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How to Offer Your Services to Brand Clients, with Nicholas Incorvaia
213 Plays1 year ago
Get to know Nicholas Incorvaia and hear his take on what motivates him to hire production companies, and what doesn’t. Nicholas is a leader in producing corporate marketing content for almost two decades with brands like T-Mobile and Amazon, where he currently serves as Head of Creative Operations. Nicholas is a laser-focused client-type whose commitment to reaching marketing goals is only matched by his empathetic kindness and thirst for creativity. Learn about what keeps Nicholas inspired and get his take on how production companies can thrive working directly with brands.
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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 Kevlis. Welcome listeners and thank you for tuning into the show. One of the hallmarks that I aim for with this podcast is to have honest and direct business conversations with my guests.
00:00:36
Speaker
My goal is to identify the best practices for production companies to succeed with clients and for clients to find partnerships that actually help them meet their business goals who are then happy to pay sustainable fees as a result of meeting those goals. This in my mind is a healthy ecosystem.
00:00:53
Speaker
So when I'm looking for folks to learn from, I generally try to find ones who, A, have enough experience to give sound advice, B, are in positions of authority to speak as an insider, and C, are able to articulate their point of view in a way that demystifies paths of success rather than to make them more complicated.
Nicholas Incovia: Leadership and Creativity
00:01:16
Speaker
All three of these benchmarks are hit with today's guest, Nicholas Incovia. Nicholas has been a leader in producing corporate marketing content for almost two decades with brands like T-Mobile and Amazon, where he currently serves as head of creative operations. I've had a few interactions with Nicholas over the years and find him to be a laser focused client type whose commitment to reaching marketing goals is only matched by his empathetic kindness and thirst for creativity.
00:01:44
Speaker
That is all a kind and a diplomatic way of saying Nicholas is a tough cookie to work with because his standards are high, but also a great client to work with because so is his desire for amplifying creativity to meet those standards. So let's learn about what keeps Nicholas inspired and to get his take on how production companies can thrive working directly with brands. Nicholas, welcome to the show.
00:02:08
Speaker
Thanks, James. Great to be here. Did I say your last name right? You did. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very Northwest accent to it. But yeah, in Corbia is how we say it. Oh, great. And that's Greek. Do I have that right? It's actually Sicilian. My grandparents were immigrants. There you go. Well, you know, in my introduction with you, I didn't use the term hard nose in your description, but I kind of wanted to. Anything you'd like to change or add about my introduction of you?
00:02:38
Speaker
No, it was all good. Thanks. It was actually very kind and generous description of who I am and how I try to be. Yeah. Well, it's that hard-nosed approach that I actually want to hear from and I think other folks should hear from. But I also want to balance that out because I find that you do have that balance. An example of that would be, I appreciated your post that you put on LinkedIn recently to help people who had been laid off. And I just thought that was you too. I mean, I recognize you with the spectrum of
00:03:08
Speaker
personality and generosity and demanding. And so I just thought that was really cool and wanted to point that out. And I was curious if anybody had responded to you.
Empathy and Career Journey
00:03:17
Speaker
Half a dozen, maybe more, you know, direct things and requests for help. Tried to do what I could for each individual. It's been a difficult time for folks lately. It has been. And that's why I appreciated it so much because I know many people that are being laid off, you know, and marketing budgets are shrinking, think all kinds of stuff that's happening to us. And so
00:03:36
Speaker
the more we take care of each other, the better. So I just appreciated that about you. I know that you've worked with brands and things like that. There's a lot I don't know about you. And my first question, have you ever worked on the agency side of production? Have you worked with production companies? Have you done the agency side work before? I don't know.
00:03:52
Speaker
Sort of, yes. But it was, I wasn't with like an advertising agency. It was like more boutique creative agencies. Who was that? Well, I started my career running my own agency and we were doing, we were telling stories for nonprofits and schools and churches and that sort of thing.
00:04:12
Speaker
And then I shifted to T-Mobile. And while I was at T-Mobile, I worked with a boutique creative agency out of Denver called Peak Creative Media. And they were born out of telco and did a lot of great creative work for, I think it was
00:04:27
Speaker
quest communications years and years ago and then and then they started working with T-Mobile and so so I was with the creative agency but I don't think you know I was never really kind of you know baptized in in a traditional advertising agency space. Did you approach this from a filmmaker point of view? Tell me how did you get into this initially?
00:04:48
Speaker
How I got into it, very specifically, I was in my late teens. A member of the family was, you know, he struggled for years with like leukemia, different kinds of, you know, childhood cancer type issues. And I was doing a movie for a fundraiser. And I was literally on two VHS tape recorders, you know, play and pause and making a photo thing.
00:05:12
Speaker
And if I go back even a little further, I worked for a guy out of, I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and I worked for a guy out of Western New York who was a character. And he did photo to video transfers. This would have been in the 90s, you know, before digital was really a thing. And so he had a whole setup where he had four Elmo projector, what would you call those, scanners.
00:05:34
Speaker
And he had a whole system for stacking photos under these scanners. And he'd have an apprentice kind of guy. And I did that with him for, I don't know, a couple of years, I think. And his name was John. And John was, you know, 90 pounds soaking wet, tall guy, cigarette hanging out of his mouth all the time with a cup of coffee all day, all the time. And he'd do these things. He had the worst language and he had his gravelly voice because you were there. Okay, boy, let's
00:06:02
Speaker
go and he'd start recording. And I would have to like chase the cameras, you know, flipping the pictures and focusing them. And then he was on a switcher with like a soundtrack, you know, and it was the same eight songs. And he told these beautiful stories with people's memories in this like little building that was falling apart in Western New York. And so
00:06:25
Speaker
That's kind of where I started to learn and then I started applying that to, you know. This is the business for me. That's right. That's right. This is what I want to do for a living. And in that time I did, I went to film school and I had a whole. Where'd you go to film school? State University at Buffalo. And I went for about a year and I had, I had that, you know.
00:06:44
Speaker
I had a conversation with the adjunct professor one day, very much kind of funny, your hard-nosed versus empathetic human thing. I was a brash, arrogant, whatever, 17-year-old. And I was just asking, what do you do for a living? It's my professor in film school. And she said, well, I'm a filmmaker. I said, no, how do you make money?
00:07:08
Speaker
Well, I'm a filmmaker. I said, Yeah, but does that pay your rent? You know, because I was new to the rent thing and trying to figure out how to make a living. And she said, Well, no, I mean, I wait tables. And I was like, Okay, so how much did your latest film cost? She was like, Well, I was, you know, $8,000. And we were watching it and critiquing it and doing the whole thing in film school. And I sat there and I had found, I had found a guy that was doing like jackhammer videos in Western New York for industry.
00:07:33
Speaker
And he was paying me like half a day rate, 150 bucks a day to like wrap cables. And the first job was he upended a bucket of whatever XLR cables or whatever. And he's like, okay, untangle these. And I stood there for four hours trying to figure out how to get all the black cables untangled. And so I was sitting there going, hey, I'm making 150 bucks a day.
00:07:57
Speaker
to like do my thing and this filmmaker is making $7 an hour at the local Arby's or whatever. And I think at that point I decided to drop out of college and like get into it full time. And that's where the VHS thing came from. And from there it was like, how do I convince people to pay me to tell stories using whatever technology I can beg, borrow and steal?
00:08:22
Speaker
Yeah. And do you have a creative streak in you as well or more of a producer role? Are you a writer? Are you creative yourself? I like to think so. I love to write. I love music. I love art. But ultimately, it's about telling stories. And how do we tell stories that move people? And so I feel like that's very creative and
00:08:47
Speaker
If I have to produce to move that through, then sure, that's gonna be the way. I mean, I started as an editor and a shooter, but really it was about telling the stories. And so I have found that my jam as I grew into my career was scaling operations and helping to tell stories in the right way. And so I find I really enjoy facilitating more than making.
00:09:12
Speaker
Yeah. And so did you figure that out when you were running your own company and doing your own thing that, cause I can, when you talk about yourself, like on LinkedIn, for instance, you do talk a lot about your team building skills. You talk about, you know, your ability to bring folks together and kind of move them in the same direction and, you know, hit a target more than the other stuff. So is that, uh, I don't think it was, it was back then that it became clear. I don't know that it ever really became clear. In fact, I think I probably, it's probably still pretty money.
00:09:42
Speaker
I love to tell stories. I love to be involved with creative. And so for me, and I'm just a
00:09:51
Speaker
I'm somebody that kind of digs into the biggest problem and tries to figure that out so that then we can move. A lot of times that biggest problem is figuring out the business side of things. I have found that in order to scale myself, it's been about what's the biggest business problem to tackle? And then who do I need to be with me to tackle that in the right way? And so creative is always the first thing and building structure around it. Yeah. And so what are you doing now?
Role at Amazon: Creative Operations
00:10:18
Speaker
I'm doing creative operations for a creative and marketing organization within the Amazon devices world. What does that mean? What is multiple different products, multiple different teams, things like that? Yeah. You figure Amazon launches lots of products every year, product services, subscriptions, and that kind of thing.
00:10:40
Speaker
whenever you launch something, you have things that you have to do to get ready for that launch. You have to do brand work and brand strategy. You have to do naming. You have to do creative direction and a lot of design work, oftentimes video and photography to help the thing come to life. You have to build detail pages and category pages. And so in order to get that done, you can imagine it's thousands of people hours for every launch times multiple launches.
00:11:09
Speaker
Coordination across all those thousands of people hours is is pretty intense and so there's there's lots of different vectors, right? You have to coordinate the flow of work. You have to make sure you have the right people to execute that work and you have to you know, make sure that you're Planning and strategizing about about what you're gonna do in 18 months. And so so I I run the
00:11:31
Speaker
the teams that do all of that maneuvering. When I first met you, you were deeply entrenched in the video work with departments like Amazon Music and things like that. And it sounds like now maybe you're actually pulled back a little bit more and doing broader marketing, not just screen video stuff, but all kinds of things, right? All kinds of different marketing approaches for products.
00:11:53
Speaker
In the beginning of my career, it was all video. And then I shifted. When I joined T-Mobile, it was for video. But then things happened in the economy, actually, like today. And all of a sudden, they weren't spending money on video, but they were trying to connect their teams. And so I spent a good two, three years just doing events, webcasts.
00:12:14
Speaker
you know, even a lot of tech, like trying to build out the technology for live streaming 12, 15 years ago. And so, you know, shifted really heavy from like just making movies, being that producer, shooter, editor, and I'd hire crews to kind of help that, to help supplement that, to doing that a little more at scale, doing more movies, but also trying to do that for events. And I focused a lot on the webcasting and event space.
00:12:40
Speaker
And that was really my focus for a little while. When I joined Amazon, it was as a senior producer. And it was a lot of video work. I built a big studio to create content to help customers make purchasing decisions. So like how to fry an egg and then we'd sell a pan or tips on, you know. Were you involved in D1? That was that. Oh yeah. That was, I'm mad. Yeah. That was probably you that built that whole thing. Is that true? Indeed. I was part of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I always thought that was kind of interesting operation. Yeah.
00:13:09
Speaker
Yeah, so D1 was a part of an internal crew that made content and design for marketing and customer engagement. And so you can imagine from there,
00:13:25
Speaker
There's just so much opportunity to make stuff to engage with a customer, a potential customer. And I spent a little bit of time doing content strategy. And then I shifted over to Amazon Music, which was really design heavy. I didn't do video much at all. And it was really about scaling a world class design team. And so that was, you know, creative directors and art directors and processes for everything from
00:13:48
Speaker
style guides and structures for making playlist art covers to generating tens of thousands of campaign assets and banner ads and engagement material for digital music customers. So video events, graphics, and design.
00:14:06
Speaker
And this role I'm in now kind of pulls all of those things together, just continues to kind of amplify the path I've been on of building and operating teams. With all that experience, could you, is it possible to kind of do a breakdown of when you're building a campaign or trying to get a product to market or something? What percentage is it done in-house versus done?
00:14:30
Speaker
through like an AOR type of agency that you have a relationship with and then they do all the parts or you decentralized approach of hiring direct production companies or design companies and things like that. Does anything come to mind for how that plays out?
In-house vs. Outsourced Production
00:14:50
Speaker
You know, over 20 years, I've seen the pendulum swing pretty, pretty broad all those different ways. And so I feel like it's really cyclical. I feel like a corporate like wants to pull everything in house, you know, and you have people that are that are good operators that kind of figure out how to how to pull things in house and then also supplement. And then I feel like it goes like
00:15:10
Speaker
way the other way where it's like, hey, we're just going to keep creative directors and producers in house and everything's going to get subbed out and we're going to do a cost per asset model. And then as that, I think it's pretty organic, like as it's swinging, nothing in corporate happens fast, right? So as the pendulum is swinging, you got to figure out how to hybrid and how to like
00:15:29
Speaker
be letting go of people but also engaging similar roles in different ways or be onboarding people but also trying to figure out how you get them up to speed. I don't think there's a consistent model over the 20 years of my career that's been normal. Where do you think we are in that pendulum swing now?
00:15:49
Speaker
You know, it's funny, I've been reflecting on that. This has been a weird, it's been a weird time, right? So I think the last two years was way pulling everything into house. Corporations had big budgets they were spending, I think, you know, trying to build these in-house teams that could execute everything because there was a lot of thinking going on, the economy was good, everything was hot. And so over the last six months, you know, it's been about like, hey, we need to squeeze and tighten up and like, what's essential?
00:16:14
Speaker
And so I think we're on the outsource it kind of model. And really the key lever points is when you outsource, you have a very clear like dollars for asset model where if I'm a marketer, if I'm a business leader, I can say, hey, I've got money, I need to think.
00:16:35
Speaker
Whereas when it's internal, it's more like a people for output thing. And so you have to figure out how to build the right people and then also optimize what they're doing. In the end, it's the same thing. You're putting people together to make stuff. It's just, are those people on payroll or do we go hire a company to take care of that?
00:16:58
Speaker
Yeah. Are you putting those people together or are you hiring a company that's already assembled those people and can just get right at it? A little bit? Yeah. Except it's not a... I do think there's been a big shift in the last, I'd say five years maybe, where it's not as clean cut as that. There's like this kind of hybrid model of managed services where you have these companies who
00:17:20
Speaker
maybe aren't agencies who maybe aren't like executing the work, but they're pulling the people together to execute the work. And they're working with the internal departments to make sure they're pulling together the right people. And there's a sweet spot in there where you kind of have enough of the internal to understand the ethos of the company and the products you're putting out and this strategy.
00:17:41
Speaker
And the strategy of what those products are supposed to do. Yeah. And then you have enough flexibility externally to, you know, uh, get the right people in the right place at the right time. Getting hired to a corporation is like, it's like moving your house, right? You gotta, you gotta get in, you gotta get onboarded, you gotta, you know, remodeled. Yeah, you gotta remodel, right?
00:18:03
Speaker
I've always found that a really sweet spot as a quote unquote vendor is when a company brand or whatever has some internal creative drivers and really, really know their product and their business strategy. If there's a business person and their strategist in there, a creative strategist even, and then that could get handed over, that is perfect.
00:18:33
Speaker
I just found it to be so much better for aligning creative to meet that business strategy than if you didn't have that role. I don't know what your thoughts are in that 100% totally agree. I mean if I if I if there's any if there's any consistent threads throughout my career it's been.
00:18:51
Speaker
It's really just been learning how to ask why. And the more wise you ask, the more you understand the business strategy behind something, the better your creative is, right? And it's funny, you asked if I'm creative and I really like to think so, but there's a thing that happens in our world where you're only creative if you output a certain thing. But some of the best sales tools are like stupid banner ads that are done by
00:19:19
Speaker
by folks right out of school or whatever. Sure, you can spend millions of dollars on a broadcast campaign, but sometimes a $20 ad is the thing that makes you click the button and buy the thing, which is what it's all about. Understanding what the business strategy is for the product is one thing.
00:19:39
Speaker
There's also understanding the intention behind the brand story and how that stacks up to customers either being engaged or acquired or handing over their money or time or whatever it is that you're trying to get them to do. That's part of the fun of being in the creative business is all of that can change and it can change fast and I think
00:20:04
Speaker
success is about really figuring that out for every project you're
Aligning Creativity with Business Strategy
00:20:09
Speaker
on. Is this a thing where you're just trying to sell? Is it a thing where you're trying to build a story over time? And then how do you convince business to fund that storytelling?
00:20:20
Speaker
Yeah, the advice that I've given production company owners is to continue to ask questions. It's hard because you want to come across as you know what's going on, but you have a gut feeling when your clients saying something and you're like, it's just doesn't add up. It does. It's not making complete sense on what they're trying to do. And I've seen it where people don't ask.
00:20:40
Speaker
I need you to explain this cuz afraid of asking those questions but i think you gotta turn the screw you really gotta continue to push and push and push a client to answer these questions especially when your gut is telling you it's not well thought out that maybe that's not correct and
00:20:56
Speaker
and really challenge the client. Do you like that? I do, yeah, for sure. I think there's nothing worse than somebody that's trying to do something and doesn't really know what they're trying to do. And so somebody comes in and presumes that they know the business and yet haven't asked a lot of questions. The likelihood that the output is going to be right
00:21:18
Speaker
It's probably not high. Well, even but sometimes the client thinks it's going to be right, right? The work has been done. And now you're shopping for order takers to some degree, like, okay, I'll carry this out and make it happen. But you still want, I think you still want the vendor in this case to
00:21:36
Speaker
still question some of the approach, right? Well, yeah. I mean, the people on the business side are all humans that have just chosen different career paths, right? And so the people on the business side are also trying to figure it out. If you're working for the T-mobiles and the Amazons and the Microsofts and whoever, apples of the world,
00:21:59
Speaker
You're doing new, interesting things that haven't been done before. You're solving a market need that nobody else is solving or somebody else is solving it worse than you, hopefully. The marketers that you're working with, they don't have it figured out. They might know their channel strategy. They might know kind of best practices about what works and what doesn't. But the whole jam with creative is coming up with that new way
00:22:25
Speaker
speak to a human or coming up with an old way to speak to a human in the right way. And if you don't ask questions, whether it's a banner ad or a big thing, a big cornerstone strategy, you're dead in the water. You're just making stuff that probably doesn't land.
00:22:44
Speaker
Yeah. Are you finding that you hire production companies directly and to do your video campaign work, screen campaign work, or do you mostly go through an ad agency or creative agency that you have and then have them manage that production piece of it?
00:23:00
Speaker
In my career and where I've been, I've leaned a lot more into hiring actual production companies. I've tended to hire creative directors and even producers to the internal teams, and then I get it done where it happens with companies.
00:23:19
Speaker
How much creative development do you expect to come from production company when you hire them directly? If you know that's your approach, let's come up with this campaign, this approach that we're going to go forward on. We're going to hire a production company directly.
00:23:35
Speaker
how much do you want them to contribute to the creative concepting of what i've had to go forward or do you just wanna make sure you have all that in house first depends on the mix man and yeah yeah totally depends on what i've got to work with as far as my internal talent and crew and also like the type of work that we're doing right like so if if i'm doing if i'm doing something where it's high level storytelling that needs a lot of creative and we're making
00:24:02
Speaker
two or three movies a year. I'm not going to hire an internal crew. I'm going to go find an agency that can help do the development and come back with ideas and then execute. If I'm doing 500 movies in a year or 10,000 design assets, I'm probably going to hire the lead creatives in-house. I'm probably going to hire the lead producers in-house. And then I'm going to go find agencies that can help us scale. And what I'm looking for there is, you know, nimbleness, you know, folks that can move and change as we grow.
00:24:32
Speaker
but then also somebody that can repeat successes, right? So I don't want to be figuring things out year over year. Once we figure them out, I want to, I want to playbook. And then I just want to see things coming. Just kind of depends on what the, what the need is for the business. How often do you hire a production company in this case, or I'll just say agency all kind of means the same thing. And for this context that you've never worked with before versus going to someone that you've already worked with and trust.
00:25:02
Speaker
You know, it's funny, I've moved around a bit in my career, particularly at Amazon. Trust in relationship is everything. So, yeah.
00:25:15
Speaker
prefer to work with somebody that I trust and who I've known, know has done it. As I look back, there's not a ton of consistency. I feel like I'm working with new people all the time. And so I actually struggle with that a lot. I think, you know, I actually feel like, you know, you start to think about imposter syndrome or somebody who's in my position.
Choosing Partners: Authenticity and Specialization
00:25:32
Speaker
I feel like I should have a Rolodex of people that I trot out everywhere I go somewhere new. But I find that the challenges I take on don't need the same people. And so I tend to find myself trying to test new agencies, companies, partners, whatever, in every place I go. And I say it's pretty rare that I've had the same crew that has just kind of flowed through to each new engagement.
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah, maybe it's a little bit of your curiosity and working with different kinds of people. I think so, but I think that's maybe unique to me. If you're familiar with the Amazon Leadership Principles, an old writer friend of mine coined the term bias for agony.
00:26:18
Speaker
So I think I have a bias for agony a little bit and I really like, I like, I just like new things, right? So I get bored fast. And so I think finding new people to help solve challenges, I really, I enjoy that, but I think that's unique to me. I do think most folks probably.
00:26:34
Speaker
Find the people they gel with and then build relationships and then bring those relationships to each new engagement. My next question then is what kind of, you mentioned trust and I imagine that's paramount, but what criteria are you looking for when you're trying to find a new partner that you've never worked with before? I imagine you get pitched probably dozens of times a week. I imagine everyone is sending you stuff. Look at me, look at me, look at me.
00:26:59
Speaker
When do you actually look? What is the criteria you have there for when you do look and what you're trying to find that would help you? And where, you know, beyond just people sending you stuff, where are you exploring and where are you visiting? Where you discover anyone or any place new? Mm hmm. That's a that's a good question. I've been on a lot of reflection lately on living in my own integrity.
00:27:25
Speaker
And really, the culmination of your outputs doesn't make you who you are, right? You are who you are because of the choices you make and what you value. And then those outputs tend to kind of flow from what you value and where you invest your time thinking. All agencies are conglomerations of people.
00:27:43
Speaker
And so I think it's the same for agencies and companies. And so getting around to the point that I think after all these years of being pitched many times a week, my bullshit meter's real high, right? And so what I'm looking for when I'm applying my bullshit meter is authenticity. Are you really selling something you're great at or are you trying to sell me because you want the dollars?
00:28:09
Speaker
And those are two very different things. And I think that when companies and people come with a pretty clear, like what they don't do and what they're great at, it's easy to say, okay, do you fit? And so the times that I've kind of responded to a cold call have really been like, here's the specific thing that we're great at. And I happen to have a need. And then it's like, oh, okay, I should pursue this company because they know how to get this thing done. And I've seen success with that.
00:28:39
Speaker
if it's more general and it's like, hey, I need somebody to take care of this particular, I need somebody to help me with a problem that's not particular, like I've got this new business opportunity, I don't know how to approach this, I need a partner. That's when I tend to go to people who've solved for me before and say, hey, I got this problem, can you help me with it, with all your resources or whatever. So I'm more likely to engage somebody cold if it's a very specific thing and if they're very clear about what they can do.
00:29:05
Speaker
Yeah. So glad you talked about really being specific. I think that's paramount over everything else is to find your niche.
Market Value of Specialization
00:29:13
Speaker
It's a, there's a line from David Baker, who's a really great consultant that I've learned from over the years, who talks about, you know, you need to have your competition level between 10 to 200. You know, if you entertain, you don't have enough of a business, do you have more than 200? You're not niche enough. Or,
00:29:29
Speaker
If you're looking for customers to, you know, 200 to 2000, there's 200, maybe you got something that was over 2000, you're not niche enough. And I apply that whenever I'm giving advice as well. I think it's really smart. And it's required, I think, in this modern age where specialization is becoming more powerful.
00:29:49
Speaker
Not only do clients need specialization, but it's where you can add value that you can charge more money for. If there's less people capable of doing what you do, it has greater value in the marketplace. And so there's kicking ass for your client and then getting paid money that you think you're worth. And that all comes down to specialization. And are there any particular kinds of specialization that you
00:30:15
Speaker
have examples of where it's resonated with you or things that come to mind of where production companies can speak from, from their own point of view. Yeah, sure. I mean, understanding, understanding your no, like where are you going to say no?
00:30:32
Speaker
is super helpful. One that I think of is AR-VR, right? There's a company in Georgetown that was doing VR for a long time and that's all they did. And it was super freaking cool and I'm sure they got lots of great clients because they just did VR. And so when I was talking to those folks, it was like, this is cool.
00:30:54
Speaker
I haven't had in my career yet a need to make VR content, but when I do, I know those people are there, right? And I enjoyed my time with them because they weren't trying to tell me they could also do my event openers and my editorial content and my, you know, whatever.
00:31:10
Speaker
And so like even to the point of, there was a guy I was talking to for a while out in New York who had this really sweet series around the shopping scene, the small shopping scene in New York, bodegas in New York.
Maintaining Authenticity and Quality
00:31:25
Speaker
And it was just cool. And I was always trying to find a way to actually work with that person because the work was cool and it was interesting. I wouldn't call that person for my event opener sizzle.
00:31:36
Speaker
There's a lot of great companies that do event sizzles. The flip side of that is, I have a philosophy that I talk about a lot is coming from a place of yes. I love the idea of finding your no.
00:31:50
Speaker
So getting down to your 20 to 200, like what is your thing? Find your no to most things so that you can come from a place of yes. And when you start with, yeah, I can probably figure that out for you. You get to a place where you start to use the five y's and you get to a, you know, a terminating factor where you can say, yes, I can do this if
00:32:15
Speaker
All these things are true. And so if you have your specialty and then your client comes, which I've done more times than I can count with a unreasonable demand or request. And I know you do event sizzles, but I really need somebody to do these 10,000 banner ads.
00:32:32
Speaker
And I don't have anybody else to talk to right now. Can you guys figure this out? And I've seen that be successful, but it's when folks are coming from a place of yes and saying, hey, I don't have a design crew. But you know what? I've got a great producer who's been looking for something to do. And so if we can have three months, and if we can test in this way, and if the banners are all this size, then yeah, I think we can do that for you. I like the specialty plus, right? Because you've got to be able to scale.
00:33:01
Speaker
Well, that's specialty plus honesty in a lot of ways, which is I think another thing that production company owners are afraid of. I think too often we say we're full service or we don't do specialty because we're afraid of losing business opportunities. But the reality is the more you specialize, the more your business and your creativity will develop because you're honing in on a particular thing that people will start calling you for. And you will be so good at it that you can actually get
00:33:31
Speaker
a little bit creative and exploratory and adventurous with it as well and be able to apply that in ways that actually really triggers that kind of the creative stuff and that you get you over the commercial side of what we're all doing here. I think it's a it's a counterintuitive but I think it's 100% true. It is you have to have nerves of steel though, right? Because you know, if you're not saying yes, you're not paying your fare, you're not paying your bills, you're not feeding your family.
00:33:56
Speaker
Yeah. And so how do you find that specialty that's worth enough to keep you going? So let's say someone does have a really tight specialization. They got their area of expertise well-defined. They can articulate it. Would it resonate with you if someone said, Nicholas, hey, I noticed your
00:34:16
Speaker
campaign on something is doing this. And I noticed that it missed this opportunity or you're, I see that you're not doing this. What we do is this particular thing. We've had some pretty good success with this. It might be applicable to what you're doing. Any chance you want to get on the horn and talk about it with that kind of communication resonant. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. If you see a campaign and it's missing a unit and you have expertise in that unit,
00:34:41
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I think most of my work has been more general than that or more integrated than that. So I typically engage in, you know, spaces that do integrated marketing. And so lots of, you know, a style guide and a general approach that then is applied across lots of different channels. But then, you know, if we're missing a channel, or if we can gain outsized impact by a certain type of asset or a certain channel, or if, you know, your specialty is taking that one channel and really optimizing it so that then you can do more with it.
00:35:11
Speaker
That's always super interesting and I have optimized workflows for that where you have certain, you know, I have my internal crew do the style guide or the, you know, direction.
00:35:22
Speaker
And then you have lots of different people to go after for optimizing each of the different types of outputs. And you see more volume and more impact that way. And so when somebody specializes in one of those pieces, it's great. What about knowing process? So if a production company is trying to talk to you,
00:35:41
Speaker
Does it help you in any significant way when they can speak to their particular process of production? Whether that is we do casting with this point of view or this is our cinematography point of view or
00:35:57
Speaker
This is how we adapt from your scripts to a screen in a commercial way that get, you know, like there's a particular IP of process or whatever it might be. Does that kind of communication resonate with you? It's always impressive. I'm always excited when an agent, particularly when they have
00:36:18
Speaker
High level of a creative bar like where the work is beautiful and interesting and then you know when they come into the pitch with here's our process for getting there love that there's there's not a lot worse than you hire some brilliant creative and they kind of go off and do a thing.
00:36:37
Speaker
and you kind of wait for a big reveal and then, you know, you got to work through maybe it's not quite right or maybe the thing is wrong or, you know, whatever it is, one piece of it's wrong. For me, I want to see that really creative, engaging in steps of a process that are logical and rational and repeatable and then scalable, right? So yeah, I love when an agency or a production company comes in and starts with process, particularly when they've,
00:37:04
Speaker
branded little bits and pieces of it. You can tell they kind of get off on the points of intersection and I love that stuff.
00:37:15
Speaker
And that might be me. I'm a process guy. I enjoy, you know, because I feel like when you have good process, you can be more nimble, right? You can maneuver and do things differently. A lot of creatives feel like process is a shackle.
Structured Creative Process in Agencies
00:37:30
Speaker
The creative process, the creative, the overall creative flow requires constraints.
00:37:36
Speaker
It's not good without constraints, right? And so process is one form of constraint that helps your likely not creative minded business partner understand what they're getting from you and when they get it. Yeah. And so being able to speak to it. And then here's the other thing. This is really important. I've seen a lot of folks come in and they pitch process.
00:37:54
Speaker
And then they don't actually follow it. So I'll get like three weeks in and I'm like, Hey, what happened to this milestone that we were supposed to like, you know, you gave me the whole slide thing and now I feel like I'm talking to eight different people and the things off track and the budget's funny. Like I thought you guys would process be that that's happened more, more times than, than not. Right. Where I think, uh, and that's where the integrity and authenticity thing comes in. Are you really process focused or are you putting this on a slide? Cause you know, I'm an ops guy and you're just trying to appeal to me.
00:38:24
Speaker
I love when companies are actually dialed into the process and they leverage it, not for the process, but to make great creative, which is the whole point. Where do you find work? Do you read trade websites or subscribe to anything? Are you part of an association where you share information? Where do you learn about new companies? Who do you call first? All of those types of things.
00:38:50
Speaker
Sure. I'm an iterative kind of guy. I like to explore and poke around. You know, I keep relationships open with other people in the business and people that I've, you know, made relationships with.
00:39:04
Speaker
don't know, like, sure, I'm subscribed to the trade things. I've, you know, I listen to podcasts, you know, as much as as much as anybody, but I there's not any sort of single, you know, bullet. I mean, I think the business process is very much like the creative process. Like you find, I mean, I was on a call just a little while ago. And all of a sudden, like somebody was talking about something fairly related to what I was thinking about. But all of a sudden, I unlocked a little diagram in my head for a structure that I'm trying to build out.
00:39:32
Speaker
Yeah, it'd be listening to podcasts and it's like, oh, oh, oh, I gotta call that guy because I think and then you'd make a phone call and then you find, you know, so I don't know. It's a, it's this isn't the answer that anybody wants to hear, but I think it's really organic. I think it's like, right place, right time, saying the right things. But I do think it all comes back to what we've been talking about. You have to be, you have to have integrity.
00:39:54
Speaker
and be authentic to yourself and to what's driving your outputs. You have to know what you're saying no to. I think if you're strict on those two things, you'll find yourself in the right place. There's one example that comes to mind. There was a guy years ago when I was doing more direct production. There was a period where we were doing a lot of explainer videos.
00:40:16
Speaker
90 second animated explainer where you're talking to somebody about how a thing works and they were running like 50 60 grand like for for I might have rose color glasses on in my history and my remembering this is probably 10 years ago but you know they were probably running around the 50k mark but
00:40:34
Speaker
It's because everything was bespoke. And anyway, there was a particular fellow that I enjoyed working with because I could give him a script and a direction and we'd get back the right thing the first or second time. And he wasn't pitching me on like, oh, hey, I got a studio here and I need all these people and whatever. It was like, hey, man, can you do this thing? And I knew his rate and I knew he'd go get it done and he'd go make these little these little movies. And the thing was, he was really hard to engage.
00:41:03
Speaker
And so I always wanted this guy because he was the best at what I wanted. And yet I probably was able to land him on my projects maybe one out of three times.
00:41:13
Speaker
And I kept coming back to him because I always wanted that experience. And yet he told me no all the time because he was already working for somebody else. And it was because he did one thing. He did animated explainers. He did them really well. And he was always busy. He found his no. He was true to the thing that he enjoyed doing. And that lasted for him for many years and was really lucrative.
00:41:36
Speaker
Right. I'm so glad that you gave that example and kind of in my mind, you just put a capstone on everything that we've been talking about here. And I know you said how long is this podcast and we probably could keep going on and on. But I feel like that's the note to leave it on. There are so many more questions and maybe there's a chance to
00:41:54
Speaker
circle back with you and when we post this online, maybe we can have some dialogue that way too. Any final words that you would give to a growing production company and they're trying to make their way and they're trying to land clients? Any other dos and don'ts that we haven't touched on already?
00:42:12
Speaker
You know, I think the one thing I'd say is something you said in the beginning about people being afraid to ask why or not wanting to dig in with the client.
Building Industry Connections
00:42:23
Speaker
And I'd say I'm always excited when people reach out to me. I love getting hit up with randos for
00:42:30
Speaker
not so much biz dev, but like when you have a cool idea, or especially young people who are like, Hey, I'm trying to figure out how to get into business, you know, can I can I have 10 minutes? I will never say no to that. And I think I think that's more common than than you'd think, right? And so there's, there's a perception that folks on the inside and corporate are like these monoliths that are unscalable. And really, you'd be surprised at how few production companies up and comers establish people
00:43:00
Speaker
just reach out to say hi. Just reach out to say, hey, I think we're in the same business, like, you know, coffee sometime, grab a glass of wine. I will almost always say yes, right? As long as I feel like you're not trying to sell me something. It's rare. It's really rare that I get that. And I've had the few times that it's happened, I've had some lovely interactions. And so anyway, parting words, I'd say, you know, don't be afraid to express your authentic self and reach out because
00:43:42
Speaker
offers to go get a glass of wine after this. So be prepared for that. And hopefully everybody that is listening to this will hear you really get the take this to understand you. And also, I mean, go to your LinkedIn, your LinkedIn profile has your personality charts on there as well. So you can even dive into a further psychology of Nicholas and try to connect with you in that way, too, which I think would be really valuable.
00:43:46
Speaker
What do you have to lose?
00:44:12
Speaker
Nicholas and provide thank you so much for all that you've given your generosity prove true here in this podcast just like it has in many other places thank you very much for being on the podcast thank you james it's been really fun.
00:44:28
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.