VaynerMedia’s Jason Beauregard: Helping Brands Build the Content Names of the Future
In our third edition of The Rough Cut, where we interview the biggest innovators in digital video, Co-Founder Alex Ragir stops by VaynerMedia’s studio in Long Island City, New York to speak with Jason Beauregard, Head of Studio for the agency owned by social media magnate Gary Vaynerchuk. They spoke live on Facebook and Youtube about a new model for brands to find their voice and create relevant content that may, in a few years, actually become a revenue stream itself.
Below are edited highlights from the conversation:
Platforms change, brands stay consistent
“As we transition into these models [with] more opportunities for distribution, you have to not be so concerned about the platform and where your content is living, but you have to be concerned with your content, about the brand, making sure that everything points back to you — and it can live anywhere.”
Picking influencers is a long-term bet
“Brands who go out and find those people who have the voice of their brand down, or the voice of what they want their brand to adopt [through the influencer] are also taking a bet that the influencer is going to maintain their reputation, and who they are — long-term. We’ve seen it time and again, where a brand gets involved with an influencer, the short term relationship is great, they’re saying everything right — and then all of a sudden something happens, even if the person is no longer associated with the brand.
The challenge will always be access to the brand itself. How do you get there? Gary [Vaynerchuk] has built it in a way, where he has put himself out there so many times that you can’t not approach him and find out, ‘what is this guy all about?’.”
Building a brand voice from the bottom-up
“We try to help brands really identify their voice. A lot of times, brands think they understand their voice, because they’re so focused on their own voice being part of the brand. As opposed to really taking a step back and saying, ‘the voice of my brand shouldn’t be coming from me, it should be coming from this person or that person’.”
The people who use your product are your voice.
To find your voice you need to, “Go back to where the people are engaging with your product every single day, you need to embrace those people. When you think about how we work best with and educate brands, it’s about finding the authenticity in the voice. It’s something that very few brands are really attune to, because they don’t understand who the consumer really is and where the voice is supposed to come from.”
Invest in yourself
“You need to invest in yourself and who you are as a brand, and not really care about the distribution…. If you do it right — in five years, you might actually be selling media, rather than finding places to put it.”
Don’t believe everything the platforms tell you
“I understand why platforms have best practices and why they feel they have to sell a model of how to produce content for their platforms. They know their platforms better than we do, and understand what’s going to get people to watch content. If you have incredible content, and you have some stuff that looks beautiful and anamorphic, just stay with that. These best practices have been established to really help the marketing teams at these platforms sell what they’re offering to brands that have been advertising on them. They want to have a way that convinces everybody that this is the right thing to do, but it’s only the right thing to do because it’s what brands need to hear.”
Previous episodes of The Rough Cut:
Courtney Coupe, VP of Content, Great Big Story
Stone Roberts, VP of Global Video Strategy, Refinery29
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By Jordan M. Rapaport, Storyhunter Writer
