St. Louis, MO – January 3, 2023 - Is your PR, Marketing or Advertising agency stupid or smart when it comes to video storytelling?

In an era where video is king and more media is created by the masses than mass media, it is essential that your agency is smart about providing your clients video storytelling. Perhaps more important than being smart, is not being stupid.

I don’t intend to be offensive or rude, but I see my colleagues in agencies being dumb when comes to helping their clients take advantage of how the world works today. Too often we fall prey to going through the motions of our daily work operating from an old paradigm.

We have been trained to think a certain way and it is hard to break old habits.

This isn’t the world you grew up in. You can’t operate your agency following the rules that dictated how Don Draper’s Madison Avenue ad agency ran in the 1960s. While thankfully agencies have banished the misogynistic culture from that three-martini-lunch era, they haven’t fully modernized their approach when it comes to client services in the era of social media.

All agencies should be providing premium video storytelling services to their clients and coaching them to behave exactly like a media outlet by posting blogs and consistently sharing their story on social media. That all starts with being smart about their video storytelling.

What do I mean by that?

If video is king, then the shareable link has to be Queen. Or at least Prime Minister. The shareable link is how media is shared today. It isn’t via rabbit ears or an eight-track tape. And it isn't traditional media.

A shrinking audience reads a printed newspaper or watches the evening news. We live in an on-demand world where we get our news and information from online sources ranging from the internet to social media. We are just as likely to learn breaking news from a friend on Facebook, Twitter or TikTok than a traditional media outlet.

Like it or not, today’s Walter Cronkite might be some “influencer” on Instagram.

That means your clients need to act like a media outlet by creating and sharing their own stories online. That is where you can help them. Help them create the media and develop that media mogul mindset.

A media mogul mindset starts with ownership of media. Own your creative. Own your video. Own your story.

I’m talking about copyright, not just taking responsibility for your story.

I am dumbfounded by the number of agencies that are not smart about this fundamental element of their creative workflow. Many agencies don’t have agreements in place with vendors and freelancers that convey the intellectual property rights of the work they create on behalf of a client.

Absent an agreement otherwise, the creator of content owns the creative. That means if you hire a video guy to shoot a video, he owns the video unless you have an agreement stipulating otherwise.

Ownership is important because you want to be able to share your story everywhere. You don’t want to be encumbered by not owning it or owing money to the creator for sharing on twitter or Facebook. That would be stupid.

Okay, let’s assume you develop agreements that ensure that the work being done is a work for hire and you are conveying copyright to your client. Kudos to you that you are on a smart path.

The next element of being smart is telling a story. A video isn’t storytelling, just like all storytelling isn’t video. Most agency folks know how to do this part, while it may be a challenge to video a video vendor who is good at it.

There are more ways to tell a story with video that I can count. Our approach with STORYSMART has been built around a brand journalism model, but that isn’t the only way to tell a story. It is a great way to get an authentic story done efficiently, but it isn’t the only way.

You can do scripted storytelling with actors. You can do animations. You do a music video. You name it, it can probably be done.

One element that I would add to a “smart” approach to storytelling is to look for ways to get the most out of your production dollar by recycling and reusing content. This is where traditional media outlets excel.

They maximize the use of the content they gather. Look to your local tv news outlet for a great example of this. They put stories on TV and share via every channel they have. They also make use of b-roll they gathered and keep an archive of stories so they can mine that material down the road on another story.

That concept drives a lot of the value we offer clients these days. A client may hire STORYSMART to do a 3-minute video that involves interviews with three people. We are able to knock it out of the park with that 3-minute story, but we really excel with adding value by creating a bunch of additional videos that can be shared via social media because we are smart about our workflow.

Here is a practical reality of our workflow you learn from. If we interview someone for 10 or 15 minutes for a story, we will get a lot of great content that doesn’t make it into the main story we produce for the client. We don’t throw that footage away. That would be stupid. We are smart. We use it. We create a short shareable video our client can use to feed that treadmill of content creation called social media.

We provide our clients with options. We can create those shorts for them or we can sell them their raw footage. Or we do both. Whatever makes sense for them.

You should be doing the same.

That is where ownership of your raw footage is critical. Too often I see agencies charging clients again for footage they already paid for. The default setting with most photographers and videographers is they sold you the finished work, but they retain the rights to the other footage gathered so you have to go back to them if you want anything else.

At STORYSMART, we are transparent with our clients on this issue. We offer them the ability to own their raw footage for an additional fee. We also encourage them to allow us to maximize the value of the process by creating short shareable videos to go along with the story they engage us to help them bring to the screen.

We think that is a smart way to help our clients. We urge you to do the same.

About STORYSMART

You have a story to bring to the screen, but you don't have the time or resources to do it yourself. Telling your story well with video can be hard. And let’s be brutally honest. No app will turn you into a great filmmaker. Few are capable of producing a do-it-yourself (DIY) video or film we actually want to watch, much less remember.

To do justice to your story on screen, you need the right skills and equipment, not to mention time, money and talent.

That is why STORYSMART developed our premium video storytelling as a service. We help clients tell their story in the amazing way they deserve with a proprietary done-for-you video storytelling service unlike any other.

STORYSMART provides a nationwide premium video storytelling service that empowers a range of clients to have their stories told professionally while retaining their intellectual property rights as though they did it themselves.

STORYSMART provides clients an experienced television reporter or journalist filmmaker to help them tell their story following our proprietary high-integrity brand journalism system. Our transparently priced premium services for agencies, businesses and families ensures that each client gets an authentic, high-quality story they own the intellectual property rights on forever.

About Ron Watermon

Ron Watermon is the founder and CEO of STORYSMART, a premium video storytelling technology startup that empowers anyone to have their stories told professionally while ensuring they retain the intellectual property rights on their productions.

A creative and innovative communications leader with nearly three decades of experience, prior to founding STORYSMART, Ron was responsible for modernizing the St. Louis Cardinals communications by leading the team’s investment in video storytelling, brand journalism, fan engagement and social media.