St. Louis, MO – December 6, 2022 – Having worked more than two decades in public relations, I have experienced more than a few PR fails. I could share my own horror stories of things not working to plan. Que the theme from Jaws or Halloween here.

Come on, if you are reading this, my guess is that you have experienced them too!

It is the nature of the business. If you work in PR, it is inevitable. There are built in challenges that come with working for clients who are human. You have limited resources and client expectations that are more aspirational than realistic. That is a recipe for things to go wrong at least occasionally.

Today we are sharing horror stories that have been shared with us as part of market research we have been doing for our business. STORYSMART has been involved in a startup accelerator program called Velocity that required us to do detailed market research interviews.

While we have done well over two hundred market research interviews since forming STORYSMART, we decided to focus our Velocity effort on a market we haven’t really served since building our company – the PR professional.

Wow! We are glad we did as it revealed a fatal flaw in our assumptions about our target market for our professional video storytelling services.

In developing our business focus, we had erroneously assumed that the ideal customer of STORYSMART is a company or individual that has little to no experience with buying video production. We were focusing our effort on the market that isn’t served by today’s production industry.

That said, the reality is that we have built an MVP (minimally viable product) ideally suited for agency professionals who are experienced with buying video.

It has been an eye-opening exercise.

The long story short, we have spoken to more than a dozen of our fellow PR professionals about their experience with video. We have heard numerous horror stories about their experience with both DIY video and sourcing professional production.

Most agencies we spoke with do not have video production in-house. They either hire out or have tried to do it themselves. Hence the horror stories. The reality is that most public relations and even digital marketing agencies tend to hire out when it comes to video because the paradigm in place requires a huge capital outlay on equipment and people.

It is paradigm we reject outright with more of an Uber or AirB&B model to our business.

But enough about us, let’s get to the Tales of PR Fails.

One PR person told us that they tried to do a cell video recently for a client, but her colleague couldn’t figure out how to get the large 4K files off her cell phone to edit them. 4K files are massive and clunky to handle if you don’t have a good computer and editing system. Even experienced professionals have a hard time managing them.

Our colleague said it was such a “sh*t show that we threw in the towel”.

Another colleague shared that she couldn’t figure out how to edit the videos she had shot on her phone. “I ultimately just gave up. Luckily, I hadn’t promised the client anything and they didn’t know I had shot the footage.”

Editing video is a skill like any other. It takes experience – along with equipment - to do it well.

Yet another colleague complained about the various formats you need to do video for social media.

“It is so frustrating that there isn’t some quick app to reformat everything for you,” one person told me about her effort to reformat video she had shot so it could be shared on social media.

Vertical video is key for platforms like Instagram, while you need landscape for Facebook and LinkedIn. This is a pain for everyone – pro and amateur alike.

Everyone has had problems with captioning. Artificial intelligence is amazing, but let’s be honest, you have probably sent a text to someone that “auto corrected” that you wish you didn’t send right? You still need to manually check your captioning before importing into your video editing software.

While I wasn’t overly surprised by the DIY disasters as I’ve experienced most myself, it was learning the horror stories of sourcing professional video that were eye-opening to all of us.

None of the folks we spoke with feel like they have video figured out.

Every single one of the folks we spoke to are looking for something that fits between the traditional production model and DIY. Everyone wants “authentic” or “real” stories they can share on a consistent basis. They are searching for a sustainable production model that works with their deadline driven clients on the limited budgets they must take care of them.

The biggest problems most agency folks cited was the time and money involved with traditional production. Traditional video production is a top-heavy and labor-intensive model that is born of Madison Avenue and Hollywood.

It is great for producing a killer Super Bowl commercial, but not dozens of social media shorts.

The average time it takes a traditional production company to produce a three-minute video is three months from idea to finished video. While average costs differ by city, the floor is $20,000 in smaller markets and it goes up from there in larger cities. It isn’t uncommon to spend $30,000 to $50,000 on a three-minute video for a clients website.

While those are big numbers, cost isn’t as big an issue to my PR colleagues as is the nature of the content they need. Most agency folks vented frustration about how hard it was to try to get short shareable content from their vendors after finishing a video.

One owner told me about the push back they received from their freelance agency about copyright. The freelance agency insisted on charging a “license fee” to the footage the PR agency had already paid them to get.

“I was so pissed off about it, I don’t want to use them ever again until I learned that it is a standard practice with most production companies,” our colleague told us. “It is so frustrating.”

It is a real horror story when you pay a creative a lot of money, but don’t own the creative. But as my colleague learned, it isn’t unusual. American copyright law protects creatives.

Most agency folks are familiar with this when sourcing photography, but they were not prepared for the driving demand for video.

Being a lawyer working in PR I see this issue as my driving motive for STORYSMART. We live in a world where if you DIY a video, you own it, but if you hire out, you don’t own it unless you have a written agreement that clearly grants you copyright.

In a world where owned media is worth multiples of earned or paid media, ownership matters.

The biggest gap we see with PR professionals is that when you are on deadline with an agency, you are not paying attention to the fine print. You just want to get a project done. I’ve made this mistake myself, but never again. You need to focus on the fine print agreement between you and your video provider.

It is the fine print that might que that theme from Jaws. Lawyers are lurking in the shadows. Hard to think of something scarier to a creative than a lawyer.

My best advice as a lawyer creative is to scope your video work appropriately and engage your own lawyer to ensure you own the freelance work as a “work for hire.” Make sure your agreement covers all the elements you want covered (ex. raw footage).

The other option is to work with companies like ours that are transparent about the intellectual property rights. We want you to own your story while also having it professionally told.

Bottom line: you can avoid video horror stories if you are STORYSMART about your video storytelling.

About STORYSMART

You have a story to bring to the screen, but you don't have the time or resources to do it yourself. Telling your story well with video can be hard. And let’s be brutally honest. No app will turn you into a great filmmaker. Few are capable of producing a do-it-yourself (DIY) video or film we actually want to watch, much less remember.

To do justice to your story on screen, you need the right skills and equipment, not to mention time, money and talent.

That is why STORYSMART developed our premium video storytelling as a service. We help clients tell their story in the amazing way they deserve with a proprietary done-for-you video storytelling service unlike any other.

STORYSMART provides a nationwide premium video storytelling service that empowers individuals, families, celebrities, small businesses and other organizations to have their stories told professionally while retaining their intellectual property rights as though they did it themselves.

STORYSMART provides clients an experienced television reporter or journalist filmmaker to help them tell their story following our proprietary high-integrity brand journalism system. Our transparently priced premium services for businesses and families ensures that each client gets an authentic, high-quality story they own the intellectual property rights on forever.

About Ron Watermon

Ron Watermon is the founder and CEO of STORYSMART, a premium video storytelling technology startup that empowers anyone to have their stories told professionally while ensuring they retain the intellectual property rights on their productions.

A creative and innovative communications leader with nearly three decades of experience, prior to founding STORYSMART, Ron was responsible for modernizing the St. Louis Cardinals communications by leading the team’s investment in video storytelling, brand journalism, fan engagement and social media.