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By Laurie Fullerton | Freelance Writer

January 26, 2016 | 3 min read

While marketers may find an ease and fluency with every level of fast innovation, occasionally one feels like the waiter in Fast Technology and the Slow Waiter who is depicted in a series of videos created by Tim Washer, vice president of marketing at Cisco.

The former comedy writer and video content producer offers a series of videos that encompass almost everything B2B content should be. “It’s informative, it’s entertaining and it humanizes Cisco’s brand,” said Jason Miller of LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions Blog.

Washer, who was a comedy writer for the David Letterman show and a student of Amy Poehler, is featured in the videos as a waiter who ends up having a conversation with real CIOs including those from Safeway, Western Union, ADP, and Grupo Modelo.

By creating a fun, casual atmosphere for a real conversation, the CIOs relax and also

concentrate on having a conversation the waiter can understand.

In one video in the series, which was actually filmed at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna and was entirely improvisational, the slow waiter approaches a table with a myriad of problems ranging from sending a new employee out to buy more pork chops, giving her his credit card and license although it is her first day. He has problems like running out of dinner rolls and having day old potato salad.

Each customer hears his problems and offer rapid-fire insight into innovative technologies that can solve his problem. In the video entitled 'Trust, Verification and Pork Chops' the comedian/waiter ends up sitting down with the head of Global Technical Security Services at ADP, who outlines the highly complex security at ADP but brings the conversation to a layman’s level and explains to the waiter that he must conduct the necessary security steps before handing his credit card and license to a virtual stranger. The result is far more effective than the simple informational or instructional video.

The waiter makes the interviews comedic and and Tim also peppers in some one good one liners, “Spray cheese – that’s innovation that matters.”

The real tech leaders play along with the gag, showing a more human side than they would in a strictly informative video. But they also manage to get across a huge amount of technical information in between the laughs. This video series is almost everything B2B content should be: It’s informative, it’s entertaining, and it humanizes Cisco’s brand.

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