“If the talent is having fun, the video will probably work.”
- Production still has to perform, but it is much easier when the talent is enjoying it.
- When a production travels abroad, plan far more than you think you need to.
For creators
Quotes from The Industry Office Hour.
Eight people working behind some of the biggest creators, talking about how the videos actually get made. Molly McDonald from Blue Door Productions put on a panel and Q&A with people who have worked with creators like Friends Next Door, Zac Alsop and Max Fosh. These are the notes I took.
Adam Dawood11 September 20266 min read
“The idea is everything. Execution matters too.”
- Focus on the story. Red Bull are never really selling you a can.
“People surrender too much time to looking at 1/10 in YouTube Studio.”
- So many people watch while they eat. That makes the relationship personal.
- Traditional media can struggle with the spontaneity that makes talent switch on set.
“Make life easy for the people hiring you.”
- Say yes early in your career: remove the gamble for whoever is taking you on.
- A Sidemen video can have 80–150 hours of planning behind it: a sandbox, story beats and every toy needed for spontaneity to work.
“You can learn everything from YouTube.”
- Use Meta ads to test titles and thumbnails, closing the gap between a guess and a result.
- At Diary of a CEO, the room is designed around the guest: their music, candles, and no audience beyond the guest and Steven.
“Culture fit is very important.”
- A small team can teach the technical work and how to be professional.
“It is not a creative job when you start.”
- At the beginning, do the coffee runs and everything else that needs doing.
- The job can mean solving ridiculous problems, such as finding a parrot that could win against a casino.
“Every time you make something, you learn.”
- Keep timelines organised when you edit. Apply the same discipline to scripting.
One thing I want to try
Can you tell which videos will work before they go live?
Someone in the room mentioned that teams often have a feeling for whether a video will be a one or a two out of ten. The Sport Obermeyer case, which I studied during my MBA, suggests a way to turn that feeling into a useful system: collect independent demand estimates, use the aggregate signal, and pay attention to where people disagree.
I want to try it with a team and a few early watchers: get everyone to put a prediction down before a video goes live, then see who was right once it has had the same amount of time out in the world. The average could be interesting. So could finding out who seems to have a real instinct for it.
Further reading: Sport Obermeyer, Ltd. and a later study of judgmental forecasting and aggregation.
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