How The Disruption is Good For The Video Production Industry EP#085 -Jamie McKenzie

Foreign.

Now, guys, just one more thing before we get started. We did have a few connection issues on this call as Jamie was in his garden, but I decided to run with it because the content was good. He did offer to re record, but I felt that we just keep. We'd lose some of the raw beauty of this interview. So please forgive the few dropouts. I know it's a bit frustrating, but I think you'll still get the absolute essence of the meeting. Jamie McKenzie, all the way from Pure New Zealand. In many sort of different ways, actually, because New Zealand, Pure New Zealand is their slogan, isn't it? And your company is called Pure Video Production.

It is. Which is by chance.

Great, great call, Jamie. Lovely to hook up with you in your back garden.

Yeah.

Now, for those people who are watching this, you'll be able to see Jamie is surrounded by palm trees. Those of you listening, Jamie is surrounded by palm trees. And today is the day that you come out of stage four lockdown, isn't it?

It is, yeah. So here in New Zealand, we've been in lockdown for level four for the past four weeks. So, like a lot of countries, all our freedoms have been taken away.

And the whole nation has been sitting at home either watching Netflix or planning. I think that's. Those have been the two options for most people sitting at home.

I actually saw a post you put out just a couple of days ago, which I loved, which was just a really kind of neutral post about there seems to be two camps. There seems to be those who are going, okay, it's a holiday, put our feet up, nothing we can do about it. And then there's the camp, which I think you fall into, which is, let's go hard and turn this into an opportunity. Talk to me about how you. How you approached this Stage four lockdown when it happened, because you're a pretty significant busy production company and everything just shut down, didn't it? Talk to me about what you did and why.

Yeah. So my production company, Pure, I started it, you know, 18 years ago. So I've been around for a while, you know, and like any production company, you know, ebbs and flows, there's peaks and troughs, you know, went through the gfc. So I've seen lean and tough times before, so.

Which was so quick, right? For all of us, you know, one minute we are, you know, about driving around, going to our shoots, doing what we're doing, you know, within 48 hours, we're locked up at home with no freedom. So as that happened, I looked at basically I sort of, I looked around me and I saw that there was no surety in anything. We don't know. And even now we don't know what the future is going to be and how it's going to look. You know, everyone's speculating, but we don't know for we know two weeks time, this virus flares up again and we're locked down again. So I thought, in these circumstances, what do I do as a business person? What do I need to survive? Because for me it's survival, you know, so the first couple of days, or I think the first sort of 24 hours, I went like pretty much everyone else, I went sort of into panic mode and fear mode. You know, it's like, shit, my business is going to close and stop, my income is going to stop. You know, am I going to pay the mortgage? How am I going to survive? And I rode that out for about a day. And then I decided, look, to get through this, I need to control, I need to choose a mindset and stick with it, you know, So I decided essentially for me, the mindset is about surviving and then thriving. So what do I actually need to survive? Cuddle my costs, do what every business is doing, get myself solid, you know, get my business into a safe position so I can last. Then how do I thrive? Well, first step, obviously, is reaching out to your marketplace and then first of all your customers and making sure that those relationships are strong, you know, And I think, I think, you know, for a lot of production companies, that's potentially an element that we miss because it's, you know, it's often job by job. You do a job for a company, you deliver them a great, you know, some great videos or a great video, you move on to the next one and you sort of forget them pretty quick, you know, unless they don't pay their invoice and then you don't forget them ever, you know, but once they've paid, they've gone. So, you know, I've got, you know, thousands of clients that I've worked with. So my first step was literally just to reach out to them and connect with them and communicate and also to get some data for myself. What are people thinking? How are people reacting.

And what are they going to need through this?

What I quickly identified through talking to a number of my clients was everybody was hungry for information, like really hungry. Trying to sell video to those people, because I did try, you know, was just not happening. No one was spending money. You know, even now, you know, people are reluctant to commit to spending any money. So I thought, well, look, I'm going to put the financial element aside. I've put my. I've hibernated my business. I do have other incomes that I'm lucky enough to receive, so I'm pretty safe. So I going to ignore trying to get my cash flow up and I'm going to concentrate.

Essentially generating some brand goodwill by reaching out to people and communicating with people, hence how I connected with you. And I launched what I've called the Expert series.

And that's what I think, something I really want to touch on there. It's the mindset, the thing that I observe you identify as being really critical in terms of the connections you've made during the series. And how do you think that's going to pan out in the future?

Yeah, so that's a really good question. So, you know, I treated it as an opportunity to connect with people that I'd never networked with before, that, you know, leaders of their field that could either give me.

Oh, I think we might have just lost you a bit there. And your signal. Hang on, we just lost you there, Jamie, for about five seconds. Can you just repeat that for me again?

Yeah. So way that I approached it was I saw that it was a great opportunity to actually connect with experts within different industries and different sectors and, you know, get information from them is a great excuse. People are really willing to share their insights to help other businesses. So leverage that concept, you know, and I, you know, over the first three weeks, I conducted literally three to four interview sessions a day, each with different people.

You know, I've got tens of thousands of views of the videos. Overall.

I think I've probably got six confirmed jobs from the people that I've connected with and I've got new business ventures that I'm talking to a couple of them about. So it's made me no money. I've put a lot of time and energy into it, but literally I've just been doing this sitting in my garden, having conversations with people.

How good is that, though? Because you are on a stage four lockdown where you're not allowed to leave the house, really not allowed to do any business. But you've just used that as an opportunity to nurture new opportunities at a time when you've got everyone's attention. And what I also loved was, I noticed last week you changed tax slightly. You actually reached out to the audience and said, who here has challenge around video? Who here struggling? And I think you spoke with a woman who was a mortgage Advisor and you basically gave her a live strategy session. And I thought that was just genius because you are demonstrating your value to people who needed the help and not just that, but the people who are observing and watching the content. Because you've built an audience, you'll see your skills and I would be very surprised if you don't end up with a very busy back half of the year as a result of that.

Yeah, I think so. And I think in terms of that, that, that sort of concept of trying to show people some strategy of some kind because, you know, in Australia you may be a little bit further along. Most businesses and marketers that are using video here, they don't grasp how to actually use it, you know, and same as many production companies, you know, I'm making content that never gets seen really. You know, it gets, gets, you know, stuck on a website somewhere and it gets a bit of traffic, but it's not really doing any heavy lifting or what it should do. So I guess, you know, part of my stand is to actually educate the market and like, you know, video works. We know it works. Combine video with social media, you've got dynamite. Combine video, social media. And actually.

The other thing that I observed is that, you know, you've been an active user of social media and paid advertising yourself for some time. And I agree with you, there is, there is this element that a lot of the market are just not sure what to do with you. I think one of the things that's really smart about what you've done is that at a time when the whole world can't communicate in any way, bought video, you've firmly established yourself as a provider of video. But someone who's demonstrating by using video the benefits of it. Have you had any interesting feedback from competitors or other video production companies? Does that come up at all? Because. Yeah, yeah, you must be standing right out in the marketplaces now and really winding up.

So I really sort of started going hard on my own promotional video content featuring me probably about 18 months ago. And when I, my first campaign was me smashing up a camera, you know, because I wanted to shake, shake things up. Everyone's heard of video and everyone's talking about doing video on their phones and all this thing. So I wanted to get a bit of attention and I wanted to show that I was a stand for something different in the industry. So I, you know, the clips, me smashing up one of my. What appears to be an very expensive camera, you know, and I got a lot of backlash from.

People in New Zealand saying You know, why do you think you can say these things? You know, what is it? What do you know that we don't know? And that camera wasn't what you said it was. And all this backlash, which to me, it showed that I was onto something, you know, because.

Firstly, I was obviously getting some attention, right or wrong, and whoever it was on, but people were taking attention. The second thing is I was walking the talk, you know, I was struggling to sell my potential clients into video and some of the solutions that I offer, but they're not doing it myself. It just doesn't seem right, you know, whereas if I can put my hand on my heart and go, well, look, I'm going to implement this strategy with these tactics, these are the results that I get myself. That's a pretty easy thing to sell.

And that was the reason I discovered you, because I. Within my coaching group, I'm always saying to my clients, guys, you're selling video, but if you're not using video to sell your video, that's hypocritical. And then I caught your ad of you smashing up a camera. I'm like, who's this guy? This guy gets it. And I think you were testing some ads to Australia and I saw it and I reached out and you were really busy, but I was like, ah, it's just so refreshing because it's actually like the market is wide open. If you're willing to invest in your business and actually create content and spend some money promoting that content, the net effect is not just showing your clients what you do, but you're demonstrating by doing. And so when you have a conversation with them, they already know you make content. So they're like, well, you make it, therefore we can get behind it. It's interesting. I love what you said there about it shaking up the market. And I think Warren Buffett says it's only when the tide goes out, you see who is swimming naked. And we are going to see a culling of about 30% of the providers in the marketplace. And I'm okay with that because it was getting flooded and anyone can make money when there's plenty of work. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah.

Look, I've always taken a stance in business and I probably class myself as a business, an entrepreneur.

You know, I think there's so many filmmakers out there and producers out there that that's all they are. And then they never really make money, you know, and you're not going to survive long if you can't make money and you don't have a product to sell. So.

You know, my stance has always been I'm either going to be a leader in what I do or I'm going to be following someone. And if I'm following someone, I don't want to do it, you know. So that's always been my stance.

I think also, you know, making content that's slightly controversial is a really powerful positioning strategy. And I feel that a lot of the filmmaking community, and I kind of refer back to really kind of 2009 when the DSLR thing kicked off, there was seemed to be this sense of that filmmakers were a community and we were all out to help each other. But in actual fact, we're all in business and we need to look after our own businesses first and look after our clients. But I think there's a blurring of the lines when it comes to this notion of filmmakers are a community that always help each other out. Because I don't necessarily see that as the case, but I love the fact that business, this is a business podcast and in business, your moral responsibility to your business is to turn as high a profit as you can for the least amount of effort in return to serve your clients at a high level and make money. And a lot of filmmakers are uncomfortable with that because they hide behind the gear, they hide behind the process. But this crisis that we're in is going to kill businesses. And I want to, and I'm okay with that because that's how commerce works. It's going to, it's going to thin the market and I believe create a higher quality product for the market and the end user. Do you have any, do you have any perspectives on that?

Yeah, I do. I think, you know, in the last five years.

Video production is, you know, the ease of entering the market is very, very, has become very easy. You know, you can know, couple of thousand dollars on a SLR and you know, a MacBook and some software and you can begin, you know, and you can make videos and there's nothing wrong with that. But there's the, there's the element of making videos, you know, a pretty little 60 second video for a business and then there's understanding what that business needs to drive their marketing to get them an outcome result and working backwards to create a video. So you know, I guess, in short, I think that the markets, especially here in New Zealand, we're flooded with video makers, video creators, you know, easy to get schooled up, easy to get the gear and easy to make yourself a bit of money. What I've seen here in New Zealand in the last few years. And this started with, you know, with a, with what's now a global company, which is 90 seconds TV. You know, they, in essence, I think it's a superb model, you know, and I don't knock what, you know, what's been built, but what they did to the industry here was they sort of came in and Uberized it and cut a lot of the profit out of it because they just undercut everyone. And they didn't undercut people by reducing their own margins. They undercut everybody else by getting all the freelancers to work for reduced rates, you know, so it's, it screwed up the industry. I think that's found a bit of a balance now. But there is a glut of, you know, new video makers, new video creators that don't understand business, don't understand marketing.

You know, and in some ways they are.

You know, and for customers and for clients, you know, they're not necessarily. When they look at, you know, for example, my work and my offer to another video creators, they're not comparing apples with apples. You know, I've got 18 years experience, you know, turning over seven figures, eight and a half thousand videos. You know, I've created, you know, there's a lot of business, you know, I've had a number of my own businesses. There's a lot of skills that I bring to it from a business point of view that, you know, other video creators don't. And it's very hard to tangibly show that and charge for that, you know. So I think, I think the market does need to clean out, you know, and I think it's going to happen.

I agree. And the fact is, you know, there's a couple of things there. One is, I've been having this conversation quite a lot on the podcast is that we cannot assume we are immune to the uberfication of our industry. It's already happened. I think the next big shift is going to be, and I said this on a podcast recently, I said, I predict that at some point in the next five years, and I have no evidence of this whatsoever, that's just my opinion that we will see something called Adobe Rough Cut. Like Adobe will create a machine learning way to edit videos for you and it might be to kind of help you with the rough cut. But if it's not Adobe, it will be somebody else. There's no way that technology. We would be crazy to assume that's not going to happen.

Editing, yeah.

Things gonna go.

Yeah. I spent close to 18 months working heavily on an idea like you're talking about to try and get. Get something built and my pockets aren't deep enough. But I mean, I saw, I saw something pop up the other day using AI and it cuts out the dead spots in your interviews or anything else like that, you know, so there's already, there's already bits of technology out there that's doing that, you know?

You know, and I've had this conversation with other video creators, you know, and it's usually the people that will spend a lot of money on their cameras don't work that often can create really beautiful work.

That looks great but doesn't serve, necessarily serve a purpose. They're often the ones to jump on about it being a craft. And, you know, no one can replace a human. And I've got my way of doing things and that's not wrong, but it's not what people want.

That's the key, isn't it? From a business perspective? You have to adapt to what the market wants. I have no issue with anyone crafting something. Master craftsmen make beautiful furniture, but there's a very small market for it. And I think our industry has this propensity to, as a filmmaking community, want. Everyone just wants an ARRI or a red because then they're shooting on the best camera, they've got the best quality, they can craft everything. And I hear time and time again a kind of slightly bitter undertone of conversation. I look at a few groups and things and it's always like, oh, they. No one appreciates us, you know, no one gets the craft. It's so unfair. And here's the thing, and this might be controversial, it's totally fair. The market wants what the market wants. And you can choose as a business owner to try and force feed the market something that you want to give them because you believe in it, or you can listen to the market and give them what they need. And I think this entire resetting of the planet just now is going to do that. So to make this useful for people listening and watching, what do we need to be giving? What do we need to be giving the audience? And how do we need to be adjusting and adapting our businesses to remain profitable? Because I believe there's still huge opportunity. And you live in a country with 5 million people. I mean, it's a tiny economy, yet you're generating significant revenues in video production. So what are you doing differently and what should people be thinking about doing differently?

So my stance, and like I say, I'm a business person before I'm a video creator is you need to understand what the market wants and you can't actually understand what the market wants without data. You can think you do. You can think that they're going to want 8k raw footage shot and you can think that they're going to want beautifully crafted videos and you can think that. But unless you go and actually test it and talk to your market and talk to your potential customers, you actually don't know anything. So, you know, my take has always been to, if I have an idea for something that I'm going to release or launch or before I do anything, I get very clear on what that idea is and then I'll pick my top 10 potential customers that I think are going to want it and I'll have a conversation about it with them and get data. If I did this, would you want it? What would you pay for it? How often would you use it? What do you think the outcomes that you could get from it? And by doing that, you'll very quickly get clear on whether your idea is going to work or not without wasting time or money or, you know, and I guess what's difficult for people like us and video creators is because we do enjoy the process, we love the craft, we can get drawn into that, you know, so we can think, oh, if we make a really beautiful showreel, we're going to get a lot more customers. But if your showreel isn't aligned to what people actually want, it can be as beautiful as anything. People don't want it, you know, so my take has always been, you know, talk to your market and listen and get data. When you've got data, then you can make a decision, give them what they want and don't be attached to how that looks.

You know, it's great advice. And mate, you know, I'd love to talk for longer, but we've got a bit of a connection issue, so we're dropping out a little bit. So what I think I might do is wrap this up here today, but get you back on the show and when we get a stronger connection, because I think there's a lot of interesting topics here we can delve into. Thank you so much for, for your time. And the only reason I'm stopping is because the signal keeps dropping out and I don't want people to miss out on what you're saying. But where can people find out more about you, Jamie?

So I've got a couple of websites. The first one is my production company, which is pureproductions. CO nz. And then I've got my own page, which is Jamie.