By Mark Kersteen - June 6th, 2014

What’s the key to unbelievably popular video content? It’s starting to look like the secret might be filming someone doing a job everyone wanted to have when they were seven. Don’t believe me?

Astronauts: Felix Baumgartner’s Red Bull Stratos jump.

Firemen: The GoPro kitten rescue.

Racecar drivers: Monster.com’s search for a winning F1 team.

Onstage at this year’s Incite Summit West, Jeff Greenler—Monster.com’s Vice President of Global Brand and Advertising—gave the audience the full story behind how they came up with their ingenious plan to help a fledgling bunch of Formula One racers build their dream team. Surprisingly, it wasn’t during a wave of inspiration while watching race reruns at 3:00 AM.

"The idea was to create gravitas around something that is seriously just a cool job."

“It started when we began to research around the question: ‘Where are the areas we think people who look to Monster would be passionate about?’ Sports, fashion and music were the big three.”

In fact, the idea came out of a much larger ongoing initiative at Monster.com: “This piece of content was part of something we call Cool Jobs. The idea was to create gravitas around something that is seriously just a cool job. There are only two criteria: it has to be cool, and it has to be a real job.”

From there, it just took a little luck and a keen eye for opportunity.

“That started the foundation of ‘Ok, we could partner with a fledgling Formula One team, then help them hire people to build that team.’”

" After someone gets hired, that’s a big black hole. They never come back and say ‘Thank you, I got this awesome job!'"

Luckily, the plan paid off.

“The program was tremendously successful. We had 800,000 job views for that particular piece of content. Normally at Monster, if a customer of ours got 300 job views for their job that they post on us, that’s pretty good. So 800,000 was crazy good. We ended up hiring forty different people for the team. Everything from aerodynamicists to people in the pits to marketing assistants, so it ran the gamut.”

And this campaign does more than just show off the kinds of opportunities you can find on Monster.

“Obviously this was proof of concept of not only that Monster has awesome jobs, but that it works. Because after someone gets hired, that’s a big black hole. They never come back and say ‘Thank you, I got this awesome job!’”

So Monster had a winning setup for a whole lot of excellent content—you can see it all on their Youtube channel, and if you have any interest in things with engines that go fast, I highly recommend watching all of it. But, it doesn’t matter how good your content is if no one sees it.

“Distribution was absolutely a part of our strategy from the start. We ended up creating a site and everything for the team, where we created all the content, all the supplies. We had first and third party distribution. We did Youtube, paid search, a lot of the other video platforms, but most of it was driven through our own site, and obviously we leveraged the team’s media channels as well.”

Awesome content and awesome distribution; both are important, but together they’ll make your marketing unstoppable.

Yet there’s an even more important lesson marketers can learn from Jeff’s story:

Don’t think content first.

Jeff and his team weren’t spending late nights in the office eating Chinese takeout and saying, “Hey, you know what would be a good idea for some content?” They went straight to their audience. They listened, they researched, and they learned what the people who matter the most to their business cared about.

So, if you’re looking to put together some world-shaking video content, maybe your first move should be asking your customers, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

If you want to learn more top insights straight from the most innovative minds in marketing, we suggest you head on over and have a look at Incite On-Demand, where you can get full access to everything our marketers have ever said, thought or done.

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