Mastering Video Content and Personal Branding in Thailand w/ Jake Mooney

[00:00:00] Jake Mooney: I do a workshop or a talk, where I’ll have different speakers come in and people are like, oh, how much business did you get from the event? I said, absolutely none. And they’re like, oh, that’s too bad. I was like, nope, that was the plan.

[00:00:13] Jake Mooney: And that comes down to like calm marketing, right? We’ve already figured out why we do events, the cadence in which we do those events. And so it allows me to relax if I don’t get any clients.

[00:00:25] Jake Mooney: It’s a part of our overall marketing strategy because of everything else it brings.

[00:00:31] Jake Mooney: It creates this opportunity to network with people that maybe you would not have networked before.

[00:00:38] Jake Mooney: Alright. So, I’m here today with Jake Mooney. I’d love if you could just start off by telling us who you are and what you’re doing here in Thailand.

[00:00:47] Jake Mooney: Sure. Thanks for having me on, Scott. I’ve been in Thailand six years,

[00:00:51] Jake Mooney: I run a marketing agency here, a small marketing agency based in Chiang Mai, but we also have remote team members kind of all over the world. We’ve been around a few years. We kind of grew during the pandemic and so we mostly help small to medium sized multinational businesses extend their marketing teams, help them with their marketing strategy, and we also do a lot of remote video editing, quite bespoke video editing.

[00:01:20] Scott: Very cool. And again, video, we’ll definitely be touching on that a lot in the discussion today because I’ve seen you everywhere. And that’s the reason that we got connected was because you’re so active on LinkedIn with video,

[00:01:32] Scott: and I think at one point I said, oh yeah, Jake, I really agree with this point on LinkedIn. And I think then you said, oh, hey, let’s, uh.

[00:01:38] Scott: Let’s meet up, and I think that’s just so cool how much video and social when done right, really does inspire these kind of connections.

[00:01:47] Jake Mooney: it does. And that’s the marketing strategy at work because for a few years we, we were doing this kind of stuff for our clients. And doing it well. Right? But you can’t grow if other people don’t know you exist. And so eventually me and the team sat down, we’re like, okay, the marketing agency needs to get a marketing strategy.

[00:02:08] Jake Mooney: So this connection and, you know, us chatting now. Basically comes from us enacting our own advice we give to our clients of kind of calm, sustainable, reasonable marketing activities that just kind of build up over time and are things that you can keep doing without, you know, losing your head.

[00:02:28] Jake Mooney: Losing your mind is the intention.

[00:02:31] Scott: Absolutely. The reason I reached out and connected with you originally, Jake, is because I trusted you,

[00:02:36] Scott: And I think it’s really important that the people that you work with or just that you meet, it’s like people that have similar values and people that you can trust And so I wanna get to know you a little bit better. I want the audience to get to know you a little bit better.

[00:02:47] Scott: Um, so you had mentioned that you’re based in Chiang Mai.

[00:02:49] Scott: So what made you decide on Chiang Mai?

[00:02:53] Jake Mooney: Long story short, my, my wife is an American citizen, born and raised in Chiang Mai. So we got married. I took a job in Poland for several years, running a marketing team there for a manufacturing company.

[00:03:09] Jake Mooney: And our kids were going to school there. And yeah, I mean, we always loved Chiang Mai. We’re always like, oh, that’d be cool if we could, you know, move there, live there. But, you know, it wasn’t practical. Bit by bit. Um, I kept pushing the company that I was working for. Hey, I mean, I’m already part-time running the Asia marketing where, and there’s no one out there.

[00:03:30] Jake Mooney: And I’m traveling to Asia and supporting our dealers there. Eventually you should just move me there. ’cause you know, we have family who’s still here in the region. And I like it. And eventually they said, okay let’s do it.

[00:03:45] Jake Mooney: So we were about to move here, had three kids. This is 2019, so right before the pandemic started, and, they asked me to resign a few weeks before we moved.

[00:03:54] Jake Mooney: So I came to Chiang Mai because we were like, okay, well this is where we’ve been heading for a long time. We’ve been planning on coming here for a long time, so we’ll come to Chiang Mai. W and and I had no backup plan. There was no plan, no network. My LinkedIn hadn’t been updated.

[00:04:11] Jake Mooney: I took a job with a local nonprofit at Dutch, Thai NGO Philanthropy connections, uh, which is a great local NGO. And I worked for them for close to three years. And during the pandemic my wife got her Thai citizenship. And at that point we had enough remote work.

[00:04:29] Jake Mooney: Uh, that I had collected to start our own business here in Thailand.

[00:04:33] Scott: Wow. That’s incredible.

[00:04:35] Scott: and you’ve made it, and despite a very hard start. ’cause to your point, I can only imagine with the plans of coming to Thailand, You got that rug yanked out from under you and you still made it work. You didn’t give up at that stage.

[00:04:47] Jake Mooney: Well, I would say to people who are interested coming and setting up a business or exploring a life in Thailand if you want to come and work or even build an online business or something like that, try to actually have that online business working before you come. Right. Have some remote work and come on the DTV visa or something like that.

[00:05:07] Jake Mooney: I don’t recommend doing what I did, which was come and nothing, you know, like you just have to build it from scratch.

[00:05:13] Jake Mooney: We were able to be very, very frugal, uh, rent very cheaply. Um, and, um, it gave us a longer runway to try to build that business. But I mean, three years in, at the three year mark, I, that’s when things started to kind of, get some momentum.

[00:05:29] Jake Mooney: It was only in year, let’s say the last year and a half or so that me and the team have made a concentrated effort to then market ourselves more aggressively. But even that hasn’t been that aggressive. It’s just more of like creating a brand, being there, showing up.

[00:05:46] Jake Mooney: We’re hoping to actually get more proactive going after the kinds of companies and clients that we’d like in 2026, fingers crossed.

[00:05:56] Scott: Well, I still, I love that advice. I just had a call and sometimes I do take calls with individuals that are looking to come into Thailand. And someone had brought up that idea of this business they were gonna start when they’re here. And it was unfortunately that kind of cliche of, I think I’m gonna start a restaurant or a massage parlor or something like that.

[00:06:13] Scott: And I was like, whoa.

[00:06:14] Jake Mooney: You’re the first man or a bar, right?

[00:06:17] Scott: Yeah.

[00:06:17] Jake Mooney: Or a cannabis shop at the moment. Yeah.

[00:06:19] Scott: Exactly. So there’s always, they there’s always that. Thought that if you could just bring your Western mentality into Thailand, you can make something work. But I think there’s a lot of things you don’t know about what happens on the ground, how it works, how you hire people here.

[00:06:32] Scott: There’s all these challenges, but I loved your advice because to your point, the way that it can work is if you build more of an online business abroad and you make it work abroad because then you’re the location is less central to your business itself. If you’re running a marketing agency and it works in the US or it works in the uk, then it’s very possible that you can transition it to operate it in Thailand, and then you can figure out how you’re actually gonna set the business up, whether or not it’s a remote office in Thailand or whatever.

[00:06:59] Scott: But if you’re expecting to start a business on the ground in Thailand and plan that all while you’re abroad, that’s gonna be a tough one.

[00:07:06] Jake Mooney: it can work for sure. I mean, people have come and set up businesses here or restaurants or whatever and made it work, but. I, we’ve been around long enough to also know that most are quite, find it quite challenging, right?

[00:07:20] Scott: Whoa there. Hold up for just one second. I’m sorry to interrupt, but if you are struggling with business operations, cultural challenges, or growing your business in Thailand, you are not alone. This market is really tough to navigate. I know because I’ve been here since 2012 and I’ve experienced a lot of these challenges myself.

[00:07:39] Scott: That’s why I founded Fractiond, a Thailand-based consulting firm aimed at helping businesses succeed in Thailand. My Accenture experience from the US, and our community of top consultants from around the world, allow us to deliver top tier strategy and execution to businesses in Thailand. If you wanna learn more, you can book a free 15 minute discovery call to see how we can help your business.

[00:08:02] Scott: You can email us at [email protected]. Alright, back to the show.

[00:08:08] Scott: there’s a term that you used on your website that really seemed interesting to me and it was that term, calm marketing.

[00:08:16] Scott: And this reminded me of just, I’ve seen the opposite of this sometimes with companies that I work with. So how would you define calm marketing and how do companies leverage this?

[00:08:28] Jake Mooney: So I think how to define calm marketing first is to define why marketing normally isn’t calm. Marketing typically doesn’t feel calm to most business owners and even most marketing teams. Generally because we’re off the strategy or there’s no strategy. We’re doing a lot of things that keep us busy.

[00:08:50] Jake Mooney: But in reality, you know, like the business manager or the owner, they forget what the strategy is. and then we can typically get further and further away from that nice plan that we had started out for good reasons and bad reasons. And then eventually it doesn’t feel like that there is a cohesive direction to what we’re doing.

[00:09:12] Jake Mooney: and so we’re just kind of like spinning our wheels. And again, it doesn’t feel calm. It doesn’t have to necessarily always feel calm and relaxed. When you’re at a trade show trying to get a, you know, a booth set up, not calm and relaxed, you know, but you can always, you know, as you’re sweating there, here in Thailand trying to get a trade show booth set up in Bangkok, right?

[00:09:37] Jake Mooney: You can always go, okay, this actually doing this trade show fits into our larger holistic marketing strategy that we have implemented step by step bit by bit over this entire year. So even if the actual instance isn’t feeling calm, it gives you that foundation that what we’re doing is the right thing.

[00:09:58] Jake Mooney: And we don’t need, necessarily need to be doing something else. We don’t need to be looking at someone else and going oh, why aren’t we doing a bunch of tiktoks at our booth? Well, we have determined that we didn’t, you know, TikTok is either something outside of the constraints or the our capabilities this year.

[00:10:15] Jake Mooney: So we’re not worrying about that. We’re worrying about this booth. So that’s kind of how I define call marketing is helping make sure that we kind of build a strategy that is very much based in constraints.

[00:10:27] Jake Mooney: And then, alright, based on those constraints, what can we do to get in front of them, right? To promote our products and services to them in a way that they’ll go, oh, I need that. Maybe not today, but eventually. When you’re honest with all that, then you can actually build a sustainable plan.

[00:10:44] Jake Mooney: And we do that for then 15 months typically. I don’t like 12 months because around nine months everybody’s like thinking about what’s the next plan?

[00:10:53] Jake Mooney: And three months is too short. Like we do phase things, you know, but I always like putting it in a 15 month you know, framework because then it also forces leadership in the company to think more long term.

[00:11:05] Jake Mooney: So I say, can you afford to keep doing this for 15 month? It. And when we think about it in that way, a lot of times we start scaling things down. We start, you know, pushing aside the things that, you know, shiny object syndrome, and we go, you know what? This is working or these networking events is where I get the best leads,

[00:11:25] Jake Mooney: because most marketing for most businesses, especially the businesses that we work with, which are kind of more B2B or in commercial or industrial industries, they’re very long sales cycles. High trust. A lot of the typical marketing tactics don’t work. You know, like for, uh, they can’t just like do an ebook and have a newsletter download or it’s just different, right?

[00:11:50] Jake Mooney: So I want them to be able to think very long term because that’s generally how their clients buy.

[00:11:58] Scott: So this really seems calm marketing is the opposite of this reactive marketing or shiny object syndrome.

[00:12:04] Scott: I often see the biggest mistake that companies make is they don’t think long term.

[00:12:08] Scott: You have a budget, you have a limitation. So you only have so many hours and time and effort you can put. If you have a very small team, the idea of trying to do 16 things means that they’re gonna all be done badly.

[00:12:19] Scott: Whereas if you say, you know what, we’re gonna focus on A, B, and C. A is our primary, we’re gonna do a little bit of B and a teeny bit of C. Now we’re dealing with some constraints and we have a clear strategy. The last thing I’ll say on this, Jake, and I’ll see if this resonates with you or you agree with it or not, but the term strategy is just so often thrown out, oh, what’s our strategy?

[00:12:38] Scott: And I think oftentimes. A lot of times owners, they think strategy is tactics. And so when they’re saying, what’s our strategy? It’s our strategy is we’re gonna be on TikTok and we’re gonna be on Facebook and we’re gonna be on this, and we’re gonna be on that. It’s like, that’s not strategy. In my opinion, my definition of strategy is focus. Because it’s to say what are we trying to achieve and what are we gonna be focusing on?

[00:12:58] Scott: And you can’t have strategy if you don’t have focus. I don’t know if you agree with that or not.

[00:13:02] Jake Mooney: No, a hundred percent. I try to a lot of times clients come to us with a particular pain point, right? The website’s broken or you know, whatever it might be. We need a video or how much is it to make a video, right? So what I try to then ask is what is your strategy? Like, where does this fit into the marketing strategy or is this a one-off to-do list item?

[00:13:29] Jake Mooney: if this is a to-do list item that you want me to do, great. But the deliverable, like the proof of success is that I fixed your website. Not that the website’s doing you any good.

[00:13:39] Jake Mooney: A more strategic approach is the website should then, you know, convert, you know, prospects into leads and into sales or whatever it might be. So we have that conversation. And this really came from me. I’m not university educated. I am homeschooled. I did six months of university. I dropped out because I was like, I can learn all this media and marketing stuff on the job.

[00:14:05] Jake Mooney: I was working in marketing and you know, on YouTube and things. Things. But one of the things that I came from is I was very task less oriented. Hey boss, what do you want me to do? You know, a marketing manager comes to me and says, Hey, we need to do this, and this. I’m like, sweet, I got it. You know, I’ll get all those videos shot and locations scouted.

[00:14:25] Jake Mooney: And then I worked for eight years in a manufacturing company that their marketing was, they were the world leader already. I was just improving and maintaining. I think I did a good job of that. But I never had to start from scratch of questioning our approach or a target market. I was all laid out for me.

[00:14:46] Jake Mooney: So when I was suddenly let go and then started working with clients, I started out kind of all action year to-do lists. But then I started realizing I need to really learn how to actually build a marketing strategy. I’m learning, reading this book right now, slow Productivity, and it’s a great book. It basically just says, do fewer things.

[00:15:08] Jake Mooney: Work at a natural pace and then obsess over quality. And so it’s just been a really inspiring read of making sure do less better instead of more worse, like you were saying.

[00:15:22] Scott: I couldn’t agree more.

[00:15:23] Scott: you have to work backwards from what’s working and what’s getting the most results.

[00:15:27] Scott: And sometimes that’s not the thing that’s the easiest.

[00:15:30] Scott: You mentioned marketing for your own business, and I saw that you’re hosting these workshops in Chiang Mai, and I think events, in-person workshops online workshops, you know, things like this are very interesting. So I’d love if you could share a little bit more about the types of workshops that you lead, why you do them, and whether or not you think some businesses could also leverage workshops as a way to do some level of marketing for their own businesses.

[00:15:55] Jake Mooney: Well, this is interesting because I do a workshop or a talk, a marketing talk, or I’ll do a group talk where I’ll have different speakers come in and people are like, oh, how much business did you get from the event? I said, absolutely none. And they’re like, oh, that’s too bad. I was like, Nope, that was the plan.

[00:16:13] Jake Mooney: And that comes down to like calm marketing, right? We’ve already figured out why we do events the cadence in which we do those events. And so it allows me to relax if I don’t get any clients.

[00:16:25] Jake Mooney: It’s a part of our overall marketing strategy because of everything else it brings.

[00:16:31] Jake Mooney: So when we do an event for one, it’s great practice for me and my team. So when we started these just over a year ago it was like, we need the practice, you know, sharing our knowledge, presenting, put on events, showing that we could actually get people to show up and we know, well, you know, how to attract people to an event.

[00:16:51] Jake Mooney: That’s great practice for our team. It puts me on the line. I tell my clients to do events and then, you know, don’t practice what I. But the other thing is local networking and it’s just, it’s interesting, you know, the connections I’ve made just from hosting these local events. Some of my best friends now are in auxiliary like, you know, related businesses, which saw I was having event and popped in.

[00:17:17] Jake Mooney: You know, I may have met them another way. And business friends as well. The other thing is I recently hosted an event because everyone kept asking how do we get more Thai clients for our business? I did a generic marketing business strategy event like six months ago, and everybody out of that was like, this was great, but how do we get more Thai clients?

[00:17:35] Jake Mooney: ’cause we are here in Thailand. Some of us have restaurants, some of us. So I was like, I don’t know, I’m not, I don’t, that’s not what I do. So I decided, who cares? I’m gonna host the event But we are going to invite, we already had one speaker and then we found two others.

[00:17:52] Jake Mooney: But a young lady who runs a very large business empire, you could say with hospitality and restaurants and entertainment venues throughout Thailand, saw my ad basically in my post saying, Hey, I’m looking for people to talk at this event about how to, you know, build your Thai client base. And here I am socially in Thailand, here she is socially in Thailand.

[00:18:17] Jake Mooney: And she messages me and says, can I be a speaker at your event? And now we’re friends, right? Lovely person, but still it, it creates this opportunity to network with people that maybe you would not have networked before. With a lot of clients complained to me that, oh, there, there isn’t a good trade show for our particular niche.

[00:18:37] Jake Mooney: I was like, do your own then.

[00:18:39] Scott: Yep.

[00:18:40] Jake Mooney: And most of them won’t because it’s just. It’s outside of the norm. The last thing on that is the marketing collateral. So when I do an event, I try to make sure that the event is at a really beautiful venue, you know, just looks nice so that all my speakers, including myself, always get amazing photos, amazing video clips, et cetera.

[00:19:02] Jake Mooney: So that when you then Scott see the results of some event, I hold it. It’s always like, oh it says something about Jake as opposed to just white wall. You know, you see me in talking in front of a crowd of 50 people. It says something to you. It starts to click over, not only with potential clients, but potential partners, potential employees, recruitment.

[00:19:27] Jake Mooney: This is a great way for recruitment. UI ux designer in Bangkok messaged me on LinkedIn a few weeks ago and just says, Hey, look, I want to work with you guys. I love what you’re doing. I just want to work with you guys a really good one too. Just from what she saw on LinkedIn. So that’s kind of our event strategy.

[00:19:46] Jake Mooney: It’s great practice, it’s great for networking, and it’s great for basically your branding and your marketing. Do events, like my advice to any business is to do events, invite other complimentary event businesses. Always make sure that your event solves a need. Don’t just say, Hey, we’re gonna be talking about marketing.

[00:20:08] Jake Mooney: No. How not to lose your mind marketing in 2026. Right? Or always solve a problem with your event theme. And yeah, just start hosting them. The first one might suck the first one for us. I’ve run events for big companies before and I have so much work. But now my team is like, oh yeah, cool. Another event suite.

[00:20:30] Jake Mooney: We, we know what to do. We know how to attract people. We know what we’re gonna. Do.

[00:20:35] Scott: I think there are so many nuggets of wisdom in that, and I think one of the biggest takeaways that I have is that you aren’t, when someone asked you how many leads did you get from a workshop or from an event, and you said none, and you said that was, you know, that was what we had planned on.

[00:20:51] Scott: And I think that’s really key because too often businesses are looking for that direct ROI and they’re looking, yeah, they’re looking like how many leads, how many people signed up after the event. And sometimes the reason that’s really bad, in my opinion, is to, because then they see it as failure and then they don’t do it again.

[00:21:07] Scott: And to me, you get that momentum by, you’re obviously hosting a lot of workshops and you’re doing a lot of events. And if it’s once a year or if it’s once every blue moon, whenever you say, oh, we have tried other things, I guess we’ll try events again, then you’re not gonna get that momentum.

[00:21:22] Jake Mooney: And we charge for our events too. So we did free ones last year, and then this year we’ve charged over a thousand baht. For each event and for a serious person, if you’re providing good value and a good networking opportunities at your event, what’s a thousand baht? The next one that we’re gonna do, I think we’re gonna do for 2000 baht, because I have a big influencer in Thailand who wants to do an event with me here in Chiang Mai.

[00:21:49] Jake Mooney: And to be able to sit with an influencer who’s built up a huge following in a very short amount of time and learn how they did it and get their, you know, ask them questions and get that directly applied to your business, 2000 baht is like nothing. And it also then helps to maybe weed out some of the people you don’t want there.

[00:22:13] Jake Mooney: You know, you want the more serious people who understand the value of what you’ve put on. I don’t make any of money at those because all you know, we we do catering. The venue always has a charge of some sort, so we basically never make any money from them, but I’ve very much appreciated all the events we’ve done.

[00:22:35] Scott: Yeah. Yeah. And you brought up too that a reason that you have to charge for those events too is to pay for a nice venue, as you mentioned. I love the idea of getting good photography and things like that when you’re there. But again, the, my biggest takeaway was just the fact that it’s not directly clients.

[00:22:49] Scott: And I’ll reinforce that. The events that I’ve spoken at, the the groups that I’m part of, the subcommittees I’m part of and whatnot it’s always a couple steps removed where it’s not that I get the direct client, but it’s more of that I’m speaking with the right people in the room, or I’m having conversation with people where I’m able to learn from them, or they eventually have a client.

[00:23:06] Scott: One of the best things that I can find that has happened to me is whether it be through the podcast or for a speaking engagement that I do, it’s when someone says, oh, you’re everywhere. I saw you there. Oh, I want you to talk to this person. And I do the same thing for other people, right? I wanna connect to other people.

[00:23:18] Scott: That is what networking is. I think networking has this, oh, well, some people think of it as a dirty word or as like, oh, networking. And that’s the thing where you have to talk about small talk. It’s like, no, I hate small talk. Right? I mean, I’m basically day one, I’m talking about politics and religion now just joking, sort of.

[00:23:31] Scott: But I talk about deep subjects.

[00:23:33] Jake Mooney: go there too. Yeah. I have fun with those in a non-confrontational way where it’s like, Hey, yeah, we can chat.

[00:23:39] Scott: exactly. Have a real conversation. And sometimes that’s what you do when you are at an event, is that you meet the people that are not necessarily even like-minded, but people that are different than you and you can learn from, and you’re just getting to know people.

[00:23:51] Scott: But if you’re thinking of it as an ROI thing, you’re gonna be sorely disappointed, aren’t you? So,

[00:23:56] Jake Mooney: how I treat LinkedIn as well. II’m not here for the hard quick sell. I’m here to connect with people who would want to connect with me, and then over time they’ll learn who I am and what I do.

[00:24:05] Jake Mooney: And

[00:24:07] Scott: exactly.

[00:24:07] Jake Mooney: that’s it.

[00:24:09] Scott: Yeah. I guess you could say if you think of LinkedIn as, this is my prospect database, I’m only gonna connect with people that I’m gonna sell to, right? And essentially say, here are my services. That’s, it’s not it. I mean, to me, everyone that I see on LinkedIn is just, like you said, it’s your thing of connect with people, follow people, understand people.

[00:24:24] Scott: It’s not necessarily following that checklist. You talked about checklist before. It’s not how many comments, generic comments, did I leave on a whole bunch of, you know, people’s feeds? It’s like, no, it’s actually wanting to engage with people. Right. And actually wanting to leave a comment because what they posted is interesting to you.

[00:24:39] Jake Mooney: Do you want to hear my quick LinkedIn strategy right

[00:24:41] Scott: Please do.

[00:24:42] Jake Mooney: 30 seconds? So basically me and my assistant send out connection requests to marketers. Business owners, you know, managers, and then people I think who might eventually, might be good for my team. So we think of it from a recruitment tool as well.

[00:24:59] Jake Mooney: So those are kind of like the criteria. I don’t give my assistant crazy restrictions. It’s just like anything that applies to that go nuts and don’t worry about it too much. Then the other thing that he does on a daily basis, he sends me five posts from my network of where I can actually, where he knows I can actually have some thoughtful things to say.

[00:25:20] Jake Mooney: So I’m running a business, so, sorry. No I’m not gonna sit there for 30, 40 minutes a day and connect with people on LinkedIn and then find interesting conversations. My assistant, no ai, my assistant knows exactly what I’m looking for. Cues those up for me. And then no AI writes the comments or anything like that.

[00:25:39] Jake Mooney: It’s me. S that way I feel like I can actually write and engage with the person and support what they’re doing. So if anybody’s looking for kind of like a cheat sheet for how to do LinkedIn you know, work with an assistant who you give them clear guidelines and they can help you with it.

[00:25:56] Jake Mooney: They can be in your LinkedIn. I think that’s a great way to connect with the right people in an authentic way. And not like turn it all over to AI automations and things like that, while also not sitting there for an hour and a half each day necessarily.

[00:26:11] Scott: Yeah, what a great way to do it. ’cause to your point, I think it’s easy to dismiss it and get right into the automation thing and say, oh, I’m not doing that. Therefore, you know, full automation. And the full automation. Guess what? If a million other people are doing full automation, all you end up is with bots responding to bots.

[00:26:27] Jake Mooney: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:26:28] Scott: it’s losing everything. Now speaking of that though obviously when it comes to video, you know, AI created video is a common thing now,

[00:26:36] Scott: And I wanna know if you have an opinion on that or how you deal with video, Jake, for yourself and your clients, do you do more of the AI generated videos at scale or do you have a different method?

[00:26:47] Jake Mooney: Well, I have a good friend who just, we did an event together and he talked about how he grew his YouTube channel to about 800,000 subscribers, sold it to some investors using ai. So we did an event on that because I think there’s a time and a place, and there’s certain kinds of content that AI can really help you.

[00:27:06] Jake Mooney: It’s more on the storytelling, you know, like fictional side of things, more entertainment side of things. We’re very careful. I mean, we use AI tools on a lot of things. We use Descript for editing our podcast because it does a, the air AI does a great job of finding all the bad takes and the mistakes that you made and pulling those out.

[00:27:27] Jake Mooney: It’s so we look for things that help enhance the, our team and the storytelling that we’re trying to do for our clients. We, so far, we use 11 labs for voiceovers and things like that, but typically we end up using a real human voiceover at the end instead of, but we use 11 labs to have this natural voiceover for us to edit around.

[00:27:52] Jake Mooney: So, yeah, I think a client sent me just the other night they’re in the manufacturing woodworking industry, and they sent me an AI generated, video where it’s an avatar talking about their product, and it was a great, it actually really worked well. The script is really good. Like they understand like a Facebook ad script, what it should be.

[00:28:09] Jake Mooney: All AI generated and I just said what we need to do is, this is a great example. It’s a template. It’s a storyboard for us to create a real one. So we’re gonna have a real person actually do a similar script, gonna make sure we’re using all your real footage. Because your brand, whole brand is built on authenticity and connection with the customer, and you’re a great customer service, let’s not dilute that just because we’ve made this video in 15 seconds and we can throw it up as a Facebook ad.

[00:28:40] Jake Mooney: We’ll take a few hours, we’ll record very similar stuff. We’ll replicate this and improve upon it. And ultimately I think that’ll be better for your brand. And honestly, people would know it’s an AI ad one way or another, and don’t want you to go that route.

[00:28:59] Scott: Oh, I love that of using it as a template. ’cause to your point it is, think of it as a wire frame to a website or a storyboard to a movie. It’s that you have something to go off of. But then what really matters is you’re putting your best foot forward. And that’s gonna be a human being.

[00:29:15] Scott: Because as you said, I mean, yeah, AI is getting better and better, but people can tell when it’s that AI avatar doing this Right. And speaking. And to be honest, to me it’s just so off-putting that I wouldn’t wanna work with a company that I see that,

[00:29:27] Jake Mooney: I don’t mind seeing it in entertainment.

[00:29:29] Jake Mooney: for business use, I, yeah, I’m, we’re very careful. I.

[00:29:33] Scott: Well that brings to how to do it correctly though. So one thing I’m thinking about is as soon as you get off AI and now you’re into actually recording a real video with a real human, and you’ve mentioned before that you’ve done this with companies in different countries. So maybe they have their own setup or you’re helping them set this thing up. I’m curious about for a company that’s trying to get on video more, right.

[00:29:54] Scott: They don’t have a huge budget, but they they realize they have to put their face forward. They have to actually show the founder or show team members or whatever in these videos. Right. I want to know from you, Jake, do you think they need to pay or rent a very expensive studio? Do they need to get the best video equipment, or what advice do you give these individuals that are trying to get started with video on site?

[00:30:17] Jake Mooney: Good question. It can be really hard, honestly, because if you’re not in video in video marketing, you just see final results from your competitors, or you see tiktoks or you see YouTube, and it can be a really hard to reverse engineer what you need to do to get there. Which ones actually make sense for you?

[00:30:39] Jake Mooney: That, that can be really difficult to do. So typically what we will often do is help clients understand what they need to do with video. You know, what’s the minimum viable thing? We started a podcast, not video podcast. Audio podcast for a a an NGO out of Geneva, Switzerland that interviews diplomats and high ranking government officials all over the world.

[00:31:03] Jake Mooney: And we started it with a phone, right? Because they were like, ah, we need to get noise, you know, good microphones and two setups and record this and, you know, and the right room. And I was like, no, you don’t. We have AI tools that’ll make what you record in a quiet room with a phone sound great and sound like it was recorded in a podcast studio.

[00:31:25] Jake Mooney: They didn’t believe me, but I was like, Hey, your budget’s not that big, so you better believe me. They did it and it turned out fantastic because of course then we add music and we. Add some we pull out like some interesting clips and put those at the beginning, you know, and then we add like a little intro and then suddenly, and then with some of the AI tools to clean up the audio, it sounded fantastic.

[00:31:46] Jake Mooney: It was able to then to get the buy-in from leadership to actually do a full professional podcast for their non-profit. The most effective videos a lot of times are very informal videos.

[00:31:58] Jake Mooney: So, you know, you open your phone, you hold it there, you record something, you do, you present an idea in a nice way, something that solves a problem for someone, gives them advice that’s useful.

[00:32:09] Jake Mooney: That’s a way to start. You don’t need a video agency to start doing that today. You have. A better camera than we had 10 years ago sitting on, you know, on, on your desk. You might need a coach, you know, to help you formulate your communication strategy, what you’re actually getting across, and to help you realize that is enough to get started.

[00:32:31] Jake Mooney: As far as like creating a little studio, we work with clients where we shoot content for them from our studio. So we will actually be, you know, represent their brand. In some cases, a lot of them will help them set up a small studio and I’m saying for hundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars, that looks like a million bucks, right?

[00:32:52] Jake Mooney: it looks perfectly acceptable and nice and professional for what they need to do because I want them to feel like it was a lot easier to get going. So that’s calm marketing, right? If it’s easier to get going and to start it up on a smaller scale, then you can keep going with it longer.

[00:33:11] Jake Mooney: So actually the, you know, video strategy itself is a bit trickier because a lot of people want to start up video and they cannot last to three months. They can’t keep it up after three months. So that’s more of, that’s really the biggest challenge. It’s not the technology, it’s not the ability to create scripts or, you know, work with teleprompters or anything like that.

[00:33:36] Jake Mooney: It’s people’s dedication to something to longer than three to six months.

[00:33:44] Scott: Yeah, I suppose it’s just like fitness or anything else. It’s easy to say I’m gonna go on a diet on January 1st, but it’s hard to continue to go to the gym every day when stress builds up, when family stuff builds up. You have to still do it. And to your point, when it comes to video, it’s a new neural pathway.

[00:33:59] Scott: It’s a new routine, it’s a new process. And so I suppose the higher you put that barrier up and say it needs to have A, B, C, D, E, F, G sort of qualifications, it’s like it’s just making it less likely that you’ll ever get started or that you’re ever maintain it. So what you’ve sort of described with this minimal setup, it seems that you’re trying to reduce the friction to get started so that you can test it out faster.

[00:34:22] Scott: And it sounds like you’re making it easier to maintain, so there’s not excuses to not do it. Which which kind of leads me to another question, which is I can imagine some companies thinking, okay, I’ve seen these professional services firms or whatever else create videos, but it doesn’t work for my business.

[00:34:38] Scott: I have this boring business No one’s gonna care about that. And I’m curious, do you have any feelings over the types of businesses that this type of marketing might work for, and whether or not boring businesses can actually follow through and follow these steps.

[00:34:53] Jake Mooney: I affectionately call them boring businesses. ’cause I come from boring businesses. I, my first jobs were in landscaping, construction carpet and, you know, cleaning and things like that. And then manufacturing, right? And a lot of our businesses are in logistics, manufacturing, et cetera.

[00:35:11] Jake Mooney: You see these flashy businesses and things like that, selling stuff on TikTok and funny videos and things like that. And you’re like, ah, I don’t know how I’m gonna relate that to my manufacturing business or my parts business, or. Video needs to basically solve you know, have a different goal in different kinds of businesses.

[00:35:31] Jake Mooney: So, a video that shows a really detailed process can be very, very effective. So we, I did a lot of videos in 25 plus countries for a manufacturing of sawm milling equipment, right in the woodworking industry. And, um, the most effective videos that we shopped. We put a lot of time and effort in these fla nice product videos, you know, showing all the little features and making, you know, the lighting look beautiful and the slow motion sawdust and the most effective videos were sitting a camera on a tripod, letting it look at the machine wide shot and letting it run for 20 minutes, because when someone’s gonna drop half a million dollars on a new line, or $3 million on a new line or more, they just want to see how this thing works. You know how it ticks. They don’t want the marketing pizazz that we throw on everything. They see right through that. They want to just see this work.

[00:36:33] Jake Mooney: I want to see 50 logs go through that line. I wanna see 50 logs that look like my logs going through that line. If I can see 50 logs that look like my logs go through that line, suddenly now the salesman is having a completely different conversation with that prospect, right? They’ve seen it, they believe it.

[00:36:54] Jake Mooney: They didn’t have to fly all the way to, you know, Malaysia to visit an installation. So that’s a highly effective use of video, The, the video guy never wanted to shoot that kind of video.

[00:37:07] Jake Mooney: It was like pulling teeth for the marketing team to make things look less sexy, but more suitable to what that prospect was going to be really effective for them. I think there’s, um, you know, personal branding video comes into nicely for personal branding.

[00:37:26] Jake Mooney: So A CEO or a sales manager, you know, showing up at a trade show in another country and just making a couple short little clips and throwing them on LinkedIn or throwing them on their Instagram or something like that is, uh, it takes work. Like a lot of us don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do it. I personally don’t wanna do put myself on video.

[00:37:47] Jake Mooney: I just don’t, I I, I have other things I want to do, I need to do. Uh, but forcing yourself to start, uh, not worrying about everything being perfect getting over the cringe factor, like, oh no, you know, like I said something funny or, I’m gonna look funny to that high school, uh, buddy of mine from 20 years ago who sees this video.

[00:38:08] Jake Mooney: Stop caring about all of that and just start, you know, documenting what your business is doing, what customers you’re seeing in some way, shape or form. That can be really, really useful.

[00:38:19] Scott: The thing that really resonated with me, Jake, is I love that example of the saw mill sort of video showing them how it’s actually working. Because to your point of the polish, I think sometimes. We do those things for ourselves, right? So we wanna put our best foot forward,

[00:38:38] Scott: but I think oftentimes if you can swallow your pride a little bit, then you can actually create some more authentic videos that are real. I think for years and years, companies have tried to look bigger than they are.

[00:38:50] Scott: They try to look more polished We sometimes forget that some of the best videos, It’s not always about putting your best foot forward.

[00:38:55] Scott: Sometimes it’s about sharing your journey. It’s about sharing, like you’ve shared in this, uh, video, during this podcast recording, we’ve talked about how you were fired. Right? You know, I, you know, I’ve been fired. I’ve lost clients. I’ve, you know, if you can divulge that, guess what? Everyone’s experiencing those tough things.

[00:39:08] Scott: And so we have to remember to be authentic.

[00:39:10] Scott: I’m thinking about like Apple, They put the polish on it. There’s a place and a time to show for them to show the polished product on their video. However, we have to also remember that some of the best of viewed videos on YouTube are people unboxing apple products. Right? And dropping them. Right? Absolutely. Yeah. How, how does it deal, deal with the fall, right? It’s like, and so that is the real life thing. I mean, for the unboxing, just to keep it simple, right? In that case, it is literally what will, like if I spend X amount of dollars or baht or whatever, what will it look like?

[00:39:43] Scott: What do I get in the box? Like, is this the thing that I want to buy? So I tend to watch reviews of products quite a bit because I want to know if I’m spending my hard earned money, what am I getting from it? I don’t want the polished view. I want the real view. And so I think that when we’re thinking about video, when we’re thinking about the other marketing topics that you’ve shared, when you talk about the workshops, we don’t need perfection. That’s just a message that I’m getting through this whole conversation, Jake, is we’re not seeking perfection, we’re seeking truth, honesty transparency. Some people are scared to share their pricing, whereas I’d argue that if someone has the question and you’re the person that answers the question, this is my prices.

[00:40:22] Scott: This is why, this is how I do, this is who I do work with. This is who I don’t work with. You’re gonna be able to filter out the people better that are right for you,

[00:40:29] Jake Mooney: A hundred percent.

[00:40:30] Scott: versus just trying to show how perfect you are, right? None of us are perfect.

[00:40:36] Jake Mooney: Yeah. I interviewed a good friend of mine Minnie from Thaid up with Minnie Instagram and TikTok. And that u that interview is on our YouTube channel. And I just asked her ’cause she got 120,000 subscribers between those two platforms in less than a year. And she didn’t necessarily take the shortcuts that some people take in order to grow those.

[00:41:00] Jake Mooney: She let them grow organically and she was herself. And it was really, I mean, her main things were be yourself, but under learn how to give the audience what they, that what they’re wanting, learn what that is because they were wanting to learn something. They’re wanting to be entertained by something.

[00:41:19] Jake Mooney: They’re wanting insight into something. Learn to package that ’cause that packaging takes time. Right. It doesn’t, you don’t do that out of the gate perfectly and then just be consistent and for her be herself. I think where we often can help is helping coach people with video so that they’re focused on the video aspects that make sense, and then we can edit that, right?

[00:41:44] Jake Mooney: So that’s a big step of the process is like, okay, now we have this footage, now what do we do with it? Someone internally can do that. You can hire someone on five to do that. We work with quite a few clients now, YouTube creators and then businesses where just we, we have a video plan. They’re producing that video in various ways.

[00:42:05] Jake Mooney: And then we’re editing for them, you know, just sharing stuff back on Google Drive, like it’s not that complicated. We have good editors who understand the different styles and approaches. Right. And I’m very careful. I’ve, man, I’ve edited and managed editing editors for now close to 20 years. I know how to set that up in order to get the right results on budget.

[00:42:33] Jake Mooney: And on a consistent basis, right? So that can be a, another big bottleneck is we have all this footage. I have a lot of clients I’ve run into. We have all this footage and nothing’s been done with it for three years. So if you have a lot of footage work with an editor to start getting through it, but be intentional about what you’re actually doing.

[00:42:54] Jake Mooney: And, you know, don’t try to get it all done at once either.

[00:42:59] Scott: Yeah. That’s why I like your point of working with a coach for that because I do think that you could have all that footage somewhere and then you go to Fiverr and say, I’ve got all this footage somewhere. But remember, a lot of the individuals not, I’m not saying the individuals that you find on are not skilled.

[00:43:13] Scott: Right. But if they’re not directed if you’re not describing to them what you’re using it for, how you want to use it, what you wanna get across, you have to be

[00:43:20] Jake Mooney: in your briefs. You have to be very clear in your briefs what you’re wanting to get out of that with someone who doesn’t, who’s new to your business or. Is maybe a slightly inexperienced editor.

[00:43:30] Scott: Yes. Yes. Now, to broaden things up a little bit more again, if you were to just give a broad overview of what you think marketing tactics are working best this year and maybe in the coming year Jake, if you could kind of summarize that for us.

[00:43:43] Scott: And of course we know that this is gonna depend on the business and things like that, but I’m just looking for general trends. Which way are things going? What things are tending to work a little bit better nowadays than before?

[00:43:54] Jake Mooney: Sure. I’m not gonna hit everything perfectly, so for all you nitpickers out there, I’m sorry. But SEOI mean, I know there’s some major challenges with traditional SEO theoretically based on a lot of the changes that have been made in the last couple of years. But a friend of mine literally just started a business and their first client came from chat GPT.

[00:44:19] Jake Mooney: Because their website was well optimized in a niche, local niche here in town that isn’t very well populated and chat GPT found that right away. Um, so that’s SEO of various kinds is con gonna continue to be something that will evolve, uh, change and you should not, um, you know, discount it as, oh, we just don’t need to worry about that anymore.

[00:44:44] Jake Mooney: You know, local listings, if you’re a local business, make sure you’re, you know, Google my business or whatever they call it now, is optimized and updated and you’ve got Google reviews coming in on a regular basis and make sure that you have processes to make sure that that happens. on video figure that out for your business if you haven’t figured it out. I would say that would be something to work on. Is figure out what kinds of videos make sense for your business. Don’t waste time on videos that don’t.

[00:45:15] Jake Mooney: You know, Facebook ads still work well in, in many cases, right? Facebook corporate pages, no, don’t worry about those anymore.

[00:45:25] Jake Mooney: Basically personal branding is I think, much more important now than a corporate Facebook page or a LinkedIn page or anything like that. Invest in personal branding for you and your staff. Understand in the company what that means, right? Like, we’re advocates and we’re going to actually encourage our staff to invest in their personal brand.

[00:45:48] Jake Mooney: Because that’s also a very much a holistic approach. Yeah, you’re gonna have turnover eventually, right? But invest in the people who are, you know, representatives of your. Networking in-person events are, I think, super, super valuable. Not all of them, but ho again, do your own events. You know, stop whining about the, oh, this event’s so boring.

[00:46:11] Jake Mooney: It’s always the same people host your own event then.

[00:46:15] Scott: Yeah.

[00:46:16] Jake Mooney: And that’s basically my list at the moment

[00:46:20] Scott: Yeah,

[00:46:20] Jake Mooney: of off the top of my head.

[00:46:22] Scott: I think the thing that ties that all together is just, you know, when it comes to SEO, it’s like if you’re delivering good information in a way that’s useful to an individual, it’s gonna be useful to a search engine, it’s gonna be useful to chat GPT and other ai. If you’re creating content that’s resonating with people, it’s gonna resonate with other people that wanna buy your product, right?

[00:46:38] Scott: So it, to your point, it seems a little bit less, it seems like everything’s trying to cut through the noise. And so no one’s really seeking out some LinkedIn or Facebook company profile. They’re doing business with people. They want to trust people. And so the people that are out there sharing good information, whether it be on video, it’d be on podcast, it be on their website, be on FAQ sections, share good information, and people come to you.

[00:47:00] Scott: I skipped AI when I gave that list.

[00:47:02] Jake Mooney: Definitely in invest in that and look into that. But definitely don’t just throw everything into AI and do more. Yeah, that would be the opposite of way you want to go. You want to implement it thoughtfully. It changes so quickly as well. So that’s something to keep in mind is the investment that you’re gonna make in this one AI tool or process worth it, even if it becomes out of date in three months.

[00:47:27] Jake Mooney: So we’re pretty careful with what AI steps and stuff that we implement. We don’t build like these massive workflows where everything, oh, when this happens, that happens. Now, there are cases to be made for that different business operations and things, but just be conscientious that AI is not the savior of the world yet.

[00:47:48] Jake Mooney: As, and. Maybe the less of you do of it. A little bit is more, is okay. Yeah.

[00:47:55] Scott: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a good point.

[00:47:56] Scott: And so with that said, I’d love if you could share the best way for individuals to either follow you or get to know you or connect with you.

[00:48:06] Jake Mooney: Well, there’s a few Jake Mooneys running around, but if you search Jake Mooney, Thailand on Google, all the main things will come up in our website, greenlightstudio.co. And you can find us between those two things. You can find us different ways.

[00:48:21] Scott: All right, Jake, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I’m sure we will chat again soon. And thanks again for joining us.

[00:48:26] Jake Mooney: Thanks, Scott.