Adopting a Content Video business Model with Mick Jones

G' day guys. Dan here with another episode of the Video Business Accelerator Podcast. I'm excited. This is the second part of a three part series I'm doing with my good friend and former host of our podcast from 2012, Mick Jones. And this week we're going to be talking about content. While we're on the subject of content, I have just been doing some really cool new things with LinkedIn, working with a guy called Steven Parachov in New York who's at the leading edge of LinkedIn profiles and LinkedIn selling without having to spend money on ads. And I'd love if you were to connect with me on LinkedIn and just check me out and also connect me and tell me that you listen to the podcast. I'd love to know who's listening and what you'd like us to do more of so you can connect with me on LinkedIn. Denleny, you can find me, I'm pretty sure by just googling that. But anyway, back to this week's episode of the podcast. Mick is a very, very good old friend of mine. We've done loads of stuff together and this week we're going to start digging into content and the power of self generated content because the whole industry has moved away from that whole broadcast space into a content driven environment. So check it out and let us know what you think in the comments.

Welcome to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast. Each week we uncover the secrets to creating a wildly successful and scalable video production business. With your host Dan Lenny, discover how the accelerator program is transforming the lives of our members at www.videobusinessaccelerator.com. enjoy this episode.

Back with Mr. Michael Jones of Filthy Luke Films here in Sydney, Australia. Michael we were last episode we were starting to go into the whole idea of a content model and that was something that you've been talking about for some time and I know you and Steve Weiss have spent a lot of time talking about this at various events about how long form web based content was going to be the way forward.

Talk to me about Filthy Luke and your strategy for content and how that's evolved over the last five, ten years.

Yeah, I mean I mentioned in the last episode that we did that the nature of what I do has changed from sort of being gun for hire, post production or.

Camera work into where I really want to move. And what I'm doing more work on is complete and end to end production, providing a finished piece of content that can be.

Put on a server or streamed or on a network that to Me is where there's value to be had because.

There'S so many people competing in the space for.

Camera work or sound work or editing work. It's. I would say the market's flooded with people who want to do it and as we said before, there's a lot of content being made and there's a. But there's even more people competing to make the same amount of content as a link in the chain. What I want with my company is to provide.

The like be basically a content studio, not a gunfire crew. Which is where I've made most of my income over the last 15 years is being gun for hire crew member but dabbling in always. You know, my ultimate ambition is to be a filmmaker in the, in the sense of completing an entire project, not just being one part of the crew. So I would say that that's the growth area for me and I'm working on a three part short form documentary series at the moment that will, that I'm writing, directing and just finishing the whole, whole job. Now I find those really good projects to get into because it's not small little bits and pieces and it gives me a chance to focus on something creatively over a period of time. It's a two month end to end from two months from concept to delivering the final product.

And are you self funding this or is this an actual commission?

Oh, it's the commission. Yeah, yeah, this is for Viceland, which is in Australia, it's on SBS and yeah, I won't, I can't give too many more details about it but yeah, it's short form, three doc, three short documentaries.

So that work does exist.

Yes, yeah. And for me that work has come about through not so. And not just this job specifically, but I'll talk about this kind of work in the broader sense. It's come about for me through having long, long term friendships and relationships and trusted business and creative relationships in the production industry.

I just want to pause there for a second because that's something that's so critical. The influx of people wanting to do this is actually I think good for the industry because there's a lot of, there's plenty of work. But the one thing that I've observed coaching video producers is especially if they're less experienced is they have no patience to, to understand that relationships take three, six, nine months or longer to grow and mature. What's your experience been? What advice would you give someone who's perhaps at the beginning of that journey to learn to deploy some patience and the fact that you can't just ring somebody up and go, hey, I'm a filmmaker, I do all this stuff. Book me. It can take months and years to form really strong relationships.

Well, there's, you know, in a sense as a society, everyone wants instant gratification, instant results. I want to be, I want to be at the end of the road. I want to be at the level of success now. I want it now. And we've had, we have that in society, in our life now, instant gratification. We don't have to wait for anything. We don't have to wait for a movie to be on at the theaters or we can get Uber Eats delivered to the home. Everything's just instant, constantly. So relationships don't work like that though. We're still human and we've still got to earn trust, build trust over time. Sure, you can go out there and you can just absolutely like graft and just knock on a thousand doors a day and you're gonna, it's a numbers game. You're gonna get some jobs, then you've gotta start working out which ones of those are relationships that you wanna nurture. If you are thinking about long term future, it's something that I can look back in retrospect, but it was a different industry back then too. It was very much patience was key. Things took, even production itself took time. You had to shoot things and have them transferred and run dub tapes with timecode in them to even look at back at what had been shot on a thing. The whole process of even production took way longer. It's just patience is something that filmmaking has always been required and good quality filmmaking now still none of that's ever changed. Like technique and patience and, and, and talent required and all that hasn't changed. But everything else about the instant nature of it has. So people can get lost in that and kind of with that instant gratification, instant result. Think that that should apply to their careers as well. I've noticed. And you're just going to burn out. You know, you got it. You've got to just play the long game.

Plus, don't you think that in terms of creating content and how long that takes to create and curate, but also the long tail of when you start to put that content out, people don't, you don't get massive following straight away. It takes time. We're actually in a place now where we produced 100 videos as an experiment that we stuck out on five social media channels and we've been through the first round of 100 videos. So we're just putting them out again, exactly the same. And the first round we got some pretty good traction on Facebook. Absolutely nothing on Instagram and Instagram TV0. What's really interesting is the second round we're starting to get some traction on Instagram tv. People are messaging me saying, love this content. Or if you're going to be any B this year, drop by our booth. We'd love to talk to you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we're also seeing a lot of traction on LinkedIn. But it's. I could have given up after the first hundred videos and gone. Instagram doesn't work for us. And I know that you've had a lot of success in Instagram. So what's, what's your experience on, on creating content? I mean, let's go there. Your Instagram account, I think we did an event together maybe three, four years ago. I think you had like 15,000 Instagram followers at that point. Maybe 20,000. You're up to 60 odd thousand.

It's 54 now, but it's stagnated. The thing with the social media platforms is they, they change the algorithms, they change the game all the time. Because ultimately this is a free bit of software that they just give to everyone. They want to make some money in the end. So if you time it right with a social media platform and they used to be coming out all the time, we're down to, we're down to three stables, right? Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And Facebook and Instagram at the same company. You know, we keep every, every now and then we get these new. Is it going to be, was it Vero or is it. There was vine and there was, there are all these other things and Periscope and Snapchat's a thing I guess as well. But the, the features of Snapchat, they. Instagram's, Facebook just go, we'll, we'll have that now. You don't need to. And people are like, it's exhausting to build an audience over and over again. Every time a new app comes out, starting from scratch to build that audience, people are like, no, I've got the audience here on Facebook or wherever it is. I'm just gonna stick with this. And I think that's their strength.

I think I remember talking about this three or four years ago. You made a definite decision to go down the Instagram route and create curated content every week. And that's kind of what you've done. And I've seen it grow and grow and Grow and grow.

Yeah, definitely. What I.

Made a conscious choice to use is Instagram as a. Basically as a.

It's like a showcase of your work and to just stay top of mind with potential with existing clients and hopefully new people can discover you on there. And you know, we've sort of said how is. There's. There's a lot of value in just reminding your existing clients that you're still around. You know, that's gold.

That's absolute gold.

You. It. Sometimes it just takes this nudge that you. Something you did pops up in their feed and they go, oh, we got this actually we've got something coming up that, that he'd be perfect for. And that's sort of because people forget because they're busy. They're busy and they just like, oh, who could we get to do this? Who does something like this? And then. Then you pop up in their feed. So it's a daily sort of weekly thing of putting. Putting something out there. Content. And you know, just. Even if it's.

And you put it as a piece of content a day, is it five days a week.

How have you started changed? It's like, yeah, photo a day was kind of the goal, but it's. So I've honestly lately taken a bit more put not as much emphasis on it because of looking at the interaction of it whenever they change these algorithms. And I've grown a bit cynical of it. The audience is still there, but they want you to pay to reach them. So even if they want Facebook have.

Done so it figures they'll do the same on Instagram.

Yeah. Yeah. So which is fine. But I've also experimented with that and this is. I don't want to get into a whole Instagram bashing thing because it's not really what it's about that I get. They're a business, they got to do what they're doing. But I find that even when you pay to try and get the results, as in can we get reach the audience that we built ourselves, even with pay. It's not really.

Yeah. I find the exact same on Facebook. You're paying the 60 bucks for a week. So worth promotion. And it still doesn't reach the people that have actually said they like you're a code.

Yeah. So working out what. How to go forward.

And just incidentally, we'll never. We'll never figure that out because they're never going to tell us.

No. There's too much at stake, you know, in terms of control and power.

I also believe they're Growing so rapidly. They, they're literally spiraling out of control internally. They just, they're just like literally firefighting the whole time. That's my guess. But look, you know, let's keep this positive. As you, as you rightly said, Instagram for you, you built up. How did you do it? How did you get from 0 to 54,000 followers?

That was through doing a bit of research.

Sorry, folks. The gardeners just decided to rattle his.

I don't know if it's coming through.

Well, I can hear it, but never mind. Doesn't matter. Just. We're just referencing it for the viewer, for the audience.

Painting a picture.

Painting a picture.

The wheelie bins are coming in. Yeah, so it was just doing a bit of research on techniques to grow an audience. And it was, you know, back then it was put content out frequently, put a photo up a day, use your hashtags that are relevant to what's in your photo and the audience you want to attract, and then go find those hashtags and other people that have hashtag their content with it and like their pictures and go on a, like, spree. So basically I'd sit there for 10, 20 minutes at a time, just scrolling.

And liking every day.

Yeah, yeah. So when. Whenever I could.

Yeah.

And scroll and like all these pictures. And if you say, if you like a thousand pictures that are hashtagged bicycles, a percentage of them will see that you've liked it and maybe come and look at your account and then a percentage of them will follow you back or follow your account.

And would you go and then follow those accounts?

No, not necessarily.

It's not a kind of follow for follow basis.

Well, that.

No, I didn't take that approach because otherwise I'd be following.

Essentially you were just being social.

Yeah.

You're investing and investing time. Because I think what's really key here is that you just sat down for 20 minutes a day and were social. Actually put some effort in still, you know, that's.

I've looked at some other people's Instagrams that are growing. Like, like Dean Lewis, who's good friend of yours, a good friend and a musician who. We had a lot of discussion around his Instagram and when it was growing and he's just taken it to a whole other level. I think a year ago he was at about 10 to 15,000 followers and I think he's at 200,000 now. I mean, there's a lot going on there.

Also. He's really good at just constantly putting out, interacting. His key Thing that I think that really grew a fan base for him on Instagram was he interacts with them and he comments and when they ask him a question, he answers it. And he's gracious and grateful for the following.

You see plenty of accounts where people ask questions and it's just like tumbleweed.

Yeah.

And that's something I've noticed you've done as well. You've done diligently gone and responded to virtually everybody that you can.

Yeah. Sometimes it's impossible to do because you might be busy doing something else and you can't, you can't get on it for that day. But I do make an effort to, if someone's asked a question about a photo that they've seen in there, like what, what lighting did you use for this or what lens did you use? Just go and answer it, you know, because that just sort of helps build. It's building a relationship of sorts. And if you can do that with enough people, it does. It's time. It's very. You got to be patient with it. You know, there's not really a shortcut to do it. People can buy followers and all that sort of stuff, but it's kind of pointless.

But the other thing that I noticed is that whilst, you know, you're building that content to attract potential people who hire you, a big majority of your followers are just avid, enthusiastic filmmakers or other filmmakers. And, and what I've always admired about you make is that you will answer every what can be a seemingly stupid question or an obvious question. You still go in very graciously and answer that, even though that person is probably never going to hire you.

Sure, yeah, yeah. I think what I want to do with that audience now, in light of what we were talking about before about providing content, is that my plan is to start making content specifically for that audience. I've got an audience of over 50,000 people that are interested in building filmmaking. And it, it's the idea of now building self funded content on the back of funded content, you know, or so say I'm doing.

Say I'm shooting a web series for someone. What kind of content can I get out of that personally to feed my account with original content? Well, I could, if I was on a five day web series shoot, I could kind of like go, oh, we're going to set up an indoor lighting nighttime scene and I'm going to use these lenses and I'm going to use this kind of technique. And that's content, video content that I can make for that audience. That's going to engage them. Putting up great images isn't what you know. That's the other thing is figuring out what the audience you want to grow. What do you want them to be? Do you want them to be customers? Do you want them to be colleagues? Do you want them to be clients? You know, it kind of grows organically and you don't really always get the choice. People latch onto something that they've seen and it can spread like that.

And how much you know. I think you remember you saying to me a while ago that one of the advantages of the Instagram account is that you've created a lot of your own content with a very specific look, and clients or prospects have gotten in touch saying, we loved that look. Can we get you to do something similar? How much of that has happened in the last five or six years?

A lot like that? Some. It's really something that I've noticed just as a. The way that production goes, when you're hired by an agency or a client, you've got to sort of achieve their vision. And you can kind of. It might not exactly be to your taste, it's still good quality work, but it sort of starts to fall into a category. I've found that when I just create my own content the way that I want it to look, the technique that I want to use to do it, and it's just purely how I want it to be, that is the biggest calling card I get for new prospective work where people use. Use my own work as and say, we like the look of that. We'd like something that falls into that look or feel and that's really good. It's kind of reaffirming too, that you're on the right track and to trust your own style and your own instincts about it. But you don't always get to express it because you're on as part of the job. You've got a creative brief from someone else that you need to fulfill. Of course, you put your own spin on it and your own taste into it. But at the end of the day, it's falling into a framework of what the client wants. And I find that the stuff that stands out the most is the stuff that I got to just have free reign on and put my own style in top to bottom. That's what is the. Has the best value currency for me getting work.

So, in summary, the Instagram road has been one of a lot of effort, consistency with the quality of images. I remember coming to your office one time and you were Sitting there for like an hour grading up the five images for Instagram that week. So you're very particular about not putting shit out. It's always something that's curated.

Yeah, definitely. Got to put the effort in. It's again the type of audience you want if you're, if you're turning the camera on yourself and you're talking to camera and you're vlogging, that's one type of content for me. It's been, you know, taking photos that involve technique and on set situations and making them look nice.

And it also shows the level of production you work towards, which is generally studio based. Always with a gaffer, big stuff, you know, Eurovision Song Contest promos, It's like there's a whole heap of stuff there. But you know, I saw a corporate you were doing the other day, just in an office. Yeah, but again, same kind of deal, big flag scrims, you know, big lights. It's all about a certain level of quality, which is very, very clear. If someone wants to investigate working with you, they look at your Instagram channel, they can see, yeah, you know, this is not going to be a two and a half thousand dollars job. It's going to be more like 10 or 15 or 20 thousand dollars because it's a bigger deal.

Yeah.

Do you find that kind of in some way helps to pre qualify the kind of people you get inquiries from?

Well, yeah, it does. People. Even back before Instagram when I would put self made behind the scenes videos out about music videos that I'd be doing or whatever and put them on Vimeo, people would see that and kind of see how the crew works together, what kind of gear we use, how big the production is or how it sort of flows and people were attracted to working in that way. It sort of manages expectations like you can see just by looking at it. Oh, these are, this is kind of how we run a set or the kind of style that we work in, how big the production footprint is and they get an idea of what to expect from that, which is really good, that's really valuable because people have a sense of. They can, they've come and they've looked at your Instagram and they can kind of. Oh, they do this kind of work and that kind of work. Oh yeah, they can kind of get an idea of what to expect.

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Sam.