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The ROI of Turkeys, Babies and Cats


Polish doesn’t always equal performance. Authenticity builds trust, and trust is what converts.
Polish doesn’t always equal performance. Authenticity builds trust, and trust is what converts.

For Thanksgiving 2019 I swayed fromt the traditional marketing playbook.


I didn’t write a white paper. I didn’t pay for a sponsored ad. I stood in front of a green screen, threw up some Turkey stock footage, pretended to be stuffed from a Thanksgiving dinner and whole thing took about twenty minutes to shoot, edit, and upload to LinkedIn. It was just a throwaway "thank you" video to my network—a moment of holiday cheer with not much strategy behind it. And that’s why it worked.


Alex Davidovich, from Trust Built Windows and Doors in Canada, saw that video. He saw a real human being having fun. He went to our website, filled out a proposal form, and we started a conversation about a custom video package for his business.


If there's 3 things the internet loves, it's babies, cats and apparently turkeys. But looking at the data, it wasn't luck. The "professional polish" filter is gone. In its place, we're seeing the The ROI of Real. Make stuff that feels true to you, reflects your values, your sense of humor and your personality and like-minded people will connect.


Check out my original LinkedIn post here.


Across the board, the content that converts is the content that feels human. Here's three case studies of brands that dropped the act, got real, and saw massive returns.


1. The Paint Guy: From Fired Employee to Brand Owner

  • The Brand: Tonester Paints (Tony Piloseno)

  • The "Post": Mixing paint in a sink.

  • The Story: Tony Piloseno was a college student working part-time at Sherwin-Williams. He started a TikTok channel called @tonesterpaints where he simply filmed himself mixing paint colors. No talking, no sales pitch, just the satisfying visual of colors blending. He amassed over a million followers.

  • Sherwin-Williams fired him for "gross misconduct" (using company paint for social media).

  • The Result: Tony didn't stop. He leveraged his authentic, lo-fi audience to launch his own paint brand, Tonester Paints. He partnered with a rival supplier and sold over $30,000 of paint in his first hour of launch. He now runs a full-scale paint company, purely off the back of videos shot on an iPhone in a garage.

  • The Lesson: People didn’t care about the corporate logo on the can; they cared about the passion of the person mixing it.

See the content: Tony’s TikTok Channel


2. Ocean Spray: The 4 Billion Impression Skateboard

  • The Brand: Ocean Spray

  • The "Post": A 22-second selfie video by Nathan Apodaca.

  • The Story: In 2020, a potato warehouse worker named Nathan Apodaca's (Doggface208) car broke down. So, he longboarded to work while drinking a jug of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice and lip-syncing to Fleetwood Mac.

  • It wasn't an ad. It was shaky, windy, and totally unplanned.

  • The Result: Instead of issuing a copyright strike or ignoring it, Ocean Spray’s CEO joined TikTok and recreated the video himself. The result was 15 billion media impressions. Ocean Spray saw a significant spike in sales. They got a Super Bowl-sized result for the cost of a truck (which they gifted to Nathan).

  • The Lesson: You cannot storyboard a viral moment. When you see authentic enthusiasm for your product, don’t polish it—amplify it.

See the Case Study: AdAge Breakdown


3. Duolingo: The "Unhinged" Strategy

  • The Brand: Duolingo

  • The "Post": The Owl being "cringe."

  • The Story: Most EdTech companies post boring statistics about learning retention or testimonials from students. Duolingo decided to let a Gen-Z social media manager put on their giant green owl mascot suit and film "unhinged" videos in the office—threatening users who missed their lessons and chasing employees down hallways.

  • The Result: Duolingo became the #1 education app on the App Store. They grew their daily active users by 62% in a single year, largely attributed to their "brand voice" on social media. They realized that to get people to use a learning app, they first had to get people to like the brand.

  • The Lesson: B2B and SaaS companies are terrified of looking "unprofessional." Duolingo proved that being entertaining builds the trust required to get the download.


The Bottom Line

My turkey video, Tony’s paint mixing, and Nathan’s skateboard ride all share one variable: Imperfection.


In a world where everyone is using AI to write the perfect caption and filters to fake the perfect life, "perfect" has become suspicious. "Perfect" looks like a scam.


If you want leads—real, qualified leads like Alex at Trust Built Window, just be a person. The camera on your phone is good enough. The story you have right now is interesting enough.


Just press record.

 
 
 

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