Tips from a Veteran TV Producer for Digital Marketing Production Start Ups
by Clare Cassidy
Okay I’m not exactly a vet, but I was 26 when I directed my first tv series (26 episodes, a gruelling travel schedule and a lot of learning along the way), so I guess in TV years I’m old news. Moving into digital marketing video production, I’ve often felt like a complete stranger to the dark art of algorithms and search terms. Our young production team at Curious Crab confidently throw around words like “fyp” and “trending sounds,” while I dive for google. I started TV production when we were still delivering on tape (now I’m showing my age) but there are some old truths from those days that I still cherish, and sagely gather the team around every now and then to share my ancient wisdom.
The TV world can be brutal, and the production company I started with was run by producers who were trained in broadcasting in the army, so it was a genuine bootcamp for me. But with fast turnaround times, pressure to gather entertaining content, and many different factors at play, a shoot does have to run like a military operation. One wrong step and the day is done. I remember travelling rural roads in South Africa, searching for two Traditional Healers, who were going to take us to a local initiation site. The production manager had organised to meet them somewhere on the side of the street. After an hour we finally came across two figures beautifully adorned in their traditional dress. They piled into our already packed production van, and we set off into the great unknown. Three hours later they asked us to stop and happily piled out of the van and waved goodbye. We had the wrong guys, and we were now thoroughly lost and three hours behind schedule. My team would be groaning now because I’ve told this story many times, but the lesson is clear: if the production manager isn’t on top of things on a shoot, the creative team won’t have the time and space to make magic.
Clients are busy, marketing and PR teams have so much on their plates, and we are often not their priority. That is why I like to make sure we give everyone clear deadlines and deliverables here at Curious Crab. We have a watertight system here, that ensures nothing is missed. What we want is to reach a point with clients where they are happy to let us run with their video productions, and not leave them worrying about schedules, typos, missing products and forgotten footage. We get it done efficiently and fast, so that our clients have the time and space to be responsive to their market.
That’s just one top tip from this old hack, for more information on how we get things done here at Curious Crab, be sure to check us out here.