oren meets world: brand content as a tv show: content strategy for social media

Today we're going to talk about why most brand content sucks and what to do about it. I am still here in sunny London having some tea as one does and I'm fired up because again and again I go into workshops with brands of all sizes and shapes and they are thinking about content incorrectly. Here's how to think about it. Your brand is a television show. I have a previous video I'll link that talks about how you can do an exercise mapping out your characters and your sets etc but on this video we're going to zoom in to creating a series for your brand and how to make it stand out. I am working on one of these myself for my brand currently. I'm workshopping multiple of these with major brands and we're going to get into the intricacy. I'm going to talk about how small brands can do this affordably. We're going to talk about how big brands can think about building a real campaign around it. We're going to talk about where to draw inspo, the current state of social media and how services business, product brands, whatever it is, need to think of their content like a television series and how to do it. Let's lock in. So I had a watershed moment the other day. As many of you know I work with a niche that I've done reports on and similar and everyone was abuzz about two weeks ago because Sephora announced they're doing a show on Hulu. So why is this important? Why is this critical? Because a brand and Sephora at the end of the day retail store but also a brand is entering content in the most major way. They are saying we are moving from what we put on our social media to Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, a true entertainment equivalent. This is a major cultural shift I believe is happening across any number of things but the idea for a lot of brands that there would maybe get ready with me style content happening on Hulu, people are engaged with, whether retail or what product focuses, changes the way that brands want to be featured in content and think about content. This brings me to all of these brands that are creating content like a television series and how you can do that too and why. So let's start with an example and a lower budget example. This is Brooklyn Coffee, BK Coffee project. You may have seen them on Instagram. They're getting millions of views with these scenarios. The owner of the coffee shop who is a smaller influencer and London streets are savage bro. Damn England. Long story, England really fumbled the bag. The owner of Brooklyn Coffee project is a smaller influencer in her own right. She has her friend who is a barista and they have a cadre of people come in including influencers to present these really surreal scenarios. Whether they'll basically act like they're in 2030 or say they don't serve this blank because it's not fair trade enough, whatever it is. They will have these really out there, particularly crazy scenarios. They're awkward. They get walked through in content that feels like a series, right? It's just like you're having your futuristic subsection of Seinfeld and someone walks in every day to the same scenario. You know what to expect. It's a different personality. It's gonna be funny in a different way. They created the format you can expect to see on their social that is inherently viral. It's driven almost too much traffic to their store. Why I want to call this out is this isn't a major company. They don't have huge content this is shot with two camera angles with the same people with some great lighting with a series of guests and yes you could find a production company who will shoot this for $25,000 an episode and yes you could find somebody who will shoot the same exact thing for 500 per this is the world that we live in now where these areas are getting progressively closer together in terms of who will do what at what cost what camera equipment can do and what some thought and intention can get for your business. I also like to highlight this because it's a services business, a retail location, not some super cool product brand or whatever it is. Let's look at a few more examples. Really the person who jump-started this trend and probably the best to do it in my opinion is Alexis Bitar. They're a New York City jewelry brand. Been around for a long time, well regarded, nice stuff. They introduced a series on Instagram featuring socialite characters in the New York scene. Overlap with the stylist community, with the drag community and created a storyline between this woman like an aging socialite and her assistant who have like a borderline abusive relationship and put them into all these funny real New York scenarios. Shot in these little vignettes from 60 seconds to three minutes and put on Instagram that blew up and people want to immerse themselves in these characters in their lives. Really rich script writing, rich ideas. I believe it was conceived by the brand founder himself and then it spiraled into a life of its own. So things would happen virally in New York like the woman who runs the Sotheby's auctions kind of went viral for some of the things she was doing and she became a character. La Roche, the stylist who does like Zendaya, he appeared as a character inside of it playing himself. So they were able to basically create a cultural moment around a series they had in their Instagram and they also did breakdown videos behind it. They also post some of their standard content but there is this through line of a television show and characters of their own creation. Now this one is a step up right. There are real actors and actresses involved. There is like production and sets. This is probably a pretty significant undertaking but certainly less than doing a whole TV show for themselves. But it has created a world that you could see stretching over. You could watch their eight episode version of this on Netflix and people would probably be into it. I'm going to hit a few more examples. Let's dive into some of the tactics here. The idea is instead of just creating content about our products or cool snippy videos, what is a narrative through line that builds a world that is entertaining? That's the number one thing. You've heard me talk in all these social videos. You can make value content that people will save that helps them or you make entertainment content people consume that competes with Netflix or you fail. That middle ground is a failure zone right. I make value content. I don't try to do anything in the middle like that's why my content does well. This is true entertainment content. You are watching this and enjoying it similar to what you would do scrolling through funny videos on TikTok. That is what a brand should be approaching it at. And then to do that you need to give yourself a way to keep people engaged. And the way this content succeeds is you could watch any episode whether it's the first time seeing it or your 10th time and still be entertained. That's where someone like BK Coffee Project crushes it because there's a joke every time you may not know the characters but the jokes will still work. Someone like Alexis Vitar you get some setup on each episode and you begin to wonder like oh I'm in this world now I want to learn more I want to go watch more of it. But each of these being able to succeed standalone or as part of the series is a critical point but what story can your brand create and how can you make it either easy production that you can repeat like using your retail location or your office or whatever it is and then just weaving that in as a component of your brand's content strategy. And then also showcasing that adding it to your email newsletters having a little section on your website with all the episodes adding that world building into this as a brand. And you'll notice for BK Coffee Project they're selling the coffee shop you can physically go to this place you see in the videos and people do. Alexis Vitar the jewelry is always their jewelry the little things that come from this that also make it a product showcase. One of my favorite examples is there are all these car dealerships on TikTok they're basically replicating the office they will go run the same scenarios where someone like looks at a camera or where there's this awkward piece sometimes they'll even remake exact episodes but any of these offices where you have a lot of downtime or things like that are perfectly ripe if you have a couple of funny personalities to put something in the world that's out there and again you may get attention beyond what you're looking for right not everyone's going to go visit North Dakota Ford dealership because it but certainly going to get them some attention in the neighborhood that they're in. Another great example on the highest of production ed is Ritz Carlton. I actually think hotels is one of the entertainment in general like hospitality entertainment it's probably the worst content niche as possible they're still stuck in 2017 taking these oddball photos of their places maybe having an influencer or two you have an amazing set to make content. I've talked about Ritz London before who you know will show you their their tea service things like that but Ritz Carlton basically got an A-list actress they got Peter from The Hungry Games I don't know his real name and then set up a whole scenario with like a family and a whole series of stuff to promote a merch drop right the idea of thinking about this is a micro idea as well you have a big initiative or a campaign dropping five or six episodes that go with that and then the behind the scenes all of a sudden you've now made your campaign but it's more compelling and narrative driven than just dropping another photo shoot. So how do you get inspiration for this how do you find this so one of my favorite TikTok series is the series called Boyroom where a comedian goes to visit male apartments in like New York and Philly for like single 30s males which is like it's basically a horror show and a comedy show like matched into one but they have thought of a repeatable thing that they can go do and it's also very sponsor ready right you could go do that with a interior design company and all of a sudden it's a redo or whatever it looks like but all this comes down to very similar formats to what we've seen in the past basically looking at existing tv and reality tv and being like what matches well with our business and so if you look at anything from Pimp My Ride to West Coast Choppers to Room Raiders to anything on HGTV to any office-based reality show there is a framework with which you could basically strip it down to work for your brand so I would highly recommend doing that exercise of what are all the sets we have in our world what's our office look like what does our studio look like do we rent a place frequently does our owner have a house like do we have any relationships like what is our potential for filming look like and look at your characters okay who and on our team actually has enough personality to do this do any of our influencers have it we can work that into our influencer deal or we recruit from it who would we recruit from down to then like establishing the plot which I would literally be pulling a bunch of references of shows that exist today or older shows I mean like what can we pull from to make a through line and then test right testing for a campaign is the easiest one shoot five or six episodes in particular style around a drop where you already have to do content to see if it works for you but this is the approach finding that series that works for you building the rest of your social content out surrounding it so it all operates in the same world so those people might cross over into one of your influencers videos or into UGC building those universes because brands are basically becoming more and more like entertainment because they're on the same feed as entertainment and need to think that way so hopefully this shifted your perspective a bit about what good brand content looks like we'll make sure all the examples are linked in the description of this and thank y'all so much for watching