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How Science Fiction Shaped a Business Niche in Customer Stories
151 Plays1 year ago
In the business of commercial film production, making brand case-studies are often seen as just a step above an infomercial. But that’s when they are done poorly. When executed well, they can transcend advertising and become content that not only provides information but also entertains and delights. That’s the value proposition SHEP Films offers their clients. Listen to hear Brice Budke talk about how the team at SHEP Films utilizes their sci-fi world building muscles to treat case studies as an art form unto themselves, and why that’s good for their client’s business and their own.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Crossing the Axis'
00:00:06
Speaker
You're listening to Crossing the Axis, the podcast that explores the commercial side of film production with your host, James Kebles.
00:00:25
Speaker
Welcome listeners and thank you for tuning into the show.
Specialization vs Generalization in Film Production
00:00:29
Speaker
If you've been listening to recent episodes or reading my articles, then you know I'm a champion of production companies who operate as specialists as opposed to being more generalist.
00:00:40
Speaker
You can see this play out when a production company has a particular skill, they market to clients. Sometimes this is like a vertical niche, filming food, for instance, sports, outdoor adventure, and so on. But it can also be more horizontal business focus that crosses categories like specializing in action sequences, design focus, animation, or narrative live action.
00:01:01
Speaker
In either case, having a tight positioning allows the production company to more easily differentiate themselves from other competitors, talk about their strengths, and ultimately demand higher fees for their services. Now, let me be clear, positioning doesn't always mean it's exclusively what you do. A golfer may aim for a hole in one, but they'll accept the landing on the green, for instance. Besides, we all take projects for a variety of reasons, whether it's the money, a client you like, or you have the extra capacity at the time.
00:01:30
Speaker
But positioning is what you advertise. It's what you want to do the most because it's what you do the best. It's what you say you do because it's one of the things you can claim you do better than just about anyone else.
Shep Films' Focus on Customer Storytelling
00:01:43
Speaker
That's why I was so struck by some recent posts by Shep Films who seem to be pushing customer story production a lot on their website and the social media. This was profound to me because Shep Films is a pretty big deal in the more glamorous commercial making space and a knock it out of the park leader in feature film production with their critically acclaimed film Prospect, which is an incredible movie by the way, and I highly recommend folks stream it.
00:02:09
Speaker
So to explain all of this, I'm joined today by Bryce Buttke, one of the founders of Shep Films, to help me understand why a production company so respected for their sci-fi world-building vision would be leading their marketing efforts with customer stories. Bryce, welcome to the show. Hello, hello. Happy to be here. Explain yourself.
00:02:32
Speaker
You set me up like I should just be making all my money doing sci-fi films. Industry works these days. So did I get this right? Have I mischaracterized your entire company? No, no, no. You, you nailed it. You are very perceptive, very perceptive. Okay. So my eyes aren't deceiving me. You are kind of, I use, this is not a real word word, but it's my word, productizing customer stories. Is that how I'm seeing in this? Totally. Yeah. I mean, I can go off on the, you know, probably 20 minute explanation, but that's not fun.
00:03:02
Speaker
Sort of it is, I mean, yes, we are known for doing sci-fi films, right? Like my business partner, Z-Girl, Chris Caldwell. Very good at world building, made an amazing film with Prospect. The narrative doesn't pay the bills, or at least doesn't for us yet, right? So we're keeping the lights on, keeping our mortgages paid with commercial work.
00:03:23
Speaker
And part of that's been on choice. We haven't wanted to move to LA and really get our bills paid via doing work on other people's films, going more on that side, because we like to create a freedom that comes with being able to tell our own stories. So we very intentionally keep being our commercial business alive for that side, but we also just really like it. It's a nice balance. It can be a
00:03:48
Speaker
It is pretty exhausting working on any amount of narrative, any amount of films. It takes a lot of you and they just go forever, man. Two, three-year projects. On timeline-wise, I love diving into a story, getting in six, eight weeks, getting back out, diving into another one. You get to go through a full arc and you just get exposed to a lot of other stuff.
00:04:12
Speaker
But that's why we do commercials in general, right? But you're asking about customer stories, right? Yeah. I want to talk about what a customer story is not. So you're saying customer stories.
00:04:25
Speaker
That's not a case study or is that a case study or is it a different way? You can kind of brand them however you want. I like the idea of customer stories. I mean, everyone knows these videos, right? You show up on someone's website, you click on their like customers tab or they're describing something and it's some talking head explaining how they used a product and all these things and it kind of rambles on stock track behind it. I think part of it is just customer stories feel much more elevated because we're trying to make something much more elevated.
00:04:52
Speaker
But in short, whether the case studies, customer stories, we are working with a client to tell their marketing story, their brand story through their customer's words. So however you want to package up the brand, that's what these are. We are talking to customers of our clients to help tell our clients marketing mission, and they can be done real poorly.
00:05:16
Speaker
Yeah, I did a whole bunch of research, what I was thinking about doing this podcast with you.
Transition to Customer Stories
00:05:21
Speaker
Oh, the explainer videos or the testimony of videos or, you know, just like, no, no, this, this can't be how it's done. There are corporations that are doing this. And I thought,
00:05:31
Speaker
there might be like a, you know, I started unpacking it more and why I wanted to have this conversation with you because I actually saw this opportunity in the marketplace. I was like, Oh God, I see it. There's a big gap here. Is that one of the things that you see or is that one of the motivators or is it just accidental? Or did you, are you, I started out my career, not in video production, right? I was in, I was a
00:05:54
Speaker
consultant, mostly with Microsoft, you know, the consultant, not like McKinsey, but like higher paid temp workers, right? Like in the sense of, you know, I'm not making minimum wage, but we're going in trying to do staff augmentation, you know, doing project management style things. Came out of that right out of school and did that for five years in Microsoft, often in marketing realms. But while I was doing that, Zeke and Chris were fresh out of school and doing these docu-style case study things for our college we went to.
00:06:23
Speaker
And it was kind of their stepping stone. And so it was this spot where it's like, it was their stepping stone and they were quickly trying to get out of that to things that were scripted, right? Like the glamorous ones. Like, you know, everyone wants the lotto commercial. And so it's kind of where our roots were. We had this one, honestly, I think it's been viewed like over a hundred thousand, maybe 200,000 times. It's called the what is gray pants video. It's this lighting design for Minnesota. And it was like the big one.
00:06:46
Speaker
for them where they really like cracked something. And it's honestly, we still get referrals for it all the time. I will get it like that one, like that one was a decade old, but they cracked something there. And it tells the, it's more of like a brand portrait, but it's the same, you know, that one's not a customer story. It's about brand talking about themselves, but it's interview-based. It uses a lot of B-roll. It's docu-style, not scripted. And that's where they started, right? And I think that's where a lot of production companies start. And we're trying to get out of it into the other things. And what we found
00:07:15
Speaker
is we, through a random circumstance of events, were paired up with this client who really was trying to do these better. And it was like, all right, we've done these a lot. We just haven't been doing them recently. But yeah, I'm intrigued. I would love to do these better. I mean, that was now four or five years ago. And we, cracking that open, it was like, oh, these, one, Zeke and Chris, back even before I joined,
00:07:42
Speaker
had a method that was really leaning towards doing these better. But we just kind of left it on the shelf because it's like, oh no, we want to go show Seahawks fighting kaiju monsters. And we want to go brush off this script and all that stuff. And that feels like the pinnacle, if you will, of commercials. But we came back around to these customer stories and be like, no, I really like doing these. Part of it is that there's so many of them are done so poorly and they don't have to be. And it's a spot where it's like, oh, this is
00:08:09
Speaker
I get to go fly around the world, the country, and talk to people about their real stories and just how technology is changing for us. It's often technology stories, right? It doesn't have to be changing their lives and their business. I have been in snack factories. I have been in Italian furniture factories.
00:08:27
Speaker
I mean, I've been in accounting offices, right? I miss this because I had a kid born around the same time, but, you know, we're up in the arc, in the Yukon territories doing one, like, get to go around, hear real people's stories. And probably it's like, they're good. Like, when you're doing these wallets, like, you're telling a marketing story, but you're also telling, like, this customer story, and we get so many compliments from the customers, which is like,
Vetting and Aligning Customer Stories
00:08:50
Speaker
Let me ask you a question about this. So if you have a client that wants to do the customer story, how deeply do you get into finding the right story or finding the right customer where you want the story to be about the customer, right? Their customer, they're the hero, the brand, your client is the guide.
00:09:11
Speaker
They, right. And their customer is the hero. How do you get involved in finding them? We have, usually we're in the spot of vetting. The finding the customers can be, I mean, I would happily do it, but usually it's one where you have to be pretty integrated with their like operations, right? Like there's going to be account teams that are like fielding, you know, potential customers who are there. There's going to be engineering, like who's on the beta test of whatever the new technology is. Cause a lot of this is
00:09:37
Speaker
I mean there's a lot of constraints that make this tough of like you're wanting to land a marketing message on a new product but you need a customer who's been using that new product and those are kind of mutually exclusive other than like beta tests or like early releases. And so you're finding like who has been using this product that's still in the marketing cycle of trying to hype, right? Like they're part of the new sales motion. So often we're in a spot where we are working with like
00:10:01
Speaker
we're working with our clients to look at okay we have this we have this marketing goal that's laddering up to this like larger campaign whether it's an event often events right events are these larger.
00:10:12
Speaker
these larger moments on their marketing calendar. We have these, like this customer, potentially these customers with these different stories. Do you think we can mash these? Like, do you see the story there or use it? I mean, honestly, how hard do we have to pull teeth to get that story to align, right? Cause sometimes you're just served up and you're like, I don't barely need to prep for this. I can show up and they're just going to tell me what I need. And other times you're really stretching the reality of the customer story and the needs of the marketing message that needs to happen, right?
00:10:42
Speaker
So we don't often get hired out to go find the customers just to kind of concisely answer that, but we are often in the vetting stage. I mean, this is one where it's like, hopefully we're trusted enough for someone and I'm like, I think you should cancel this project. Like this isn't a good cuss, like we'll do it, right? But like maybe save your budget and like come back when there's like a customer who like really lands this, but like otherwise like we will make, we'll always make it work, but you know, it's how much heavy lifting do we have to do to like land that story?
00:11:11
Speaker
And who are you working with the most when you're going after this? Are you working with the sales team department that's trying to sell their product and get customers or is it the CMOs team or is it a combination? Like who's your primary client? Change is a bit company by company. Normally, if a company is big enough to have a customer evidence, you know, customer advocacy, customer storytelling team, they have different names kind of wherever you're at, then that's usually under central marketing somewhere or brand marketing and whatever this customer is called.
00:11:41
Speaker
But they usually are then acting as an internal agency towards the product marketing managers or the sales enablement manager like marketing folks.
00:11:50
Speaker
Cause normally what you're doing is you are, you are highlighting a feature. If you're within a tech company, a product, if you're in a more product featured company, and that is owned by a product marketing person who is then working with customer evidence and the account teams to like blend. Cause you need someone who knows the customer, you need someone who knows the product. And then if the company is big enough, you have these, you know, these people who are experts in customer evidence kind of bringing those together. But if it's a smaller company, we're usually working with the product market
00:12:17
Speaker
right on that side. They're, they're the ones really built to get this, to get these goods out. But it's, it's usually part of events. Sometimes we'll work directly with the event team or like sales enablement, like field sales enablement. Like these are being used by people out in field sales to land big, big deals, right? Like it's the, you're trying to land some large deal and you're showing a customer like them and really getting that like heartfelt message to kind of like, either as a conversation opener or as like a seal the deal with the CEO before they need to like sign on the
00:12:47
Speaker
I was asking the question because I was imagining the different groups or different teams and a client might have a different point of view about what they think is important for the story. I was thinking which team gets it. Entire process built because it makes a good story, but it's entire process built to get through the various
00:13:09
Speaker
toll gates of internal sign off in order to get one of these landed and not have it like watered down because there, there are so many cooks in this kitchen, right? Like there are so many cooks in this kitchen. Um, so yeah, no, no. How deeply do you get involved with the creative development then of the kind of the script writing and the story?
Turnkey Solutions and Skill Refinement
00:13:27
Speaker
And we, I mean, we can do this turnkey end to end, right? Like a lot of it is trying to figure out like what the,
00:13:35
Speaker
who what our client has in house that we're supplementing, right? Like if it is a product marketing manager who like has no video background and they're being asked to do evidence and never done it before, we can just we can handle it. And often, otherwise, you know, sometimes they have people
00:13:51
Speaker
on their team who can supplement some of the scripting or the interviewing or other portions of it. But the high level, what we kind of need every time is like we need, we, I am not in the endless meetings that are in most like large corporate bureaucracies these days of knowing what the like end goal marketing message is. But once we know that we can be like this does or doesn't serve it.
00:14:14
Speaker
Like there's like, I knew you really want to talk about sustainability in that land theft, but you're muddying the message, right? And we need to cut that out if the end goal is empowerment of frontline workers, right? Like sustainability is just, it's an aside. I don't know when I talk about it, put it in the written case study. Don't put it in the video case study.
00:14:31
Speaker
I'm actually that makes me think about how far you might get involved in the impact or the goals of these videos. Do you get involved and say, hey, we could figure out like the media buying of this or placement might be for getting the call to actions that you want or I mean, because you're marketing yourselves as these customer story experts. So how far you know, the further you could get down that pipeline, the more money you can make. We could. I mean, we could get into media buying, we can get into those. I think part of this is like we know
00:15:01
Speaker
we are actively moving away from a more like generalized set of services, right? Like, look, I can make a sci-fi film. I can make a customer story. I can make a really bad case study if you really needed me to do that, right? I don't want to, but I probably could. You know, we've done a short film for Sony, you know, that was part of marketing a new phone. We like filmed something with their phone. So it was like heavy integration with their engineering team and working on the color side. So we went deep onto that side. Part of this is like, no, we,
00:15:28
Speaker
we're trying to get away from generalized, right? Because part of it is like, you're scattered, right? Like you're, you're working on one thing than another. And it's like, I want to get better at these things, right? I don't just want to, like, we, we like doing video production. We like doing these marketing things, but I also like, I like, I like being good at what we're doing, right? Like we, on the like Shep originals, the narrative sides, like we were really digging into world building. And that means sometimes we're putting up art installations and sometimes we're doing films and
00:15:55
Speaker
Sometimes we're doing things adjacent to that, right? Like building series Bibles and run from there. And we're getting a lot better at it, right? On the commercial side, it's like, no, we were digging into customer stories. And part of it is like, I don't want to dig into customer stories media buying. Like I don't really want to be doing event production, even if events are where our videos are landing. Cause I think we're going to get worse at this, right? Like they're, this is an art form. There are so, I mean, they seem easy. Maybe, I don't know.
00:16:21
Speaker
They seem like a lot of companies stepping stone into video production because you are a small crew. You can do it with two or three people. You can have relatively cheap equipment and the person who writes directs can edit like you're pretty self-contained, right? So you can offer pretty low rates if you're starting out because it's just all your money. And it shows. I've looked at a lot of them. That's, that's the, that honestly, it's a, they're, they're part of it is skills, like part of it is budget and resourcing, right? But part of it is like, there, there are so many constraints on this that it,
00:16:51
Speaker
In order to land with a really good case study, customer story, whatever you want to call it, you have to really know how to balance these. You don't want to show up with a crew of 20 people into some snack factory in Australia to get the perfect lighting of chickpeas running down like a conveyor belt, because you're going to so disrupt that customer's operations that they will never do something like this for your client again.
Balancing Authenticity and Marketing
00:17:15
Speaker
You have to go in and you have to make that customer like your client even more when you leave, which is low touch.
00:17:21
Speaker
high professionalism. And that's like, that's an arc. But on the other side, it's like you're being asked by a client to do like the highest level of work possible. So it's like, I need the best four people possible flying out there with really lightweight travel gear more than I'm just going to hedge my bets and throw, you know, 20 people at it to make sure I get what I need. I'm a part of, I mean, that's one microcosm of this, but it's, there are so many levers you have to pull and it isn't just throwing money at it.
00:17:49
Speaker
Right? Like this isn't a throw gear, throw money, throw, it's like, this is an expertise problem, right? And you're, we're not going to get better if we're not just continually doing and refining. And so let's talk about when they get it wrong. Cause that's the fun stuff. I mean, I see, you see some of them going for drama and it's not there. They like the problem we had, but it's not, it just don't believe any of it. You feel like it's a paid advertisement. It's not.
00:18:19
Speaker
How do you get around that? How do you create the adversity story or the risk story or the social proof without it coming across as artificial saccharine? I mean, the like cheap key to this or like the, you know, Pythian one-liners, it's about authenticity, right? And you can smell inauthenticity quite a ways away, but it's like you have to tell a story that exists. And that is the documentary side of it. But at the same time, kind of the other pole is like, we are not,
00:18:49
Speaker
Journalists. We are not documentarians. We are marketers. And so it's the pull of those two and you get it wrong by leaning too hard on either side.
00:18:57
Speaker
Right? Like you go in there and you think you're a journalist and you listen to what the customer wants to say, and you just kind of package that up as like a chat GPT, you know, re, you know, condensed story of it. You're going to hear some nice little story about this company. And you're really going to miss the, like the larger marketing message. And that's just going to make it fall flat within the activities that your client's trying to use it for. Right? Like it might be a nice video, but it has no use.
00:19:25
Speaker
And at best case, you're like, cool, I learned a lot about this company, but why is this like, why, why is this on, you know, insert clients, you know, profile, and you go too hard to the marketing side and you are the worst is when you are having essentially customers teleprompt something that some marketing person obviously wrote. Right. Like if you are inserting a script into some customers like hand to read, like you have failed on so many levels, because it's like, they're not professional actors that you can tell they're scripted and also
00:19:54
Speaker
unless you have a really good script writer, you're going to write a script that's made to be read, not on a screen, not read out loud. It's just going to sound funny. It's word choice. It's cadence, right?
00:20:06
Speaker
And so it's like either of those sides, and so it's having to find that middle. But ironically, the middle of that is we sometimes you have to fake a lot of things to lend that authenticity. And I think that's the line that a lot of companies or a lot of clients don't cross. We got a compliment once on creating one of the most authentic
00:20:28
Speaker
customer stories, this, you know, exact get this company has seen. And I looked at it, I was like, you got to be kidding me. Great story. I want to be clear. I love this story. It was a rush project. It was for a big event.
00:20:41
Speaker
but it was for some company that worked out of a co-working space. And so we rented an office, dressed it to make the office feel like with this company's office should feel like despite the fiscal realities of this company being they mostly work from home, they need a co-working space, right? So we like dressed the whole office that was completely fictional. We, they're one of like the customer's customers, you know, it was a news organization
00:21:08
Speaker
We were not able to film a news organization because of constraints. So I hired actors I rented a location and I like created a fake news organization that we filmed as though they were using this customer's products We did screen replace with the effects some of the screen replace because it wasn't quite screen ready So we like did a bunch of screen replace did a bunch of like, you know UI style VFX creation landed in there. So it was essentially a completely fake story but
00:21:37
Speaker
Or fake visuals, I should say, but it was very illustrative of what this company was going for.
Sci-Fi Skills in Customer Storytelling
00:21:43
Speaker
And it felt real. The like interview, the whole like talk track was completely real customer voice, everything from there. But yeah, it felt like, Oh man, this company's so cool. And look at this news organization, all of this. But it was like, no, those were actors paid, paid locations across the board, but it was done really well.
00:21:59
Speaker
it landed that authenticity more than if I showed up in the co-working space and filmed that it would have had like a dissonance of like, why are you in a co-working space? Like it just, it wouldn't have felt right for the story. And so sometimes you have to know when to be inauthentic in air quotes, right? In order to better land that authenticity. And I think that's a hurdle that a lot of people run up against. We're like, well, that's not the real story. It's like, it doesn't, this is, everyone knows this is marketing. And like the thing that you have to commit to is that you're not,
00:22:27
Speaker
Any video that ever, we always get customer approval, not client approval, client always client approval, but customer. Because it's a lot of like, if they watch it, like that's not my story, then it's never going anywhere. So it has to pass that line of authenticity. But the dressing of it often they're like, man, I really thought I bungled that interview and I sound so articulate. And you're like, oh, yeah, I must have just been nerves. It's like, no, I reworked half of your sentences.
00:22:52
Speaker
in order to make you say the point a little bit more clearly and a little more concisely. And they're like, oh, yeah. I was like, oh, it's all you. Well, listen, customer success stories is nothing new. And many, many, many people do it. But what stood out to me when you guys went for it, first of all, you were claiming it in a really bold way. And that's what struck me. And then when I thought about why you were claiming it, I thought,
00:23:14
Speaker
oh it's that world-building sci-fi part of their brain that they're like i was like oh i get it like that actually can lend itself well in my understanding of it anyway a customer story you want
00:23:29
Speaker
your client's customer to feel like they're actually in that world, right? To sign on, to become a member or whatever the subscription might be, you know, to buy the service. And your sci-fi experience, is that, is the same, is it the same muscle that you're using? Do you use the same sets? Do you, do you have, are there any, are there Easter eggs that I can find from Prospect? I mean, you have, yeah, no, they, you're, you're right.
00:23:59
Speaker
I think it's a funny way to think about it, but I think you're 100% correct, right? A lot of that muscle is the world building, but it's also, I mean, it's the sci-fi world building. Part of it is just the skills we have learned having to create such big budget films. Well, big budget compared to commercials, small budget compared to...
00:24:17
Speaker
other people, we were relatively efficient with prospect, but you know, it was still $4 million and maybe should have been eight, but it was. Well, I was going to say that nobody making a sci-fi movie is hard with any budget. Making a sci-fi movie successful and believable for 4 million bucks is talent. That is where I have to give you some shout outs. I'm very impressed. I appreciate that. It's part of that world building, right? It's part of, you know, but it's all the little things that go into that, right? I mean,
00:24:45
Speaker
For sci-fi world building right we are extensively creating in world brands right and different typefaces and all these different things when you like you know if we if we were to go to a whatever rom com you can just grab a bunch of like you could make the rip-off Oreos and whatnot right and go from there but we have to like what is a sci-fi Oreo right and all these layers and layers of reality that are going
00:25:07
Speaker
When you take that over to this customer success, customer story, it's figuring out what those layers are, which similar to other things. It's how you're pulling in the score, right? We will always do a custom score because you're not going to get that reality. You're not going to get that emotional arc if you're just doing some pin drop stock.
00:25:24
Speaker
You're, we're being really careful with our lensing, our cinematography to ride. I mean, this is now out of my wheelhouse, right? But it's in a general world, right? It's like, we are choosing much dirtier glass. Um, cause we don't want it clear. This needs to feel like you're there, right? Like this, we're trying to like take off the like infomercial lens, right? Or that like hyper clarity, make it feel a little more real.
00:25:49
Speaker
where, you know, most of it's handheld. You're trying to roll into that docu-cinema verite. So it's like, it feels like you're there. You know, it's more like the office is like the parody of that, right? But it's where you're like, you feel like you're in the office because they're jiggling the camera around, right? And then it's, it is coloring, right? Like it's all the layers of like what we learn on film production, music, right? Like sound design. It's all of these things you have to take into account, but it's also thinking through like, all right, like we're,
00:26:16
Speaker
We need an office, their office isn't good, what do we do with this? How do you land that? And how do I land that with five people halfway across the world?
00:26:29
Speaker
because they have directed Pedro Pascal and they can definitely direct these two actors that I pulled out of some agency in Amsterdam. And they can get them across really quickly without having an AD and a makeup person, all the other things. We can't do that on customer location. Not even just a budget thing. It's like, I'm not doing that because we're putting too much
00:26:53
Speaker
onto the customer and I need to make it as seamless as possible for them because I am like a representative of our client. If I make their life hard, we have killed the entire reason for us there, which is like, this is their super customer that they are featuring on prominently in their marketing.
00:27:08
Speaker
they have to leave feeling even better about that client. And I am the way that that happens, right? Like I am the representative of this client, even if I don't work for them directly. And so it's like, yeah, maybe I want to make a person, they're not showing up because I'm not having 10 people milling this person's like factory or wherever it is, you know, their showroom in order to land the story.
00:27:24
Speaker
So being a biz dev show that this is, the first thing that comes to mind, I guess there's two types of customer stories that I think
B2B Focus and Positioning in Production
00:27:32
Speaker
about. And there's the classic B2B is often what you get, like the big major companies selling services to other smaller companies. And you see these customer success stories, that's often a tool that is used there. And on the other side, in a more B to business to customer, actually what came to mind for me was like Red Bull or like Nike.
00:27:54
Speaker
Red Bull is kind of a master at the B2C customer story if you think about how they take these niche athletes and then their whole brand is based on the story of their athletes. And I thought, oh, that's a customer story.
00:28:08
Speaker
But that's a B2C customer story where maybe like AWS or Microsoft or whatever or Intuit is doing their customer stories more toward other businesses. Are you marketing yourselves in one direction or the other or both? How are you going about your biz dev on that? We primarily are doing B2B.
00:28:30
Speaker
I think a lot of the B2C campaigns are orchestrated as part of larger big marketing moments that are orchestrated under large agency contracts, right? Happily we'll work with agencies. You know, we have a story history working kind of on that line. We have found a lot of success on the B2B side part because we work so well direct to client.
00:28:53
Speaker
right in the sense of it, which takes its own skills, right? Takes different skills working with agencies, but agencies do a lot for us if we're working with them, right? They're doing a lot of story betting ahead of time. Some of the like interview side, some of that will be housed on the agency side. So it's like happily work with them. They're usually not working with our full arsenal of strength unless they're
00:29:12
Speaker
an agency who is, you know, this is an add on to what they would not otherwise do. So we found like, we really, I mean, the introduction, usually it's B2B kind of working direct with client. And part of that is that there is, you get the right mix of what the marketing goals are.
00:29:31
Speaker
that customer stories case studies are really impactful for, right? Like this is one where you need a wide enough breadth of customers that you can start telling kind of micro stories in there that are also, it can be seen kind of across everyone. So it's often software, right? Because of that.
00:29:49
Speaker
But we work with design, we work with design agencies, but in order to not there, they're not creative agencies, right? They're design agencies who are working with other companies there. That's a great one, right? That we work a lot with because it's again, you know, they're, they have a certain client profile that they're trying to feature to get other clients that are similar but different than that. So usually B2B is the sweet spot here. I mean, I love to do B2C stuff. That sounds awesome. I think it's just more like you can't Red Bull or Nike, but it's like, that's two of one of the like
00:30:16
Speaker
best marketing machines in the world. But don't those kind of seem like customer stories? Oh, no, 100%. Right. Yeah, they're the aberration. Right. Right. Like, I mean, they're, they're the, they're the aberration. I mean, Red Bull is a genius marketer, right? Like they like almost reinventing. They inserted themselves into Formula One as a marketing play. And that's a huge for them, right? And there's like a whole thing like they're genius marketers. I would love to do more B2C. It's just not customer stories are not the muscle
00:30:45
Speaker
most B2C places are looking for. And what I'm not trying to do, at least now, is go to customers who aren't looking for customer stories and try to sell them on it directly, right? Because there's a spot where it's like, that's getting into agency land. That's getting into a spot where it's like, maybe we grow there to a spot where we're going and like, look, I could see this whole niche and we go there and expose it. What we have found is that
00:31:13
Speaker
There's a lot of companies doing case studies, customer stories, and they could just be much better than they're doing today for probably not much more budget than they're spending. And it's like that to me is what I want to focus on, right? They already have a whole apparatus in place for sussing out these customers, forgetting all that. There's a lot of legal steps to this. There's a lot of integration with other marketing, right? And I come in there and empower those people as much as possible.
00:31:39
Speaker
if you've never done customer stories, they have to happily work with you figuring all this out, right? Cold calling on people who aren't even thinking about customer stories. It's like, honestly, that sounds all right, but again, I just want to be out in customer land talking to customers, right? That's where our specialty is, too.
00:31:58
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I started out this podcast by being impressed with your willingness to position yourselves, right? You talk about Red Bull. Red Bull is the master of positioning. They, they didn't go after the sports marketing. They were like, let's find these niche sports with these niche, you know, athletes that are, everyone's overlooking and own them. And then I love that. And I think that's what I see you doing with you. Yes, of course you've done this and you've done that and you can do all these things, but you're,
00:32:25
Speaker
You're like, we're experts in this one thing and we're going all in on that. And I just found it to be a really brave thing to do. Also, like I said, when I started doing research for the conversation, I started really looking around to see who's doing customer stories well and whatnot. There is an opening for it to do much better. I think every major corporation needs to have a playlist on the YouTube channel that says customer stories and have a whole bunch of good ones because right now they are bad and it does not represent them well.
00:32:52
Speaker
And so I started to think, I was like, oh my God, I think Bryce has figured it out. So I want to end this podcast on one last question that you could offer other production company owners that are thinking about positioning and thinking about letting go of what they say they can do to focus in on one particular thing that they say they can do. And is it scary? Do you feel like you're giving up work? Where are you in that journey?
00:33:18
Speaker
It's a little scary because there's a lot of projects that come in that are a lot of fun that aren't within the customer story angle. There's work we're doing actively with people now that don't fit in this bucket. I like working with this particular client, these people. I like the stories we're telling. I like the productions we're doing. It's honestly nice to have a little bit of variety every once in a while. But the other part of it is, I mean,
00:33:43
Speaker
production company, production company. I was sick of doing a bunch of RFPs and having to compete almost purely on price, right? Like it's just like, whatever, right? I mean, it's like we, I mean, maybe, maybe what really like jaded me on this one, you know, the full cards on the table was, you know, we, we made Prospect, beautiful sci-fi film, production design's immaculate, right? Like we had an amazing production design team.
00:34:04
Speaker
Successful by almost every measurement. Yeah, it's great, right? And so we're like, all right, well, we can do more commercials in this vein. Like we have an entire apparatus built up around this, right? We have a lot of recognition. We want our category in South by Southwest. We have Pedro Pascal. We were in theaters, right? And we would go into rooms and people are like, oh, that's nice, right? Like that's a really great movie. I love it. But when it comes down to it, like they're not
00:34:29
Speaker
paid 20% more because I made a film with Pedro Pascal. It's still what comes down to the pitch and the dollars, which is fine. I mean, that's just the market economy, right? But it was like, oh, in order, I have to niche not in just that I did a feature film, I have to niche in that I make sci-fi commercials, right? Which is like, it's a
00:34:51
Speaker
I mean, I'm really getting out of Seattle. I'm going to New York and LA and talking to agencies. They're like, that's where the work is coming from for those. And it was like, we enter, you know, Zeke and Chris are, you know, we're.
00:35:02
Speaker
or represented on their like writing directing side. And we looked at commercial representation. It was like, oh, this is a whole different path. Essentially we had to specialize in this, right? And it's like, yeah, we, you know, a few things have come up here and there, but it's like, I don't know. I think it's, honestly, it's less scary to me in the sense of like, I just really liked that we are developing an expertise in something and we're still gonna do that other work, right? Like it's, that work is then just a little more relationship based where it's like, people know we can do that. They're gonna come to us. We'll like suss out, but it's also,
00:35:29
Speaker
we're going to get the projects we want because that is the extra work, right? That's the on top of and it's like, no, I don't want the well under budgeted sci-fi commercial where I am just like duct taping everything together. I want someone coming in and be like, oh yeah, here's like a proper budget and a proper prompt and brief and everything. It's like, oh, I really want to dive into this. Like I got to be picky on the fun stuff, right? Or I got to be picky on the other stuff. Like that's great. Right. And with the customer service, well, a little less picky on that, but it's partly because we have a really
00:35:58
Speaker
we have a good expertise. And so even the ones that are maybe slightly off scope or brief or it's like a tough customer or it's a tough timeline, it's like we know how to make those good because we've done them so many times. Like I talked before about our whole like method and like, I mean, we can go in on my whole method, but there is like a step-by-step approach we take to these that has a lot of flexibility built in, but it's
00:36:21
Speaker
You know, it's really figuring out like the marketing goals, it's the background on the customer. We are doing outlines, kickoff calls with customers that has certain things going through there. We are, you know, really trying to get certain voices in these, right? Like there's the business side, there's the tech side, there's the frontline person, right?
00:36:38
Speaker
trying to get that story. We have stories with like act structures, right? Like some background lead up the problem. What is the problem? What's happening? The solution and the payoff, right? So there's these like arcs into part of this that they feel familiar. Cause these are, we're making, you know, ideally some companies make into said like a whole playlist of them. They should feel similar story to story to story. They should have a like a feeling. And so it's why every movie more or less is a three act structure. You don't want to reinvent the structure every time. So it's like, how do you fit these stories there?
00:37:08
Speaker
a ton of pre-interviews to really vet the story. So when I show up, I've already talked to this person for like an hour. Now I'm going to talk to them on a really specific set of things. So I'm no longer just like vetting whether they're going to talk to my talking points. And then all the like going through, but a lot of this also is like, it's also just in this space. It's like, what we also had to get good at is these like
00:37:33
Speaker
a certain, as you said, like sign off and it's, it requires us like not just to make a good video, it has to be good to be able to get signed off by like 14 people across the company. So there's like compliments that get signed off and talk tracks that get signed off. And then the, you know, we, we, the visual edit only gets seen by a few people because like, well, content was already signed off over here and customer sees it at this point to make sure that you don't get that
00:37:54
Speaker
you know, exact CUSI is an un-color corrected, unscored thing. It's like, I don't know, it just feels wrong. And it's like, well, it feels wrong because like, it's not done, right? And it's like, how do you avoid that? It's like, we've gotten good at that. It's different sci-fi commercial where you have boards and a bunch of like previs and all this other stuff. Like that has its own process. And this is like, we've gotten good at it. And I can also see like, I don't want other people to be like, I don't know.
00:38:20
Speaker
Someone meddled, that's what happened, right? And it's like, you could have avoided it with the right process. And the right talented people, like it's a process, but then like, you know, as Zeke and Chris often out in the field doing these, who are very talented writer-directors, but they also can improvise so well on set that I'm like, oh, that'll be good. So I'm hiring those type of directors kind of in their ill producers, kind of
00:38:43
Speaker
I suppose in my ilk, right? You know, who can like really wing it out in the field because it's like, it's a good process, but it has to be one that where you trusted people out there. That's the end of it. Specialized, specialized, specialized. You're such a, I've always known you to be a very self-aware person. And I think that's come across in how you've run your business as well, whether it's making a feature film or doing commercial stuff or
00:39:03
Speaker
like finding this opportunity and seizing it because you know what you're good at and what you want to do. And I think that's what I want other production companies to take from this. I don't want to ask you any more. Actually, I feel like if I ask you any more questions about the process of this, I'm going to be giving away trade secrets that everyone's good. It's fine. It's fine. Let's compete hand in.
00:39:22
Speaker
Oh, there you go. There you go. I don't want all the listeners to become customer story companies. I want them to find their own, but whatever. Yeah. The more, the merrier that are specializing. And I think that's the takeaway for this. So Bryce, thank you so much for being on the show and being so generous with your information. And I appreciate that. No, it's great talking with you. I've enjoyed the podcast all up. Happy to be part of it this time.
00:39:51
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Crossing the Axis with James Keblis. If you're interested in joining the conversation or have a topic you'd like covered, please drop a note at keblis.com. That's K-E-B-L-A-S dot com.