It’s hard out there for a content producer these days.
Content should be professional, but not too polished. It should be on-brand but also go viral. Content needs to reach the right audience, but also have broad enough appeal to accrue big numbers. Oh, and ideally the content should be conducive to cross-platform distribution and packaging, from giant billboards to tiny screens. And sometimes the best content is the B-side or behind-the-scenes, not the main hero piece. Or other times, content production is best left to creators with built-in audiences on their channels.
Did you keep up with all that? Me neither.
But such multi-faceted demands of content and campaigns are the new normal. Justin Whiting has been in the trenches for years, adapting as the aperture for content production has expanded and the definition of ‘good’ content has evolved. From early days at GoPro, when POV video was a revelation, to the onslaught of raw-feeling UGC (which also came during his GoPro tenure), to years producing content for brands like Red Bull, he has a unique perspective on what content strategy looks like for brands today. Now, from his perch as co-founder of sports creative studio north of normal, Whiting is right in the middle of this new era for content, where the answer to polished vs. raw is a singular ‘Yes.’
“I see that now very much the split between authenticity and premiumness,” said Whiting, who, after leaving GoPro, spent time as a content leader at adidas. “I see a lot, especially with a brand. You look at something like Adidas. Adidas wants to be high-end. They want their content to look amazing. You don’t want something to look like it’s made by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. They don’t like that style. But the authenticity, especially around an athlete or a personality, gets the views and gets people watching it and gets way more of that interaction…”
Whiting continued, describing how the need for more diverse content types and formats affects production shoots.
“Sometimes we would shoot a campaign with an athlete and say, okay, we’re going to shoot the TV spot or the global campaign, but we’re going to have someone walk around with the phone and capture some real moments with you in between.”
There’s an economic reason for such an all-angles-and-aspects production, too. The proliferation of short-form feeds, and the ability to rack up views in these environments, means there’s insatiable demand for content, where one more captured video could translate to millions more impressions. It’s an all-hands-on-deck operation now, with some shooters sporting the fancy, expensive cameras, while others, by design, record on iPhones. No shot is missed, and the hero shoot is just one aspect of the overall output.
“I remember there was one drifting video we did at one point,” said Whiting, “and we were shooting the main video, and then when we were shooting the story bits, we had a social media filmer and a drone pilot just with the driver, getting pickups and getting other social media content, getting funny little one-off videos, because we knew we put a lot into that campaign, so we wanted to get the most out of it. And we wanted to make sure we had 10 or 15 different assets that could live at different times on different platforms, but still in the same world.”
Pay close attention to the last part of what Whiting said there. Even if the packaging and platforms differ, the content should still feel cohesive. This is easier said than done, whether it’s different teams doing the editing and execution, with their own ideas, or just trying to balance adherence to ‘best practices’ and anticipating what will ‘work’ on a given platform. And some variance is expected; that’s by design. But, said Whiting, “The most important thing, I think, for a great campaign is having that through story, where a piece of content that is shot on a phone that lives on TikTok for an athlete, all the way through a TV spot, can live in the same story and feel like it’s coming from the same thread.”
A great campaign has a purpose. It carries a message, activates a brand, and is designed to reach and resonate with a specific audience. The answer to the question of ‘What’s the purpose of this content?’ is decisively NOT ‘to go viral.’ Virality, Whiting explained, is too random to chase, and having virality as a goal can often divorce a creative team’s strategy from the actual objective of a campaign.
The key is to ask the ‘why’ questions. Because there are a lot of pathways to reach certain metrics, but it’s all for naught if there’s no alignment with business and brand objectives.
“A lot of times what goes viral and what blows up with 100 million views is not what you would expect…,” said Whiting. “So what I think of when I approach these projects is really coming up with the best story for the brand that’s going to resonate with their target audience. And it’s a lot of strategy discussions in the beginning and really understanding what they’re looking for, what they need, what’s the point of making the content.”
That’s not to say the metrics don’t matter. Part of the calculus in devising brand content IS to maximize its impact, of course. Data-driven analysis in content production is as dynamic as ever — because content production nowadays is both art and science. Every element and creative decision is made with consideration and purpose, combining the creative instincts of a seasoned veteran like Whiting with what the data says about those instincts.
“It’s a bit of a give and take, and toeing the line, because you don’t want to be sitting there spending 100 hours looking at, okay, how can I get 10,000 more views?” said Whiting, whose biggest GoPro hit racked up something like 150 million views. “But also, especially on something like TikTok, you can take a very analytical approach to TikTok and look at, okay, here’s my last 25 videos. These ones performed; these ones didn’t. Why? What happened at this point? What happened at this point?”
There exists the potential for a Ship of Theseus conundrum to play out if you start manipulating content too much, however (swap out enough planks to please the algorithm, and is it still your brand?). Yes, brands want to attract awareness and attention, but it should be in a manner that enhances brand equity, not one that dilutes it. Trends and best practices aren’t mandates; they’re guiding principles that can inform brand campaigns and strategies, but the best brands aren’t subject to the whims of a capricious culture, algorithm, or edit.
Whiting invoked the thumb test as a gauge for brand fidelity. If you cover the handle or logo for a given piece of content, would the brand behind it still be identifiable? He went on to explain in more detail what he means by that, using Nike and adidas as examples, and why defining what a brand is all about is paramount.
“You can tell by the tone, you can tell by the look and the feel, the color correction, the videography,” said Whiting, who worked for big brands GoPro, adidas, and Sixt before co-founding north of normal. “Everything screams that brand, from the way it’s lit. And those are huge, well-established brands, so they’ve had years and years of amazing agencies and creatives and internal teams building that…”
“And a lot of that is just building the brand in the beginning, experimenting a bit,” he said. “Sometimes you try different things, or sometimes you come out of the door shooting and you say, okay, we’re going to be the challenger brand. We’re going to be the funny brand. We’re going to be the serious, intense brand. We’re going to be the urban brand, etc. And know that, and then build the voice around it. And when you do that authentically, and you lean into it, it performs really well.”
Whiting cited Red Bull as a shining example of a brand that’s unmistakable through its content strategy. (Whiting has worked with Red Bull in the past.) The best brands build a culture around themselves, he said, and the content they produce exists to thrive in a world where the most entertaining and engaging content wins every time. But the brand behind the content is clear. Look at a piece of Red Bull content, cover the cans and the helmets, and apply the thumb test. I have a feeling it’ll easily pass.
The path to effective brand content is coming more into focus. A method to the madness that isn’t merely beholden to metrics, but backed by actual strategy. Whiting got into the nitty-gritty, and for him, it starts with two questions.
“When we’re building that strategy out, we want to know, for each campaign, what’s the goal of this and what’s the target audience?” he explained. “And then you have to build the campaign around that. That’s partly on platform, partly on the style of content, partly on who you put in front of the camera, how you shoot it. But there’s very little content that’s going to be universal…”
“In brand content, you’re not going to hit everybody with something,” he continued. “So you really have to say, okay, what is needed in this? Who’s the one buying the product? Who are we really selling this to? Who do we need to do this? Because you could make a piece of content on TikTok that gets millions of views but doesn’t turn into a single sale if your target consumer is a 50-year-old guy and you’re targeting 12-year-olds because you know you’re going to get the numbers. So you really have to think about that.”
The content production field — heck, all business sectors — has been obsessed with best practices for years. But best practices have always been a slippery slope to sameness. And AI is the looming specter amid all of this. When AI and large language models declare what’s ‘best’ and what science (big data) says is correct, originality and creativity diminish. It wouldn’t have been best practice to create campaigns around amateurish UGC when GoPro was coming up. An AI trained on all the brand advertisements of all time likely wouldn’t realize a 30-second vignette shot between scenes of a six-figure commercial shoot could end up the real winner.
But this isn’t a rejection of AI. Whiting himself leans on it for the admin side of running a company, but made a conscious decision to keep writing his own emails rather than lose his voice. Think back on everything this piece presented. When brand creative strategy is informed by campaign goals, by asking and answering the right questions — it’s no longer a battle between chasing virality and creating value. It’s not a dichotomy of polished or raw, of this platform or that one. The answers are readily evident because the foundation is defined and everything feels connected. That’s where creativity can shine.
So, yes, it is a challenging time for content producers. But it’s an era of endless possibilities, when the permutations of packaging and platforms present an unparalleled canvas for content. It’s not easy, and it’s not supposed to be. Embrace it.
