Sharing my latest creative work & behind the scenes for Hot Takes readers

This is different from my normal post: I don't just write about marketing, I also make ads. Some creative work to brighten your Friday...

On set my team built to film an ad for our growing startup, AdQuick

For readers who don’t know, my Substack is of course not my day job. I write here as a labor of love to share ideas …but am extremely grateful for those of you who choose to support me by being a paid reader, thanks for that, you help feed my dog biscuits.

During the day as VP marketing at AdQuick I’m helping grow a very cool B2B startup that is modernizing the OOH (out of home) advertising category. See a screengrab below of our Browse feature, which lets advertisers have a birds-eye view of the largest global inventory, and select units from 1400+ media owners (1.5M+ units) in the real world that can now be managed and measured digitally.

How much would Don Draper’s team love this?

At this juncture, OOH media such as billboards and airport displays are really the only ad medium left much of the industry is not buying through modern digital platforms. It is of course inevitable this will all happen. So to me, this is an exciting company and category to work for, as it’s really the last mile of an industry that has a somewhat mixed scorecard with embracing the future.

With that, it’s my job to help those booking media over phone calls like it’s still 1985 instead of digital campaign planning, and measuring via things like PDFs instead dashboards come into the modern age. AdQuick is still a young startup that’s grown to date via digital growth tactics and organic word of mouth. But it’s time the startup invests in a proper ad to tell the story and also speak ‘in-kind’ to our market which has a deep respect for advertising. So, a live-action ad is necessary as cheap/throwaway stock footage work would not pay homage to our users, as well as not do justice for the hard work of the product and eng teams. We came up with the concept of using a rehab group as a metaphor for bringing advertisers into the future.

Here is just a little behind the scenes context for those who have never worked on filming an ad to get a taste of the process (ad pros already know how much work goes into a live-action piece of creative). It’s really not that different from filming a TV show or movie.

It of course all begins with a script draft after the creative concept is determined

Next we create some ‘mood boards’ to ensure the vibe of everything that is chosen fits the aesthetic we’re going for

Several locations are kicked around, we went with the above warehouse in downtown Austin we felt had the right energy

Cast is chosen along with wardrobe to help create the right personas and aesthetic we want in the actors

Pre-production and post project plans are created to make sure shoots are seamless, all scenes look great, filmed in timely manner and we get a final product we like

I’m extremely proud of the work from my team did on this and so wanted to share with readers here as I don’t really do a good job showing you my actual day projects. I think it’s also cool to see that in-person work for our sector is being done once again (yes, even remote teams do projects IRL, it’s completely false notion by people not in the game distributed work doesn’t mean coming together, too).

Anyway, you can view the final creative via embed below or here if you can’t see it. If you’re in marketing I think you’ll especially appreciate this piece, but hopefully even those without an ad background can get the story here succinctly.

Also huge thanks to the team at Bennett Creative for helping me bring this to life, they rock and I recommend working with them without reservation.