Batch it in the quiet months, and keep it real: Gina Kay's video method
A team of one, 44 years of Confex history, and an audience of event planners who spot a fake instantly. Two AI experiments cost trust. One summer afternoon of filming carried a whole campaign.
Summer is not crunch time, so summer is when Gina Kay films. She takes one of the team out and they shoot five or six short videos in a couple of hours. Nothing elaborate.
The real lesson is to work with the peaks and troughs of your own marketing calendar. When the team built its video flows for the show it was three weeks out and it was chaotic. Worth it, with over 31,000 views across those three weeks, but, ideally, that work belongs in July, not February.
What a batch actually looks like
The batch itself is simple. Gina takes one team member out for an afternoon and works through a list prepared in advance, five or six short videos, each tied to a specific moment further down the campaign rather than filmed to be perfect on the day. A countdown video for three months to go. Another for one month to go. A speaker intro or two if any are confirmed yet. Real desks, real offices, whoever is free that afternoon.
Nothing goes out immediately. The clips sit ready until their moment in the calendar arrives, then get released, watched, and reposted with a new caption if the first version undersold it, the same trick that turned a thousand-view walk-through gag into six times that on the second run. It is a small, repeatable process, and it is exactly that discipline, filmed once and trusted to work, that made it so obvious, so fast, when something else stopped working.
The two experiments that lost trust
Mash Media publishes Conference News and Exhibition News, so the team was making weekly news videos. AI correspondents were tried first. Views declined, because people did not trust it.
Green screen came next, shot with the in-house production team. That declined too. You can see the tinge with the naked eye. People can tell the person is not where they say they are, Gina says, and that is enough to break it.
Both came out, and people went back in, with real team and real backgrounds. Confex marketing videos are now bulk-recorded with actual people in actual places, because that is the approach this community appreciates, and it shows up in the click-throughs.
Being the recognisable face is the social proof
Anyone who registered for Confex in advance saw Gina on the website. She will not call herself an influencer, “that's a little bit cringe”, but she has been in the industry a long time, mostly at Mash Media, and has spent eight years sharing what she has learned on LinkedIn. Most of the time, people know it is her.
That is the social proof you would normally try to buy with testimonials, she argues. Using somebody from your own team who the community already knows does the same job, and it makes the obvious point that there is a person behind the website. At Confex, a team of one.
Consistency is what buys you permission to be funny
You have about two seconds to hold somebody's attention on social or on a website. Something moving, something that pops up, a different angle coming in. Those are the tactics influencer marketing and user-generated content have used for years, and Gina sees applying that research to event marketing as a big part of lifting registration conversion.
But the memes and the sillier videos only work because everything else is consistent. Same tone of voice, same shade of purple, year after year, so people know subconsciously that this is Mash Media and Confex. Being bolder works when the brand underneath it is stable, and the alternative, she says, is being another brand that fails to catch your attention.
Copy the method
- Book one filming afternoon in your quietest month. Aim for five or six clips, not one perfect film.
- Record in sets that map to campaign moments, so the release schedule is decided before you shoot.
- No avatars, no green screen. Real rooms.
- Put the person the community already recognises in front of the camera.
Watch the full session