Video Marketing, Creativity, and Authentic Storytelling with Jeremy Brady
In this episode of Notes from Video Village, host Dan Lichtenberg chats with creative director Jeremy Brady, who’s worked with brands like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, the NBA, and more. They dive into the early internet days, team collaboration, and what truly defines a successful video campaign.
Note: This is a podcast transcript and is best experienced through the audio version above. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Intro
Jeremy: My name is Jeremy Brady, or JB for some, and I've been doing this thing they call advertising, marketing, design for the last 25 years. It feels a little odd to say a quarter century. And I think we're all just kind of in this business to just genuinely get people to feel something and do something, but just do something real in a way that we can tap into who we are as humans.
How did you get into advertising and marketing?
Jeremy: By sheer luck, determination and a lot of pestering. I took a very non-traditional career path. I started out as a drum and bass DJ in South Beach, Miami, which is where all careers are born. That's really where you start.
And this little thing called the Internet, was around and popped up in Mozilla. And at the time we were doing a lot of 3D work for I think the kids call them raves. And we were like, wait, we can do this [but do it on the internet]. And then every person on the planet who has this thing that sounds like it's making them an espresso slash a modem can see it and the back of our heads just blew right off.
So that just kind of started the whole thing. And think along with me and some very, very smart people - and I did not include myself in that group - decided let's get some one way tickets to San Francisco. I hear that's where it's going [on]. So in ‘97, ‘98 I left the, dare I say, rave world behind.
Dan: And you worked at some of the early Internet people, right?
Jeremy: Yeah. I mean, in the way of both in terms of starting my career let's call it 11 and working on brands like Shutterfly and then working with some of the old brands, like Williams Sonoma, but bringing them into the future that was happening around us all.
And at the same time, really kind of splitting my time hanging out with a lot of people that were in kind of hacking and phreaking communities with a PH and learning enough about coding to be dangerous, but never able to really to write code, but enough to go like, “Oh, okay. Like we could tinker with this.”
Do you remember the first video that you worked on during those years? What was it? And what was that experience like?
Jeremy: I mean, I think there were always those campaigns and pieces of work they were doing. I think fast forward, leaving San Francisco, moving to Atlanta, and then working at Cartoon.
I think the first moment we're truly like, we're getting our hands on video and making stuff. I don't know who agreed to do this. And I don't begrudge them. They were like, “Sure, you can do as many on-air promos on Adult Swim as you like.” And we're like, “Great. You know what? There's this brilliant comedian that we work for slash work with named Brad Neely. And he's doing a show called Professor Brothers.” So we just took clips and all sorts of stuff that he was making and others.
And I mean, I think the one that we did that particularly, I was like, okay, I really like this, which was a spoof of Kiefer Sutherland from 24 was running an ad agency. And came in with like that level of intensity, something, something, doing a hand plant on the edge of something, something Grand Canyon.
It's that simple apparently. So yeah, I think that moment I was like, “Oh wow. Like we can do this and also can be fun and it could be scrappy.” And it was sort of the, I don't want to overstate it, but sort of the dawn of what social media, if that's, you know, if we could call it that in around '07, and so we went from like really big shoots to just being like, “No, anyone can do it.” And also anyone was like, “Sure, you can do these on-air promos.”
Dan: What do you think was the net result of that sort of democratization?
Jeremy: I mean, I think there's always folks that, I mean on the potential negative side, there's people that punch down in that moment and just go and try to wall it off and go, “Well, you don't have big crews.”
You don't have, you know, I was like, yeah, we're not doing Lexus commercials for 4 million out in the Tucson desert anymore. And I don't know if that's a bad thing. You know, and we really were just kind of taking, I think that spirit of the early Internet days of like, this is open to anyone. If you've got an idea, good ideas are going to bubble to the top.
And so I think it was that for me, it was like, Oh, wow. I love that because we went from your competitor, just being whatever, blah, blah, blah, brand to like your competitors and/or your friends being everyone on the internet. And I was like, “Great.” ‘Cause it's kind of what we were about.
Dan: And I'm sure the type of content that got created was so different as a result.
Jeremy: It was different. I mean, some of it was wonderful because we were just making really bad stuff, like really, really bad stuff. And then being okay to make bad stuff.
And I can't stress how important that is to just not be good.
Dan: Yeah experiment, right? Like you can experiment and learn from that. As opposed to having to vet every little idea before it goes into production, right?
Jeremy: Yeah. And in trying that and then being okay to kind of fail, I think in particular because, there was a risk of talking too much about Adult Swim that always seemed like, “Okay, we're going to be doing this at 2 AM in the morning. How many people are actually watching? A fair amount now for sure.”
But it was just a good kind of lab and at the risk of giving a dollar answer for a 25-cent question, that's something we've kind of lost a little bit and to some degree and actually gained. It depends on which arena you're playing in.
Dan: Yeah, ’cause you mean like a big brand versus all these little brands that exist out there?
Jeremy: Yeah, and the stakes being like, “Oh we have to hit these numbers or individually, I have to have this amount of likes to validate it.” And whatever it is, I think it's okay to be a little punk rock with it and go just like, make to make. Not to get too much into a philosophical thing, but I think we're just chasing the dopamine a little too much versus just like, “No, okay, let's just try a lot of little things and then great things come from that.”
Dan: Right, the focus on all the analytics and the data and everything has people manufacturing their content to the millisecond, right? Like “Oh, what's the engagement rate in these first two seconds?” But what's interesting is that in some ways, you can say, okay, finally, we have real data that we can see now if it's really successful or not. But on the other hand, what type of success are you measuring?
Are you just measuring this kind of short-term success? ‘Cause you can't really say whether this piece of content is affecting your long-term brand in a good way.
Jeremy: And the whole thing around, no matter how much data plays a role, I don't know how much it does. It definitely needs to be in the room, but if it's leading the conversation, that is an abandon-ship moment.
That is like, what are we doing here? I mean, we've talked about this. You know this better than most. People remember not so much what you said, but how you made them feel. This Apollo, Dionysus sort of logic, emotion kind of thing. And I'm just continually surprised that we forget that.
Dan: A hundred percent. I always tell people, if you're trying to turn your PowerPoint slide into a video, take a step back. That's the first thing that you're doing wrong.
Jeremy: I think that actually caused physical pain in my liver. The PowerPoint list has its point. Some places, but yeah, not as a video.
Do you have any pet peeves around ways you see people using video?
Jeremy: Coming back to my earth point, go out with it. I don't know if it's so much a framing of being annoyed, but just like a little saddened by, I think what a lot of us are seeing is, it looks the same, the beats of the same, I'm seeing the same motion transitions. Or maybe the same stories being told.
Great, online communities, your voice is heard. Cool. I don't know if that's a narrative. I don't know if that's a story that we necessarily have to keep telling. So some of these sort of more well-tread narratives that I feel are, we're all in the same Instagram feeds. We're seeing the same stuff.
And I'm more interested in either people who are going to break out of that, or if you're going to tell a story, tell a really good story. And there are people who've done a really great job for that for a really long time. And some of us are trying to reinvent that.
And it's like, no, Ogilvy kind of got it right the first go around, like there's just some fundamentals. So I guess if I were to summarize that: Don't try to keep telling the same stories, because we've already heard it. And if you are, at least have the fundamentals of the craft, like the beats of a story, the beginning, the middle, and end. You know, characters you can believe in, etc.
Can you think of a time in your career when you've made an ineffective video? What have you learned from that?
Jeremy: Okay, I could spend the entire week. Maybe we all kind of fell in the sand trap where I was falling in love with tools early on like Pretty Studio. You know, Alias Wavefront, just, ‘cause it was like magic. It was lightning in a bottle. You went from black and white to technicolor. And I did a lot of unnecessarily abusive things in Bryce3D to people's eyeballs that I think I should write apology letters for.
So falling in love with tools and just not actually thinking more about like, “Okay, let's come back to is it a good story?” So I think that's a biggie. And then other times just missing the human truth. Like just missing the mark, putting too much of myself in a story or a video that I might be doing and really having to learn this lesson over and over.
I mean, there's so many examples of this, it's hard to kind of narrow it down like, it's not about you. It's about this person. So do as much as you possibly can to just be an authentic storyteller by walking a mile in this person's shoes, or at least just have a general understanding before even thinking about doing a rough draft script.
In the past when you've been working on big campaigns, how did you decide where a video should sit in the campaign, whether you should even make a video? How did your team talk about that type of thing?
Jeremy: There's definitely a lot of inside baseball in this, but I think the short headline is, "Just where are people playing at." And coming back to just understanding what people are thinking and feeling and doing and then also go, not only like where are your customers, you know, people where are they hanging out at, how are they consuming content, but you don't want to be that Steve Buscemi meme with a skateboard over the shoulders and showing up and just being tone deaf too.
So making sure that understanding the media and how much media strategy is so, so super, super important.
Like get that early on, you can have the greatest idea in the world and you can tell it in all the wrong places. So you and your media friends should be hanging out like besties.
So the combination of creative strategy and media, just like hanging out together and not just like sharing, but like brainstorming in that way. And that so much relies on creativity, not just making space in the room. It's really not our job to make space, but just to remember that it’s important.
Has the role of video in campaigns changed over your career or the past 10 years? Is it more central now, or is it similar but on different platforms?
Jeremy: Video is just how people are communicating. I mean, social media isn't just where I share what I did this weekend, as we know. I mean, this is going to be like water is wet, sky is blue, but it's the entertainment, it's the commerce, it's the whole world lives in that.
And the medium in which that's delivered obviously is in video and to the degree and to the extent that you're delivering those narratives, I think it's important in video probably, I think also along with 3D, not that I'm pitching for a metaverse to happen. I'm not super pro metaverse.
That's just the world we live in now and the world that will completely occupy all of our spaces soon.
How do you typically measure the success of your campaign videos, whether through KPIs or qualitative methods? What metrics do you find most valuable?
Jeremy: I know this is not what you should say, but I mean, there is a part of this that is like, do my friends think it's cool?
Dan: It's a good litmus test.
Jeremy: Because your friends will tell you some straight-up stuff, you're going to get the most honest feedback from your friends. So as much as I want to, impress them. Tell me what sucks. Did they feel the things that I hoped they would feel? Did the beats of the story hit at the right moment?
Long story long, it's super hard to measure and I think we can only draw loose connections. From large brain awareness lifts to many people still want to engage with us and even want to purchase with us further down the line.
Have you seen a recent video campaign you found impressive or would be proud of?
Jeremy: I'm kind of like a dog chasing cars a little bit. So sometimes I only remember the things that are really in front of me. I was going back and looking at Land Rover ads and printouts and stuff like that. And I’m just like, “Oh, that's such genius.”
But I mean, I thought the Hanes like original commercial had just came out, just super simple. It's a cowboy restaurant, and the company's been around for a long time. It's pretty silly, and doesn't take itself too seriously. It's like a minute long, titled as a Hanes original, which I really love because it reminds me of those BMW original films with Clive Owen that they were doing.
It's like, do more of that. People still talk about those things.
Dan: Yeah, I remember I had the DVD, and I would watch the films on the BMW film series. I feel like there was like a Wong Kar-wai film on it. There was crazy stuff on there and yeah, Clive Owen. And just to think that like I was basically like voluntarily popping in an advertisement into a DVD player to watch it.
Jeremy: You know the kind of quasi sort of philosophy, but I mean, we are in the business of interrupting people.
No one asked us to be there. So we damn well be entertaining. If we are.
So yeah, that kind of stuff for me, I love that. And then I just like little things too. I liked simple ads, even like MailChimp's people cluster thing that they were doing, you know, it's just like, “Oh, that's interesting.”
It's not super complicated. Give me something that's a minute long and it's going to hold my attention.
What emerging trends or technologies do you see shaping the future of video marketing in the coming years?
Jeremy: I think we're just going to see some people kind of wild out a little bit with tools and it's going to need to settle, like we're going to the shiny toy.
And part of that cycle is like the shininess will wear off and people were like, Oh yeah, we have to tell really good stories and there is no AI thing that's gonna give us empathy into a human insight to really understand someone and the tools will always be there to be amplifying, but I think people just have to remember that you can't shortcut quality.
I know I sound, I'm really getting close to sitting on my porch and being an old man here, but I'm not mad at it. I think it's great. I love it. Like get into it. Go take it as far as you can. But don't forget, you still have to tell the beginning, middle and end.
Dan: Yeah. Just because it’s a cool AI driven thing, no one’s going to be emotionally engaged with it unless it tells a good story.
Jeremy: I don't know if you feel this way. I'm starting to feel like we kind of got the Avengers out of our system.
Bob Iger is like, “Yeah, we need to stop making tons of stuff and turn these things back into the events that they were like” versus like I don't know if I need to know about the storm trooper group.
Dan: Right. There's so many spin-offs. I think Mandalorian was a good thing. Because it showed that good old-fashioned storytelling can just be awesome. It's actually like the most conservative, old-fashioned, typical kind of storytelling you can get just done with cool Star Wars stuff.
Jeremy: How active are you incorporating AI stuff?
Dan: We've done like one or two projects where we've used Midjourney comprehensively in it just to create images from scratch.
I've used Midjourney a few times to do storyboards. It's a super cool tool for ideation. ‘Cause you don't have to worry about making a mood board or a storyboard. You can just type in a prompt.
Jeremy: Yeah, just don't include fingers.
Dan: Oh yeah, the six-finger human, oh my god. Yeah, we haven't found a lot of ways to use it really like in an end product yet, but I think it'll happen soon. Did you see the Sora thing that came out?
Jeremy: I did. Yeah. I'm like, cool. Like, keep going. Just keep going. It's like, great. Thank you. Keep going. Thanks.
Dan: Yeah, it was cool and it'll get there eventually. And it's gonna be a cool tool I think.
Jeremy: I do think like the copyright who owns what, I think that's all very, very important, but I just want to be super clear, it's not for me to decide. I always would be like, “Should I be entering this dialogue? Like, no, let me check. Not a lawyer, so I think I'll be quiet and just and tinker…”
Dan: Yeah, experiment and then see if you can make something cool.
Jeremy: I know it seems silly, but it's actually kind of not. It's like just making cool stuff that your friends, especially friends that are just not even in your bit, like the world that you're occupying, and you're like, “What do you do?” You're like, “I'm a park ranger.” I was like, “What do you think about this video?”
Dan: Yeah no, that is such a good, it is a good litmus test. I mean, sadly, I remember there was sort of a time in my career where I just stopped sharing stuff with my wife. There was a time I used to be, “What do you think of it?”
And I don't really do that anymore. Maybe I'm like not making the cool stuff anymore.
Jeremy: No, I think, I think open it up, you know?
I've been talking to a lot of people lately and I don't know if this is a halo effect, but I've kind of hit a point where that joy of making - it's harder to kind of tap into. In the sense that, that space to play and be silly and to ask questions, to feel like you have the time and the space.
Dan: Yeah. I mean, when you have to turn out that much content, maybe you just don't.
Jeremy: I'm curious about your world, knowing that sometimes the deadlines or the time to turn things around, how are you creating the space for the work to breathe?
Dan: I mean, I remember earlier in my career, I would do a lot more little passion projects or just know people that were making something that there was no client for, or even like a client that wasn't really paying just because they wanted to make something cool.
And that was like such a good way to do what you're talking about. But at least in the Bay, the whole money thing has just amped up the stakes of everything. And you moved to New Orleans, right?
Jeremy: For me in New Orleans, you know, I was always here because I just wanted to kind of get out of the…And I love living in San Francisco, it's where my son was born, it's a fantastic place. I'm not saying this for everybody, but for me personally, there was no separation of work and life. So many of whom I knew, people I knew were just doing what I was doing. And that was weird because the conversations just felt like work never stopped.
So, coming to New Orleans, currency is a little different. Everyone just wants to have fun. But I think there are less opportunities. It's kind of a mixed bag, both in terms of the work that I'm doing currently where you may not see those bigger budgets and then whatever budgets are taken up right now are taken up by someone where the streaming service shows.
Dan: What I've noticed though is a lot of people like you and a lot of the creatives have left the Bay. Like, 10 years ago when I lived here, I was just meeting creative people every day and maybe that was feeding the juices of creativity and so maybe the fact that they've all spread out is part of why I haven't been involved in as many cool projects. I don't know.
Jeremy: There's a lot to be said for community just as net large, like how important community is. And it sounds like you're saying, “Hey, I remember what it was like” and then kind of feeling that absence.
Dan: Yeah, I guess we were kind of talking about how you were saying people have less and less feel like they're excited about making stuff or get that excitement from like having made something.
And I think, yeah, maybe it's time, maybe a part of it is community. I mean, like COVID obviously had this massive effect on…
Jeremy: I'm sorry. Sorry. What?
Dan: Oh yeah, it didn't happen down there. I forgot. But yeah, I mean, so maybe it's like the reverberations and aftermath of that and everyone trying to reconnect.
But I agree with you that it's been harder to find that satisfaction with making stuff.
Jeremy: I think we've gone past the reasonable excuse of we are just calibrating back to pre-pandemic staff levels to like, are we really? And then the remote thing for sure. I've been remote since like 2011. So hypocrisy here for sure. But nothing beats being in a room and the energy and making stuff.
Somebody asked me recently, “Well, how do you know it was like a good idea or it's good?” Like if we're in the room and it makes us laugh, it's probably a good indicator. There's something there. And like having a comedic conversation just feels natural. I mean, this is good. We get to hang out and see each other. It's been a minute, but it's not the same.
Dan: It's also like you're in the room and you're brainstorming and whatever and there's a good idea that pops up and all of a sudden like the energy in the room kind of changes. There's like so many different ways you can feel a good idea. Not just laughter, it's so many different things.
Jeremy: So I think those are the areas, whether we're making videos, whether we're making ‘zines, whether we're just making skateboard graphics, whatever we're making, there is a joy in that creation.
And I think if we just remember like, yeah, the numbers, those things are important, but it's not a widget factory. And there's a lot of like, back in my day, you know, you could slip into, but our job is we got to get people to feel something and do something.
Dan: Yeah, trying to manufacture emotion, that doesn't really work.
Jeremy: Not just manufacture, but also the pressure, just be like, “Okay, be funny now,” or like “Make a great video.”
We're just trying to figure that out and try to have a good time. Like this used to be really fun and I think it can be again. It can be again.
Dan: Soon we'll all be in the metaverse together, laughing and brainstorming and coming up with great ideas. Pray for the next generation.
Thanks for reading this episode transcript of Notes From Video Village!
Follow the podcast on Spotify for more or check out our other blogs at Slowclap.com/blog
FAQ
What is Notes From Video Village?
On a film set, a “Video Village” is more than just a corner of the set where clients watch their vision come to life—it’s a space where ideas spark and partnerships flourish. Over the years, it’s also become an unexpected hub for video marketing insights, especially for B2B. Inspired by these conversations, we’ve launched Notes from Video Village, our first-ever podcast.
Join Dan Lichtenberg, Founder and Creative Director at Slow Clap Productions, as he sits down with marketers to share insights on all things video. From personal career journeys and content strategy to tips on producing everything from broadcast commercials to social media reels, we dive into what makes video an unparalleled marketing tool. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, join us to level up your video marketing game.
Who is Slow Clap Productions?
Slow Clap is a San Francisco Bay Area based creative video production company united by a desire to create short-form web content with staying power.
We are filmmakers that came of age in the internet era. And we apply the same rigor to web video that the filmmakers we most admire apply to their films. We want viewers to watch our content over and over, the way they would with their favorite movie or TV show.
We team with brands, artists, and agencies that are willing to take creative risks, in the belief that an audience will follow.
Have a video project in mind or interested in the Note from Video Village podcast? Get in touch with us.
