How to Creative Direct a Personal Brand

Transcript

In this video, we are going to go through Creative Direction 101, creative direction specifically for personal brands and personalities. We are going to talk about the eras of creative direction and why personal brands are so important for this now, as opposed to the entire art being very brand-focused for the last two eras. We're going to go through terminology. I'm going to discuss the difference between the strategy, content operations, and creative direction because the terms get used interchangeably quite a bit. We're going to zone in on the personality era, how brands use personalities and why they need to be creative directed by the brand world matters more than the account now, creating a content flywheel and determining how to actually put content out around personal brands from a creative directed perspective, distribution strategy and how to apply creative direction principles to what personal brands do, and then get into the actual sauce of how you apply creative direction techniques around visuals, design, styling, and world building to personal brands. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart as someone who has built my own personal brand. I've had hundreds of success stories come out of Cut30. And in particular, this last week, I was at Cannes Lions here in the south of France. I'm still in Nice right now. Where creators and personal brands were at the forefront of the world's largest advertising and creativity festival. The entire industry was gathered here. The number one topic again and again in every room that I was in was leveraging creators, leveraging influence, building internal teams around that, and this new personality era we're in. I'm inside this every day. Someone who's worked on this formerly inside a brand. So I'm excited to share as much sauce as I possibly can with you inside this video. Let's lock in. But first, let's talk about the creative direction eras. Era number one was the original fashion and agency era. When you thought of a creative director, you would think of someone who worked inside of a fashion house or someone who worked at an agency. This was my first gig inside this world. I was a graphic designer, became a senior graphic designer. It was at a smaller agency that needed that differential. They were trying to work with interesting clients. At the time, we were in Red Bull, with Vice, Grey Goose. We were doing events in the Hamptons, at Super Bowl, at Sundance. And the agency looked at having creative direction as a differentiator that they could bring to their clients to say, we think in an interesting way about these ideas, activations, and campaigns that you're doing. And we can approach that even as a smaller firm from a more unique, culturally rooted perspective. But then the term began to explode in what we'll call the Virgil era, creative direction 2.0, where all of a sudden, Hypebeast, High Snobiety, all of these cultural publications that covered kinds of streetwear revolution and streetwear's crossover into both luxury and mainstream, and gave this huge aspirational look at these designers, at these creative directors, at these brands that made thousands and tens of thousands of kids around the world aspire to have those kind of positions. Prior to that, when I was growing up, people wanted to be athletes. They wanted to be musicians. In this era, kids squarely began thinking about, could I become a designer? Could I become a creative director? You see things like Travis Scott with McDonald's, Adidas collaborations, Virgil working with Louis Vuitton. And it opened up the idea of the field to be something much more. Why wouldn't McDonald's want to activate with a creative director? Luxury brands wanting to tap into streetwear. And in this era, I had recently become a VP of marketing. I was working at a company called 3DR at the time that made camera drones. I was managing a super talented creative director, who inside of our company was the singular person who was giving incredible ideation that separated our campaigns and visuals at the time from everyone else. For our launch film for one of those products at the time, he was the one who had the idea to train actual apes to use the drone. We executed that with all these 2001: A Space Odyssey Easter eggs, had a very viral launch video at the time. It was coming with concepts around everything from our trade shows to our campaigns that as a hardware tech company, were elevating us in a really competitive scenario. But now we are in what I'm going to call creative direction 3.0, where the term has pretty actively lost its meaning. You have real dilution of what a creative director actually is. We'll talk about that in a moment. But we also have real solutions that need creative direction. So here's what I hear a lot. You see a lot of companies and younger people who are hired into that role, a lot of personal brands that are hiring that role. But really what they're hiring for is a creative strategist. And I'll break down those terms in a second. But because everyone knows what this role is, ideas, creativity, personality, creating is now at the forefront of marketing and the way it wasn't five years ago, even 20 years ago, it was still ads, campaigns, top down. Every brand now from an up-and-coming coffee shop to a tech company to traditional reins like fashion all need this creative to stand out even more so in the content era. And they need more of it. But because there's so much of it, the term now means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And interestingly enough, for the last year until about 60 days ago, I was a creative director at a PE firm doing basically creative strategy across brands inside their portfolio. There aren't many PE firms with that kind of job, but it makes sense, right? If you are a forward-looking, and this company was inside of beauty, you want to have an edge across all the brands in your portfolio. But because there's so much of it, the term now means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And interestingly enough, for the last year until about 60 days ago, I was a creative director at a PE firm doing creative strategy across brands inside their portfolio. There aren't many PE firms with that kind of job, but it makes sense, right? If you are a forward-looking, and this company was inside of beauty, you want to have an edge across all the brands in your portfolio. Creative is a way to do it. We're only going to see more of this. We've seen it now with VC firms hiring the same thing to represent both themselves and their firm and also help companies inside the portfolio. So there's more demand for it than ever. And why I made things like this video is to give people the foundations of what you would actually do to execute this job. Because it does mean a lot more than that vague unemployed term you might see in someone's Instagram bio. So let's actually define these different segments. So first, when most people see creative direction now, because you'll see a lot of personal brands hiring for it, for instance. You'll see a lot of newer brands or brands that are running mostly meta. They're really hiring for creative strategy. And a very directly defined creative strategy is someone who is bringing regular concepts every single week for ads and or can be either one or both organic content. They're doing ideation. They are making briefs to get the ideation actually executed by whether it's external creators, whether it's existing video teams or a personality they work for. And they're looking at analytics and improving that flywheel. And this is a relatively new job in its popularity. There are tons of people that are hiring for it. Many of you I know were inside the motion bootcamp that I was one of the instructors on. They had 90,000 people in there. So how many people signed up for that bootcamp? There are thousands and thousands of people on every call. Tons of people got jobs in strategy after. There's lots of tactical application there, but that's not full creative direction. Then we have content operations. This is a really important one. This is when you can do that creative strategy. You can ideate, you can help brief it to people. You can run analytics and improve it. But you're also starting to manage the schedule, what gets produced when. You're interacting with the people, you're sending out the briefs, you're getting it back and you're managing the vendors around it. We need new videographers, we need new designers. I can pull that all in there. That is an extremely valuable job right now. The brands either have from one person or they're recreating in the aggregate and personal brands do as well. I have multiple people that work on my team, including one I've just brought on last week, working through this kind of stuff. But then you get to full creative direction, which includes the above, right? You're still going to be actually ideating, you're still going to be briefing, you still need to live in the analytics, you're going to more than ever need to know vendors, who you can pull in. I can get this photographer, that videographer. But you're layering on the foundations of determining, making the decisions around the aesthetics, driving the entire campaign versus the ideation on just briefs, finding through lines across these campaigns, building out what that brand stands for and then establishing the world, who are the collaborators, the people, the retail merchandising, all of the intangibles. And that adds up to an extremely complicated job and one that's ultra valuable. This brings us to section two here, the personality era. This used to matter most for brands. This used to be something you would apply this art to brands, like you see in the kind of the visuals here. You would have collaborations, you would have massive activations, Adidas driving around a huge shoe, whatever it is. But brand accounts, brand social media, ad campaigns, these concepts are useful, but matter less than ever on the core. This is something I've had to admit as someone who's worked on brand social for a long time and was instrumental in working with hundreds of brands now over the last few years on their social strategies, beginning to look at it being what? The actual account itself is not the core driver. Now the world is the core driver. That's what I mean by that. The founder, the team members, creators and UGC people who are making content for the brand, influencers the brand works with, and the customers, all ad ops has significantly more of a marketing push than the brand accounts and ads themselves in many cases. Now if a brand is spending a ton of money on ads, potentially, also even then, they're using creators, UGC, and influencers for that. Last week, I hosted a panel inside the villa that we put together at Dara Denny, who you've seen me collaborate with. I had marketers from Whisperflow and ManyChat. We were doing it with the software company, Motion, all focused on ad strategy and every single one of those brands. That includes high growth tech, high growth software, tons of consumer goods. We're recommending 30 plus percent of someone's meta ad account should be whitelisted, meaning they are running ads from someone else's account. So for instance, you will see me doing whitelisted ads with my sponsors like Notion or ChatGPT Who you've seen me collaborate with. I had marketers from Whisperflow and ManyChat. We were doing it with the software company, Motion, all focused on ad strategy and every single one of those brands. That includes high growth tech, high growth software, tons of consumer goods. We're recommending 30 plus percent of someone's meta ad account should be whitelisted, meaning they are running ads from someone else's account. So for instance, you will see me doing whitelisted ads with my sponsors like Notion or ChatGPT who run ads from my account for their products. Shopify is doing that on TikTok right now. But 30% of those ads at least being run on that, being listed as a best practice by people that are on the edge, shows you the importance of the personalities that come up to a brand even when it is ad heavy. That world matters so much now that it needs creative direction. When before you could say, hey, I want to apply this to the campaign, the big shoe, the collab. Now it's, man, we need to get great at how do we actually define this for these team members? And they all need enablement, right? What do I mean by enablement? So working as a creative director for that PE firm, one of the big initiatives that the core company in their portfolio was doing was sending out tons of mailers, mailers to creators who they want to make content around their new launches. And the design, look and feel of those mailers would raise their efficacy, the creative direction of them. The cooler and more unique the concept is and how it looked, the more likely it is to be made a video about. And that post rate, how many mailers we send out, do 20% of people post or 60% of people post when you're sending thousands a month, really adds up. Creative direction is in the enablement of content for the community. And this goes a step further too on another campaign recently with a company that has 100 creators that they work with relatively regularly. We were discussing how do we help them break out of the current flow of content they're in. And one of the things we were doing is giving everyone a budget to book a luxury hotel room so they could film a series of videos inside there to elevate the look and feel of what they're doing for a campaign that match that. So you're saying, okay, we have 100 creators, we have a $400 budget per additional one of those creators to then elevate and have all the campaign footage around this look a different way. Same thing with buying creators, Osmos, renting out studios where people actually film it. If you saw the production set that we had at Cannes, I'm creative directing my own channel, right? Saying, hey, it makes sense for me to be filming inside of a villa, bringing in guests, having them see it's high production, having it look and feel elevated to tell the stories I'm trying to tell. Same thing with brand trips or sending people on trips around this content. All of this adds up. These are all creative directed elements inside of personality strategy. And you will see it inside here. People represent these brands. Ducey was probably one of the best, most prolific examples of this I've used a lot where the people became the representation of the brand. That is happening all over now, whether it's just a face to a personality to someone who's making the content. And you'll see all the companies that are on the cutting edge, like Gentle Monster here, was ahead of those trends, ahead of the mailers, ahead of all the things we're talking about. Let's look at this concept of personal brand 2.0. So personal brand 1.0 was attention. It was influence. How can I just get people to watch my get ready with me, how cool I look, what my lifestyle is? But now, and this is the repeated theme here, it's about how do I make money, career growth, power, intellectual influence, how do I learn? All of a sudden, people that are making content in our lives are giving us significant advice about the things we work on and replacing mentors, teachers, and other things that have gone by the wayside in our current world that anyone across the world can access online. Obviously, I serve as a teaching creator for a lot of people having learned about the concepts of marketing, creative direction, social media, that helps them in their brands and their careers. That is a very different personal brand era than beforehand if I was just sharing, if I'm walking around France showing my glamorous life. Not that glamorous. Meanwhile, I turned 40 this year and as serious Below Deck consumers, my family is celebrating by chartering a yacht around Greece for seven days. But now to do this, to do this well and to continue to elevate in this scenario, these people need creative direction, right? Everyone's videos look the same. Everyone's doing yaps. How do you determine a personality, right? Even the fact that you've seen me across these videos, Meanwhile, I turned 40 this year and as serious Below Deck consumers, my family is celebrating by chartering a yacht around Greece for seven days. But now to do this well and to continue to elevate in this scenario, these people need creative direction, right? Everyone's videos look the same. Everyone's doing yaps. How do you determine a personality, right? Even the fact that you've seen me across these videos, now roughly 30% of my videos, I'm traveling inside of something. Hey, I was just talking in London. Hey, I'm here in Cannes. Hey, I'm on the boat in Greece. You're beginning to learn and tell more stories about me. But then how you're presenting that in the visual field. I had a creative director being like, hey, let's look at this in an incredible visual aspect. How do we turn those into campaigns? These are the things that all personal brands and any brand that has people representing them need to start thinking about. Applying this on a smaller tactical level. Let's actually get into some tactics here. I'm going to talk briefly about content. I have a million videos about content if you want to actually dive deep into that. So we're not going to get into tons on hooks and stories and stuff like that. I will give you a format for actually working with a planning inside that niche. Then we're going to get into thinking through distribution strategy. And then we're going to get into the creative direction tactics portion. So first, when you're coming up with content for this, a big part of creative direction for personal brands isn't just what does the photo shoot look like? It's helping them make content, right? What is the YouTube video? What is the LinkedIn post? What is the Instagram video? How do you create ideation for that? And so this comes from having recurring topics that you talk about, from having recurring formats like types of yaps. I have a whole yapping video if you want to get into that. But I make content in front of a whiteboard. I make vlogs where I go around. These are all formats and things that creative directors should understand and be able to give people access to. But most importantly, it's stories. What are the events, people, and products you can tell stories about? What happened in either my brand arc or my arc or something in history that's able to be talked about? What are people in history that inspired me or are worth talking about or that I'm collaborating with now that can tell stories at and around? And what are products? That's an unboxing video or something you were developing or something that got released or the five things you're going on a trip with or whatever it is. That becomes the framework that creative directors for personal brands need to be able to bring to any scenario. How can we actually use topics around those to engage and build content plans? Like I mentioned, I'm not going to cover scripting heavily in this because I want to focus on the creative direction portion at the end. But the best thing you can do if you are doing this strategy for yourself, if you have a personal brand or if you are a strategist or creative director you're working with a client is a twice monthly meeting every two weeks and do this exact flow. And if it's you, if you're the personal brand, hire a strategist or a writer. It's important this is conversational. You don't want to do this just by yourself. How we'll do it is I will make sure Granola is on as an AI notepad and have a conversation about news in the niche. How do you get news in your niche? So I have Perplexity. Send me a report every week. You can follow aggregation accounts and make a list. There's tons of carousels and stuff like that. LinkedIn news if you're doing more generic business is excellent when you log in on desktop. They have a bunch there and that's also a cheat code because they weight the topics in those news higher in the algorithm. The editorial team curates additional posts to attach to the topic. I won't get too deep into that. But basically looking at all the news that's out there in the world and going, do we like this or do we dislike it? Can we share an opinion on that? Is there enough of an opinion to share or can we share a tactic on that? Easy way to go through interpretation of the news. Then look at personal history. What happened since our last meeting? What's in your camera roll? This is great if you're working with a client or if you're looking back Looking at all the news that's out there in the world and going, do we like this or do we dislike it? Can we share an opinion on that? Is there enough of an opinion to share or can we share a tactic on that? Easy way to go through interpretation of the news. Then look at personal history. What happened since our last meeting? What's in your camera roll? This is great if you're working with a client or if you're looking back at your history wondering what to write about. Look at this last week. Okay, what happened? Is there anything in my camera roll that inspires a story or an anecdote? Okay, now go back one year. Apple makes this really easy on the phone or any phone really. So you go back one year. What was happening one year ago? Is there any stories you can tell from the couple weeks around that time period? Same thing with three years, same thing with five years because you'll notice a lot of the stories of where you came from. Oh, I was developing this thing. Oh, I worked on X and Y. This is when I was living in this. So here's a lesson with a co-founder I broke up with. Whatever it looks like. Those become really compelling stories. And just having that process for every two weeks you're going back through that and looking into your history starts a lot of good conversations. Then pull from video database. You can go look at by topic winners. You can go real estate, marketing, whatever it is. You can look at videos that are outlier performers from the last period of time if that inspires topics. Then another one is ask Meta AI. Meta AI is super underrated. It's a free app. You can ask for viral formats that a handle should be considering. I can go in there and be like, hey, I'm Oramite's world. I'm traveling in Nice. What topics have I been hitting around here? What would you suggest for me based on my existing content? That's actually quite good. So the job is to discuss with people back and forth in person and debate around these. Would this make a good video? What could the hook be? What could the angle be? And that conversational back and forth sparks really good ideas. And then Granola is mad useful for this because while you have this conversation, it's not a meeting bot. There's no bot in there. It transcribes audio directly whether you're in Zoom, you're in Google Meet, Slack huddle, or if you're in person sitting down and doing it. And it does AI enhanced notes. So it writes it like a notepad. So it's a shorthand, clean, full summary of the conversation. And then there's recipes. This is why I use this. So it's pre-built prompts that can work before or after the meetings. And so I can say, hey, I want a full list of script and hook ideas. I can basically have that as a recipe. I run after every planning session. It's going to give me a list out of all the ideas that we had. But what I would do is I would then very quickly be like, is this a priority? Is this a back burner? Or is this a middle? And we'll just tier them. And a lot of people are using ChatGPT and Claude for brand voice. You can integrate Granola with its MCP connector. So it's a reference. And all these meetings that you do, if you have that and you're in a project for a particular client or your own, it will just pull in all those topics and ideas that you already have. It's completely integrated. You can learn more about Granola in the link in my description. They are the sponsor of this video and one of the recurring ones. I appreciate them for being an excellent piece of software. And as a meeting, you should absolutely be running inside strategy like this. Now I want to shift to distribution before we talk about tactics. So what do I mean by distribution? So brand creative directors have retail merchandising. What happens in shows up in the stores? They have the runway and the runway shows. They have the physical trade show booths. That still applies to this world too. What does the merchandise look like? The Marty Supreme campaign being an excellent example of that. Pharrell's, Schumann Race, and Adidas with a new smoothie store. Another kind of example, okay, you're building a collaborative world here. But now inside the personal brand era, that's every social network. That's part of your distribution. That can spill into the physical world. What are events, right? I had four tour dates earlier this month. What does the merchandise look like? The Marty Supreme campaign being an excellent example of that. Pharrell's, Schumann Race, and Adidas with a new smoothie store. Another example, okay, you're building a collaborative world here. But now inside the personal brand era, that's every social network. That's part of your distribution. That can spill into the physical world. What are events, right? I had four tour dates earlier this month. I just did a villa in Cannes. We had merchandise for all of those. You can get bags, dark room villa with orange on, the hats, matches, towels. You have a whole setup built around this murder mystery 70s, 60s brand world that we were building. All of these concepts you would understand from traditional creative direction just get ported over into what these new channels look like. Getting into the sauce, and the sauce is the good stuff, right? This is what the internet consultant types will never be able to get that if you're a real creative, you can dive into and hammer. Because what I see all the time is people that call themselves a creative director get hired for a personal brand or coming up with ideas and scripts so they don't have the ideas. They don't have this toolkit that I'm going to talk about right here that allows you to make hot stuff. So first is these ideas of sets, visuals, lighting, right? I'm filming this here, not in front of the white background wall. All of those things help tell a story. How do you set those up? How do you use them as recurring bits? How do you change that as part of the narrative? That is part of the creative direction of personal brand. Then same thing with your design. The colors, the fonts, the lockups, the titles for your series. What do those say? How do you have those repetitive? How do you build those out into a brand kit? If you even take those, if you take a personal brand that's making content right now or experts for a brand and everything's going mid and you go, hey, we're going to dial in the set to really tell a story and be visually eye-catching on feed. Then we're going to lock in our specific fonts and color patterns in a way that's good. We're going to have our repetitive series. We're going to make cool lockups for them with animations. That's the basics, tactical stuff of making higher end content, but it will immediately elevate the performance of what a lot of that looks like. Then styling, another huge one and radically underrated. What are people wearing and why? What does that say? How does that get put together? Applying those same principles to personal brands, to UGC, et cetera, is important. I don't know how many times I've told people in Cut30, there's two scenarios. One is the guys who've never had to care about their appearance before who are like, hey, just clean yourself up a little bit and put on a nice shirt and your content will go a lot better. Female creators can kind of make the choice and can go either way of like, hey, you can go all in and fully glam up and that will get you a particular audience or you can go the opposite of that and say, I'm going to take it completely natural or candid or casual which tells a very different story. You have to think about how those approaches go and they're very powerful. Then there's the world building, collabs, interviews. Personal brands engaging with other personal brands are signals to the algorithm and they're also signals to the consumer. You see, every month I try to collab with a different person, right? I collabed with someone when I'm out here in Europe who were doing luxury Italian villas for sales investment properties. Made a collab on something I knew nothing about with a creator from Cut30 who I enjoyed who we made a video together. But before that, I had a collab about collabs with Bima Williams. Did a buying guide with Hans Luray, right? You continue to interact with each other's worlds and build up the people that you know, even in the events, right? So in Cannes, I put together a house with a bunch of other creators. We had Sammy Cohen, Dara Denny, Ashwin, a bunch of small and up-and-coming creators. JT Barnett was in there too. And we're all together making content, hosting events together, living in a place for a few days You continue to interact with each other's worlds and build up the people that you know, even in the events, right? So in Cannes, I put together a house with a bunch of other creators. We had Sammy Cohen, Dara Denny, Ashwin, a bunch of small and up-and-coming creators. JT Barnett was in there too. And we're all together making content, hosting events together, living in a place for a few days and building that world that we all interact with each other and know with each other that is part of personal brand world building. And with brands, it's especially important because you have all these personalities and influencers and founders and you can use each other to lend each other credibility. And then treating actual launches like campaigns. It's the same thing with personal brand. You want to follow, if you've seen my Art of the Marketing campaign video where it's like, hey, how are we going to tease this? How are we going to unveil it? What's the actual launch and how do you sustain it? That's the same thing for a creator launching a podcast. That's the same exact thing for a personal brand just playing a part in a launch. All of this follows the same playbook focused on for a personality. And I just want to highlight that if you are thinking like this and you want to apply this to personal brands, you can be ahead of the wave. And what's also nice about that is there's so many and it's hard, right? I always recommend you need to have a core skill first. You need to be a designer, a video editor, a copywriter. Have some kind of core creative skill that you then layer that on top of. But really, you need to have that strategy component. You need to be able to brief, ideate, do those things I broke down in content strategy to content operations to creative direction. But doing that for a brand requires a lot of trust. For a personal brand, that's a much lower standard, right? Because if you do that for someone with 50,000 followers, you're still doing all those motions. You're still briefing, you're still ideating. Maybe you're getting paid significantly less, but you are getting the experience to move it up. That's why I like this era because it gives so many more people the ability to say, yeah, for $1,500 a month or five grand a month or whatever it is, I'm working on creative direction for these personalities or for UGC creators for a brand or for an influencer. And you're building that toolkit that you can then continue to use to level up and learn because there aren't a lot of opportunities to hop to those jobs otherwise. And we are ahead of the game here. And I had done a test, those of you, they were on my last community call. You've heard about this. I ran a content operations one week bootcamp in June that we sold out. We had 50 people in there. I was only doing 50 slots. We did basically a one week sprint where we're going to develop front to back end a plan whether it was your personal brand or a client's personal brand, working through all the content ideation and formats, working through a plan for how you were going to creative direct visually for the next 90 days, basically like a concrete mechanism for it, but I was surprised at the popularity, how fast we sold it out. And then how many people in there were beginning to apply it and asking for more, right? This is just an introduction of this because there's just not much information out there, but that's alpha for people that are selling freelance services, right? Or for creatives who want to make a step in their careers, seeing where that trend is going and getting ahead of it. I am going to be doing that evergreen now. So not in the one week format. I'm just going to have that all available with the Slack community that we have. You can learn more about that below as well. I just want to introduce the concept inside of this. If you liked this kind of one-on-one overview, I have a full advanced creative direction video prep for this. Let me know if that's interesting or if we're going too deep. And a shout out Granola. You can learn more about them in the description. And thank you all as always so much for watching. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Now if a brand is spending a ton of money on ads, potentially, also even then, they're using creators, UGC, and influencers for that. Last week, I hosted a panel inside the villa that we put together at Dara Denny, who you've seen me collaborate with. I had marketers from Whisperflow and ManyChat. We were doing it with the software company, Motion, all focused on ad strategy and every single one of those brands. That includes high growth tech, high growth software, tons of consumer goods. We're recommending 30 plus percent of someone's meta ad account should be whitelisted, meaning they are running ads from someone else's account. So for instance, you will see me doing whitelisted ads with my sponsors like Notion or ChatGPT who run ads from my account for their products. Shopify is doing that on TikTok right now. But 30% of those ads at least being run on that, being listed as a best practice by people that are on the edge, shows you the importance of the personalities that come up to a brand even when it is ad heavy. That world matters so much now that it needs creative direction. When before you could say, hey, I want to apply this to the campaign, the big shoe, the collab. Now it's like, man, we need to get great at how do we actually define this for these team members? And they all need enablement, right? What do I mean by enablement? So working as a creative director for that PE firm, one of the big initiatives that the core company in their portfolio was doing was sending out tons of mailers, mailers to creators who they want to make content around their new launches. And the design, look and feel of those mailers would raise their efficacy, the creative direction of them. The cooler and more unique the concept is and how it looked, the more likely it is to be made a video about. And that post rate, how many mailers we send out, do 20% of people post or 60% of people post when you're sending thousands a month, really adds up. Creative direction is in the enablement of content for the community. And this goes a step further too on another campaign recently with a company that has 100 creators that they work with relatively regularly. We were discussing how do we help them break out of the current flow of content they're in. And one of the things we were doing is giving everyone a budget to book a luxury hotel room so they could film a series of videos inside there to elevate the look and feel of what they're doing for a campaign that match that. So you're saying, okay, we have 100 creators, we have a $400 budget per additional one of those creators to then elevate and have all the campaign footage around this look a different way. Same thing with buying creators, Osmos, renting out studios where people actually film it. If you saw the production set that we had at Cannes, I'm creative directing my own channel, right? Saying, hey, it makes sense for me to be filming inside of a villa, bringing in guests, having them see it's high production, having it look and feel elevated to tell the stories I'm trying to tell. Same thing with brand trips or sending people on trips around this content. All of this adds up. These are all creative directed elements inside of personality strategy. And you will see it inside here. People represent these brands. Ducey was probably one of the best, most prolific examples of this I've used a lot where the people became the representation of the brand. That is happening all over now, whether it's just a face to a personality to someone who's making the content. And you'll see all the companies that are on the cutting edge, like Gentle Monster here, was ahead of those trends, ahead of the mailers, ahead of all the things we're talking about. Let's look at this concept of personal brand 2.0. So personal brand 1.0 was attention. It was influence. How can I just get people to watch my get ready with me, how cool I look, what my lifestyle is like? But now, and this is the repeated theme here, it can, it's about how do I make money, career growth, power, intellectual influence, how do I learn? All of a sudden, people that are making content in our lives are giving us significant advice about the things we work on and replacing mentors, teachers, and other things that have kind of gone by the wayside in our current world that anyone across the world can access online. Obviously, I serve as a teaching creator for a lot of people having learned about the concepts of marketing, creative direction, social media, that helps them in their brands and their careers. That is a very different personal brand era than beforehand if I was just sharing, if I'm walking around France showing my glamorous life. Not that glamorous. Meanwhile, I turned 40 this year and as serious below deck consumers, my family is celebrating by chartering a yacht around Greece for seven days. But now to do this, to do this well and to continue to elevate in this scenario, these people need creative direction, right? Everyone's videos look the same. Everyone's doing yaps. How do you determine a personality, right? Even the fact that you've seen me across these videos, now roughly 30% of my videos, I'm traveling inside of something. Hey, I was just talking in London. Hey, I'm here in Cannes. Hey, I'm on the boat in Greece. You're beginning to learn and tell more stories about me. But then how you're presenting that in the visual field. I had a creative director being like, hey, let's look at this in an incredible visual aspect. How do we turn those into campaigns? These are the things that all personal brands and any brand that has people representing them need to start thinking about. Applying this on a smaller tactical level. Let's actually get into some tactics here. I'm going to talk briefly about content. I have a million videos about content if you want to actually dive deep into that. So we're not going to get into tons on like hooks and stories and stuff like that. I will give you a format for actually working with a planning inside that niche. Then we're going to get into thinking through distribution strategy. And then we're going to get into the creative direction tactics portion. So first, when you're coming up with content for this, a big part of creative direction for personal brands isn't just like, what does the photo shoot look like? It's helping them make content, right? What is the YouTube video? What is the LinkedIn post? What is the Instagram video? How do you create ideation for that? And so this comes from having recurring topics that you talk about, from having recurring formats like types of yaps. I have a whole yapping video if you want to get into that. But hey, I make content in front of a whiteboard. I make vlogs where I go around. These are all formats and things that creative directors should understand and be able to give people access to. But most importantly, it's stories. What are the events, people, and products you can tell stories about? What happened in either my brand arc or my arc or something in history that's able to be talked about? What are people in history that inspired me or are worth talking about or that I'm collaborating with now that can tell stories at and around? And what are products? That's an unboxing video or something you were developing or something that got released or the five things you're going on a trip with or whatever it is. That becomes the framework that creative directors for personal brands need to be able to bring to any scenario. How can we actually use topics around those to engage and build content plans? Like I mentioned, I'm not going to cover scripting heavily in this because I want to focus on the creative direction portion at the end. But the best thing you can do if you are doing this strategy for yourself, if you have a personal brand or if you are a strategist or creative director you're working with a client is a twice monthly meeting every two weeks and do this exact flow. And if it's you, if you're the personal brand, hire a strategist or a writer. It's important this is conversational. You don't want to do this just by yourself. How we'll do it is I will make sure Granola is on as an AI notepad and have a conversation about news in the niche. How do you get news in your niche? So I have perplexity. Send me a report every week. You can follow aggregation accounts and make a list. There's tons of carousels and stuff like that. LinkedIn news if you're doing more generic business is excellent when you log in on desktop. They have a bunch there and that's also a bit of a cheat code because they weight the topics in those news higher in the algorithm. The editorial team curates additional posts to attach to the topic. I won't get too deep into that. But basically looking at all the news that's out there in the world and going, do we like this or do we dislike it? Can we share an opinion on that? Is there enough of an opinion to share or can we share a tactic on that? Easy way to go through interpretation of the news. Then look at personal history. What happened since our last meeting? What's in your camera roll? This is great if you're working with a client or if you're looking back at your history wondering what to write about. Look at this last week. Okay, what happened? Is there anything in my camera roll that inspires a story or an anecdote? Okay, now go back one year. Apple makes this really easy on the phone or any phone really. So you go back one year. What was happening one year ago? Is there any stories you can tell from the couple weeks around that time period? Same thing with three years, same thing with five years because you'll notice a lot of the stories of where you came from. Oh, I was developing this thing. Oh, I worked on X and Y. This is when I was living in this. So here's a lesson with a co-founder I broke up with. Whatever it looks like. Those become really compelling stories. And just having that process for every two weeks you're going back through that and looking into your history starts a lot of good conversations. Then pull from video database. You can go look at by topic winners. You can go real estate, marketing, whatever it is. You can look at videos that are outlier performers from the last period of time if that inspires topics. Then another one is ask Meta AI. Meta AI is super underrated. It's a free app. You can ask for viral formats that a handle should be considering. I can go in there and be like, hey, I'm Oramite's world. I'm traveling in Nice. What topics have I been hitting around here? What would you suggest for me based on my existing content? That's actually quite good. So the job is to discuss with people back and forth in person and debate around these. Would this make a good video? What could the hook be? What could the angle be? And that conversational back and forth sparks really good ideas. And then granola is mad useful for this because while you have this conversation, it's not a meeting bot. There's no bot in there. It transcribes audio directly whether you're in Zoom, you're in Google Meet, Slack huddle, or if you're in person sitting down and doing it. And it does AI enhanced notes. So it writes it like a notepad. So it's like a shorthand, clean, full summary of the conversation. And then there's recipes. This is why I use this. So it's pre-built prompts that can work before or after the meetings. And so I can say, hey, I want a full list of script and hook ideas. I can basically have that as a recipe. I run after every planning session. It's going to give me a list out of all the ideas that we had. But what I would do is I would then very quickly be like, is this a priority? Is this a back burner? Or is this a middle? And we'll just tier them. And a lot of people are using ChatGPT and Claude for like brand voice. You can integrate Granola with its MCP connector. So it's a reference. And all these meetings that you do, if you have that and you're in a project for a particular client or your own, it will just pull in all those topics and ideas that you already have. It's completely integrated. You can learn more about Granola in the link in my description. They are the sponsor of this video and one of the recurring ones. I appreciate them for being an excellent piece of software. And as a meeting, you should absolutely be running inside strategy like this. Now I want to shift to distribution before we talk about tactics. So what do I mean by distribution? So brand creative directors have retail merchandising. What happens in shows up in the stores? They have the runway and the runway shows. They have the physical trade show booths. That still applies to this world too. What does the merchandise look like? The Marty Supreme campaign being an excellent example of that. Pharrell's, Schumann Race, and Adidas with a new smoothie store. Another kind of example, okay, you're building a collaborative world here. But now inside the personal brand era, that's every social network. That's part of your distribution. That can spill into the physical world. What are events, right? I had four tour dates earlier this month. I just did a villa in Cannes. We had merchandise for all of those. You can get bags, dark room villa with orange on, the hats, matches, towels. You have a whole kind of setup built around this like murder mystery 70s, 60s brand world that we were building. All of these concepts you would understand from traditional creative direction just get ported over into what these new channels look like. Getting into the sauce, and the sauce is like the good shit, right? This is what like the internet bro consultant types will never be able to get that if you're a real creative, you can dive into and hammer. Because what I see all the time is people that call themselves a creative director get hired for a personal brand or coming up with ideas and scripts so they don't have the ideas. They don't have like this toolkit that I'm gonna talk about right here that allows you to make hot shit. So first is these ideas of like sets, visuals, lighting, right? I'm filming this here, not in front of the white background wall. All of those things help tell a story. How do you set those up? How do you use them as recurring bits? How do you change that as part of the narrative? That is part of the creative direction of personal brand. Then same thing with your design. The colors, the fonts, the lockups, the titles for your series. What do those say? How do you have those repetitive? How do you build those out into a brand kit? If you even take those, if you take a personal brand that's making content right now or experts for a brand and everything's going kind of mid and you go, hey, we're gonna dial in the set to really tell a story and be visually eye-catching on feed. Then we're gonna lock in our specific fonts and color patterns in a way that's sick. We're gonna have our repetitive series. We're gonna make cool lockups for them with animations. You know, that's the basics like tactical stuff of making higher end content, but it will immediately elevate the performance of what a lot of that looks like. Then styling, another huge one and radically underrated. What are people wearing and why? What does that say? How does that get put together? Applying those same principles to personal brands, to UGC, et cetera, is important. I don't know how many times I've told people in Cut30, there's two scenarios. One is the guys who've never had to care about their appearance before who are like, hey, just clean yourself up a little bit and like put on a nice shirt and your content will go a lot better. Female creators can kind of make the choice and can go either way of like, hey, you can go all in and like fully glam up and that will get you a particular audience or you can go the opposite of that and say, I'm going to take it completely natural or candid or casual which tells a very different story. You have to think about how those approaches go and they're very powerful. Then there's the world building, collabs, interviews. Personal brands engaging with other personal brands are signals to the algorithm and they're also signals to the consumer. You see, every month I try to collab with a different person, right? I collabed with someone when I'm out here in Europe who were doing luxury Italian villas for sales investment properties. Made a collab on something I knew nothing about with a creator from Cut30 who I enjoyed who we made a video together. But before that, I had a collab about collabs with Bima Williams. Did a buying guide with Hans Luray, right? You continue to interact with each other's worlds and build up the people that you know, even in the events, right? So in Cannes, I put together a house with a bunch of other creators. We had Sammy Cohen, Dara Denny, Ashwin, a bunch of small and up-and-coming creators. JT Barnett was in there too. And we're all together making content, hosting events together, living in a place for a few days and building that world that we all interact with each other and know with each other that is part of personal brand world building. And with brands, it's especially important because you have all these personalities and influencers and founders and you can use each other to lend each other credibility. And then treating actual launches like campaigns. It's the same thing with personal brand. You want to follow, if you've seen my Art of the Marketing campaign video where it's like, hey, how are we going to tease this? How are we going to unveil it? What's the actual launch and how do you sustain it? That's the same thing for a creator launching a podcast. That's the same exact thing for a personal brand just playing a part in a launch. All of this follows the same playbook focused on for a personality. And I just want to highlight that if you are thinking like this and you want to apply this to personal brands, you can be ahead of the wave. And what's also nice about that is there's so many and it's hard, right? I always recommend you need to have a core skill first. You need to be a designer, a video editor, a copywriter. Have some kind of core creative skill that you then layer that on top of. But really, you need to have that strategy component. You need to be able to brief, ideate, do those things I broke down in content strategy to content operations to creative direction. But doing that for a brand requires a lot of trust. For a personal brand, that's a much lower standard, right? Because if you do that for someone with 50,000 followers, you're still doing all those motions. You're still briefing, you're still ideating. Maybe you're getting paid significantly less, but you are getting the experience to move it up. That's why I like this era because it gives so many more people the ability to say, yeah, for $1,500 a month or five grand a month or whatever it is, I'm working on creative direction for these personalities or for UGC creators for a brand or for an influencer. And you're building that toolkit that you can then continue to use to level up and learn because there aren't a lot of opportunities to hop to those jobs otherwise. And we are ahead of the game here. And I had done a test, those of you, they were on my last community call. You've heard about this. I ran a content operations one week bootcamp in June that we sold out. We had 50 people in there. I was only doing 50 slots. We did basically a one week sprint where we're like, cool, we're going to develop front to back end a plan whether it was your personal brand or a client's personal brand, working through all the content ideation and formats, working through a plan for how you were going to creative direct visually for the next 90 days, basically like a concrete mechanism for it, but I was surprised at the popularity, how fast we sold it out. And then how many people in there were beginning to apply it and asking for more, right? This is just an introduction of this because there's just not much information out there, but that's alpha for people that are selling freelance services, right? Or for creatives who want to make a step in their careers, seeing where that trend is going and getting ahead of it. I am going to be doing that evergreen now. So like not in the one week format. I'm just going to have that all available with like the Slack community that we have. You can learn more about that below as well. I just want to introduce the concept inside of this. If you liked this kind of one-on-one overview, I have a full advanced creative direction video prep for this. Let me know if that's interesting or if we're going too deep. And a shout out Granola. You can learn more about them in the description. And thank you all as always so much for watching. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.