Title: Why Video Is So Important For Your Business
Guest: Erich Meltvedt of Integrity Media
Peter: Yeah. So today my guest is Eric Meltvedt. He is the president of Integrity Media, a video production company, video creative agency actually. What do you call yourselves?
Erich: Production company. Yeah.
Peter: It’s a good
Erich: good word for it. Yeah.
Peter: Great. Eric and I are actually related, so we’re, sort of shirttail brother in laws as well, just for full disclosure here.
Erich: Right.
Peter: We’ve worked together on some video projects. So I’m Peter Wilson. I have a marketing agency, bizmarketing.com, and we’ve worked together on a really nice project. We may talk about that a little bit. But today, Eric and I wanted to talk about the benefits of video for businesses and why it’s so important to be considering video for your business in 2022.
So how long have you been in the business before we dive into the question? How long have been doing this?
Erich: Yeah. It’s funny because I’ve been filming since I was a kid. Really? Literally. I’ve been filming with a camera.
We were filming army movies and all sorts of music videos probably since I was 12 years old. Secure, captain. Good work, sergeant. Alright. Moving up now.
So I got into it really early on.
Peter: When you say army movies, you mean those little green army men?
Erich: Those little green army men. Exactly.
Peter: Right? Stop motion?
Erich: Yeah. Blowing things up. Yeah. Always had a fascination with it. And my dad said, hey.
You know what? He was also into photography. He also made a big movie for Pepperdine University, which we’ll talk about a little bit as well. But it wasn’t until after college I went into business that I knew that I had to do this full time. Cool.
I got my start in direct response, infomercials. Everybody remembers those infomercials, thirty minutes. You know what
Peter: I mean? An hour. Thighmaster.
Erich: Yeah. Exactly. It’s probably the best way to gain experience in this industry, my industry, because you’ve got to learn messaging really quickly and how to sell a product. You got so much time to gain someone’s attention. Mhmm.
And get that messaging across, and that’s what that’s what I was able to cut my teeth on.
Peter: Video’s always been important, but it’s now more important than ever. Why now? One of the things that I just read the other day is that the, the president of Instagram said that for 2022, they’re doubling down on video. They’re they’re publicly stating we’re no longer a photo sharing site. We really believe in video.
We’re gonna get into reels big time, and we really feel like the future of our platform is video. And, of course, you got TikTok, which is all video. Right? Yeah. And it’s what the fastest growing platform out there is TikTok now.
Erich: And the team now on TikTok.
Peter: But one of the things that we were talking about is why video now? And the obvious thing is your phone. Right? Yeah. People are just consuming video.
It’s so easy.
Erich: It’s 95% of all videos are consumed on someone’s phone.
Peter: Mobile device. Yeah. That’s crazy. And the other statistic you were sharing with me earlier was given a choice between text and video. Let’s say you go to a website and there’s a video there or you could read a whole page of text.
79% of people choose to watch the video rather than read the text. Well, and the and the experience is so much better. Right? Ten years ago on our phone watching a video was a torturous experience. Right?
And now we’ve got five g and all that. It’s I understand what you’re saying. We need to be using video if we’re a business, but I really wanna understand the benefits of that. And we wrote out a list of some things here about why what is the benefit for using video as a business owner? Obviously, it’s easier.
We already covered that.
Erich: Mhmm.
Peter: This one, you control the experience. What tell me about that a little bit.
Erich: You have the opportunity over somebody else to tell your story Mhmm. More or better than anybody else.
Peter: Yeah.
Erich: So you and you wanna protect your brand. So you built this brand. Right? And you know what’s going on out there. People are doing reviews on on products, and they’re telling you they’re telling your story.
Peter: Right.
Erich: You have the opportunity to tell your own story through video. Right. Protect your brand.
Peter: Well, that brings up a good point because YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world behind Google. Right? And even if you’re not telling your own story, I guarantee you, if you have a product or service, there is a good chance that somebody’s already created a video about your product and service. There’s nothing to stop anybody from just making a video about it and throwing it up on YouTube and using your name in the title. So if somebody searches on YouTube for your brand, that video is gonna come if you have nothing there, the only thing that’s gonna come up is stuff that other people created.
Could be good. Could be bad. Right?
Erich: Yeah. It’s a good point.
Peter: So you wanna do that. The other thing that I was looking at was getting a leg up on the competition. So give us you’ve probably seen examples where you’ve worked with a business that maybe maybe wasn’t used video or was, but not very well. And then they made some videos and just blew up because their competition wasn’t doing it. Can you give any experiences like that or examples?
Erich: There’s not one company that we do video for that’s not going through the rough.
Peter: That’s awesome. That’s great. That’s true. Well, one of the things that we talked about as well is that video allows you to show the experience of doing business with you, the experience of actually owning your products so they can kind of sort of pretend what it’s like to be owning your product. Right?
And they can also understand just at a basic level, the features and benefits of your product. Right? You can have a whole website full of features and benefits and all that stuff. But if you put it into a video, you’re actually putting it into a narrative story. It’s so much easier to understand the actual value of owning a product or using a service Right.
If you see it through video versus just reading a plain page of text.
Erich: Well, you can almost you can picture yourself actually owning that product. Yeah. Using that product.
Peter: Yeah. Exactly.
Erich: That’s why lifestyle videos are really important.
Peter: One one thing that we’ve been talking about a lot also is, like, the culture of the company. And we’re working with a lot of organizations that are using video now for recruitment of employees. And so one of the things that you mentioned was that it just shows the culture of the company. Right?
Erich: Yeah. So number one video request we’re getting right now is human resource videos, recruitment videos. Dave, I think the reason why is because more hey. Everybody’s looking for, good employees. Right?
Number two, though, is that they can actually show the culture of the company Mhmm. And get testimonials from current employees and current people that are working or even clients. Yeah. And it gives that person looking for a job a real insight of what it would be like to work for that company. You can’t get that through a LinkedIn ad of the brands.
No. You know what I mean?
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. That that’s a good point showing even actual, like, testimonials of customers to potential employees so they can see, oh, these are the types of people I’ll be working with. Or this is the this is how my business or this business that I could work for actually helps people. Yeah.
Which is super important characteristic for millennials, especially. Don’t just want a job necessarily. They want to know that they’re doing something that’s helping other people. Right?
Erich: Right. Yeah.
Peter: There is one thing you mentioned that I just wanted to take a quick look at. You mentioned this Evel Knievel video. I don’t know if you wanna set this up or not, or we should just take a look at it. But Yeah.
Erich: Let’s take a look at it. Okay. It will be done.
commercial: And the Evel Knievel shock absorbing stunt cycle. You can make them do wheelies, back even mid air somersaults. And for that big jump, here’s evil. Up and over that four foot dish, evil Knievel stunt cycle.
Peter: Alright. That was awesome. I remember that. I remember that little toy. I never had one man.
My parents just didn’t think I needed one so maybe I was too old. Don’t know but you know
Erich: when did that come out? That came out in ’76.
Peter: I would have been 16. I was a little too old. I was looking at real motorcycles.
Erich: Yeah. So That’s cool. The creators of that, toy basically contacted Evel Knievel, enterprises and asked, hey. Can we recreate this toy and and make it and make a comeback with it? And so they got the rights to it.
They called us up and asked, hey, can you make a commercial for this toy?
Peter: Yeah.
Erich: And I said, yeah, absolutely. They had a very tight budget. I think it was maybe $9,000 and so we shot we spent a whole day just shooting this toy and essentially use old footage as you saw. Yeah. Evel Knievel jumping over.
Peter: Retro. Yeah.
Erich: Seizures Palace and everything. Yeah. And since we’ve done that tool that has seen millions of clicks and is now their number one toy they’re selling.
Peter: That’s awesome.
Erich: They’ve come out with different variations of this toy, the gold version, it’s just unbelievable. That’s cool. And it was just creating a an initial video for the initial commercial.
Peter: And just creating some energy and so just some fun. That that just a lot of fun. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is why companies wouldn’t do video. And because we talk to a lot of businesses and they’re like, you know what? I tried video.
My cousin shot something for us ten years ago. And you see that, I’m sure. Right?
Erich: Well, I think they’ve had there’s right. The that my cousins have shot it, turned out horribly. Yeah. I’ve had someone in the family just didn’t turn out right or it was just way too expensive.
Peter: You’re right, right.
Erich: Years ago it was expensive. Right. But it’s come way down in price because of digital. Yeah. And but in the quality has gone up actually and the fact that you have all these platforms now before you just had broadcast.
Peter: Right, so you only had one place to put it.
Erich: Now it’s unlimited on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, you know, everyone. Yeah. So the number one reason a lot if you haven’t done it or you maybe had bad experience with it is because they thought it was very cost prohibited.
Peter: So one of the things, of the other negatives or one of the reasons why maybe somebody wasn’t going to do video was, is my product or service worth it? Yeah. But given the costs that you’re talking about now, we’ll get into the costs a little later, but that’s that really shouldn’t be a prohibiting anymore. You may not get a ton of videos, you may get shorter video but it but you will get high quality video for a price for a good price. Another one that I see is somebody just says I’ve never done it before.
I don’t know where to get started. What would you recommend for folks that were looking to do some video for their business? First, I wanna talk about just how do you get started, and then I wanna talk about Integrity Media and your specific five step process. So I’ve never done video. Eric, where do I how do I what should I how do I get started?
Erich: Well you just get started by giving us a call. Okay.
Peter: Biz, bizmktg.com. Yeah. Integritymediacorp.com. You can look up Eric on the web as well. Our websites are interlinked here.
Erich: Yeah. It starts with an easy five star process.
Peter: Okay.
Erich: Five step process. Starts with an easy five step process. Initial call, initial meeting. Could be over Zoom, could be in person. For us, then it’s that initial meeting is basically to get to understand your product or service.
We want to know about what you’re trying to sell.
Peter: Sure.
Erich: What is the story you wanted to tell? Okay. How can we help you out? So from there, it’s a matter of just us storyboarding it, giving you an idea, a vision, how it’s gonna look and then creating a script.
Peter: So it starts off with a collaborative session where you’re you’re bringing a lot of I’m sure a lot of business owners and marketing people in the companies have a lot of their own creative ideas, right? So you kind of get that out on the table to begin with.
Erich: They do. They’ll have they’ll have great ideas and we want to try to fit those ideas. We just add a little more creative touch to it to really make it Right.
Peter: Or refine it. Yeah, refine it. So the next step so the first step is this collaborative session and storyboarding. The next step is actually a script. So you’re actually working with you’ve got a script writer.
Erich: You’ve a team of script writer depending on what the product or service is.
Peter: Okay.
Erich: And then we write the script, the visuals, and then that is presented to the client to make sure they have buy off and they agree with it.
Peter: Right.
Erich: And once that’s done, we set up a pre production meeting, step three.
Peter: Okay.
Erich: And that meeting is just to go through you with the client and us to figure out exactly what the shoots gonna look like, over the shots, where we’re gonna be shooting at and just lock everything down for shoot day.
Peter: Got it, got it. Okay.
Erich: It could be a one day, two day shoot, we shoot it and then step five we edit it and give you the final product.
Peter: Got
Erich: it. And of course you have the client always has final revisions on all the edits.
Peter: So when you talk about shooting and you talk about your team, I was witness to some of the work you guys did here recently. You have a photographer that showed up and you had some other folks that were there.
Erich: I was sound. Yeah.
Peter: Yeah. And I was blown away by the level of intensity these people bring to what they do. Right? It’s not just somebody showing up with a phone and which you can do if depending on what you’re trying to do. A phone will shoot just fine.
But, like, the audio, just the audio alone, you guys had this huge microphone set up and you had the the big the wind thing on there and all that stuff. And then your photographer was telling me the camera he happened to be using that day had like a $60,000 lens So on you guys are shooting with some pretty high end gear, depending on the shoot, right? Depending on the need. And you guys shoot four ks, is that kind of your standard
Erich: four six ks now, yeah.
Peter: So what does that get me? What does four ks get me?
Erich: Four ks basically is just the amount of color pixels that you get. So there’s a lot more color correction if you shoot it too light or too dark, can actually go back and actually correct that. That’s what it does.
Peter: Because there’s more information to play with there?
Erich: That’s exactly right. It’s a film. It’s what basically films have always been shot on. It’s been filmed but that’s it’s more if you could translate it would be four ks.
Peter: Oh, so the equivalent of a 70 millimeter whatever Right. They shoot
Erich: Wow. Yeah. Our gear is we shoot with reds, shoot with the cannons, we shoot with literally the top film equipment you can that Hollywood shoots with.
Peter: Right.
Erich: Essentially, and if it’s $5,000 commercial, you still get the same amazing equipment. Yeah. Like, same lighting package, sound package. Right. Everything.
Peter: And then you guys had some one of the days we shot, you had some the camera would kinda just glide
Erich: Yeah. Yeah. Have all the equipment for dollies and jibs. We’re We’re licensed by the FAA to fly drones anywhere, and so we do a lot of
Peter: Yeah.
Erich: Fantastic aerial footage. Yeah.
Peter: That’s great. That’s great. If I’m a business owner, I heard this sounds good, Eric. What is this gonna cost me?
Erich: Good question. Million dollars. $1,000,000. There
Peter: you go.
Erich: A typical we can get shots, shoots done for as low as $3,000 and it goes up from there. But it’s a one camera shoot, and we’re just shooting a an executive telling his story, for instance. Doesn’t have to be that much. Mhmm. But you can you do we can do something for 2 or $3,000.
And then it’s, you know, I think, also, we’re chat we got we’re bringing in talent, for instance. We’re bringing in extra cameras or extra jibs and extra cranes. You’re now looking at 7 or $8,000.
Peter: You’re you’ve got voice You you can bring in voice talent, for example, so you don’t have to rely on the people who work for the company to be in the video
Erich: That’s right.
Peter: All the people in the video, for example.
Erich: And in great ways, like, I do everything I can, work with my clients to tell them, hey. Let’s if you need to save money, we will make sure you do it. The best thing a client can do is say, hey, Eric. Hey, Peter. I got 5,000 Can you do a video Right.
With this quality for $5? We’ll make it happen.
Peter: Yeah.
Erich: Yeah. We’ll do our best, whatever that is. Right. The best thing for us to do is be straight up honest with us.
Peter: Yeah. Don’t come out with this vision. I’ve got this $50,000 vision and you got $5,000 to work with. That’s right.
Erich: And we get that a lot. Yeah. And it’s just it’s better to say, hey. I only have 7 or $8,000. Yeah.
And it’s like, alright. Let’s get it done. This is how we’re gonna do it.
Peter: So is there a video that every company should have in about us or is there like a in terms of gotta have.
Erich: I’ll tell you the most important video you can have is the video that’s on their front page of your website.
Peter: Front page, yeah.
Erich: And that is a thirty to sixty second highlight video of your brand. Yeah. It could be your people, your product, the mixture of the both. Because just Peter, Google records every second someone’s on a website. Yeah.
If they’re watching your video for sixty seconds
Peter: They’re gonna stay on your
Erich: website longer. SEO goes
Peter: up because they’ve spent more time on your site. That’s true. Yeah. Google does look at that, and and that is a a factor that they use to rank how high your your website will show up in the search results on Google.
Erich: Yeah. Many times people companies just don’t think they have a story to tell. Everyone has a story to tell. It could just be a simple story of your employees or, like, how you started the company. Right.
Anything.
Peter: Right.
Erich: Your events. What’s fun about the people that work there? Tell your story. People love stories.
Peter: Oh, absolutely. And part of it is they become part of the story because really the story is about the customer. The character in the story is ultimately the customer. Right?
Erich: That’s a great point.
Peter: And so you want them to feel like they’re like they have a place in that story.
Erich: Right.
Peter: Like, they can see themselves participating with you and being part of your because really, we don’t survive. We don’t have anything without our customers.
Erich: Oh, you’re absolutely right. That’s a great I think there there probably should be more stories told about customers. Right.
Peter: Right. Right.
Erich: And the experience customers have had using your product or service.
Peter: Right. Or how it’s changed their lives or Totally. Sometimes that’s a little dramatic, but or even simple things can even simple products can impact people in ways that you wouldn’t even imagine.
Erich: Yeah. Yeah. If I just made pens, for instance Yeah. There’s a great story you could tell about this. You could tell your that your pen is the most incredible pen in the world.
This is the only pen you should use.
Peter: Well, it could be the cheapest pen. Okay.
Erich: And it’s also the cheapest. You know what I mean? Or you could just tell the story like how this pen is made.
Peter: Right. Yeah.
Erich: Who’s using this pen?
Peter: Well, it’s actually maybe this pen was made by plastic that they pulled from the ocean.
Erich: Exactly right.
Peter: So it’s recycled plastic from the ocean.
Erich: Good point.
Peter: And the ink is soy ink that was it’s recycled soy
Erich: as well. There’s five stories right there. Yeah. See, who makes this pen right here? You know what I mean?
Peter: Yeah.
Erich: Uni ball makes it. Give us a call and we’ll take care of
Peter: you. Eric, this has has been a good look at video and an approach to video. And I can’t wait to work with you more as our companies continue to work together. We really understand the value of video and really appreciate working with a video company that is serious about what they do. One thing I would say about you guys, you’re certainly not gonna be like the cheapest guys out there.
You’re not like, oh, get my cousin to do this or something like that. Mhmm. But the level of professionalism that I see you guys bring to the table has just been amazing.
Erich: Thank you.
Peter: And I’m sure the clients can attest to that as well.
Erich: Yeah.
Peter: For sure.
Erich: And we do have a five star ranking on Google, so that’s good. Yeah. Yeah.
Peter: Right on. Great. So again, if you’re interested in learning more about video and how it can help your business, contact us, schedule a meeting on the Biz Marketing website. We’ll loop in Eric. Just make sure you mention video on there, and we’ll loop in Eric, and we’ll see how we can help you win online.
Can I tell a quick story? Sure. Love to hear it.
Erich: And we we might not use this, but Yeah. It’s funny because about video is the fact that how video can literally save your business. Wow. And I’ll give you a quick story and this so happens to be, of course, it’s my dad. Yeah.
Right? But back in 1951, Pepperdine University allowed him to make a video, the only video in existence of George Pepperdine. And the video was because their enrollment was dropping. They needed to increase enrollment.
Peter: This is actually like a video, right? This is film, this is a movie, yeah, not even a video,
Erich: yeah, Yeah. Essentially, Pepperdine hired my father. He wrote and directed the thing with a friend of his, and it turned that college around. Wow. And from there, now we all know that Pepperdine is in Malibu now, but one simple video.
Yeah. Turned that college around. Wow. And it was with their number one recruiting product they use to get new students.
Peter: Right. Wow.
Erich: So if you’re even on your last dollar or whatever it may be, a simple video could turn your video around your your business around. So
Peter: That’s a great story. Yeah. I love that story. Yeah. That is so cool.
Well, hopefully, most of you aren’t on your last
Erich: Yeah. No. Hopefully, you know
Peter: It’s your last leg.
Erich: You wanna you double your business this
Peter: year. Exactly.
Erich: And great statistic is marketing companies that use video for their clients increase their revenue by 50%. So marketing companies that are actually using video for their clients increase revenue by 50%.
Peter: I like that. So That’s good.
Erich: Well Yeah.
Peter: We’ll keep doing it. Alright, Eric. Alright. Thanks today. Love having you on here, and we’ll do it again soon.
Erich: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
