The E-commerce Content Creation Podcast

Summary

Curren Calhoun joins Daniel for this episode of The E-commerce Content Creation Podcast and we discuss his approach to identifying, implementing and supporting new and existing technology in your photo studio. 

Key Takeaways

• Technology in your studio should be an enhancer. It should enhance your production process and allow creatives on your team to create. 
• Anything that can be automated, should be automated. No one should be spending time on repetitive tasks.
• Evaluate your own process before trying to identify or implement new tech. Your process needs to already have the non-value add steps removed, otherwise the new solution enhances those issues. 
• Look for solutions that allow you to work the way you want to work, but also be willing to adjust your workflow to take advantage of the tools available. 
• Being able to "translate" creative needs and ideas to numbers to sell a necessary tool, is a vital skill to support your team. 
• You need an advocate for tech in your studio, because things change so quickly and workflows can be interrupted easily. 
• Educated and engaging your IT team can help smooth tech transitions and help improve support for the studio team. 

Links & Resources

Curren on LinkedIn

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

Joining Daniel for this episode is Shanna Ferris, video production specialist and new member of the Creative Force team. We touch on some best practices for developing video content, engaging your teams across workflows, and how to create a unified presentation between stills and video. 

Key Takeaways

• If you're trying to introduce video, take the time to strategize. Define your goals and expected outcomes, avoid treating video like just another strategy. 
• Providing value with video can mean something different depending on where the video is used. 
• An added dimension to video content is accessibility, and should be considered as part of your strategy. 
• For video content that is cohesive to other visual content, reducing silos in your org is absolutely key. 
• Video content production really necessitates more transparency in your teams to improve communication and add value to the customer. 
• Consolidated asset review can make your content more cohesive, and provide opportunity for cross-functional relationships.
• Video production is more accessible to studios than ever, because technology, including hardware, has made it very simple and inexpensive to product high quality content. 
• Data and reporting are vital to understanding if your strategy is working, and learning how to increase velocity in your production. 
• Pilot, test, and iterate, whenever possible. 

Links & Resources

Shanna on LinkedIn

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

Ali McLeod of Saks Fifth Avenue joins Daniel to talk about trust, transparency, and professional fluency and their roles in your relationship with your creative teams.  We discuss earning the trust of your team, building a culture of trusting each other, and how curiosity can help earn trust and drive professional growth. 

Key Takeaways

• A key part of earning trust is to understand your team and its roles. Shadow your teams and learn about their roles if you don't have experience with their role.
• Spend the time learning the process inside and out. Not just what is being done, but how and why it's being done.
• Keep up with your process, but be careful not to get lost in the weeds.
• Listening to your team and helping remove even minor barriers, can help build trust and encourage growth.
• Leaders should keep open office hours, discussion is always on the table.
• Jumping levels should not be scary, the studio environment should be collaborative. Any person of any level should feel able to collaborate with anyone else.
• Read the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott, and then practice it in your studio.

Links & Resources

Ali McLeod on LinkedIn

Saks Fifth Avenue on LinkedIn

Creative Jobs at Saks

Reading List

Radical Candor - Kim Scott - Build confidence in having difficult conversations

Trust Rules - Bob Lee - Basic guidance how to build and gain trust with a team or colleague

One Minute Manager - Ken Blanchard - Advice on feedback and coaching

Leaders Eat Last - Simon Sinek - Trust building and leadership through real life examples

Culture Code - Daniel Coyle - Guidance on how to build culture at your company

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

Colleen Devanie of REI joins Daniel to talk about agility and adaptability when complex processes are made even more difficult by business interruptions. We learn how to essential data is to make sure your process is agile and adaptable. As Colleen put it, you cannot be agile with guesses. 

Key Takeaways

• "If you're doing it right, your content supports the business in more than one channel"
• Data is the key to understanding efficiency of your process, when you have multiple inputs that cross each other and supply multiple outputs.
• Building a style guide that allows for flexibility is a key way to  build agility into the process.
• Having a team that is passionate about the product can help support agility in imaging, creating images that the customer needs to see, even if they aren't called out in the style guide.
• Sometimes we think of agility as synonymous with cost savings, but sometimes its means creating the ability do the work that adds value to your customers.
• Having options, like dial knobs, that allow you to maintain your content needs while shifting responsibility to vendors or changing standards based on the business needs, is key to overcoming dramatic business disruptions.
• Being agile means having a process that your team can follow, but allows you to pivot when the business needs change.
• You can't be agile with guesses, you need data to make sure the levers you're pulling are working.

Links & Resources

Colleen on LinkedIn

REI on LinkedIn

REI Talent Portal - Create an account, and please remember to maintain the accuracy of your information to help producers when they are casting. 

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

Lindsay More Nisbett of The Line Studios joins Daniel on this week's episode to discuss how to plan for and successfully deliver versatile content that can serve many needs across many channels and the impact this agile imagery can have to improve customer experience.

Key Takeaways

• Customers come to your site to understand your product. You can learn from your customer how they WANT to understand your images.
• User Generated and Influencer content can provide low-cost contextual details on your product for your customers.
• Large-scale business interruptions can force a studio to pivot rapidly to other ways to produce content, such as influencer or crowdsourced content.
• Your brand will also dictate what types of agile content you can employ.
• D2C retailers can create agility in their content by building a community that understands their brand voice.
• Lindsay will come back to discuss strategies for effective user-generated content campaigns.
• Building a foundation of agile content requires extensive pre-production planning, and the role of content or brand director can play a big part.
• Engaging stakeholder teams in pre-production can illuminate content needs across channels and ensure that assets are captured according to specific needs.
• MM LaFleur realized a 40% cart capture increase attributed to refreshed, thoughtful, and agile imagery.
• Capturing social content during marketing and/or ecomm shoots can ensure brand adherence even on social channels which can sometimes be difficult to maintain.

Links & Resources

Lindsay More Nisbett on LinkedIn

The Line Studios

The Line Studios on Instagram

The Line Studios on LinkedIn

The Line Studios' speaker series on emerging trends in e-commerce creative

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

Carrie Crow of Hello Fresh joins Daniel to talk about some things she learned when Hello Fresh was acquiring brands and rapidly expanding, along with their content needs. We discuss how it's ok to get it wrong at first, and learning your lessons quickly. Carrie quickly realized that her team and space needed to be modular and nimble, constantly growing their skillset and capability while anticipating what future creative requests might be. 

Key Takeaways

• It's ok to get it wrong at first, but fail fast and move on. Leverage your learnings and always review or hindsight your work.
• Rigid team structures and processes make it almost impossible to adapt when your company grows overnight. 
• Cross-training teams to make sure that any one creative team member can produce content for any channel is important to agility and business continuity. 
• Offering the opportunity for your teams to build portfolios is a great way to attract top talent and engage teams. 
• In NYC, if you need a tiger on set, Carrie can help you out. 
• When planning is difficult, you can always look at the worst case scenario and determine a plan.

Links & Resources

Carrie Crow on LinkedIn

Hello Fresh

Every Plate

Green Chef

Factor

Glossary
Steve Giralt - Visual Engineer, Director, and Photographer at The Garage which is NYC based content studio that specializes in engineering incredible video content through the use of robotics, AI and human ingenuity. 

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

Joining Daniel on the show this week is Terence Mahone of Farfetch. When Terence took on his role at Farfetch, the directive was simple: Go out and create a culture of continuous improvement. We talk about the need for senior leaders to be willing to build the structures that can allow ground up engagement and idea generation. We also talk about the importance of fluency around a directive, and how understanding the language can help prevent fear or doubt in your teams. 

Key Takeaways

• The best implementations of continuous improvement starts the process with the ground level team, but senior leadership has to be on board to build the structures and create the environment.
• Fluency in the process is important. You can assuage fears by teaching your teams the language.
• Listen to learn. As a manager, listen to learn, invite your directs to speak freely and listen to learn. 
• Work to ask questions in a way that doesn't feel like a deflection. 
• The words we use and our tone of voice matters when it comes to getting buy in for ground up idea generation. 
• Build a system to quantify the effect of process improvements, and provide meaningful feedback. 

Links & Resources

Terence Mahone on LinkedIn

Can Lean kill creativity? No. 

Overview of Six Sigma

Continuous Improvement - Kaizen

Glossary
5 Whys - A root cause analysis technique to determine the root cause of a given problem and help identify a solution. Read more here. 

Gemba Walk - The action of going to see the actual process, understand the work, ask questions, and learn. Read more here.

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

This week Clair Carter-Ginn of Forecast Agency joins Daniel to discuss the post-pandemic era of e-commerce content, what that means for casting, and the efforts to expand representation that will shape content in the future. 

Key Takeaways

• Some trends in casting we saw pre-pandemic, have accelerated now that studios are beginning to open up again.
• Content planning will be a huge benefit, with so many micro-channels of marketing all with specific content needs.
• Talent usage is as important as ever with so many diverse channels for content. Buy more usage than you think you may need.
• Influencer marketing and using relatable talent to share more than just product assets will continue to be a strategy, but bringing back more art director control as in person shoots start up.
• Diversity continues to be an important effort in casting, even with complicated sample availability. More and more brands are following the lead of other industries and making budgets to include more diverse talent.

Links & Resources

Creative Production Day by Henry Stewart Events

Clair's LinkedIn

Forecast Agency on LinkedIn

Forecast Agency's Website

Forecast Agency on Instagram

Additional Reading on Diversity in Fashion - Vogue Business

Glossary
DE&I - Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Usage - Modeling contracts usually have stipulations about how and where an image with the model can be used. Print and Ad Campaigns sometimes costs more than digital or social. This is negotiated up front as "usage"

Influencer Marketing - Using an individual with social media clout and/or large followings to represent a brand, not only in images but usually inclusive of their personality as well. 

Law & Order - A long running fictional television series depicting the criminal justice system in NYC, known for its specific format, style, and easily recognizable intro and bumper sound effects

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

Joining Daniel this week on The E-commerce Content Creation Podcast, Dallas based producer and founder of The Producers Agent, Kaylah Key. We discuss effective and sincere networking in the creative production industry and how she launched The Producers Agent in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Key Takeaways

• Effective networking is about making a sincere connection, and building a relationship, not just simply cold calling.
• Effective networking can have an impact on relationships between team members on set, which is critical to efficient production. 
• Reach out to people in a sincere way. Interact with them based on who they are and their unique perspective, not just because of their role or stature. 

Links & Resources

Kaylah Key on LinkedIn

The Producers Agent Website

The Producers Agent Instagram

Gary Vaynerchuk on Networking

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

Jen Bakija joins Daniel to discuss how to advocate for your creative team in a challenging environment.  Jen has built warehouse based studios from the ground up, and staffed them with high performing teams in the face of temperature challenges, dust and grime, loud warehouse noise, and DC safety policies. Through all of this Jen advocated for and supported her team in any way she could, finally building out a more controllable studio environment with extremely low turn over in her core team.

Key Takeaways

• Open up lines of communication with external stakeholders who can impact your day to day (for example: FC leadership for warehouse based studios)
• Be honest with talent about the environment the studio exists in
• Don't be afraid to give your team what they need to be comfortable and productive
• Good leadership and supportive management can help overcome the challenges of operating and staffing a studio in challenging environments
• The excitement of having ownership of a new effort can help engage teams and make them more willing to take on challenging projects
• Cardboard boxes create their own dust! Seriously!

Links & Resources