Nobody Is Watching Your Demo Reel

I was horrified.

I'd been preparing for this keynote for years. Massive room, huge broadcast cameras, I was up on the big screens around the whole place, and I felt great walking off. It took the meeting about three weeks to get me the video, and I remember getting it as I was heading home from the airport. As soon as I walked in the door I started watching.

My delivery was impeccable. And the whole time, I had my hands pressed together in this little triangle right at the tip of my chin, over and over, doing the thing the villain in Austin Powers does. I had never done that in my life. When did that nervous tick start?

There's another one. There's a group I speak to very regularly, and apparently I say "already" or "already then" constantly when I'm with them. I had no idea until somebody made a joke about it. It was specific to that room and that comfort level, but it was pronounced enough that they made fun of me for it.

Applause will never tell you any of that. The only thing that tells you is the tape.

The footage you make for you

I call it game tape. It is not your reel. It is not the clip you put on LinkedIn. It's the raw, uncut, unflattering recording of your whole presentation, made for an audience of one—-you.

Every time I speak I try to set something up. Sometimes an iPad in the back of the room, sometimes an iPhone, and make sure it's plugged in because it will die on you halfway through a keynote, I promise. Sometimes a Plaud to capture just audio. Half of these recordings are genuinely bad, low angle, high angle, me wandering out of frame, and I don't share them with anybody. They're for catching the triangle hands before someone else does.

Athletes have done this forever and nobody thinks it's strange. Speakers walk off into the applause and call that a review.

And then there's the footage you make for them

I saw a thread recently where three meeting professionals said, flat out, that demo videos don't matter to them. Not "nice to have." Didn't matter. A couple of very respected people pushed back and said the reel is a sample, not the whole case, and speakers go wrong asking three minutes to carry the entire sale. I think the pushback is right, and I'd add to it.

The speaker reel is absolutely not dead. It has just changed shapes.

I run three levels now. There's a fast teaser, a minute or less, high octane, the quick sound bites that establish authority and make somebody want to know more. Then there's the longer demo reel, uninterrupted, straight minutes of me talking on different topics with longer testimonials woven through, and that one is almost ten minutes long.

Here's the part that stung when I pulled the numbers. Nobody watches it. People barely make it in, they click through, they bail, and it is nowhere near as powerful as the short one, which has thousands upon thousands of views. I built the careful comprehensive thing and the sixty-second version is doing all the work.

Where engagement ticks back up is full-length keynotes. Somebody will say, you're speaking for an hour, show me an hour. You're doing twenty minutes, show me a twenty. So I keep those and share them privately on request, and I always offer them. I'm not hiding them. I just don't want a future audience finding my material and ruining the surprise before I get there.

Which means the move on your next call is simple, and you can say it exactly like this: "Do you want a quick reel with some highlights, or do you want to watch a full-length presentation?" I asked that on a recent call with a committee and one person said the reel, another said the full presentation. So I sent both, clearly labeled. Nobody has ever been annoyed that I asked.

The worst video I ever sent

A meeting planner once asked me for a full-length presentation, not a sizzle reel. The best thing I had was from a restaurant in New York City, thirty or forty people in a back room, an iPad propped up, bad lighting, no microphone, servers walking through the shot. I sent it anyway, because it was the whole thing start to finish. That's what got me booked on a major stage.

So when those meeting professionals say demo videos don't matter, I don't think they're wrong exactly. A beautiful three-minute cut can't answer the question they're actually asking, which is whether you can hold a room for the length of time they're buying. Only the whole thing can.

The fix that cost me the most to learn

Early on I had a keynote video shot in 4K, great stage, genuinely the strongest thing I owned. It was to a very niche audience. I sent it to everybody, and what came back was, oh, I guess you only speak to that audience. One video, and they were prejudging me off it.

So now I send context with every video. This was an anniversary celebration for a company that's been around fifty years. I had a specific directive to include this story. If you send a bank a video you did for the plumbing association, those are radically different rooms and they're watching through completely different lenses. Now I'll send two and label them, here's me in this niche, here's me in that one, which shows I'm well rounded and shows I'll tailor it for them too.

To be clear, context is not an apology. If you start qualifying your footage with "oh, I had a cold that day," you've just discredited yourself.

So here's your week

Prop your phone up at your next talk, plugged in, and hit record even if nobody ever sees it. Watch it back while it's still fresh, because the tick you find is free to fix and expensive to keep.

Then go look at what you're actually sending buyers. If your lead-in video is over 90 seconds, it's too long, and you can cut a teaser out of footage you already own without hiring anybody. Keep your full-length keynotes ready to send privately and offer them out loud instead of waiting to be asked. And from now on, every video goes out with one line of context about the room it was recorded in.

Because you almost certainly have this backwards. The polished reel you paid real money for is the one nobody finishes, and the ugly one you're embarrassed by is the one that proves you can hold a room.

Until next time,

P.S. If you've ever watched yourself all the way through, what did you catch? I've given you my triangle hands and my "already then," so you're not going first. And if you've never once sat down and watched a full recording of yourself, just hit reply and say "never." I want to know how many of us are working blind.

P.P.S. If the footage is the thing stopping you, reply and I'll connect you with my video guy. He did my reel and he's done a bunch of my speaker friends. He's surprisingly affordable and he can work with most of what you already have, so you may not need to shoot anything new at all.