Showtime! Why Every Brand Needs a Show
With advice on how to create yours
Every great brand and organization needs a good show. I’ve written about some of my favorites before. Shows like Oatly’s Will It Swap, Huckberry’s Dirt, and (I think) Architectural Digest’s Open Door. These flagship shows build awareness, cement cred with niche audiences, flex creative chops, signal taste, and also what matters to an organization. In today’s internet, shows are far more than content marketing tools, they are the cargo ships of all things brand.
Some other brand shows I really like include Hearing Songs for the First Time from the online musical lesson platform Drumeo, NYC DOT’s Meet DOT series, and Closet Picks from Criterion. I also love these little video vignettes from the Portuguese eyewear brand Lohause.
Great brand shows range from the highly produced to the it-could-be-shot-on-iPhone level of production. They can be long. They can be short. They’re made for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or all three. With the barriers to entry for video production being so low now (especially with AI tools for audio, editing, etc), the only thing preventing a brand or organization from not having a show is the lack of a good creative idea.
Don’t believe me? Give Atlantic CEO/Publisher Nicholas Thompson a follow on LinkedIn. He’s creating video content every day proving that all you need is something interesting to say and an iPhone and you’re good to go.
At Aspen Institute, we launched two shows in the last year. One is a vertical social-first series called Leading Voices and the other is a more high-production in-studio series called In Session. Both are designed to reach leaders and emerging leaders in different places online.
Whether you run content for a consumer brand, impact organization, government agency, or B2B company, I’m convinced that creating recurring video content - a show - is essential. Obviously, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are all video-first platforms, but video is also essential fodder for newsletters as well as LinkedIn, which has suddenly become another serious platform for video creators. I’m seeing more CEOs and C-Suite types create quick low-lift production videos for LinkedIn as an alternative to blogs and press releases.
Huckberry’s Dirt is a long-form food+adventure show that feels like the keystone of years of work producing great shorter-form content. Its host and producer show up on other Huckberry shows like Gear Lab, amplifying the Dirt and Huckberry brand messaging even wider.
If you’re in charge of content at your organization, you should create a show. To do this, your first step is to spend a lot of time researching the best shows online (think Hot Ones and other ones mentioned above). Think about how you can build a series that riffs off a tried and true format (street interviews, masterclass videos, vlogs, etc).
It’s also critical that your show serves a business purpose AND be creative. Shows, and content in general, that don’t serve a business function are art projects. Shows that lack great creative execution are boring, forgettable, and can be dismissed as just more advertising. Shows and content that combines creative and strategy are what you need to break through to get noticed and earn repeat viewers/followers. Put another way, you need a creative strategy.
I’ve helped build creative strategies and develop and launch new shows and editorial properties at Aspen Institute, Hodinkee, and Gear Patrol. Here are some things I keep top of mind when thinking through a new show idea.
Your Audience
Who is your audience? What niche can you fill? What information can your audience that they can’t find elsewhere? What device are they watching on? Is it YouTube on their living room TV? Their phone? TikTok? Figure out exactly who this person is and what matters to them, then name them, and create the show with them in mind, not your boss, manager, best friend, or whomever else.
Host or No Host
Some of my favorite shows, like Dirt, Track Star, and Subway Takes are hosted. Hosts give your audience a recurring character to care about which helps build habitual watching. If the host has an online following, they can also distribute the content on their channels, which can be a huge help in getting your viewers to find your show. But, the host has to be likable, knowledgable and charismatic. Finding a good host is hard. Finding a good host with the time to dedicate to your organization’s show is even harder. If you go with someone as a host who doesn’t have the time to create regular episodes, your new show is dead before it was launched.
Personally, I don’t want to be a host or on camera, but I love interviewing people. It’s probably my favorite part of my work. To get around this, I’ve created multiple shows that cut me out entirely and just feature the interviewee’s responses. You’ll see Dan Buettner and Reshma Saujani answering questions from me, as well as Black Thought and John Malkovich (Below), but you won’t see me on camera.
Another benefit of this setup is that in a pinch, I can shoot and interview at the same time.
Your Shoot Location
After your host, your location is another big hurdle to jump in creating a show. Renting locations can be costly and not every organization has access to a quiet space to shoot. That’s ok, street interview shows have become hugely popular for a reason. They give upcoming filmmakers a free place to produce their shows. As a result, we’re all very accustomed to watching person-on-the-street style interview shows.
If you have a limited budget, shoot in a corner of your office, on the street, or anywhere else you can find that’s not visually distracting. Less-polished videos are performing better on social media anyway these days, so you don’t even really need a studio. Just make sure you have a lav mic to eliminate ambient noise. If you want something more polished and have a dedicated room to shoot in, think of grabbing some seamless backdrops. They can quickly turn a boring space into something a bit more clean and visually interesting.
Staffing
Make sure you're staffed up from the beginning. Creating a show is easier than ever but you still have to have dedicated resources. Having a great creative video editor is probably your most important member of the team, but a two-person shoot crew is far preferable to a one-man-band kind of setup. An editor who can flex in Premiere, or their chosen editing software, and bring polish will elevate your work 10x more than any current AI tools. And with the incredible amount of young hungry video editors out there, it shouldn’t be hard to find someone great.
Publish Consistently and Give it Time to Gain Momentum
Don’t expect immediate results. Stay committed to publishing consistently. This is especially true for podcasts which can take months to build audiences.
Bring in Guests…With Big Followings
Find some people with big social followings to get on your show early, to help boost awareness. Do whatever you can to get them to reshare and spread the love.
Name it Well
A bad name won’t break your show, but a good name could make it. Spend a lot of time thinking of something clever that works on multiple levels.
Take Inspo
Spend time looking at the best shows online (think Hot Ones and the ones mentioned above) and figure out how you can build a format that riffs off one that is already successful. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, you just need to tweak it a little.
Additional Resources
Formats Unpacked from Storythings is a newsletter that explores various content formats and is essential reading for anyone building out a new editorial property.
Creator Spotlight features interviews with creators who are thinking through all the issues around creating, distributing, and monetizing content.
The Rebooting could be a bit too deep for non-media people, but it will give you a really insightful look into the discussions at the forefront of all things media/internet/content.
Good luck!
Watching
I’ve been losing it to Conan Must Go for the last few nights. Four episodes are simply not enough.
Listening
I fell deeply into Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, even though I’m not usually an audiobook or podcast person. Calling this an audiobook feels a little off, it’s more of a podcast or long-form audio documentary. You hear audio of Simon noodling on guitar and actual conversations with him discussing his work in various locations through time. It’s not just a voice actor reading a book. Bravo to Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam for producing it. If you know of any other audiobooks that feature interviews and archival audio like this, please send them my way!
How can startups with low budget do this?