A million views.Zero buyers. Maybe.

Watching someone peel masking tape off a freshly painted tennis court is oddly satisfying. The white line appears. The corner is crisp. A million strangers watch it and feel slightly better about the world.

Now say you’re the Perth business that resurfaced the court. Do you make another one?

There are two lazy answers. One camp says a million views is obviously a win. The other says views are vanity unless someone asks for a quote. Both are wrong for the same reason. They judge the number before asking who it was.

Here’s my position. A million views from people who’ll never buy, and never mention you to anyone who will, is a cost, not an asset. You paid for the shoot, the edit and your team’s time. The bill doesn’t shrink because the number on the screen got big.

But “people who’ll never buy” is doing all the work in that sentence. Define it carefully, because most businesses define it far too narrowly.

Views measure delivery, not value

A view tells you the platform showed your film to someone. It doesn’t tell you who, whether they were paying attention or whether they knew it was yours.

That last part is where most content quietly fails. If someone watched with the sound off and scrolled before the end card, what connects that new court to this particular contractor? If the honest answer is nothing, you made a nice film for the category. Your competitors thank you.

The fix is simple and routinely skipped: put the brand in the picture, not the caption. The sign on the fence. The branded van in the background. The shirt on the person holding the tape. If the name only appears in the last two seconds, most viewers never get there.

Not buying today isn’t never buying

The opposite mistake is just as expensive. “Only leads count” sounds hard-headed. It’s actually short-sighted.

A school business manager who won’t need a court for three years is a very useful person to reach. So is a club committee member who’ll be in the room when the decision gets made. Neither will request a quote this week.

Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute makes the timing point with the 95:5 rule. In a category where buyers replace a supplier every five years or so, only around 20% are in the market in any given year, which works out to roughly 5% in a given quarter. The other 95% are future buyers. Dawes is clear the exact percentage varies by category. The principle doesn’t.

So content that only counts this week’s enquiries is designed to ignore most of the people who’ll buy from you. Use your own category’s buying cycle to decide how long you’ll wait for a response.

Three films for three jobs

The biggest mistake is judging every piece of content on the same number. Give each piece one job and measure it on that job. For the court contractor, an illustrative example, that means three films.

One for memory. Make the tape-peel film. Get the club’s permission, show where it happened and build the contractor’s name into the shot. Judge it on whether people in your service area saw it and linked it to you.

One for the decision. Film the difference between a court that needs fresh markings and one that needs a full resurface, and what gets inspected before anyone gives a price. It’ll reach a fraction of the audience. Success is a club secretary forwarding it before a committee meeting.

One for the purchase. Show how a resurface gets staged around fixtures, what the club needs to provide and what changes the timeline. Give it to sales. If it answers the same awkward question in ten live proposals, it’s done its job without troubling the national viewing figures.

Judge a scheduling guide on views and you’ll stop making scheduling guides. That’s how content programmes drift into entertaining strangers.

Don’t chase the accident

The real risk with a hit is following it to the wrong place. The contractor cuts three more tape-peel films. One does especially well because there’s a small mistake at the end and people argue about it in the comments. The next brief becomes “more mistakes”. By film six, the business has learnt a great deal about what strangers like arguing about and nothing about winning the next school contract.

Before a sequel, ask one question. Would another million views from this exact audience help the business? If yes, make it. Those corners really are satisfying.

What to do on Monday

1. List your last ten pieces of content. Next to each, write the one job it was meant to do: memory, decision or purchase. If you can’t, that’s your first finding.

2. Check where the brand shows up in each. If it’s only in the caption or end card, fix it in the next shoot.

3. For your biggest hit, find out who actually watched: location, age, whether they’re anywhere near a buyer.

4. Give sales a list of the five questions buyers ask most. Make the next three pieces answer them.

5. Before anyone films, write one line: we want these people to see this so they’ll remember, understand or do this, and we’ll know because of this. If the line says “everyone” and “engagement”, put the camera down.

A view is a delivery receipt. It isn’t a customer.

Sources & notes

• Professor John Dawes, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, “Advertising effectiveness and the 95-5 rule: most B2B buyers are not in the market right now” (the ratio is a heuristic and varies by category)

• The court contractor and the three films are illustrative.

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