. Just not on its own.