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00:00:01
Adam Lupsha
98 Plays19 days ago
Thanks for listening to our episode with Adam Lupsha.
To keep up with or connect with Adam:
✨ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlupsha/
To stay in touch with Meredith and Medbury:
Follow Meredith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-farley/
Follow Medbury on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/medbury_agency/
Subscribe to the Medbury newsletter: https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
Email Meredith: Meredith@MedburyAgency.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Adam Lupsha's Career
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, Adam. Hey, how do you do? I'm good. or anyone who doesn't know you, can you just intro who you are and what you do? Hi, my name is Adam Lupsha and I am a creative director. I've come from the television world, spent about 15, 20 years there working mostly in the travel and culinary
Working with Anthony Bourdain and Transition to Branding
00:00:22
Speaker
space.
00:00:22
Speaker
I was on several productions that Anthony Bourdain was on, started very early on with him and I've worked with a lot of talent, a lot of really great ideas and programming that is centered around people's passions and art and the extent to which we as humans can create things. I'm here to document it, make it look good.
00:00:49
Speaker
I've spent a lot of time in the branding space and the personality sort of development space in recent years. And think that's what leads me to you today.
00:01:01
Speaker
Yeah. Are we allowed to name drop
Early Career and Technical Challenges in TV Production
00:01:04
Speaker
a little? Can we say were with Anthony Bourdain, you were No Reservations and then Parts Unknown? No Reservations and then Parts Unknown. came on like season two of No Reservations as like just a scrappy kid right out of college, 25 years old.
00:01:20
Speaker
And i was a PA and I wasn't particularly good at it. I was really good with the equipment, technically great, but you know, it in those days and especially in smaller production environment like that, you're doing a lot of little jobs at once. You know, you're doing office jobs, you're wrangling things that have to do with travel such as Carnet, which is like your passport for equipment that's traveling.
00:01:44
Speaker
I gravitated towards the artwork, towards being in the field and but technical details of shooting. I was a film student out West before I came out East. Our mutual interests in film and media and the art of where you put the camera, how you deliver the message, what the mood and feel of a piece is. And especially with his programming and some of the other PBS stuff like Mind of a Chef and even Gourmet's Diaries with the Diary of a Foodie and Adventures with Roof.
00:02:17
Speaker
Those kinds of things were led, especially with Tony, since he was a film nerd, by I love this movie. We're going to go to this country and I want it to feel like this movie, either because the director is from here or because the stories that we're going to search for, the segment producers are going to find.
00:02:36
Speaker
are going to evoke something that this filmmaker does. At the time, we're in this very unique position where video looks bad like 20 years ago. It still looks bad and we're shooting it on a tape.
00:02:48
Speaker
And usually there's just the one camera with the one kind of crummy zoom lens. And so we're doing everything began to make it look like a film and be cinematic. And I think that's what we didn't want it to look was MTV Spring Break, running around and zooming. And so brilliant camera department figures out a lot of adapters and ways to kind of stick film lenses on crappy video cameras and any little trick that can be done.
Balancing Creativity and Precision in Production
00:03:18
Speaker
I, being on the technical end and mostly in post-production, was trying to figure out how to get a type of color or to get a film look or to be able to in post deal with the
00:03:31
Speaker
aspects of things like depth of field and focus that we just couldn't do on our budget with our production size at the time. And so that led to really being able to up the visual game of this simple travel series. And of course, it's a huge percent of what Tony was bringing as a personality and as an individual, but visually and thematically, it has to be supported and you have to bring the same game that your very talented host is bringing.
00:04:07
Speaker
So you're dating my cousin Aaron. Shout out Aaron. Hi. And so you and I met at my cousin Graham's wedding in New Orleans like last April. Mm-hmm. Out Graham. Hi.
00:04:18
Speaker
My husband and I are both huge Anthony Bourdain fans, David Chang, Mind of the Chef fans. And when you told us what you do, i remember we were like, what? Stop. Please come to dinner with us. Tell us absolutely everything.
00:04:31
Speaker
And there were so many of the cool no reservations episodes that really stuck out in my mind, like the one in Italy and everyone that we threw at you, you were like, Yeah, I worked on that one. The production was complex, but we got it. And it just seemed like such an incredible, creative, interesting experience. Thank you again for doing Thank you. Yeah, it's hard not to get a big head to start thinking about when I'm going to write my biography, put it into the pantheon of really significant, important biographies out there. I think so far for the title, I like Bitter, How I Became a ah Fluffer in the Food Porn Business.
00:05:06
Speaker
Because. Madden Mouse. i read no I might need to go more positive, but it does e accentuate, although I am a beefy middle-aged man, how much of Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada kind of coming into this world and figuring out how to thrive and survive.
Creative Solutions from Production Constraints
00:05:25
Speaker
um, in a production world and that it hard as hell and you eat a lot of shit early on. And then at the same time, you are learning how to do something and how to do the kind of work that it's easy to wash out on. It's very hard because the budget constraints, the time constraints, there's a lot of time constraints and budget constraints in production work, whether you're at the sort of medium, low food TV end, or even making a large film is that You are doing things with precision where there's very little room for error.
00:06:00
Speaker
What I loved about the travel situation was it was almost like being, you know, a two star restaurant, but having to be a catering business and do a really pristine job and set up with production somewhere really far away.
00:06:18
Speaker
And having to cope with the fact that if you forget a tiny little piece of the puzzle, let's say a piece of equipment out in the field or on the producing end, you don't secure the exact location that you thought you secured for a shoot and one small detail is off.
00:06:39
Speaker
You could find yourself... spending a lot of people's talent the and the network's money and your host's really brilliant idea and your production staff's brilliant idea because one tiny detail isn't there.
00:06:55
Speaker
And I've tried to square the circle between being artist slash scientist in that you do need all these parts in place to make a production work, to make post-production work. But you also, and what is very obvious, hopefully from the end result of all the work is you have to have fun and the work needs to look like it was fun, like it was inspired.
00:07:17
Speaker
And like you did sometimes just throw spaghetti at the wall and got a Jackson Pollock out of it somehow. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm always drawn to spaces that are a mix of left brain, right brain or masculine, feminine data, art.
00:07:35
Speaker
And definitely it seems like you're right the thick of it. I'm curious, can you think of a time, maybe it's an episode or a project where the time constraints and the travel constraints or anything, budget, timeline, location, you think actually made a project better creatively?
00:07:53
Speaker
I think almost all of them. There is in the, this is probably in all production worlds, but specifically so much in film and TV is that you have the director or the stand-in for the creative person and the producer or the stand-in for the business person that like needs to just get it done and has a budget.
00:08:14
Speaker
And that to me has always been a real... Yin and Yang relationship that needs to coexist because without any restraint, the job would never get done because the director would never finish.
00:08:27
Speaker
And without any restraint, ah that's hard. I think that we've seen what happens like when a director does get a two or $300 million dollars budget and everything looks perfect, but we're all left with something bland and uninteresting.
Challenges and Successes in 'Mind of a Chef' Production
00:08:44
Speaker
I think if I'm to think of something specific, I would say the entirety of working on a show like Mind of a Chef is great because it's a show that endeavored to have the travel value of a lot of the shows that we produced for networks that had higher budgets. When you're working with CNN or travel, they're going to have a higher budget than a first sheet season show that's on a PBS affiliate or even a smaller streaming network. And so Mind of a Chef being largely it was driven by the, what are they called? not
00:09:20
Speaker
We don't call them donor dollars or supporter dollars. are The Yeah, the sponsorship or supporting dollars. There's a way that it like works in PBS land that is not exactly like... You know, you hold up the jar of tomato paste and say, this is good in the middle of the show.
00:09:36
Speaker
You elegantly at the end of a PBS show, put up maybe a logo and say, what is it? Support provided by thing. Anyway, we were support provided by when we're on this PBS affiliate. So lower budget and our mandate for Mind of a Chef is to make a show that is like Sesame Street, but for adults and about food with the travel aspirations of the Bourdain show or something that we might have done with Steve Rinella or Tim Ferriss or any other type of bon vivant out in the world.
00:10:09
Speaker
And at the end of the day, it was great to be stuck in a little studio with a lot of cardboard and a smoke machine and maybe some food to film and a couple of cameras, not cinema cameras, but like pretty good cameras into other people that are willing to go until two or four in the morning because we can only rent a small crane for two days.
00:10:35
Speaker
I really need the crane for four days. I'll go and go under the restraints. And I like it. I like the, I think that it was the cinematographer for, it might've been DW Griffith that coined the phrase, the wind in the trees. And that's from when production moved from being in a studio to being out in the world. And so you would just see the leaves rustle.
00:10:57
Speaker
He would see a kid like inadvertently look towards the lens during a shot. It's about the sort of happenstance that happens while you're filming that can't be controlled or fixed. And so... That's a long way of saying you learn to deal with it.
00:11:10
Speaker
And then when you mess up and commit it to film. Well, is there any project that comes to mind where in the process of the episode, you were like, this is not our best. It was a series of unfortunate event. Then we're going to have to move on from this one.
00:11:30
Speaker
And then you look back at it later and you're like, you know what? Actually, that came out really well. Ooh, that was a twist at the end. Like, actually that came out really well.
00:11:40
Speaker
I usually go, man, thank God I had the right artists and there was enough. And there was actually the episode was so good as a whole with the producing and the filming that it uplifted my work.
00:11:52
Speaker
But I think that One of the tricks to having self-confidence is forgetting the really terrible work you've done, but also remembering it too, because then the only time you remember it is when you're working on something and it starts to head in the direction of a bad project or a situation you've seen before. And that negative reinforcement, that can be great. You have something...
00:12:17
Speaker
bad happen on a job or in the middle of the project that really takes the project, you will be, your eyes will be wide open and looking for it. Totally. But just to press you on it. So there's no problem we can think of where you're like in the process. You're like, I don't know, guys, maybe be we're just going to have to Call it at some point and do better next time. But then even like with a distance or time, you look back and you watch it and you're like, you know what? That was actually a really cool episode for things we didn't see at the time. like I'm just I'm always really curious about the way that I think when we're really in the thick of things with commercial constraints, sometimes it's hard to.
00:12:57
Speaker
assess it accurately. And I can think of times or projects that worked on over the years where I look back at it later, I'm like, you know what? There was great stuff in there that we just couldn't see in the moment. Do you ever have a disaster of an episode in your mind and you like catch it on TV five years later and you're like, ain't not half bad.
00:13:15
Speaker
That doesn't happen very much. But what is similar to that happens is a lot of times you'll have maybe a director or whoever your creative lead. or a talent say, hey, I really want to do this.
00:13:28
Speaker
And all you're thinking the whole time is this is going to be terrible. And one of the the best times that it's happened to me is when a director has said, why don't we just do this as a bunch of photos instead of filming anything or having a description or doing the recipe?
00:13:44
Speaker
What if we just took a photo and put it on the screen every five seconds to music and did something that was very much such an art piece and not documentary or not an explainer or somehow I'm just so damn used to getting information across and my arty collage film days are so long behind me.
00:14:07
Speaker
I'll have a director come up and and suggest something that I'm like, I don't know if we could put that on TV. And it turns out being great. And I love being pleasantly surprised to work. The inverse of that is having somebody Usually more on the corporate side of things tell you they just saw something on TV that was so awesome and it looked so great.
00:14:30
Speaker
Doing a serial commercial for a client. It's a new Puffy Oat brand serial and the clients really loves the opening to True Detective.
00:14:42
Speaker
And they want to sell cereal with a hardcore crime and sex show look. And you're trying to bridge the gap in your head between how did this person find their way into this position that they're trying to create something so poorly juxtaposed against.
00:15:01
Speaker
You're just trying to get like a breakfast cereal out. For example, you have to say, To yourself, first of all, i have to find a way to do this that satisfies both ends. When somebody is so in love with their project and they've been so in it for years and they're so dug in they will see it in a million different ways. One of the hardest, worst things about doing what I do is having to simplify it and just putting it up as an image on a screen.
00:15:28
Speaker
Reduce it to a couple of taglines, make a very crystallized important point. I think it's super interesting. Identifying little interesting problems and hypothetical use cases for how this sort of transitions from a documentary world and over into the marketing and content world.
00:15:47
Speaker
And now the messaging is different. I think like one thing that jumped out from what you were saying, anyone who works in creative, there's that complex moment where suddenly an exec comes into a project and had to point like a lot of new ideas that are difficult to integrate without totally changing course or impacting the integrity of the work or the results.
00:16:10
Speaker
That's hard to navigate. And also what you said about sometimes when folks are really in the thick of something, like they worked on some project or product for years, it can feel reductive to distill it down.
00:16:24
Speaker
But I'm also mindful that sometimes like for me, like for Medberry, for example, I'm so in the thick of it all day, every day. And I am seeing like a thousand different angles or a thousand different approaches to almost everything.
00:16:37
Speaker
We have a few incredibly, really helpful, Thank you. other leaders on the team and an awesome creative director we've been working with for clients. And sometimes they come in and when they're distilling it or crystallizing, it takes a huge weight
Transition from Film to Brand Storytelling
00:16:51
Speaker
off.
00:16:51
Speaker
It can feel like you're reducing something by distilling it, but also it can be such a huge gift to the folks in the thick of it for someone else to be like, I think we can simplify this. Here's the image that needs to be part of the product or part of the commercial. Such a great way of making what I said sound useful and relevant. You have just crystallized that sort of big, broad stroke of a verbal convulsion I had.
00:17:14
Speaker
in I do want to move more into some of the commercial side of your work. So now you're doing a lot of creative director style work for brands and for production projects as well, right? ah What I've enjoyed, and this is since being, i moved from being a director of design in the mostly TV space, doing some branded content, specifically at the time when, you know, it was very popular to come to a production company or network and say, we love the style that you work with. We love the way that you guys make content and what it looks like.
00:17:49
Speaker
We are brand A and we make this. We would like to give you money to tell our story. And I started getting into that as an art director at a studio.
00:18:02
Speaker
And at the time we had maybe half a dozen to a dozen shows on at once. And my job with television shows specifically was to, when we had a new show or a project to pitch, it was really identifying what the look and feel, which I guess we now call vibes of the subject matter was, and then to start to assign, um,
00:18:28
Speaker
an artistic feel, sometimes even the music and sound of something, but predominantly what the look, what the speed is, who the audience is, and really commit that to the look and make that work along with the edit to establish whatever the film language, I guess it would traditionally be called the film language of the person or the project is.
00:18:49
Speaker
And then more and more brands were coming in-house and saying, how could we take the directorial and post chops of this production company and artistic chops where I was and and use your production company to ah uplift our products.
00:19:07
Speaker
I got into that and I loved it from the standpoint of the challenge being new from film, have a film and TV having this directive where you are doing at least with a lot of our shows that were travel related and the ones that were travel and culinary related were about those shows were primarily almost journalistic. We didn't have to follow the same rules of journalism, but you could dive into a story. We did it through food, which is just one of the warmest and greatest.
00:19:39
Speaker
convivial ways to get into a person's soul and to find out what they're about. it It's just, it's how we connect and relate. It's such an easy connection and learning how to foster that connection with a brand and really go from, you may just be selling a widget, but how does the aspect of storytelling wrap around what you're trying to sell?
00:20:02
Speaker
And so I moved into a space where Still doing design work and some filming and movement, but a lot more advising startups, local nonprofits, some national nonprofits in a very holistic, but leading from design kind of way. Yeah, it makes sense. And I think as technology, like even before we hit record, I was talking about Descript, the tool that we use for podcasting and how it keeps coming up with the amazing tools that make it so much faster to edit, for example. So something that used to take to edit the podcast, maybe two to three hours, takes 20 minutes to get through this episode. Yeah.
00:20:45
Speaker
And yeah as technology makes the execution of the work faster and faster across the board for brands, I think it's the storytelling, it's the branding work that is part, not everything, but part of what elevates a brand and helps it stand out. I predict that creative directors are actually not going to get, they're not going to be the ones out of business because of AI. It's going to be the folks doing some of the more tactile to work that are.
00:21:12
Speaker
Sometimes I'd imagine brands are coming to you and being like, make they're a product or widget to your point, but they want something cinematic and they want a story to tell. So what is your process for figuring out how to make a widget cinematic? What do they usually mean and what kind of work are you doing?
00:21:29
Speaker
That's a great question. I think that the patterns don't totally change in people wanting something cinematic. The overall pattern being that, and boy, I hope I'm right about this, production value still matters, that something being at least a little well lit and well shot, even if it's on the iPhone, is...
00:21:52
Speaker
significant, it's eye-catching, and that there are still things innate to being human that visually resound to us and aspects of professional storytelling that are able to reach directly into an audience's mind, a consumer's mind, and speak to them on a primal level.
00:22:15
Speaker
Just because a lot of how branding and sales is going is an influencer with their phone to themselves. And I think that's economically very effective and it can be great for conversion and turnover.
00:22:32
Speaker
i think it's always been an ebb and flow and good looking eye catching work matters on the subject of AI in general, I've always tried to see where it's an aid and where it's a hindrance and really observe myself as somebody who actively wants to hate AI art.
Impact of AI on Creative Production
00:22:53
Speaker
We all see it. We see a lot of this stuff and we say, I know what's uncanny and not quite right about it. I also know that I lost 12 billable hours because of that, but like you've said about your interview system, it's changed. People always want more for less. And the cost of the democratization of good looking content, of cinematic content,
00:23:22
Speaker
The cost is having to work with a little bit less budget, maybe know a couple more jobs. Realize that the divide between really high-end cinema that still has a lot of people working on set and very small specialized jobs, the divide between that and the low end of being here with your semi-professional microphone and gear and sometimes being a one-man band,
00:23:53
Speaker
The cost of that democratization is that there will be less room for entry level jobs. You will have to learn stuff on your own and be at once a director and a sound person.
00:24:05
Speaker
But the benefit to that is that almost anybody can make something that traditionally would sound very professional. You know, a real simple case in point is this microphone that I use to do like rough. If I end up editing and doing like a very small piece for somebody, I will use this microphone to do some rough cut audio of the voiceover before we get our voiceover person in to do it.
00:24:30
Speaker
But this quality of recording for voiceover is like way better than what I had available 20 years ago in school 25 years ago. So
Case Study: Creative Production During COVID
00:24:40
Speaker
there's a give and take. Another quick case study that might make sense is I worked a lot with a wonderful regenerative farm around here in Westchester, New York.
00:24:49
Speaker
They're a farm slash three star Michelin restaurant, and they couldn't do what they would normally do under the constraints of COVID. So they decided to make a lot of content. And I was able to, with one person's amount of equipment and home studio,
00:25:08
Speaker
for a couple of years, shot several hundred hours for them. It's hard to organize as a one or two person operation, even with an assistant editor. But within the last year, this thing that I shot back during COVID with a couple hundred hours of footage, it has all been tagged by Adobe Premiere that takes a look at the footage for content.
00:25:28
Speaker
And I can, in a search bar, type something very... and find a piece of footage. I could find every damn radish I filmed on this farm for four years in a moment, whereas it would take me hours to go through that. Yeah.
00:25:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's incredible. And I agree. There's pros and cons, and I won't presume to have a viable prediction about what it'll bring for the future, but it's interesting to be a part of.
00:25:54
Speaker
It's all about threading the line between making our new digital tools useful and not letting them turn everything into a ubiquitous, same looking sludge.
00:26:07
Speaker
I imagine too, they'll be like, waves of things so for example when the economy is down people are doing more they're like telling their in-house teams to just figure it out with ai as opposed to hiring other folks there'll be like an uptick and a trend towards stuff that's ai and there'll be pros and cons to that and then i can see something happening in a couple years where it's like almost like a farm to table movement but relevant to creative work and brands that are using humans are
00:26:38
Speaker
They're going for way more homemade, way less polished, and maybe getting some type of like kudos around for using people.
Future of Handmade Digital Work vs. AI
00:26:45
Speaker
So I think this thing would be super interesting to just see like the cycles of it all because there'll be progress and backlash and progress and backlash.
00:26:53
Speaker
That's almost exactly what I've been thinking, that there will be a demand for very, quote unquote, handmade digital work. um I always think in the context of 20 years down the road, you're in an antique shop,
00:27:08
Speaker
and you're shopping for something, would the antique dealer say, this is pre-2024? This is before there was any chance that a robot brain helped build it, yeah made right here. So I feel like we'll enter that world at some point where there will be value to something that in no way could have been helped by this collective robot thing.
00:27:31
Speaker
It's interesting. I can picture like a museum of antiquity when we go in and it's, yeah, only humans thought of or made up face things. Then you got into the robot one and we're like, oh, better. They got us. Oh man, they nailed it. well meet How weird is this thing these days that chat GPT has such a distant back memory now to everything that you've talked about.
00:27:52
Speaker
If there's a popular prompt, which is tell me what I might not know about myself. What are my blind spots? And I think it, but then again, also there's this Heisenbergian observation problem where chat GPT only knows what you would talk to it about. and So you have to think about what aren't I telling this thing that it's missing about me? Yeah, I feel like I've had that combo with chat GPT.
00:28:15
Speaker
It's all the rage. I think you're wrong because I'm only telling you what I'm stressed out about or need help with. That's right. it's Because it'll say, it seems like you're really interested in work. and we I hate to tell you this, buddy, but that's all I use you for.
00:28:27
Speaker
Yeah, that was interesting. So you worked with a lot of hospitality, culinary and luxury brand right now. Where do you think? From a brand perspective, where do you see them focusing? What do you think some of those brands are really getting right?
00:28:43
Speaker
Really, like when you're out in the world or observing in action from a professional perspective, where are you like, man, they're nailing it?
Authenticity in Brand Marketing
00:28:54
Speaker
I think what's always nailing it is through sense of authenticity. And that is this, that's such an intangible MacGuffin. And to me, that's what told me a lot about ah problems the problems that brands have when initially I started working with them and they would come to you because they wanted to use somebody in your talent roster.
00:29:15
Speaker
Because that was the person that would lend authenticity and realism to the brand. And then something started to happen where instead of having specific talent, a brand would say, we're about handcrafted things and American things.
00:29:32
Speaker
So let's spin that into a content project. You could do a content project for a car company that was completely about people that like to live like lumberjacks and cut down trees and not see one automobile in the entire piece, because what you were doing was taking the brand's love for authenticity, for what's American made, for whatever core brand values are.
00:30:04
Speaker
And then you were ostensibly using the brand like in the traditional Renaissance sense of the Medici's funding funding an oil painter to make their art at the same time that they needed that same oil painter to fill the inside of a chapel.
00:30:23
Speaker
So you had a relationship that I liked and I see still going on. It's a little bit obviously more about influencers these days, but that you have a brand that says we have all this advertising money. And instead of saying, look how great we are with it, let's say Look how great this thing is that we love. Do you love this thing too? Because we should be friends.
00:30:48
Speaker
And to me, that's how we make friends in the wild. Um, when we go out somewhere because we have a mutual friend group, or more importantly, we have a club or an affiliation or hobby or a habit, we will seek out people that are similar.
00:31:05
Speaker
And what I like and appreciate is when a brand does that instead of that very nineteen fifty s a traditional, I'm driving a Chevy and I'm a successful man.
00:31:17
Speaker
There's just something so tacky and cheesy about that. And we're an evolving culture. The converse of your question is when I see them getting it wrong, I think the thing that turns me off the most ah is when a brand vaguely tries to hit upon um a social or political cause and they're doing it as a not showing long-term commitment.
00:31:40
Speaker
I hate to say it, it's an easy sell when the cause is... good, easy to identify, or the product truly offers something that is easy to align with.
00:31:52
Speaker
Surprise, I don't do marketing in the politics world. Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like authenticity is complex and it's such a buzzword.
00:32:03
Speaker
This is something I've been thinking about is that ah feel like we say authenticity, but sometimes we just mean resonance. And what I mean by that is like in your example, Chevy or whatever, like Chevy is a brand entity doesn't care about lumberjacks, right? Like they don't care about anything. They're a business.
00:32:22
Speaker
But they know that their target demo or the person they've identified as their ICP would resonate with the idea of chopping wood in nature and a plaid shirt and like looking out over their vast land and rolling hills.
00:32:37
Speaker
So like once they create the imagery that the ICP will resonate with, and that is good marketing, but do you think that's actual authenticity?
00:32:51
Speaker
I think in a way it's almost the closest that ah company can get, but they're not people. They have to buy, borrow, lend, and appropriate personality.
00:33:04
Speaker
That's where marketing comes in. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a big fan of Edward Bernays marketing and social. it was that sort of partial inspiration for Don Draper from Mad Men, at least the thought processes that went into the mental states and desires behind marketing and what reaches into somebody's mind and evokes The right feelings, whether they're nostalgia or togetherness, aspirational always. Those are the tools that get used because they're great storytelling tools.
00:33:36
Speaker
But I think that at the end of the day, how can a brand be authentic when their primary aid purpose is to sell their product or service at almost all costs?
00:33:46
Speaker
So... To me, as somebody who's always been interested in digging deeper, in finding what's authentic and not, the best thing a company can do is almost throw their hands up and say, listen, here's what we love.
00:34:02
Speaker
We happen to make this thing associated with what we love that you probably love. It works great. It does the right thing. So we would prefer that you buy it from us.
00:34:14
Speaker
And if that isn't the most Canadian sales pitch, ever like very polite, and do you think we got a good offer here? And if you can relay it, that would be great. I'm going to leave my phone number. I'm not going to ask for yours.
00:34:27
Speaker
ah But that's personally what I like because I feel like my generation and hopefully younger, we can see bullshit a thousand miles away. Okay. I need it. I think like a brand can't love something, right? So Chevy does not. Oh, right. Yeah.
00:34:44
Speaker
You're right. By them saying, this is what we love. If you love it too, let's be friends. What they're doing is figuring out what the people who they want to buy their cars love and then putting forth like aspirational getting in your brain imagery around it. i think I've been working through how I feel about the concept of authenticity in marketing because I actually think the more authentic in the terms of the way one might typically think of it in so far as like slightly lacking ah veneer or manipulation is the old, the more old school.
00:35:16
Speaker
Chevys are cool cars. If you want to be a cool guy, maybe you should buy a Chevy. That is actually the more like in some weird way, there's more integrity in that, but it's less effective and wrapped in a veneer of authenticity. But really just like ICP manipulation based on all that we know about consumers these days are these more like endemic style commercials that get in our heads and are manipulative.
00:35:41
Speaker
But I actually think they're the opposite of authentic. Does that make sense? It does. ah But I'm curious what you are liking these days. Oh, I hate commercials. I mute them. was in such a strange way to us in YouTube for five or eight seconds.
00:35:55
Speaker
I think that I'm often, if I see them, maybe this is a defense mechanism, but i'm very analytical about them. One thing I was super fascinated to learn from Julia Lechner, who's the head of exec content at Medbury,
00:36:08
Speaker
She lives in L.A. She a lot of folks in her network in like actors and in the entertainment industry. And she was telling me on Monday that a lot of those influencer ads that we see when we get them in our feed, where it's some person being like, look at the hair growth from these gummies or whatever.
00:36:27
Speaker
those aren't even just influencers paid to create that commercial. They're actors. And there's a director who via an app is directing them via the iPhone as they make it. And so that to me, I was like, man, like there was this whole conversation in marketing about how influencer marketing is in some way authentic more authentic because you're tapping into the audience of people who are resonating with a particular person who's aligned with your product or service.
00:36:56
Speaker
But even that now has been totally Trojan horsed. And a lot of the influencer commercials we've seen are actors under the pretense that it's a social media post from an influencer that's been sponsored. But I think it's super interesting.
00:37:10
Speaker
That's fascinating. It almost this maybe not a cynical way, but in the wanting to go as hyper far as possible. We've got to cut the director out of that equation. where That's almost too many people. Let's get it down to an influencer.
00:37:25
Speaker
But they're not influencers, they're actors. Oh, yeah. Just to be an actor that can self-direct. Yeah, close. Let's just really cut this down. I could probably get enough information about my customer base to know what the ideal influencer would look like, just what they would like to see for a face and then generate that face and have the product be pushed.
00:37:50
Speaker
Yeah. So that's interesting. And I think to your point, you're like, okay, you're going to complain about things. What do you like? Like, I do think people like content is important. And obviously that's what we focus on at Medbury. So like when we work with B2B brands for their LinkedIn, we go and we download first with their marketing team.
00:38:09
Speaker
We do whatever sales demos or SME homework we need to do. figure out what they
Aligning Brand Messages with B2B Content
00:38:14
Speaker
do. and then we interview the potential key folks who we'd be creating content for. What we're looking for is the overlap between what the brand's core message and goals are and the story, then the attitudes and the vibes and personalities of the kind of leaders or sales folks that they have on deck feels the most natural. So like, for example, your chief product officer should be the one talking about the like building in public as it comes to your product research.
00:38:44
Speaker
Your salesperson is the one who can be making the most direct pitches in his or her content on LinkedIn. So trying to like, I think from a B2B perspective for brands, trying to align in a supportive way where you're not trying to make your people write content, supporting them and figuring out How do you align the message from the right people? I think brand work is so fascinating, but it is also so complex because we're like using these beat and archetypes and we're tapping into what we know in a primal way people respond to.
00:39:19
Speaker
And I love that you're focusing on nonprofits and using your powers for good, essentially. Oh man, I have made a couple of stinkers out there. TV shows, but I'm sure I guided people completely in the wrong direction just with my little bit of contribution to some projects. Working with nonprofits is really awesome and different and interesting in that it's a hard sell because a lot of times you are straight up asking people for money in return for, drumroll, a better world.
00:39:51
Speaker
and know well And we all want that, but right? and That is what we want, but it's very hard um to get that point across. And I think also what I enjoy about it is keeping in mind exactly who that demo is. It's a very different demo than the people that buy products and services.
00:40:10
Speaker
traditional business. And you're also dealing with people that are potentially whales that do a lot of giving. You're dealing with people that occasionally find a cause that resonates them.
00:40:21
Speaker
And at the same time that you're shoring up, this is very traditional marketing, shoring up new business. You're making sure to honor and respect the people that have been donors, contributors, participants for so long. I'm sorry to stop you, but I have to hop on for a client call. Oh, okay. Of course.
00:40:39
Speaker
But thank you so much for doing this. We'll put your LinkedIn in the show notes. Yeah, this is great. Thank you so much for having me. And I got to say, I was so worried that the name of the podcast was Content People and that I wouldn't be able to do it. You did great.
00:40:55
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you so much, Meredith. I'll talk to you later. Good day.