“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’” – Dave Barry Barry was talking about meetings, of course, but a webinar is often just a meeting with a marketing budget and better lighting. I have been reading a new report from Zoom about webinars, which was a bit like reading a report from a barber on the importance of regular haircuts. It is unashamedly self-interested. It is also, thankfully, useful in places, so I extracted the good bits and added a few of my own for your reading pleasure. The report’s central complaint is that most companies treat the live webinar as the destination when it is really the departure lounge. People pour everything into the hour webinar itself, then inevitably, after the recording, it goes into a folder, no one touches it, and months of potential audience attention evaporate without anyone noticing. Which brings me to trains. Rory Sutherland has his famous example about the Eurostar. They spent roughly six billion pounds shortening the London to Paris journey by around forty minutes. An entirely logical thing to do for an accountant. Rory’s creative person’s suggestion was that, for a fraction of that sum, you could have installed free Wi-Fi, hired supermodels to walk the aisles serving Château Petrus, and had passengers begging for the train to go slower. Marketing departments do the accounts thing constantly, we optimise registration numbers, attendance rates and cost per lead, because those are the dimensions that come with a number attached. Meanwhile, the two things that genuinely determine whether anyone remembers the event at all receive no attention whatsoever, largely because no one has worked out how to put them in a numerical report. Here are those two things, and I promise this becomes practical. 1. The Peak-End Rule. People do not store experiences as averages. We store the peak and we store the ending, and we are almost comically indifferent to how long the whole thing takes. Which means the final three minutes of your webinar are doing more work than the forty in the middle, and you are almost certainly currently using them to read out housekeeping notes and apologise for overrunning. Instead, put your best story at the end, your most useful, most repeatable idea. The thing somebody will share with a friend later that week. 2. The pratfall effect. In 1966, Elliot Aronson played people a recording of a quiz contestant. In one version, the contestant spilt coffee on himself at the end. That version was rated more likeable. The catch is that it only worked for the contestant who had already proved he was good. The way to apply this to your webinar is that yes, you should prep it well, but don’t aim for broadcast-quality polish. A webinar that sounds natural and not overproduced will be better believed, remembered and shared. The three key takeaways I found from the Zoom webinar report were: 1. Build one format and run it repeatedly. Novelty is expensive, time-consuming, and nobody in the audience wants or needs your format to be original. 2. Pre-record whichever segments reliably go wrong. Keep the Q&A live; the awkward questions are often the best bit (sometimes they will feed into my pratfall effect tip above). 3. Treat the recording as raw material rather than a trophy; most decent AI video tools will now turn one session into five usable things in the time it takes you to make a coffee. To summarise: your audience will remember the last three minutes and the moment something went slightly wrong. The rest is admin. Now go and open that folder, the one with all the recordings in it, and get to work. If you enjoy this sort of thinking, our Advertising Masters miniMBA course is full of it.