St. Louis, MO – September 26, 2022 – Should you own or rent your story? It is a fair question everyone interested in sharing their story should ask themselves before embarking on telling their story.

Should you own it or lease it?

It is like the decision on where to live or what to drive. There are benefits with alternative approaches to each of those key life decisions. If you rent your home, the landlord pays the taxes and is responsible for maintenance.

If you own your home, the government gives you a tax break on your income tax, but you will pay property tax. Economists will tell you that you pay either way. If you rent, the landlord is likely passing those costs through to you.

There is a similar analysis on whether to lease that new car or buy it outright.

I believe you should do the same analysis when it comes to sharing your story. Especially if you decide you want to tell your story on screen with a video or film.

Allow me to explain.

When I talk “ownership” in the context of video storytelling I’m talking about two interrelated but intellectually distinct concepts. Copyright & responsibility.

We are advocates for people taking ownership of their story from a responsibility perspective and a copyright perspective.

We believe you should own your brand narrative. You should take responsibility for sharing your own stories.

If you own a business, you should absolutely own your own narrative. Take responsibility for sharing your business story directly with your customers.

Who is the ultimate authority on your business? You.

And in this era driven by online search, your customers and potential customers expect you to be the ultimate authority on you. Like it or not, they will turn to you for information about you.

It may seem intuitive to say that, but it isn’t easy to implement from a practical standpoint.

When I worked for the St. Louis Cardinals, it took me a long time to convince my boss of this fundamental fact. St. Louis Cardinals fans expected the team to be the ultimate authority on the team. Want information about the Cardinals, go to cardinals.com.

Makes sense right?

I had him at hello on that one, but it was the tactical reality of staffing it that was the impediment. It is real work with a real cost.

• Who will put the information on the website? In what format (text, images, video etc.)?
• How much work is involved with that?

From my vantage point, I thought we needed to be putting our own news and information on our website and social media every day.

While fans could read the newspaper sports page or watch TV to get the latest on the Cardinals, we should want them to go to our website as that is where we build a relationship with them and monetize that relationship.

If they buy their tickets from cardinals.com, don’t we want to create more reasons for them to go to our website and for google algorithm to recognize us as THE AUTHORITY on us?

Frankly, every time I had one of our executives go on TV, we had already built a landing page on the website with the information they were sharing on TV so they could say “to learn more go to cardinals.com.”

It is a good thing when you customers visit your website. It is your modern showroom or digital equivalent of your bricks and mortar store.

I realize most businesses are not like the St. Louis Cardinals when it comes to media coverage. Most businesses don’t have dedicated beat writers, tv reporters or radio folks reporting on their business every day. If they want to get news out about themselves, they need to do it themselves the hard, and potentially expensive, way. Hire an ad agency or PR company.

You have a lot of different ways to get your news out as a business, but they all involve work. Write a blog and post it on your website. Send a press release. Buy an ad. Pitch a reporter. You name it. It all requires effort and time.

But those options fall into the other area of “ownership” that you need to consider. If the local paper does a story about you, they own it. You rent it.

There are benefits with renting your news coverage.

You reach a new audience possibly much larger than your own. There is third party credibility when a reporter reports the news about you. It may not matter to you that you don’t own the copyright.

As a business owner of a startup, I’d bend over backwards to let the media cover us right now. We could use the publicity. Copyright is a small price to pay.

For any reporters out there, my message to you is we are game for renting our news to you.

The limitations of renting your story might come when you try to share the story.

Your customers might run into a “pay wall” preventing them from seeing the story in the local paper. You might not be able to embed the story on your website or share via an email. That would be a bummer, but not entirely insurmountable.

The paper might charge you money for making a print of the story. If they take a great photo of you, they own it. You don’t. Again, it may or may not matter to you. It depends on your circumstances.

Sometimes media outlets offer paid options to let you rent your story. This is increasingly the case.

Most local market TV stations now have lifestyle programs that you can pay to be on. In St. Louis, all three major network TV stations in town have these.

This summer I paid to go on one of the stations (Fox2) to plug STORYSMART.

What attracted me to the Fox 2 (Nexstar) approach is they share the video file with their customers and allow you to embed it on your website. You can see the video story on our website.

Now they own it. We don’t. We paid to rent our story. That worked from my vantage point as it allowed us to reach a bigger audience. It was an experiment on my part to see if we might get any traction on sales. I thought it might be worth the expense if it drove sales to STORYSMART. Unfortunately, it didn’t generate any leads.

I suspect it would if I did it with consistency, but I don’t have the marketing budget to sustain a weekly or monthly approach to doing it. And I don’t have enough evidence that those expenses would be better than pay per click, social media advertising or even direct mail.

Bottom line is I’m game for renting my story as a business owner if it makes economic and practical sense to do it. That is what traditional marketing is after all.

Owning your video storytelling is another approach.

Ownership of your story also gives you one element that is attractive to me as a business owner – control. Control and unlimited usage are very attractive.

As a reformed PR guy, nothing is more appealing to me than getting the story right. I want to tell the right story and have it be consumed by my target audience.

Having been in PR for the better part of my life, I have never had a traditional journalist get everything I wanted into a story I pitched.

While we hit a lot of home runs over the years, invariably my bosses would be disappointed in some aspect of our news coverage. It is rare that everything in your press release or pitch makes it into a news story. Journalists are independent. They don’t work for you. They work for their news outlet (and most see themselves in relationship with the audience).

Getting the story right is why the ownership thing is so appealing to me. In today’s world, it is all about the shareable link. Sending the story out to people you want to see it and having them actually see it.

It sounds see spot simple, but anyone who has actually done it for a living will tell you it isn’t.

Media pay walls, attractive thumbnails, internet connections, user interfaces, formatting, target audience distractions and host of other things can stand in the way of making that simple connection.

One final thought before I wrap this up. Who you are may matter also in this equation.

If you are a business or non-profit leader, your analysis comes down to ROI (return on investment), budget and practical needs.

If you are a family or individual, it is a mostly personal decision. Media coverage may not be a realistic option at all for a family.

You would love the New York Times to do a write up about your grandmother, but it may not be realistic. For you it likely comes down to do it yourself or find a done for you option.

If you go the done-for-you option of hiring a video storytelling company like ours, make sure you own it.

If you are a celebrity, then you need to decide what is most important to you. The benefit of media coverage is that it extends your celebrity, but they own everything.

If owning the photos or video is important to you, then be very careful about who you work with on a project. Most photographers will only grant you a limited license to photos. Same goes with video folks. A filmmaker who wants to do a documentary about you most likely expects to retain copyright and monetization rights. The filmmaker is making money off of you just like the traditional media outlet such as the New York Times or Today Show.
You might be good with that, but just be sure.

I recognize my values and our values at STORYSMART might not be yours. STORYSMART was created from the belief that you should own your story.

Everything we do is born of this idea that you are responsible for your own story and no one should be able to take that away from you unless you expressly grant them those rights.

When you work with us, you own everything we do for you. We believe that is the way it should be. Our role is to help you make the most of your own story so you will always be remembered. But we realize that isn’t the only way you can share your story. At the end of the day, it is your decision on whether you will own or rent your story.

About STORYSMART

If you want to be remembered, share an amazing story on screen. Whether developing a brand for your business or preserving a family legacy, nothing is more powerful than a great video story.

While there are a lot of DIY apps out there to help you produce a video, no app will turn you into a great filmmaker. Telling your story well with video can be hard. You need the right skills and equipment, not to mention time, money and talent to do justice to your story.

STORYSMART helps you tell your story in the amazing way you deserve with our done-for-you premium video storytelling service. Using a nationwide network of talent, STORYSMART provides you an experienced television reporter or journalist filmmaker to tell your story professionally following our proprietary STORYSMART system.

STORYSMART provides a nationwide premium video storytelling service that empowers individuals, families, celebrities, small businesses, and other organizations to have their stories told professionally while still retaining their intellectual property rights. Learn more at getstorysmart.com