![]() We’ve mentioned, in these articles, how we do a lot of ghost writing for our clients. Usually the client is a consultancy, and we’ll be ghost writing in the voice of either the business owner or a subject-matter expert, and the audience is often C-level executives. That’s not the case in the story we’re about to describe. This one was a consumer play. The client was an ad agency. And the person we were “ghosting” for was an internationally-known celebrity. Background action First things first. We’re not going to tell you who this celebrity is. We’re not allowed to; we’re under strict NDA for this client. That said, we can say some general things that pertain to the assignment—and thus this article’s topic—about how do you go about writing for a celebrity? The assignment had two parts. The first was a TV commercial. The second was a longer-form video, which was kind of a behind-the-scenes interview, in which our star was asked about the shoot for the commercial itself. We were tasked with helping to script both. Again, we’ve got to be delicate here, but “helping to script” is different than “asked to script.” Remember we’d said that this was an international assignment. We were brought in because we’re native-born English-speaking. Connect the dots yourself. Original input Initially, we were provided with rough drafts of both the TV spot and interview. And in case you’re wondering, the interview was to be tightly scripted—even though it wouldn’t look that way in the finished product. More about that in a minute. But what we weren’t given—and which we immediately requested—was more info about this star. Regardless of how well-known this person is, we needed more information on background, context, and so forth. We asked. We got. This wasn’t a hard request for the client to fulfill; they quickly sent us a few links: Websites, TV coverage, news stories. Now we could start on the project. Voice lessons The main product here was the TV spot. So we had to learn not only what was being sold to the viewer, but how our celebrity fit into it. That was the main thing. How did this person’s career, and renown, mesh with what was being sold? How could we help it to look as if there really was no “selling” going on at all? That is, how do you make it seem as though this celeb just naturally loves and lives this product, without it feeling forced? The same challenge applied to the behind-the-scenes video. The celeb was to be asked about the shoot, and to talk all about how fun and fulfilling it was, while also, still, selling the product. In case you were curious, the scripting included both the interviewer's questions and the celeb’s replies. The solution to both of these challenges was the same: It resided in the background materials we’d requested. The job was to “climb inside this celeb’s head” and figure out what kinds of things they would say, and how they would react, given 1) what was being sold, and 2) what they’re known for. This, by the way, is different from “what they’re really like.” Every celebrity has a public persona; this one was no different. Honestly, we really don’t know what they’re like, personally. We were writing for the public. We were scripting for their public persona. Layer cake No, we weren’t selling baked goods. We’re referring to the the layers of handlers on this assignment. We worked for the ad agency. The ad agency had their corporate client (whose goods we sought to sell). The celebrity had an agent and PR team. Suffice to say, everyone scrutinized every single word we penned. Of course there were revisions. And of course—we saw this one coming from a mile away—all attempts at humor, which were included in the original input materials, were tricky. That’s because of the language barrier. American-style idioms and even British-style wordplay may well work and be ha-ha funny, but they’ll never make it to the screen unless all of these international clients and handlers and agents can understand that these jokes are 1) genuinely funny, and 2) make their celebrity look great. So that helped to set the guide-rails here. We weren’t going for “Saturday Night Live” style humor; we just wanted some cute, self-effacing lines that make our mega-star come across as humble, approachable, and even a tad vulnerable, in an endearing way. Lights, camera, action The client was happy with the materials we supplied. And then they use them as they see fit. That’s their job. We simply want to make their lives easier. In that regard, writing for a celeb is no different than the work we do for everyone else. And that’s a good takeaway for all you other creatives out there: It shouldn’t be any different for you, either. Need help with that next creative assignment? We’d love to pitch in. Contact us today for a no-obligation consultation.
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![]() We recently helped to knock out a video for a client that really paid huge dividends; read: “landed more business.” Along the way, we often found ourselves leaning away from “corporate,” and toward “Hollywood,” in our approach to this video, which was being crafted for a very small audience: the C-Suite. The story of this video’s genesis, and then later, greater success, lends itself very nicely to a helpful article. So here we are. So what was the challenge? Mind you, we’re under NDA, so we’ll be cloaking this story in anonymity. But the gist will remain. And it goes something like this: Our client—a consultancy—had recently wrapped an initial “quick-win” project for a client of theirs: a large, respected enterprise. Then one of the people on our client’s team—a very smart sales rep—had an idea. It went like this: This “quick win” which our client had just created for the big enterprise, was really only known, and appreciated, by the enterprise person who was sponsoring the project. Couldn’t we parlay this “quick win”—this foot-in-the-door—to a “bigger success”--i.e., a stay-in-and-grow—if only other people in the enterprise knew about it? Sure, the sponsor was delighted with the project. But the project itself was complex, and very difficult for her to quickly explain to her superiors. (She, like us, wanted not only recognition for the great quick win, but to allow our consulting client to do more great, game-changing work.) So the idea of “Let’s make a quick video about this” (the sales rep’s suggestion), quickly took hold. That’s when we were called in. Dueling dashboards The project in question here involved a series of business analytics sub-projects, which delivered unprecedented decision-making power, in the form of easy-to-read graphical dashboards. The idea of “dashboards” isn’t exactly revolutionary these days; what made these particular dashboards so sexy was the fact that they captured information which had previously been impossible to capture. (We won’t say how, here. That’s a trade secret of our client.) But there were a whole lot of dashboards. Each one was richer than the one before. Even a fast-paced video would require about 20 minutes to describe them all. Think. C-Suite. Do you really believe they’ll sit through a 20-minute video, describing dashboard after dashboard in detail? You’re right. They won’t. Thus the boundaries of this assignment. The movie vs. the trailer An important ingoing consideration was: What should the run-time of this video be? The easy and obvious answer was “About two minutes.” Two minutes! Impossible? If you take it literally, yes. If you take it creatively, no. Here’s how we structured the thing—and this is really the impetus for this article, because you can liberally steal from this structure, for similar assignments that will cross your plate, whether they’re videos, or PowerPoint decks, or RFP executive summaries, or whatever: The video first laid out, in decent detail, the initial challenge of this “quick-win” project: How could all of this un-capture-able data be captured? Then it quickly laid out the methodology, and set the stage for the main part of the video: An overview of all these sexy new dashboards. We say “all.” But that’s misleading. Here’s how it worked: We singled out the coolest, sexiest dashboard, and showed it first. We described it in detail, with sufficient video and screen-time to show it in action, to dive into its various live charts and graphs and really show off its whiz-bang technology. And from there, we switched gears. Now that we 1) had shown just how cool these dashboards can be, and 2) basically created “the halo effect” for the subsequent dashboards, we were able to 3) breeze through just the highlights of all the remaining ones. This wasn’t a problem. It was an asset. It was a “hit ‘em hard, then knock ‘em down again” moment. In the video, it’s just overwhelming, all this goodness! You totally understand what’s being presented—and then you’re wonderfully overwhelmed by just how much awesomeness there is. It actually accelerates as it goes! When “the lights come up,” you’ve got this sugar-rush high. You want more. Can you say “movie trailer”? Going viral The “movie trailer” analogy is an apt one. The idea of a trailer is to get you to want more—indeed, to buy more, in the form of a ticket. Guess what the enterprise execs did? Yep. They bought more. So this frantically-knocked-out video—which, again, was originally intended for an audience of maybe a half-dozen people—paid for itself a zillion times over with follow-on work for our client consultancy. Here’s the nice little “icing moment”: The enterprise execs were so delighted with the little video (we wisely framed it as “Look at What Our Enterprise is Doing!” rather than “Look at What The Consultancy Did for Our Enterprise”), that they had it posted on the enterprise’s intranet, for all of its thousands of employees to see. The execs wanted to spread the love, and the excitement, and the enthusiasm. And how many of those employee-viewers will go on to become executives themselves, someday? At that enterprise... or another? Talk about icing the cake. Need help with that “Hollywood challenge”? Contact us. We help businesses with these types of projects all the time. We’d love to help you, too. |
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