PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Jessica Hughes: 00:00 Hey everyone. We are back. And when I say we, I mean, Randall Hughes and I.

Randall Hughes: 00:04 Hello.

Jessica Hughes: 00:05 We are starting a two part series today. The first part is, well, the entire two parts are about meaningful content, but today we are going to talk about making it. And then tomorrow, when we come back, we’re going to jump in to how to strategically distribute it. So let’s jump into making meaningful content.

Welcome to the Fork & Lens podcast, brought to you by VisCul. Ooh, smells delish.

When we say meaningful content, it’s something that has purpose and it aligns with the brand and that it’s not just fluff, filler, stupid stuff. And I say that in the most polite way possible.

Randall Hughes: 01:09 You know what that means. It means do some homework. I think there’s a lot of brands that … well, companies in general. I think they put out content because they think that it’s the thing that they’re supposed to do. You can spend a lot of money on content that will do nothing for you. It’s just adding noise to the pot. And yeah, just being really strategic with that, doing homework, understanding what your customers want from you and from your brand, and not just putting stuff out because it’s what you think they want. Do the research.

Jessica Hughes: 01:41 Quality over quantity.

Randall Hughes: 01:43 Correct.

Jessica Hughes: 01:43 Yes. So don’t just make something for content’s sake. Like we’re saying, it has to be quality. It has to have a purpose. It has to align with the brand. It has to do all the things. Something that I’ve found is make a check box list. Is that even a thing, a check box list?

Randall Hughes: 02:06 It’s just a checklist.

Jessica Hughes: 02:07 A checklist, okay. Note, we’re recording this late at night. So it’s a checklist, but it’s different qualifying factors to make it a valuable piece of content. So in my rule book, there should probably be about five different things that it has to tick the boxes on. And it has to at least check off three of those five boxes. If it doesn’t, it’s a dead deal. If it’s three, I would say, “Let’s have a conversation.” If it’s four, okay, I think we’re good to go. And five is a home run.

Randall Hughes: 02:40 So you’re saying you have a checklist that everybody should use, or you want to have a checklist of five-ish things in general?

Jessica Hughes: 02:45 I think it should be on a brand by brand basis. Does it speak to the client, customer, and does it fulfill the brand voice and mission? Those are some things to get you started. Maybe you have seasonal lines. Does it cover the color palette that aligns with the season? There’s so many things that those check boxes could be there for. And I think it just depends on the brand, quite honestly and what your messaging is supposed to be. But doing that gives you kind of this checks and balances to ideas. Otherwise, you’re probably creating stuff that doesn’t need to be created.

Randall Hughes: 03:27 Probably.

Jessica Hughes: 03:28 Probably. So needless to say, you don’t need endless amounts of content to regularly come up with, but when you’re starting to produce really good quality things, you also have the ability to be purposeful in that creation, and being able to pull multiple pieces of content out of one production.

For instance, back in 2017, we traveled to 13 different states and three different countries to produce an entire series for Ahold Delhaize called Fresh Stories. And whenever we traveled, we got content for … long form video, short form video, photography assets, and all sorts of things. And actually, looking back now and knowing what’s available to us just four short years later, not even, there’s so much more content that we could’ve pulled out of those shoots, whether it was audio or being able to produce carousels and instant experiences and landing pages and micro sites or podcast material.

Randall Hughes: 04:32 I think that actually brings up a good point [crosstalk 00:04:34] is because when we were doing that, some of those content things weren’t even available to us.

Jessica Hughes: 04:39 No, they weren’t.

Randall Hughes: 04:41 The point that I’m trying to make here is that you can go back in time a little bit-

Jessica Hughes: 04:45 You can go back in time.

Randall Hughes: 04:46 … and you can look at some of the content that you’ve produced in the past and say, “Can I repurpose this? How do I use this again? Do I do I need to send a crew out, my agency out, to gather more content, or do I have something here that I can work with them on to produce something new for me?”

Jessica Hughes: 05:03 And honestly, Randall Hughes brings up a really good point because a lot of people who just listen to him say that are like, “Maybe you shouldn’t say that. You’re going to put yourself out of a job.” But if you’re working with the right agency partner, they will make those recommendations and say, “Why are you sending us out again when …” let’s say, because we live where we live, “to shoot another crabs video?” when we can say, “Well, we have plenty of footage. We can repurpose it for these additional five assets and you don’t have to pay production fees. Instead, it’s just different edits and breakdowns of that content.”

Randall Hughes: 05:36 Yeah, exactly.

Jessica Hughes: 05:37 It’s so much more cost effective. And honestly, it gives your campaigns so much more life and it also makes it very specific for every single platform that you’re posting to as well. You think about long form video, short form, video, audio, photography, digital assets that can be produced with a lot of those individual assets that I just listed off. The opportunities are endless, really.

Randall Hughes: 06:04 Yeah. I would say, I do think if you’re producing content for right now, you’re going to do a flight of say a three month cycle of content, I do believe it’s a good thing to kind of come up with a plan on how you want to use this, that content, and how you want to execute on that. Because when you’re working with an agency and you’re going to do your marketing, it is good to have some clear understanding of what you want and how you want to get there. It can help direct the type of content you get. It can even help direct what cameras are used and how it’s shot. A lot of things are done vertically now, but if you need horizontal and vertical and square and-

Jessica Hughes: 06:45 Then we’re going to bring in a more expensive camera.

Randall Hughes: 06:48 4:5, and 16:9, and 9:16. You can have all these different formats. If you’re shooting on a DSLR, even if you’re shooting 4K, it can be difficult for that. So I think you either need to make a choice of going with a production agency who has the ability to shoot a much higher resolution, or saying, “Okay, we’re going to commit to shooting vertical for this, or we’re going to shoot horizontal for it,” understanding that you may not have the option to go the other way. Now that said, you could have a smaller crew go out and you have one crew member shooting vertical, the other shooting horizontal. But again, it always poses challenges because then you don’t have as much editing room in that. So I really think just thinking through it, understanding what you want, knowing that there’s always potential in the future to continue to expand on things.

But like I said before, there’s so many opportunities now where technology has changed or how we use technology has changed that the different platforms are building new ways for us to consume content. And we’re always … I hate to say the word reactive, but we’re always having to react a little bit to exactly what different platforms need when.

Jessica Hughes: 08:03 And what the new trend is.

Randall Hughes: 08:05 Yeah. I mean, there’s a new platform that came out this year called Quibi, and Quibi’s designed to be able to run stuff vertically and horizontally, both ways-

Jessica Hughes: 08:15 In one segment.

Randall Hughes: 08:16 In one segment. And the beauty of it is that the actual story has the ability to change a little bit because you can cut out your surroundings a little bit and things. So anyway, a little bit of a tangent, but …

Jessica Hughes: 08:26 It’s all good. But getting back to that checklist, one of the things that I always ask during client conversations whenever we’re working on things is, “What platforms is this content going to go on, and on which platforms do you want to accomplish different things?” And when I mean that, or when I say that, what I mean is, do you want it to educate the viewer? Do you want it to inspire? Do you want to just put out an aesthetically pleasing looking thing that really doesn’t have a message behind it? You really need to think through what are we trying to achieve on each platform other than a call to action with click-through sales. Because we all know the call to action is there at some point in time and not every post should have a call to action, mind you.

Randall Hughes: 09:16 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Jessica Hughes: 09:17 But I think you need to decide, are we here to educate customers? We work in food and beverage, so if it’s a recipe that would be educational. Or are you looking to inspire someone? Maybe it’s a new ingredient or maybe it’s a tablescape or maybe it’s inspiring a new way to do a family dinner or all these different things. So there’s different ways of going about it, but making sure that … LinkedIn is more about educating than inspiring, and Facebook is more about inspiration than education. Or whatever your mix of messaging should be, that’s what you need to make sure when you’re creating that list of assets that you want out of a production, what they’re meant to achieve in terms of messaging.

Randall Hughes: 10:07 Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s okay to go down different routes for different platforms like Jessica Hughes was saying, but still making sure that you’re building cohesion within the brand. So because inevitably somebody, one of your customers is going to be on LinkedIn. Most people have jobs, a lot of them are on LinkedIn. You may find that same customer finding you on Facebook or Instagram or wherever other places they might find you. And even though it’s different content, it’s still building brand loyalty and trust throughout those different platforms. So just make sure that you’re continuing on that path.

Jessica Hughes: 10:44 I agree. It’s interesting because you want to make sure everything is cohesive. I’ll go back to that cohesive statement. Everything should be cohesive as a brand, but that doesn’t mean that it should be canned or mix-matched. It’s making sure that everything looks and feels and sounds like you as a person embodied by a company.

Randall Hughes: 11:11 Right, exactly.

Jessica Hughes: 11:13 Okay. So what are some other ways that people can use content beyond social?

Randall Hughes: 11:19 I’ve always thought about this we talk to customers. A lot of times sending a crew out to do a video production or something like that, it can get pricey depending on what you want, what the need is. And then there’s always that thought of, “Okay, I make this one video. Well, now what? What do I do with that?” And that’s where we always say, like we talked about before, there’s so many other things that you can get out of a shoot, and so many different pieces of content that you can get. I mean, the possibilities are endless. And I think thinking beyond social is a brilliant way to do it as well. I mean, obviously there’s broadcast or your traditional media. There’s still, I call it analog advertising, your billboards and things. You can do that.

But then there’s also ways, even if you’re not running a piece of a campaign on social, you can put out a quote block from somebody you went and did a video with, and you had an amazing interview with them. And maybe there’s a piece of content that didn’t quite make the cut of the final video, but it’s an incredible piece that can ride along. And you have this amazing photo from the shoot, you can, in a creative way, do something with the quote. There’s things like that. You can create in-store signage if you have stores. You can use that content that way. You can put together direct mailers and other pieces of physical marketing that would go out to customers.

Just think about all the different possibilities of things that can be done. If you say, “I want to send people out to get as much content as I can possibly get,” and come back and maybe only have a plan for 40% of it, say, the video. That’s the part that we’re going to do first. We’re going to make this video, a short video and maybe an instant experience with it. Amazing. Okay, well now what? There’s got to be more there that that can come out of that, and how can I use that?

Like I said, if you have a store, take it into the store, do something with it there. If you have display screens how can you use You’re not doing narrative or a doc video, but you’re just using B roll and you’re creating your in-store signage that way, and screens, moving screens and things. So I just think there’s so much that you can do with content to be able to get it out there. It’s just thinking through and it’s working with your agency to make them think through it as well. We’re all creatives. We can figure out creative solutions on how to make the dollar go as far as it can possibly go.

Jessica Hughes: 13:47 Well, it just comes back to understanding your customer and knowing all of their touch points. At what point are they looking to hear from you? At what point are they capable of interacting with you? And how do you meet them at those points with content? We talk about in-store. We talk about even advertising. We talk about social. We talk about websites. We talk about all those different pieces, but they’re all touch points that the customer has. And depending on what you do, that could go to point of sale, that could go to apparel. That could go to all these other pieces as well that really make things stand out. But, but, but, but we have part two coming and we’re going to talk about strategic distribution. And I think we’ll be able to dive into some of those things in a little bit more detail. So we’ll talk to you tomorrow.

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