--:-- Ryan Hanley: So the audience is the most important thing. And this is another one that people think is hard, but it really isn't. The reason it isn't that hard is because you are also an audience. You also click on your phone when you're bored and go to another video. You also choose what you're watching on streaming based on how good it is for you. So if you're looking at a story and it's boring, don't do it. If it were as easy as just putting our benefits up on the screen and typing, that's what you'd see in the Super Bowl. But it isn't that easy.
--:-- Steve Stockman: Yeah. Right. We have to pull people in. We have to take them on a journey. But the good side of that is we know boring when we see it. We know what the journey is.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home... Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous episode for you, a conversation with Steve Stockman, a veteran filmmaker and author of the bestselling book, *How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck: Advice to Make Any Amateur Look Like a Pro*. And guys, I will tell you, that is exactly what Steve does today. Video is huge. Everyone's talking about it. There's all kinds of services and VAs and post-production software and should you use AI, et cetera. What Steve does for us is break down exactly how to create video people will actually watch.
--:-- Because guys, at the end of the day, you can have all the tools, all the equipment, all the post-production, et cetera. If you can't create a video that someone actually cares about, that they're actually going to watch, that they're actually going to get a payoff from, and then either build brand value or reach out to you as a prospect to engage and possibly work with as their agent... If it's not producing results, if people aren't watching it and feeling some kind of emotion from it, then the video is worthless.
--:-- What I love about Steve and his style and what he breaks down for us today is that he breaks everything down in a very simple format. He gives you resources and tools that you can use to learn from him. So very happy to have Steve on the show. This is a great episode. And for anyone who's interested in video, you're going to want to listen to the whole thing.
--:-- Before we get there, I want to remind you guys that Finding Peak, my new consulting agency, is launching in February. We are going to have both a one-to-many coaching program—we'll call it a mastermind, a coursework, et cetera—where you're going to be learning exactly how I have been able to grow multiple agencies incredibly fast. We'll break down the exact strategies. While I can't talk about specific details about my last agency, we are going to go step-by-step how to do it. And then the other side of that is if you need hand-holding, if you need customized work, if you need that next level, that's going to be available to you as well.
--:-- You can always reach out to me at Ryan at FindingPeak.com. That's Ryan at FindingPeak.com. Happy to talk to you about that. But guys, go to Masterclass.insure. Masterclass.insure. That's HTTP colon backslash backslash Masterclass.insure. You can get on the list, get notified as we get closer to the launch. And then once we launch this program, you can get access to all kinds of discounts and additional features and products and stuff that we're going to be doing for the people that commit to Finding Peak early.
--:-- Guys, this is what this is—taking my legacy in this industry and creating a through line for the rest of my career. I want to give you guys everything that I've learned. That's what I've always wanted to do. For many different reasons for a long time, the only way I've been able to do that is at a very high level through this podcast and through keynotes and workshops and stuff that I've done. Finding Peak as a coaching and consulting agency is going to be about taking you to the next level, about getting down to the hand-to-hand combat, the nitty-gritty, answering your questions, and making sure that you guys get real results.
--:-- Inbound marketing, generating inbound leads, closing those leads, and ultimately retaining and generating max value from every one of those leads is the future of our industry. We already know how to do cold outreach. We already know how to retain and do work as account executives. But what about all that inbound business? How do we get more of it and how do we maximize what we get?
--:-- Well, hey, Steve, thanks for coming on the show, man. I really appreciate it.
--:-- Steve Stockman: I'll wait to launch it. Go to masterclass.insure.com.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I will tell you that I love you for listening to this podcast. I should have mentioned this before we went live or whatever. But I actually in the insurance industry, like got my street cred, whatever cred I have in this in the insurance industry, which this is one of the largest insurance podcasts in the insurance industry, you know, creating video. And when your people reached out to me about what you were doing and what I'd be interested in having the show, I was like, "Oh my God, this is fantastic." Because I am in no way a video expert, yet somehow in this particular industry, people think that I am. So I'm so excited to have somebody on who knows what they're actually talking about and can give us the real deal and has resources for the audience to actually go to and learn more from.
--:-- Steve Stockman: Well, I'll try to live up to that. I am hopeful that after all these years practicing, I know a little bit more about video than most insurance people. But I guess we'll find out. Quiz me. We'll see what I can do for you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So for a long time when I'm asked, "How do I make video look good? How do I make myself look good?" And you get all these emails about what cameras I should use and lighting and all this stuff. I want you to critique this advice. This is what I'm interested in. Critique this advice. So what I'll say is I'm going to make you Spielberg in 30 seconds. 30 seconds. Grab your phone, hold it above your head at a down angle, find wherever the sun is and be behind it. Or be in front of it. Sorry, be in front of it. And then just don't be in an echoey room. So if you have a down angle, the sun is in front of you, and you're not in an echoey room, there's a decent chance your video will be good enough. How did I do with getting people at least a minimum viable Spielberg?
--:-- Steve Stockman: It's in my top 10. So I'll tell you where we're perfectly aligned: spending a huge amount of time worrying about equipment when you're a video novice is a wank. There is no point to it at all. It's like going, "I'm going to take my first golf lesson, so first I need these $30,000 clubs." There's no way that you know enough to tell the difference between a $15,000 driver and a $100 driver. You just don't. So I would say I'm with you 100% on that.
--:-- The other thing is that equipment at this point in the evolution of video is not the thing that determines whether your video is going to be any good or not. The phone that you have in your pocket shoots better video than Hitchcock could shoot in his mid-20th century career with a crew of 150 people. It's amazing. Smartphones will make you look good. It's almost hard to make them make you look particularly bad. So I think your advice of holding it up so that you can see people's eyes when you're looking up at the camera, and also having the light behind the camera basically so that you don't look like a refugee from the witness protection program—those are great pieces of advice. But even now, the phones can probably fix it if you put the light in the wrong place.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It is crazy. I have not upgraded. I have an iPhone 13. But I have a buddy who got the iPhone 15 Pro Max, the newest, biggest, baddest iPhone. It's basically the same thing, except the cinematic mode on that camera—I would have to spend like 10 hours with... I used to have a Canon 1DX a long time ago and would do all kinds of ridiculous vlog stuff that was completely unnecessary. It would take me 10 hours to get that buttery cinematic motion. With that phone, he was just walking, filming his kid playing soccer, and it looked like some $10 million production video. I said, "We no longer have to worry about how to get the video. We're beyond that now." Now we can talk about what feels like the actual harder part: how do you actually create a video that doesn't suck, which is what your book is all about. We're going to make sure that everyone has those resources. But what's that next step? We're beyond equipment. How do we actually get something that somebody wants to watch?
--:-- Steve Stockman: Well, the first thing that I tell people is that you have to understand one basic thing about how video works: video works in shots. If you watch television or a movie or a really great YouTube video, you're going to see that the camera rarely points at the same thing for more than 10 or 15 seconds. In a commercial feature or TV show, you'll almost never see a really, really long shot. But when people go to soccer games or they start shooting an event at work, they run the camera and they just leave it going for hours. That's not how you tell a story in video. Video works in small bits that add up to a whole. So if the first thing you do is think about video in shots, it will make your video 2000% better instantly.
--:-- What I mean by that is a shot is just like a sentence. When Mrs. Cooper taught you nouns and verbs in third grade, that's what you want to go back to. A shot is a noun, a verb, and maybe an object. "Bob hiking" is a noun—Bob—and a verb—hiking. We can shoot that shot with our cameras. If there's no verb, there's no action, and it's just Bob, that's a still photograph. If Bob is hiking off a cliff, which would be the object, then that's a great shot. Even better, because we're going to watch Bob plummet to his death, and that's great video. So you want to think about it like a sentence. When the sentence is over, you want to stop.
--:-- If you're at a company function, the CEO giving a toast is maybe a shot. That might even be a little long. The CEO raising her glass might be your shot. Another shot might be Jim accepting an award. Another shot might be the waiters setting down the dinner plates. If you think in terms of these short shots, then the video that you're shooting of your event or your home video is going to look like a movie when it falls out of the camera and be much more entertaining instantly than if you just ran it for 20 minutes. Makes sense?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes. It makes complete sense. So let's take this into this audience. At any given moment, there's somewhere between 8 and 15,000 independent agents and professionals listening to this show. A lot of them listen because what we tend to focus on here at Finding Peak is growth, scaling, marketing, sales, et cetera. Very few, if any, are professional videographers or video creators. Would it be a fruitful exercise to break down one of the things that I see a lot of them do? Maybe go to a client's location and try to create a little co-marketing video with that client—say a bakery or maybe a warehouse, depending on what that client is or what they're providing insurance for. How could they set that up? What might you do off the cuff to tell the story of that client or their relationship together?
--:-- Steve Stockman: Sure. Once you get the idea that you're breaking down your video into shots, the next big thing that you need for a marketing video is the story that you're going to tell. The question that you have to ask as an insurance agent is: what do my customers want to know that will take them on some sort of emotional journey that's going to either amuse them or surprise them or anger them or make them feel strongly about my business one way or another? What's that story I can tell?
--:-- If you're going to work with a bakery that you're working with, the first question that you want to think about when you start communicating to your audience is: what do they think is magical about working with me? I use the word "magical" advisedly because I want you to get beyond, "Oh, it's a thing we do. We write insurance." You can say that about every single agent on the planet. But saying, "These guys provide magical customer service and they provide support in analysis and other areas that I would never have expected. They're always there when I need them and they always return my calls"—whatever the thing is that makes your agency better than anybody else's agency for the customers who love you. That's where you want to start your story.
--:-- So I guess the question is: when you talk to this bakery or you're thinking about going to this bakery, what experience have they had that is magical for them in terms of working with you that surprised the hell out of them, that made you stand head and shoulders above all the other people? Our analysis of our target wants to start with the people who already love us. That's where our stories come from.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Gotcha. And then positioning whatever their answer is in kind of a "what's in it for the audience" way—would that be the next logical step? To say, "Okay, what do you believe, current client and friend who owns a bakery, is magical about us? And then how do we express that in a way that shows what's in it for someone who's watching?"
--:-- Steve Stockman: Yeah, for sure. I would even go further and be more specific. Once you know what's magical about your agency for your customers, then the question is: what story are you going to tell? Before you go to the bakery necessarily, you might want to make sure that you understand something that all the customers are going to agree with. Something that all the customers are going to feel. Your best customers—what do they think is magical about you?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's up, guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. In exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in—men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales—the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode.
--:-- Now, if the bakery has a good example of that, then that's a story you can tell. You can tell the story about how they had an oven catch on fire and there were problems and they were having problems replacing their oven. And you stepped in and did X, Y, Z for them. That was astounding and surprised them with how great an experience this was. The way you want to tell it is in the form of a story. First, this happened. They had a problem. Then they had a challenge that they didn't expect. And then working with us, that challenge was solved. So that's a nice little two-minute story about what makes working with your agency magical for this bakery, based on what you think makes working with your agency magical for all your other clients. And then you can tell that story.
--:-- Steve Stockman: Yeah.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Do you have or recommend a framework? I somehow get asked a lot of questions about video, even though it's something I do for my business, not what I do for work. I've always used the story grid model. I don't know if you're familiar with that. It's synonymous with a lot of people: beginning hook, middle build, ending payoff. Try to get people to frame their stories in some way, because otherwise they tend to be meandering. I see a lot of videos that are well-intentioned or maybe even do have a good story, but it's mashed up in all these things and doesn't really tell you why you're watching until two minutes in. Do you teach a framework through your work?
--:-- Steve Stockman: Yeah, but I think it's simpler than we want to make it. I don't know the story grid per se. Plato was the original story guy way back in 250,000 BC. I like to go back to the very basics of storytelling because storytelling is something that people think is hard. It's like, "Oh, I'm going to shoot videos, so I have to get expensive equipment." And when they hear about storytelling, it's like, "Oh my God, I have to learn how all this works." It's really much simpler than that.
--:-- Let me give you the four elements of story that I like to tell people to use. First, story is about a person. There's a hero to every story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you do that, you win. Every part of your story needs to be about someone and have a beginning, middle, and end.
--:-- If you're doing that bakery story about how magical your ability to help people who've had an oven disaster is, the first thing that you need to consider is: who's the hero of the story? You probably want to make the hero the baker. But it could be that the hero is someone who works in your agency who went out of their way to help them. The story changes depending on who you choose as the hero, which is up to you.
--:-- If the hero is the baker, then at the beginning, their challenge is running this extremely busy, very popular bakery. At the very beginning of the story, their oven explodes and takes out the bakery with it. The middle is their attempt to make sure that their bakery is put back together so that they can continue that outstanding customer service. They come to you with this challenge. The end is that you and the bakery work together to get them 100% up to speed at the least possible cost and as fast as humanly possible so that they don't disappoint their community and their customers. That's the story if you make the baker the hero.
--:-- If you make the agent the hero, then the beginning is the phone call from the baker. The middle is discovering what the baker's crisis is and figuring out how you're going to help that baker get their bakery back together. The end is, from the agent's point of view, what it took to make those extra phone calls, push vendors, work with the underwriting insurance company, and whatever it is that needed to be done to get everything up and running as promised by the date promised, and what happens when you deliver it. The story changes a little bit depending on who you choose as a hero, which is why that's a very important element.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that. I think that's often misunderstood. Even my wheels are spinning in my own head about different things that I've done. I can see how much the story changes as you position that hero. It seems the most selfless to make your client the hero, but you can also see how internally, if you want to highlight certain services or even certain individuals, what that looks like. It does dramatically change the story. I'm positive that most of us listening, myself included, probably don't start there. We probably just start with, "Hey, I want to create a marketing video for this bakery, and I'm going to go over there and have him tell me why I'm awesome and what he does, and off I'll go." We're not thinking about the hero.
--:-- So we have the hero. Where does the audience play into this? Let's say I want to attract more small businesses in my local community using this baker. I've decided I really want to tell the story from the baker as the hero. Do we draw the audience in? Do we consider the audience? How do we work that aspect in?
--:-- Steve Stockman: Well, this is the thing about video. If you do a video and it's not interesting and it doesn't take your audience on an emotional journey, their phone can transport them instantly to a rerun of *Family Guy*. They don't need your video for anything. Even if you've bought tons of Facebook ads to get them to click on it and watch it, they're gone in three to five seconds if they're not treated to something that is worth their while. So when you say, "How is the audience a part of this?" The answer is: they're the only thing that matters.
--:-- This is one of the parts that we forget when we're doing marketing video, because we know so much about our business and we know so much about what happens and we want to tell it all. We want to say why they should be coming to us. We forget that if we haven't drawn them into this story and given them something of value—a moment's entertainment, a moment's interest, a moment's involvement—then they're just gone. They have no business sticking around for any of that.
--:-- So the audience is the most important thing. And this is another one that people think is hard, but it really isn't. The reason it isn't that hard is because you are also an audience. You also click on your phone when you're bored and go to another video. You also choose what you're watching on streaming based on how good it is for you. So if you're looking at a story and it's boring, don't do it. If it were as easy as just putting our benefits up on the screen and typing, that's what you'd see in the Super Bowl. But it isn't that easy.
--:-- Steve Stockman: Right. We have to pull people in. We have to take them on a journey. But the good side of that is we know boring when we see it. We know what the journey is. So the thing that most people do, and sometimes they do this in the name of considering the audience, is, "Oh, I must do these things. I must have a story hook. I must get my key benefit out there." And it's like, yeah, those are good things to try to do. But first and foremost, if your video is boring, no one's ever going to watch to get to the story hook. They're never going to watch to get to the benefits. They're just gone.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's funny. I was doing some research the other day for this podcast. I do intermingled with interviews, I do kind of solo episodes on topics, questions that I receive, things that some of my clients struggle with. I'll anonymize them and answer those questions for people. I don't mean this to sound egotistical, but I'm sure it's what everyone does. I put a video out and when I got done, I thought, "The content of that video is really valuable. I'm giving, do this and X is going to happen." And it did okay. I'm very self-reflective. I try to get better. So I started looking at other people who did straight talking head videos. To what you said, and to the audience listening, so you guys know that I'm as much at fault and learning as all of you, even though I do a decent amount of video.
--:-- I was watching other guys like Ben Hardy. He does straight talking—just him talking into a microphone or talking to his cell phone camera for 10 to 12 minutes straight. But in post-production, what they do is, as you said, they might take a still image and just slide it while he's talking about climbing the mountain to success. Or he'll take his face off completely and just have scrolling text, or motion words where the words come in as they talk. All these different cuts and moves. All he sent to his video production was him talking into his cell phone. The content is good. But then he did this thing where you can tell in post they thought, "Okay, what does this shot look like? What do we need to show here to amplify this part of the message?" You can just see how much more engagement he's getting, how deeper and richer it is. This was so validated for me like a month ago. It's unreal. I was like, "Oh my gosh, I am boring the shit out of people with me talking with a black screen and captions underneath. It's literally probably making their brain hurt, even if the content is valuable."
--:-- Steve Stockman: Yeah, I think if we're subjected to a video that visually bores us, 50% of your cerebral cortex is about visual stimuli. That's because we grew up on the Serengeti Plains. We evolved watching for stuff that was important to us. We used our eyes as our primary sense. What we wanted to know was: can I eat that? Is that going to eat me? Can I have sex with that? Am I fitting in with the community? These are all based on visual cues. If you don't give us stuff that tells us visually what's going on, and you don't keep that visual cortex involved constantly, we get really bored. What we feel is claustrophobic. If we're forced by a camera to stare at one guy just sitting there for 10 minutes, we're going to feel like we're missing stimulation that we should be seeing. There might be a wildebeest over there.
--:-- Steve Stockman: Somebody with a spear might be over here. We don't know. We're trapped in this little box of watching this guy talk straight to us for 10 minutes. It just makes our skin crawl, makes us really uncomfortable. That's one of the reasons thinking in shots really works — you're constantly changing up the visual stimulus. And also, like you're saying, putting words on screen and different camera shots.
--:-- Steve Stockman: When I did my video course that I adapted from this book, one of the problems with doing a video course about how to shoot video that doesn't suck is if your video course sucks, you're in big trouble. So I had to actually produce it like I would produce a TV show. It's got all kinds of cuts, different shots, actors doing examples, graphics, words on screen. I realized I kind of didn't realize when I started that I was really going to have to get that into it, but as I started to watch it and look at the script, I went, "This is not going to work unless it lives what it's supposed to be teaching." It's hard, but once you get into the idea and once you start seeing the world that way in your videos, it gets a lot easier and becomes habit.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That post-production piece is something I know holds back a lot of professionals in our space. They might be comfortable enough to get on camera, they're okay at telling a story, decent at everything we've talked about so far. But then they get to that post-production piece and they're like, "Yeah, but I don't have time for that. Or I don't know how to do that. Or I don't have the money to pay somebody," because they're assuming it's super expensive. So maybe help these individuals, myself included, better understand the method. If one of these insurance agents takes your course and calls you and goes, "Steve, how do I do this at my shop? I love what you're doing. I want to get as close to this as I can, but I don't have a huge company's budget." How do they start to get there?
--:-- Steve Stockman: There are a few ways I'd recommend. First, let's understand the most important thing about post-production. Post-production is when you take all that footage you shot and configure it into something that really tells the story in a tight way. People think post-production is super complicated. The truth is that post-production is cut, copy, and paste. It's just like Microsoft Word. So if you can write a Word document, you can edit a video. The simplest thing to editing that video is put all the footage in a row in whatever editing program comes free with your computer or your phone and cut all the stuff that's boring. Just zap it, then see what you have left, then cut some more stuff that's boring, and then maybe move a couple things around. Really easy.
--:-- Steve Stockman: Now, having said it's really easy, there are two kinds of people in the world. There are the kinds of people who really like to edit video and the kinds of people who would rather kill themselves. My wedding video is still not edited and my kids are in their twenties. I don't edit. I'm a director. I hire people to edit. What I would say to small business owners are two things. One, if you have a decent size agency, there is a pretty good likelihood that someone in your agency likes to edit. So find them and either assign them some more work or offer them incentives to do some more work for you and see if you can get them to cut your stuff. They're hobbyists. They love it. They'll do it. It's a good experience for them. They get better as they go.
--:-- Steve Stockman: Another option is to talk to local colleges in your area and find students who are learning to edit and offer them a fair but paltry wage to come in and edit your video for you. Another is just practice cut, copy, paste until you get better at it and forget about all the bells and whistles, which odds are are stupid anyway. Nobody needs to see sepia in a video. Nobody needs the kaleidoscope effect. None of that's important. Movies are told in cuts. So just cut your video together yourself and try it.
--:-- Steve Stockman: Your last option is if you go shopping for a real editor in your market, most cities have them. A pure editor, a junior editor, hundreds of dollars a day. So if you've got a grand, they can cut you a two and a half minute video. And if it isn't worth it to you to do that, rethink doing video as a way of marketing your business. Because once again, a video that sucks will not be watched by anyone. So either do the editing right and make it look nice, or accept the fact that all the time you spent shooting it was a complete waste. I know that's harsh, but I think it's true.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I can tell you firsthand that it's true because I've created plenty of videos that sucked and learned the very hard way. It's funny, I think if you haven't bought into this concept yet, the way your mindset works is, "I would rather push out 10 shit quick videos than spend that same amount of time on one video." Quantity over quality is the mentality. I've been doing videos since 2011 to market various insurance businesses. The videos I took in some cases weeks to create — tens of thousands of views, still watch today. The ones I pounded out, 10 videos in a month, just banging them out — each one maybe has 500 views and people forgot them as soon as they were done. There's still that constant mentality of, "I need to get another video out." I'm literally speaking to myself: one great piece of content is worth a thousand of nothing. It's worth all infinite shit pieces of content probably.
--:-- Steve Stockman: My favorite example is Dollar Shave Club. Look up their video, I think they did it about eight or nine years ago. Their introductory video is very, very funny, beautifully done, captures them perfectly. It's stunning. It took a lot of work to make. But as a result of doing that piece, that piece alone propelled their company to success. They sold for like a billion dollars to Gillette, I think. So a video can make an enormous difference in your business if it's the right video. And it will make no difference at all in your business if it's the wrong video because no one will ever see it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I agree with that. For those of you listening, if you remember back in 2018, Sydney Rowe and I created a Dollar Shave Club-esque video to promote a conference we were putting on. You can search Agency Nation's YouTube channel and find that video. That video took us a month to create. It took us a week to kind of bullet out, another week to script out what we wanted to say, another week to plan the shoot, and then a week to shoot the video. I still see that video getting viewed and brought up to this day. Something we did back in 2018. And maybe this is because I'm an idiot — I never spent that much time on another video again, yet that is still by far one of the best pieces of content I've ever created. So maybe I need to remind myself of the lessons I've already learned. I am so glad you're on here, Steve, to remind me of how short my memory is and how much of a dummy I am.
--:-- Steve Stockman: We all are.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think this is great. I will say that in our industry, there is a sea change happening. Baby boomers are starting to phase out and you have this next generation of late 20s to early 40s agency owners. They've grown up in an era where video and marketing on social media has been a big part of their life. So I think that now more than ever, if they're willing to adopt what you've said and what you teach in your video course — guys, if you go to stevestockman.com, right on the front page you'll see the video course. You can sign up, you can get two lessons for free. I also have links in the show notes. And there's links to the book and all that stuff as well.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But I want to finish with vertical video, short form video, because this seems to be something I see a lot of people trying. A lot of people do it one of two ways. They seem to just do raw talking into the thing. Maybe they put captions on it, maybe they don't. Or it's this very templatized, every video looks almost exactly the same. Usually there's a bar on the top with their logo, their face wedged in the middle, maybe captions, and every one looks exactly the same. Neither one really seems to be working particularly well for anybody. So what are your recommendations for vertical short form, Reels video that a lot of people are using?
--:-- Steve Stockman: Well, this is where it gets a little complicated, so let me see if I can pick it apart. One of the reasons short form video works — like Reels or TikTok or some of the other short form stuff — is because the people who are doing them are great on camera. I can't emphasize enough: if you are not great on camera, do not appear on camera. The flip side is if you have somebody in your agency who is great on camera, make them your spokesperson and put them on camera all the time. You'll know the difference because you'll look at them on camera and go, "Wow, she's terrific." That's your person. It doesn't take brain surgery to know that some people are good on camera and some people are not. That's a huge thing people discount.
--:-- Steve Stockman: Regardless of the formatting around someone in a short form video, if the person doing the talking is charismatic and interesting and talking about interesting things, you will actually pay attention because they're just going to grab you. That's why movie stars get so much money — because they're charismatic and interesting.
--:-- Steve Stockman: The other thing about the other kind of option — there are two other ways to make a successful video like that. One is if you happen to be capturing something amazing. You have your camera out at the moment your son catches a football thrown by the quarterback of the Detroit Lions during the playoff game and it lands in his lap and you happen to catch that — that's going to be a great short video. It's not repeatable, but it's a great short video.
--:-- Steve Stockman: The last thing is a lot of great short form video is still structured like a story. If you remember back in the olden days, we had something called newspapers. In the back of the newspapers, we had these things called comics. You could read these comics every day and on Sundays. On the daily comics, they had three panels: the setup, the response, and the punchline. If you look at the really great, funny TikTok and short form videos, they follow basic comic strip format. They've got a hero and a setup and some kind of response and a great punchline at the end. Sometimes they'll have repeating punchlines because that's a thing you can do in a video pretty easily. But they're set up like little stories. So the question is always, if I have a charismatic spokesperson or not, what story am I telling and what's the best way to get it out there? That's going to guide you to the answer on short form video. You've got to give your audience something.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I completely agree. I've been doing a lot of testing with Reels. Have you ever heard of 75 Hard?
--:-- Steve Stockman: No.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's a mental toughness program put on by this guy Andy Frisella. Long story short, discipline and organization are not my strong suits. I said in 2023, one of the things I want to do is challenge myself to this 75 day thing. It's basically seven things you don't necessarily want to do every day, and you force yourself to do them to practice discipline. Part of that is you have to work out twice a day, one has to be outside. So I made a commitment to show the workouts in a short form video just to show people, "Hey, at 42, I can do this. I am doing it and holding myself accountable to you, the audience."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I would record myself working out or whatever I was doing, and I used this app CapCut. The app doesn't matter, but it had templates, story templates essentially set up. Over that time period, I went from like 5,000 to 112,000 followers on Instagram, which does me no good for business because most of them are following me for reasons that have nothing to do with what I actually do for a living. But what I found really interesting was I started to figure out the formatting of the templates that did really well and the formatting of the templates that did not. Simple things like how quickly the cuts moved, as you said. Was there a payoff at the end in terms of a Morgan Freeman thing or some inspirational quote being said over the top? What was being said and how it hit — the amount of cuts. Simple things like, was it just gray text at the bottom for captions, or was it like these cool things where the word is highlighted in yellow and the rest of the words are white, capturing your attention? These things really mattered in terms of whether you got a couple hundred views or maybe a hundred thousand views.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: At first it was very random, but over the course of the 75 days, I really started to pick up on it. I did not necessarily pick up on it to the depth you're describing here, but I did start to see there's a real difference. You could think the video quality or the way I framed myself was perfect, but if all these other pieces were not in place or it didn't grab them right away — the ones that just had one image going for a long time were obviously the easiest to create because you didn't have to put all the cuts in, but they all did not do the best by far. Not even close. Instead, that rapid cut to a story that went along with the words almost always got exponentially more traction, comments, et cetera, than the ones that would just be words over the top of one exercise in an unbroken line.
--:-- Steve Stockman: I think payoff is the key word I heard you say. It's got to give the audience a laugh or an inspiration or a feeling or something they can take away that's valuable to them. I think when you hit that, you probably did way better than when you didn't. The rest of it is important, but not first principles. First principle is give the audience something they will value from their point of view, not something you go, "You should value this." It's more like, "Oh, I see. I'm entertaining them. I'm enlightening them. I'm making them feel something. I'm showing them a journey." That's what we watch video for. And you have to do that whether you're a marketing video or a feature filmmaker.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that. Steve, I appreciate you coming on here and sharing this. We'll have links to your website, to the video course, to the book. Where else can people connect with you if they just want to follow along with your work?
--:-- Steve Stockman: I would go to the website, stevestockman.com, because I've got like 200 free articles you can read, excerpts from the book and all that stuff. You can reach me with questions and comments from there too. I'd love to hear from you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Steve, thanks for having me. Your time, man. I know this episode is going to be incredibly valuable to this audience and to my industry. I just appreciate you sharing it with us.
--:-- Steve Stockman: Thanks so much for having me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right, buddy. Be good.
--:-- Steve Stockman: All right, take it easy.
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