The Video That Acted Like a Trojan Horse
A client got in touch with me a few months back, and when I asked how she found me, she pointed to a video I had posted on LinkedIn over a year earlier.
The video was taking the piss out of corporate videos and how sterile they are. It turned out she worked in the exact industry I was parodying. Every time her boss suggested making another boring, generic corporate video, the marketing team would secretly circulate my video around the office.
It became an internal meme. When the time finally came for them to hire someone to produce real video work, she picked up the phone. That piece of content acted like a Trojan horse, quietly moving around inside the company until buying intent showed up.
Stop Obsessing Over Raw Views
In awareness and top-of-funnel advertising, it is easy to get caught up in whatever metric a platform pushes in your face. YouTube pushes views, TikTok pushes views, and LinkedIn pushes reactions.
When you run paid distribution, raw view counts become almost meaningless. People constantly brag on LinkedIn about getting 5 million views on an ad, but all that proves is you paid enough money to force a video onto people’s screens.
The real benchmark is your ratio of views to likes and comments. If a campaign clocks millions of impressions with barely any likes and zero conversation, the creative missed the mark. YouTube at least gives you deeper retention analytics to see rewinds and exact drop-off points, but surface-level view counts alone tell you very little.
Why Most B2B Ads Get Zero Engagement
Roughly 90% of ads on LinkedIn fail to get a single organic like or comment. Brands become obsessed with showing off the product itself instead of the problem it solves, stripping away any shred of human perspective.
You do not have to make pure comedy or avoid being promotional, but you must give people a reason to care. Shoving a solution directly in someone’s face without acknowledging their actual pain points creates white noise.
A useful exercise before publishing any script or final cut is to draft the comments you realistically expect your audience to leave. If you cannot easily imagine genuine talking points or emotional reactions beyond a polite “Great post,” the piece is probably just rattling off product facts that no one will remember.
The Power of Dark Social: Saves and Shares
Beyond the public feed, the metrics you should actually aim for are saves and shares.
A save signals that you provided tangible value someone wants to reference later. In a market flooded with generic content, that is hard to pull off, but it remains a strong benchmark for educational creative.
Shares are even more powerful. When someone shares your video, they are putting their own taste on the line to say, “I found this relevant, and I think you will too.”
A prospect scrolling past an ad in their feed has twenty browser tabs open, a busy workplace, and a fraction of a second of attention. When a colleague drops that same video directly into their DMs or Slack, they watch it with intent and give it their full focus. One view earned through a private share is worth a thousand passive impressions on a feed.