Is this the best product demo ever?
It’s not the most reverent product demo that’s ever been shown. Then again, it would be naiive to expect any sort of family friendly subtleness from any video featuring Steve-O and Ryan Reynolds.
Why were Steve-O and Ryan Reynolds demoing a saas product in the first place? Did a mad lib come to life?
Actor turned serial enterpreneur Reynolds has a majority ownership in MNTN, an advertising platform. If you’ve been in marketing like me, a lot of SaaS product demos start to look alike after a while. Some of the platforms have a high barrier to entry and require certifications to really use them well (looking at you Salesforce…).
But this…well you just have to watch it.
There is a lot going on here. The video is funny. And there’s probably a lot of discussion that we could have on the pros and cons of tapping into their target buyer’s nostalgia by having Steve-O be the featured person doing what he does best: take unnecessary pain.
But what I really got out of this is the effectiveness of the product demo itself.
Why was this one of the best product demos I’ve seen?
The actual demo of MNTN Steve-O does is designed perfectly for our current ADD, multi-tasking audiences.
If you’ve invested in any B2B tech yourself, you’ve sat through a lot of demos. They all start to sound the same at some point. What this demo does great is show off the product but also have something else going on in the background - Steve-O in excruciating pain trying to power through it.
Oddly enough, I think the idea of having multiple things going on at once probably kept the audience’s attention better than had they just gone through features one-by-one. That alone likely kept people from opening another screen or picking up their phone to do something else while the demo ran.
Steve-O using the MNTN platform while also in terrible pain showed how easy the platform is to use. If someone who isn’t a trained media buyer could successfully navigate the platform with one of the hottest substances on earth inside of his body, you too could onboard the tool really quickly.
All-in-all, the demo:
Held your attention by having multiple things happening at once, satisfying our internet-induced ADD brains.
Showed, in a rather unorthodox way, how easy a platform was to use without an awkwardly quiet demo or cheesy cartoon with canned corporate music in the background.
There’s a lot we can learn from here. How could you demo a product, tell a story, or make a pitch in a way that people will actually pay attention? How could your story stick?