Will Truettner (00:00):

I think it's easy to get caught up in execution when you have the funds. You're thinking about the best ep, you're thinking about the best sound designer, the best color grading. If you say it had the a hundred thousand dollars production, everyone knows the recipe for that. That's going to look beautiful. It's going to sound beautiful when you have the $10,000 limit. That's when you're forced to put concept first. I think concept is different than execution, and when you have limited resources to work with, you put all your eggs in the concept basket because it's free.

Cole Heilborn (00:29):

Welcome to the Backcountry Marketing Podcast. I'm your host Cole Heilborn. On this podcast, you'll hear from leaders in the outdoor marketing industry discuss the gritty details of their work as well as the latest challenges and lessons they're learning along the way. If you want to hone your craft and become a stronger marketer, then this podcast is for you. This podcast is produced by Portside Productions, an outdoor film production company based in the Pacific Northwest. If you work at a brand or agency in the outdoor industry that needs help bringing a video project to life, head over to portside pro.com and send us an email we'd love to help. Welcome to the Backcountry Marketing podcast. Today I'm sitting down with Will Truettner. He's a brand marketing creative working in the sports tech startup space. Will welcome to the show.

Will Truettner (01:12):

How's it going, Cole? Good to see you.

Cole Heilborn (01:14):

Likewise. Yeah, thanks for taking the time and thanks for lining up a fun conversation for us.

Will Truettner (01:21):

Yeah, excited to dive in

Cole Heilborn (01:23):

The creative world. I think you and I both get really excited about great concepts and great creative and pulling productions together and all of the headaches and the fun times that are had along the way. But I think it's easy, and we talk about this on this show, sometimes we talk about maybe the lack of creative inspiration or the challenges of actually developing really solid creative in this outdoor sports world that we work in. Frankly, it's difficult to develop good creative. Good creative takes time, it takes resources, and as easy as it is to kind of poke fun, I think at some of the creative that gets produced, I think there's oftentimes a very good reason for why that is and will. I'm excited to bring you onto the show to talk about in a world of constraints and in a world of budgets and timelines, creative can't always be maybe what we want it to be, but there are ways to still make it effective, to still make it good. Maybe we just have to approach it a different way or kind of reset our expectations, and so we're going to be talking about how to develop creative in the real world with budgets and with timelines and what a better person to talk to than you will. Why is this something you're passionate about or maybe not passionate, but why do you think about this?

Will Truettner (02:41):

Yeah, sure. Yeah, well, that's a great intro. My background jumps all over the place within the creative realm. I started out in big advertising, worked as a designer and art director, started a production company, worked as a DP and ran company. Then I went over to the brand side and worked in-house as a content producer, as a creative director, and I'm currently working in the startup space in the last several years with an outdoor sports focus. But what I've learned, having jumped through all those positions and now sitting in a position where I'm at the intersection of all of these things, I've kind of felt some value in efficiency of creative. So I've gotten really interested in this idea of doing more with less first out of constraint because I'm working with smaller budgets and smaller teams. But then once I got into it, I kind of realized that there's this beautiful constraint that if you kind of turn it back on itself, you can actually leverage the constraints to your advantage and produce creative that you otherwise probably wouldn't have if you had more freedom or budget.

Cole Heilborn (03:58):

Interesting. So you feel like the constraints actually adds more creative to the table?

Will Truettner (04:03):

It can. It can, yeah. I need a name for this concept, we'll call it creative, the creative efficiency concept for sake of discussion, I guess. But I have this idea that if you have, say you have to create a creative campaign for a product launch, you're representing the brand, you're putting together this production, you're thinking about all your costs, the crew members, you're going to bring in all the post-production materials. You're going to have to parse out and the landing pages and everything, and you're trying to come up with budget and say, you have a hundred thousand dollars budget to bring all this together, and let's say for the sake of argument, that would put your creative at a 10 out of 10 in terms of creative quality. So imagine that's maybe a small number, but let's just use that number for now. Imagine an apple-esque TV commercial and just absolutely beautiful jaw dropping photography and film and design and everything.

(05:06):

And then imagine you have $10,000 to create that same campaign. Obviously you're not going to have a 10 out of 10 in terms of quality, but I would argue you could get up to maybe seven or eight out of 10. And so when you look at the efficiency of those dollars spent, there's sort of an arbitrage to be had if your focus is of course on delivering the best creative. But if there's a macro level above that, which oftentimes in my role there is, which is make the company profitable or build the company as quickly as possible to get sold, these are the goals in the startup space. Often then there is this arbitrage to be had that all of a sudden your $10,000 production is going to have a bigger business impact for the brand than spending a hundred thousand dollars when you analyze it on a per dollar basis.

(06:02):

And I think there's a bunch of reasons for that, and they're all kind of efficiency concepts. A lot of Tim Ferris type thinking, the classic 80 20 rules is one that a lot of people are familiar with. So say you have a given team of 10 people, two of those people are doing 80% of the work often, and there's reasons for that. I think often there's disparities between people's abilities is the most obvious, but there's also this idea of communication inefficiencies. So if one person is coordinating the entire production, that person doesn't have to communicate their plans or anything to 10 other team members. Everything could happen in one head. And so when you're communicating, say, I'm communicating to you right now, I have to find the word in my own head to express these ideas. I have to say them out loud. You have to then receive them, download them into your brain, analyze them, and process them. And we have to hope that somehow in that exchange, the information was accurately represented and that you understand that information. Oftentimes that doesn't happen. And so for every person you add, there's communication inefficiencies happening, and the project can exponentially grow in complexity because of that.

Cole Heilborn (07:29):

Fascinating. Yeah. So you're saying if I've got back to your example of a hundred thousand, and maybe you only spend 10 of that on a project, you're saying, well, is the 10 that I spend, is it going to do enough of what I need it to do and then could I use that 90 elsewhere or do we just keep that 90 in the bank for 10 other projects down the road?

Will Truettner (07:50):

The 90 didn't exist in the first place.

Cole Heilborn (07:52):

Oh, okay.

Will Truettner (07:54):

Fair enough. Yeah, yeah. In this example, this is an example of working with, you didn't have the option in the first place. So this other concept that I've been playing with is this idea of applying MVP to creative. So you often hear product managers talk about minimal viable product, this idea of launching product into the market early, even though it might not be perfect because you want to get users, you want to get people using it, you want feedbacks, you want to iterate on that, often introduce bug fixes and improvements. And so when I was thinking about ways that could be applied to creative, I think it works well with this kind of efficiency topic that we're talking about because the idea is sort of building blocks. So if you have very little resources to work with and you need to get something built, it's helpful to think about the MVC, the minimal viable creative.

(08:49):

So I often think about that in terms of creative. So what is the MVC, the minimal viable creative? So when I'm thinking up a campaign or a film or something and I'm pitching it to the team, I'm getting everyone on board. I'm thinking, okay, what is the project that everyone will look at it and be like, oh yeah, that's good, that works. And then it's building blocks on top of that. So the idea is you never actually settle for that, but it's a way to establish some footing on your project, and it's a way to manage constrained resourcing. So if you can come up with an MVC that's 80% of your budget, for example, that's half the battle, then you can use that 20% that you have in your mind to build on that and iterate it and push it further. It's also just, I feel like it's very tangibly effective when you're trying to build something. It's kind of like sculpting. You want to start with. It's hard to just paint a white canvas. So if you start with something that works and that people agree is of value and it gets the job done, it's much easier to iterate and build on that and tweak it than it is to just think about, alright, how do I make the best thing ever with this small budget that we have to work with?

Cole Heilborn (10:07):

It makes sense. I mean, I think that's kind of just a good approach to creative projects in general. I can't remember if I was telling you this or someone else, but there was this task that I was reading about this photography professor challenged his half of his class to go out and try to take the very best photo that they could, and they were given three shutter clicks and in three shutter clicks they had to sculpt a perfect photo. The other half of his class he sent out and said, take as many photos as you want, and then let's come back at the end of the quarter and let's evaluate. And it wasn't much of a surprise, but the students who had been out in the field snapping away, taking average photos quickly learned what makes a good photo, and they were able to produce significantly better photos than the students who just set out to create the best photo.

Will Truettner (10:55):

Right. Yeah,

Cole Heilborn (10:57):

I like this approach. What I'm curious about, yeah, go ahead.

Will Truettner (11:01):

Yeah, well, it reminds me similar example here. It's the beautiful constraint idea, which is if I gave you a white piece of canvas and I said, paint me a beautiful picture, you would be would a stick? That'd be really hard. But if I said to you, here's a blank canvas. Paint me a beautiful picture that is in different shades of blue and it has three circles in it and you can only use this brush, all of a sudden you have boundaries to work within and you can start to, it's a lot easier to come up with ideas that are three circles in blue with this brush than it is to just look at a blank canvas and create a masterpiece.

Cole Heilborn (11:42):

And if I was painting, you would be sorely disappointed with what I gave you.

(11:47):

So I'm curious to kind of stress test this idea of seven out of 10 versus 10 out of 10 creative because actually just two of the last episodes we've done on the show have been about something similar, and I was talking with Kevin Knutsen, he's an Art Director at Eddie Bauer, and for folks who are listening to this episode, I'd recommend you go and listen to Kevin's episode because we were talking about brands being concerned about taking risks on media and content and stories and the potential downside of that lack of risk. And as he was saying that lack of risk can bring brands, all content fills the middle. There's nothing really on the outside, there's nothing really pushing the boundaries. There's nothing really that stands out. And so I'm curious, we were talking about seven out of 10 versus 10 out of 10 creative. In the back of your mind, do you think about, well, does this truly stand out? Is this really good? And I'm curious, I know there's constraints to everything, but how do you think about the content that you're producing and the creative that you're producing and how it stands out in the world versus

(13:01):

Maybe those are different expectations and different goals than the internal goals of what the content needs to do, but I guess that's something I'm wary of is creating stuff that stands out.

Will Truettner (13:11):

Yeah, no, it is the constant dread of being a creative in the digital age is you have access to examples at your fingertips, but by nature of that, everything ends up looking the same because looking at the same inspiration, especially in the outdoor sports space, everyone is referencing a lot of the same work, so it is a constant challenge. I would argue though that putting constraints often leads to more unique ideas and concepts. If you say had the a hundred thousand dollars production, everyone knows the recipe for that. That's going to look beautiful, it's going to sound beautiful, but when you have the $10,000 limit, that's when you're forced to put concept first, and it's not about execution. I think it's easy to get caught up in execution when you have the funds. You're thinking about the best ep, you're thinking about the best sound designer and the best color grading, and that's all amazing and important, and the craft is, I have a lot of respect for people that can pull together such beautiful piece of work, but I think concept is different than execution, and when you have limited resources to work with, you put all your eggs in the concept basket because it's free.

(14:30):

So when I represent a brand in-house, that's not a cost, that's not an out-of-pocket cost. I can spend three, four or five days just thinking only about the concept. Whereas if I had the budget to sort of outsource that, I probably wouldn't do that, and I would probably outsource that out to oppression company who may not be focused on, they may want to be producing the sickest sound design piece for the specific use case they have in the portfolio in the following month. There's always some other motives when you start outsourcing things, and I think the more you can own in-house, back to the efficiency of communication thing as one piece of that, the more you start parsing things out to other people, the less control you have over it. But the more you have it in-house, the more you can manage the cost of it for every step it gets removed from the person that's leading the project, the cost balloon. I'd love to share a work example here to kind of paint some light on what I'm talking about because it's all kind of theoretical, but maybe if we can, yeah,

Cole Heilborn (15:43):

Let's do it.

Will Truettner (15:44):

Put some pen to paper. I can kind of explain some of these concepts better.

Cole Heilborn (15:50):

Yeah, so will, I think you're pulling up a couple example spots of things that you've produced, folks who are listening to the audio. I think you're going to get a lot out of the audio experience here, but if you are interested in seeing the video head, don't over to YouTube where the show, you can listen to us and watch our faces and see these references that will's about to pull up.

Commercial VO (16:12):

Hi darling, it's mom. I hope you're being good while I'm gone. I'm calling you from the top of a mountain. It's so beautiful. I wish you could see it one day when you're older, I will take you to the tops of all the mountains I've ever been, and you can stand on my shoulders and see the things I've not yet seen. I'll see you soon, my love.

Will Truettner (16:41):

Yeah, so the reason I think it applies here is, well, just to give some background, I was the creative director at Hammerhead. It was the first year of the Tour de Feme, which is the Women's Tour de France. This was two or three years ago, and we were definitely new in the space. A lot of people didn't know hammerhead at that time. We had this brand tagline, see the Road Ahead, sort of a devil entendre of you can quite literally see the road ahead with the product, but it offered itself to a lot of really great brand storytelling of imagining a future in which you want to inhabit and working towards that. So a lot of great human interest stories that came out of that. But we needed to launch into the sort of global cycling market with a Tour de France and Tour Defend TV spot.

(17:31):

We had basically no budget. So the task was create an international tour de France tour de fme tv spot with very little budget. So my first inclination was let's put all of our eggs into the concept basket. This is never going to the 10 out of 10 creative. I don't have the budget for it. It's never going to be, I can't bring in a 20 person crew. This is during Covid, not to mention. So even traveling to an international country was a hurdle itself. So the crew had to be me and maybe one person. So the idea was like, okay, if I put all my eggs into the concept basket, I will absorb all the upfront costs of the creative integrity of the piece, and then I'll figure out the logistics of getting that shot and getting it done. I started shopping this concept around internally and one of the gals on our team had just got back from Gerona, and she had met serendipitously on the steps.

(18:32):

This female cyclist, Keira McVitty, who you saw in the commercial there, whose mother actually raced bikes back in the eighties and by some chance had a very identical life story to the one that I portrayed in the film. So we had our character, then we had to figure out how to go get it shot and done. And so I hit up Nick Nelson at Bang Bang Studios, who does phenomenal work, who I've worked with a lot, and he and I just, the two of us flew to Spain and found this iconic Spanish climb and shot this in basically four hours. But we were only able to do that because the concept lended itself to that production. I created the concept with that execution in mind. It had to be a three hour shoot with one person. We didn't have a choice there. I knew my budgets, I knew the covid restraints, and so that beautiful constraint was put on the production of you can't spend more than this amount of dollars and the concept can't, if it's outdoors, if there's a VO that's very easily executable, you just need to go do the thing.

(19:44):

It's not like rocket science. Nick Nelson is amazing and very talented, so he made it look great, but if that concept wasn't there in the first place, if there was an indoor scene or if it wasn't vo, we had to bring a sound person, or all of a sudden those costs start ballooning, not only is that additional crew additional costs, that's additional communication I have to have with these people. We're on a limited time span. All of these things have had to work together. The point I'll emphasize again is that's all because it was designed that way is because we had a small budget and I think the creative really saying in the end, I don't know if I necessarily would've taken that direction if I had a hundred thousand dollars budget to produce this campaign. I think because of those constraints, I really focused on designing the way that it was designed, and I probably wouldn't have come up with these ideas had I not had those.

Cole Heilborn (20:43):

Can you share a little bit more about the actual, the impact and the response from the ad? Did it work as intended?

Will Truettner (20:51):

Yeah, yeah, it worked very well, and I'll give credit to a guy, Ross McGraw, who I work with, who's a sports tech business leader and marketer, super talented. But the strategy here was like, okay, if you're awake at six in the morning watching the Tour de Femme in America or the two day France, you're pretty much a target customer. There's a high intent there. You're not going to wake up and watch cycling in America. That's a very niche person, and so it's shooting fish in a barrel serving up content to these people in that space because it's very, very effective spending. And again, I would argue that's another piece of this equation of, I would say that's way more important than how much we spent on the production. Serving up the content in the right spot is often another missing link that we have here.

(21:52):

I know I've done a lot of work with, especially when I was working on the production side and I had production company and brands would hire us to produce stuff, and you kind of say, okay, well what is this a part of? What are the bigger goals you guys have for this piece just so we can keep that in mind? Oftentimes there wasn't one. It was like, we just want to make a cool piece of creative and we're going to put it out on socials, and it's like, okay, well that will be great for one day. You'll see no impact on your sales and everyone will wake up the next morning having completely forgot that it happened. So where and when and how you're bringing the content to market is of equal importance.

Cole Heilborn (22:30):

So I think there's a lot we can kind of dive into a little deeper here with this ad. So would you give this a seven out 10 in terms of the concept?

Will Truettner (22:40):

Yeah, I mean, I think it was strong. I'm very proud of it. It is one of the pieces I'm more proud of, but as everyone does, when you create something, I see every fault in it and there's a bunch of mistakes we made and could have been a lot better

Cole Heilborn (22:59):

If we had more money as the curse goes of being a creative. So you bring up something interesting here, this equation. I was taking some notes and I'm going to see if I can identify the key concepts or the key ingredients to this equation to kind of bring all of these elements together into creative that actually works. So we've got the concept, we have the budget and timeline restraints. We have the placement of where the content is being distributed, and then we have the audience.

Will Truettner (23:31):

Yeah, sure.

Cole Heilborn (23:33):

Does that feel right?

Will Truettner (23:34):

Yeah.

Cole Heilborn (23:36):

So when I look at this spot, I see two things that really stand out here. I think it's your understanding of the audience and because you understood the audience, you could develop creative that spoke to that audience and you knew where they were going to be at sitting at four in the morning watching the tour to France. Do you feel like that seems like it's the biggest piece of the puzzle

Will Truettner (23:59):

Here? Yeah. Yeah. And that's all in-house concept work. None of that's out of pocket costs. If you're a brand, you're trying to figure out how to spend your money. I think the first inclination, sometimes maybe a brand manager or even sometimes even a creative director is like, alright, who do I need to bring in? What experts, dp, before you do any of that? There's all this upfront savings to be had and the efficiencies to be had of just figuring, just spend three days with the problem, trying to figure it out before you think about spending any money. That's all strategic conceptual work that I think is tempting to overlook if you have bigger budgets.

Cole Heilborn (24:45):

Do you feel like that does get overlooked? If you have more money to spend, then maybe you don't spend as much time thinking about the core foundation pieces?

Will Truettner (24:55):

In my experience, I think so, and that's why I kind of enjoy this angle of the beautiful constraint of embracing the limitations and turning them into your advantages.

Cole Heilborn (25:08):

Why do you think that is? Why does that get overlooked if there is more money to be spent?

Will Truettner (25:14):

Because you don't have to do the work yourself. If there's money, then you can have someone else do it. I think people, that's the blanket statement. I'm sure there's a lot of people, a lot of hardworking people that doesn't necessarily apply to, but I think it's tempting. If you're a brand manager in the outdoors space, you're understaffed, you're under resourced, you have a hundred different things happening. So the more you can outsource those things and focus on other things that are maybe more pressing or someone else is asking for, it's tempting. You might always do it. And I think when you do do that, when you outsource those things or pass them off, that's where it grows exponentially. It doesn't just get passed out to someone else who absorbs that because now there's communication inefficiencies and that curve is

Cole Heilborn (26:07):

Exponential. Yeah. Talk, I want to get back to this idea of knowing your audience because I feel like that's, I'm going to generalize, but I feel like that's something that maybe the outdoor industry struggles with, and it's easy to say like, oh, if we're an outdoor brand, then people who spend time outside are our audience. And while that might be true, I don't know that that's exactly who your audience is, and I wonder if part of, I'm drawing from multiple guests who have been on the show, but I wonder if this race to the middle of content that we're seeing is in part because we don't know who our audience is, and so we don't know who they really are. We might know generally who they are, but if we don't truly understand who they are and what speaks to them, it's extremely difficult to develop creative that speaks to them and works with them.

Will Truettner (27:03):

Yeah, yeah. I mean it's important. I personally have taken a immersive journalism approach in the last few years of my career. There's a guy, Michael Pollen, who does, he did that show cooked on Netflix. He does a lot of great journalism, but his whole approach is like, if I'm going to do a show about cooking and the history of cooking, before I do anything, I'm going to spend a year becoming a chef. So this idea of if you live it and learn it, then you can communicate it best. And so when I started working at Hammerhead, I bought a bike and started riding a hundred miles a week, and now I'm focusing more on running and I'm running ultra marathons in my free time. When you start doing that, you become the customer, especially if you're new to it. I think there's a great advantage to being new to sports, especially in the outdoor space. You have a lot of sport veterans working in these. A lot of times it's like athletes that have retired and have started working at these companies and a lot of people have been living and breathing that for years. But coming in with a fresh perspective to a sport and going through that process of discovering it and running into the barriers and knowing where decision points are and where purchase points are in the mind of the consumer that you're selling to firsthand is hugely beneficial.

Cole Heilborn (28:25):

Can we talk a little about your creative process? I'm curious how you maybe start at a five out 10 and then incrementally turn that into a six or a seven along the way. I think we all have a lot to learn about how can we improve the ideas and concepts that we have. So can you share with us what is your process? Is it just kind of madness and you come up with ideas in the middle of the night?

Will Truettner (28:52):

No, there's definitely some framework to it. I think obviously identifying the limitations as the drum that I've been beating this whole time is hugely important. So is it money? Is it athlete? Sometimes it's the campaign is it's centered around a partnership with another brand or it's centered around an athlete. So that's your starting. I think this idea of building blocks is what I always come back to. So start with the easiest, smallest resolution problem. It has to be with this athlete on this date. Then all of a sudden you're tied to, you have a lot of other things are figured out. Then the date is figured out, the lighting, maybe you don't have a choice, maybe it's midday, maybe it's afternoon.

(29:42):

Figure out what things can't be changed that you have to work with, identify those, and then it's conceptualized after that for me, then it's like, all right, given those constraints, what are some cool interesting ways we can put a spin on this? What are some things that haven't been done? I think borrowing from other industries like fashion or going outside the outdoor space into music or, I agree with this idea that nothing's original anymore, but one of my first creative directors told me that creativity is a combination of two existing things, and I think that becomes more and more true. The more we've progressed here with everything is like, yeah, maybe there were some novel things a few thousand years ago, but now it's just taking two things that exist and combining them. So if you can take some cool inspiration you saw in the fashion world and marry that with running, I mean, that's a very obvious example. The running industry has been doing that for several years now, but you get the idea of what I'm saying. Then you can start iterate on that, and then it's built beyond the original building blocks. Then you have your MVC. You're like, okay, this works. This is a thing. If I took this to my team, I would not be embarrassed. They would be like, okay, yeah, this is a great work. And then it's like, all right, say I have 20% left to play with. How do I blow it out and expand it from there?

Cole Heilborn (31:09):

So for this hammerhead spot, are you developing a log line for your concepts? Are you just jotting down a whole bunch of ideas as they come to you and then you workshop them from there? How do you go from this concept of, what's the name of the spot? A mother's letter.

Will Truettner (31:28):

A mother's message? Yeah,

Cole Heilborn (31:30):

A mother's message. How do you arrive at that? I'm assuming you've got 20 other concepts.

Will Truettner (31:36):

I had three for this one,

(31:39):

And I think maybe that's good. I hadn't thought about it until just now, but sometimes it is good to have to pitch things to other people or to do that even though you don't have to. So in this case, I brought three ideas to the team At the time, I had two designers in house under me, but I was essentially free to do as I wanted for the piece, and I didn't necessarily need buy-in on the concept from the other team members within the marketing department, but I did bring a pitch deck with three ideas to the team. I wanted to hear people's thoughts on it, and that forced me to ideate three ideas obviously, which maybe I would not have done if I just had to go produce it myself. I probably just would've thought of something and gone and done it. So maybe that's a good thing is force yourself to go beyond just the first idea. Sorry, I forgot the original question.

Cole Heilborn (32:35):

Yeah, I was just curious if you could elaborate more on how you arrive at concepts. Is there a process that you put yourself through to arrive at a concept? Do you just go on a bike ride or run and let things simmer until something pops through? What works for you?

Will Truettner (32:52):

Yeah, I'll sit down and focus on it pretty hard, ride up a bunch of things. I think just writing just like stream of conscious writing is really great, but you're right. A lot of the processes has nothing to do with that. It's getting out on my bike or something. All the best ideas are in that come to I think me and probably most people, when you're in that flow state of doing your sport or whatever, it is not work related. I've also recently identified that when I'm between the hours of nine to five, it's really hard to be creative thinking about emails and I'm thinking about things I need to get done. But if I go sit down on my computer on a Saturday morning, which obviously sucks, but all of a sudden my mind is so light and I'm thinking so freely and I'm all of a sudden playing in a sandbox because I have no meeting at nine 30, I have nothing else taking my attention. So spending off hours on the problem is often really, really helpful.

Cole Heilborn (33:59):

Isn't that why they say when you take a shower, that's when your best ideas

Will Truettner (34:03):

Usually

Cole Heilborn (34:03):

Hit

Will Truettner (34:03):

The shower and the sauna? Oh my god, all my best ideas are in the sauna.

Cole Heilborn (34:07):

I don't have a sauna or really have, I guess I could get access to one, but I've never really used one. Maybe I should add that to the list of business purchases. Business

Will Truettner (34:18):

Purchase, yeah.

Cole Heilborn (34:18):

Expensive quotes. So we're talking about minimum viable creative, which I think is a really, I love that phrase. Have you ever gone to minimum? Have you ever come up with something that's a three out of 10, let's say, and you were proud of this concept MVC, but it didn't work, and I'm curious if there's any lessons you can share there or things to just be wary of or consider.

Will Truettner (34:48):

Yeah, it is just like tell the truth always to yourself. Most importantly, it's easy to tell truth to other people, but when you're lying to, it's a lot easier to lie to yourself. And what I mean by that is if you're telling yourself like, oh, this is the NBC and I pushed it, and deep in your heart there's kind of a sinking feeling of like, oh, this actually isn't my best work. Try to avoid that. But yeah, of course life gets busy or things happen. Maybe you might put forth a MVC project that you're not quite proud of. So you definitely have to be wary of taking that approach. But again, the idea is building blocks. It's like that's only step one. MVC is step one of eight steps that should happen in your creative iteration. So it's like a be all ends to the projects. It's just the first step, a way to take a really scary project and make it a lot more approachable.

Cole Heilborn (35:52):

So what would you do if you had a hundred or 200 or 300 grands? You're talking about producing great work with a shoestring budget. I can only imagine what you would do if you had the war chest at your disposal.

Will Truettner (36:09):

Yeah, I think that would be really rad because I think the most important thing to keep in mind there is don't the concept at the start, but yeah, it would be really fun to be able to spend a lot more money on the execution. I think oftentimes that's where maybe my stuff falls short is the execution. It's never the best looking or sounding, but I think it always has that creative nugget in it, and that's the important thing. Well, I guess the other thing I'll add is, again, the macro goal a lot of times for me at least, is not necessarily the creative, it's the business. Is this having an impact on business and sales and that my work recently has mostly been within organizations where I'm the only creative one in the entire organization. So the goal is not do the 10 out of 10 best creative, although in the back of my mind, that's my personal goal. A lot of times the goal for everyone else concerned is this making an impact on the business. And so a lot of times I'm measuring the work with different metrics than maybe say a lot of creatives probably listen to this are, and in that sense, the Tour de France spot that I just shared, while I would say maybe that's a 6, 7, 8 out of 10 in terms of creative, I think it was a nine or 10 in terms of the business impact, it a hundred percent accomplished the thing that we set out to do.

(37:40):

We measured site traffic before and after the commercial. We measured sales. It had a very significant impact because I think the concept and the authenticity was there. It doesn't necessarily need to be 10 out of 10 execution.

Cole Heilborn (37:56):

The way you phrased that is it seems like creative goals and business goals aren't always aligned, which is an interesting concept to kind of dig into. And I feel like creatives sometimes get a bad rap where a client shows up and says, Hey, here's a brief, go make this thing. And then creative goes off and does something that looks great and is artistic and whatever, but it doesn't actually move the

Will Truettner (38:22):

Needle. Yeah, right. Yeah. I think that happens a lot with production companies. When a brand manager will hire a production company, I know this because I ran a production company for a while, and it's very easy to get your motivations mixed up when you're working, especially just on a one-off project if you don't have a long standing relationship with a client, because of course you want to do the best work for the client, but that's assuming the client told you exactly what they wanted or needed, and that's very rarely the case. Oftentimes, they're not even sure. So there's that. And then assuming they did translate to you exactly what they wanted and what the business needed for you to put that as your only consideration in terms of how you're producing the content is not always the case. I know for myself, for example, when you're running a production company, you're also thinking about, oh, I really, really want to hire this colorist on this project, or I need to have a sound designer on this because my portfolio work is really lacking in that area, so I really want to build that.

(39:30):

You have a hundred other different motivations that you're focused on, and so you're not necessarily, the business impact is often at the bottom of the priority list in terms of when the content actually comes down to getting produced on set on in the field. That's not even on anyone's mind. And again, going back to my original argument of the more people you introduce, the more that's going to start happening. If you have one person or two people on a set, and one of them is representing the brand as the brand manager or the creative director, there's no communication and efficiencies, there's no gaps for that stuff to fall through, and so you can get really efficient with the money that you're spending.

Cole Heilborn (40:16):

I hear you say that, and part of me cringes like, gosh, production companies, we got to do better. If that's really true, if that's the experience, do

Will Truettner (40:25):

You find, how do you feel, how does that strike you? Do you find yourself juggling priorities sometimes, not necessarily in the best interest of the client?

Cole Heilborn (40:34):

Oh, I'm sure it happens. I'm sure it inevitably happens. I think though, I hear that get talked about, and I guess when I think about the process that we go through when we work with clients, we spend so much time building a brief and articulating goals and articulating all of the elements that are needed to make a project successful. That I feel like that kind of defines, that gives us, as you're talking about, the constraints that we need to then develop something that fits within those constraints. But there was a time when, this is a few years ago, when we would just try to go out and produce work just to make it look good. We were like, oh, we really want to get this cool dynamic car shot, and maybe that wasn't best serving, but that's what we wanted to do.

Will Truettner (41:28):

Yeah, exactly. Was you bought a new piece of equipment and you're going to use it on that shoot regardless of what anybody says, you've made your mind up. So you're, there's all sorts of things that come in and that's great, but it is just important to keep in mind.

Cole Heilborn (41:44):

So I think we were there. I think we did do that for a while, but as the company has grown and matured, we really try to take a problem first approach, and that's just trying to articulate needs and all that good stuff. I've appreciated this conversation. I think there's a couple things that stand out here that I want to take home and kind of think about, and I'll reiterate them for the audience. One, it's just this idea of an equation of what are the key ingredients that you need to develop creative that really works, and we've got concept, budget and timeline, the placement, and truly understanding your audience. I think that's such a wise and worthy thing to consider as you're producing creative. And then the second idea is in a world of constraint, which we all live in, what is the minimum viable creative, and how do you facilitate and foster that? Will, is there anything else that you want to leave the audience with before we sign off for the day?

Will Truettner (42:45):

No. I mean, I guess implied in this whole discussion is that the assumption that you have someone on your team that can kind of assume all these roles at once. I happen to have a background that touches on all these things, so that's why for me, it comes naturally to be at the intersection of all them, and this idea of the efficiency of keeping things small, but I understand oftentimes you may not have that resource on your team, and so maybe it doesn't apply so much in that scenario, but maybe it is something when thinking about building out teams, reframing the thinking of needing all the different pieces and instead having someone that maybe isn't a specialized in one area, but understands how they all come together. Again, when you're, the efficiency of budgets is the priority as it is in the space that I work in, building tech startups, that's the number one concern. So it's a good way to solve for it.

Cole Heilborn (43:54):

That's a great point, and maybe if you don't have someone internally who can do this work, if you do find someone out of house to help you, maybe just consider some of these concepts and share them with the folks that you're considering hiring, and if they're receptive or on board, or maybe that's part of your decision making process. Also, it's just trying to evaluate how they approach some of these problem solving issues. Will, if folks want to find you, if they want to check out your portfolio, see some of the things that you've been up to, where can people go and find you?

Will Truettner (44:25):

Yeah, will rener.com is my website, and you can find my lived in from there. Instagram is Willie, T-T-E-E-E three E, but yeah.

Cole Heilborn (44:38):

Amazing. Well, I want to thank you for taking the time. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and ideas, and I'm excited when you get the a hundred thousand dollars or 200 grand, let me know. I want to see what you're making.

Will Truettner (44:48):

Cool, man. Excited. Thanks for chatting.

Cole Heilborn (44:51):

All right. Have a good day.

Will Truettner (44:52):

See you.

Cole Heilborn (44:54):

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Backcountry Marketing Podcast. Please share it with a friend or leave us a review on Apple.

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