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Hello, DTC Pod. Today we have Jen Jennings from Nash Media. Jen is a content creator who I've gotten to know over time for being a content creator on trend. Jen, I'm very excited to have you on and let brands know a little bit more about content and the work you do. So why don't you take it off and tell us a little bit more about yourself and what Nash Media is.

Yeah, well, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed my time on trend. So a little background on me. I'm originally from California. My whole career background started in healthcare, and on the side, I started doing wedding video. And that was a lot of fun. Loved kind of learning about the camera and how, you know, video works and all the all the intricacies of that and kind of nerd it out on that. And then decided during the pandemic to just fully walk away from healthcare. And so that's when I transitioned into creating Nash Media, which is I'm now the creative director, and I primarily create content for CPG brands, food, beverage, beauty. And now I create all types of different content photo, video, UGC, all the good things. And I found other apps such as trend that allow me to be able to connect with brands and create a lot of UGC content print for them. That's been a lot of fun. So that's kind of how I hear.

It's interesting how you mentioned that you were a wedding photographer videographer and how the pandemic sort of unlocked the UGC because initially it was well, for the creator's perspective, it's like, well, it's the only kind of content I can shoot at my house. But then they started getting jobs and gigs and saying, well, now I can just do this by doing my passions, doing the things that I like, and I don't have to go to someone's wedding that I don't know and sacrifice my time and do that. So how was that transition? Did you ever go back to that or did you just double down to keep increasing those engagements? How was that transition?

Yeah, I had a hard stop, so I stopped doing weddings completely and just made the decision that I'm going to go all in on CPG brand content. Because during the Pandemic, all these brands were like, crushing it because they're running Facebook ads, they're making money. Everybody was at home just buying stuff. And so there was kind of a huge surge for a need for content. And at the time, it was kind of that professional, high end video and photo. And so I kind of took those skills, and yeah, it was a hard switch, and I didn't look back.

Yeah. And so for the creators that are making that kind of content, some creators stand out for having something in particular that they use their environment as their assets for or skill set. Whether it's environment or skill set, if someone lives by the beach, they just become like a beach content creator. What was your niche? Were you cooking these recipes? I know more about your work and the stop motion and everything, but what was your specific thing that you leaned into for why brands chose you instead of other creators, and how did you differentiate yourself?

Yeah, I think I really leaned heavily into the studio style because I realized I could manipulate my bedroom to be anything in a studio, you put up a backdrop, you get props, and you could create anything. And then that kind of slowly transitioned into other areas of my home. Definitely, like kitchen heavy bathroom for beauty and that sort of thing. But I definitely started out with more of a studio look, I would say. And then that quickly transitioned.

Yeah. Where does your creative mindset come from? Take us back to your background. Most people aren't thinking of seeing that opportunity of being able to turn the bedroom into creative studio and have it generate you money through your apartment. So where does this all come from? Where did it all start?

Yeah, I think what's interesting, when you do weddings, it's the most crazy experience because you just don't know what you're walking into. So when I filmed weddings, I didn't know if I was going to walk into some dark dungeon and be filming the groom getting ready or if it was going to be some beautiful, lavish hotel. And so you kind of have to be prepared for anything and be able to create really beautiful content because people expect their wedding video to look beautiful, of course. And so I think that was like the best first experience as a creative because I got to kind of just get thrown into the craziest lighting situations, location situations, timeline situations, too. Sometimes you're running from one place to the other. And so I think that's what kind of gave me that foundation to be super flexible, that I can look at any environment and say, okay, I know I'm going to shoot this. I know I'm going to set the lighting. I know how I'm going to put my angles, like, exactly how I want it to look that kind of gave me that foundation to be able to do that.

Yeah, now you have the creative background and experience with that. But now you entered the landscape of shooting content from your home with brands who might not be used to hiring individuals as running their content and state agencies. So this is the part where the rates, the negotiations, all these things come into play where you might not need as big of a set up or you might not need to spend 4 hours or 5 hours, but it adds up once you have a ton of brands and you're working with a lot of brands. And so given that this is happening through the pandemic, you're almost forced to sort of define what these rates are going to be. This isn't an established way to hire content creators yet and we're sort of making it up as we're going, which is almost what Trend was doing in the early days with our fixed rate and everything. And so before we dive into the types of content and all that, I want to talk about UGC specifically because I feel like this is what was born out of that pandemic, the boom of content that we still see today. And I would love to hear it from you directly. Like, what is UGC? It's a simple question, but we see a lot of brands asking for it. So how from your perspective, what is UGC?

Yeah, I think the way that I look at it, it's a very different type of content than what I typically make in that it's just kind of about a person, their iPhone and their environment, right. And then taking the product that they either own or are tasked to create content with and making whatever they want out of that. And that's kind of as simple as it is and I think it's a little bit more raw than other types of content and that's what I really love about it. So that's kind of how I would define it.

Yeah. Okay, so brands hear this and then some brands are doing UGC with their team members or in house. What are some of the pros and cons of outsourcing to a creator to UGC versus doing your UGC in house? From my perspective, one of the main reasons is you just don't have that representative within your company. You don't have a twelve year old kid in your company that can make this UGC if you're selling to kids.

Yeah, I think being able to access not only creators outside of your company, but a variety of creators so, I mean, your customer is going to be very diverse, right? It might be a family, it might be a couple, it might be a single person living in different environments. So being able to access different types of people to be able to represent your product in a similar way is how you're going to be able to connect with as many different types of customers as possible. So I think that's a huge benefit to hiring out your UGC. I've heard it called I think it's like EGC. It was like employee generated content.

Okay, that's a new category.

Yeah. I think obviously being able to have somebody in house that's going to create that consistent content is awesome. But then you should be able to supplement that with other creators that are all over the country from diverse backgrounds and different environments. Did they live in a house? Did they live in an apartment? Who's going to resonate the best with your customer? You really want to think about those things.

Yeah. Like what is their lifestyle? What is their day to day, what places do they go to that you would otherwise not go to? Yeah, I mean, that's one of our things. Like the environment being a huge asset for your brand. You can tap into people's environments. So outside of UGC, you make the studio content. How is this different in terms of time, effort, which all goes back down to the rates? How is it different, the process of making studio content, the making UGC? And then do you see these as just two completely different things that might have two completely different rates or, you know, one is just a different form of an art than the other?

Yeah, I think it really depends. That's a horrible answer, but it depends on the expectation level. So if you're looking to create content that looks like a Coca Cola ad, that's very different than saying, hey, we want some pictures with some props on a green backdrop. So it just depends on the expectation level. I will say UGC can be just as complex as studio content depending on the complexity level. And I kind of break out my higher end content into studio and lifestyle because I think there's a time and a place for lifestyle content as well, even if it's done with a professional camera. But I think that it really honestly just depends on what your expectation level is. And I think setting that expectation and providing examples of what type of content you're looking for as a brand can be helpful in determining how much it's going to cost. Right, so if your expectation level is higher, it's going to cost more if there's more involved.

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned the lifestyle because it reminds me of all of sort of the categories that are within content itself. So you have photography, then you have videography, then you have UGC, then you have UGC, you have product shots, you have lifestyle content, you have testimonial content and then you have length. Right, like short form, longer form, 15 seconds, 60 seconds. Yeah, exactly. So how do you break those down? Do you have sort of like a blueprint? Like if we were to be a strategy with Nash Media trying to understand how do you break down rates and content? What are those categories and pillars?

Yeah, so right now I have my content broken down into like product on white, background, product in studio with props, product in lifestyle, and then the UGC style content, stop motion content, and then more of like a high end video ad. So that's how I currently have it broken down. I'm sure there's a lot of other ways you could break it down because there's so many different complexities. And then within the video category, obviously the length is important, understanding what type of audio is going to be required, the aspect ratios, all of those things kind of start to come into play depending where the content is going to be used.

Right? Yeah, the aspect ratio itself, it's a whole thing. Aspect ratio, you want to make it native to a specific platform. And so this is where the creative brief comes into play because this all has to go in symphony together in order to produce the perfect output, where we just don't have to do us more revisions and let's try to get it right, be aligned on the first time. And all of those details have to be predetermined. However, not all brands know that your lighting wasn't going to be like that. So now they want the better lighting. They didn't know you wouldn't shoot enough angles. Now they want you to drive back to the beach and do that piece of content. And so what are some of the things that you see most commonly that brands get wrong when doing a brief?

Yeah, I would say like 90% of the brands that come to me have zero brief. That one, I would say is your first mistake. But I think really what it takes is spending some time understanding what it is that you want as a brand and why. And that is like taking a really hard look at your current content and what's performing. Because sometimes the things that do really well are not things that seem that obvious to someone who maybe doesn't come from a creative background. And as a creator, the things that I'm thinking about are what's happening in the content in the first 3 seconds, what environment is it in? What lighting is being used, is it natural lighting, is it hard lighting, is it afternoon sunset lighting? Those types of things are things that your customers might be really resonating with and is the aesthetic that they're really drawn to. And so you have to kind of go through your current content and see what's performing well. And from that you can kind of start to put together a brief of okay, we know when videos are shot in front of a big window with this beautiful natural lighting, they perform really well. And we know that when people say this in the first 3 seconds, they perform really well. So starting to look at some of those themes and utilizing those in your brief. And then there's some of the things that are, like, not obvious. And I say this because I know there's a lot of creators that might need to get this in the brief, that it's like, make sure your environment is not cluttered. Make sure you're wearing either dark colors or bright colors. What's going to resonate with the brand? There's all these little things that if you leave it up to the creator, you might not get back what you were envisioning. But you really have to spell it out. And it might seem tedious and kind of like redundant and obvious, but spelling it out is very helpful for the creator because it's going to increase your chance of success on what you get back.

Yeah, I think that's a really important point of, like, just also your vetting process in the creator you choose to work with. We've seen instances where a creator had a slight logo of a shirt in the shoot and therefore the entire shoot is just not going to work. And I feel like some of that can be prevented. If you look at the brief, the challenge for some companies is that they know they need more content, but they don't know what kind of content. And so I think looking at that previous performance is a great place to start because at the end of the day, the only reason we make content and brands make content is to have better marketing and better performance. And by the way, better performance might not necessarily be a specific row as it could be generating, getting attention, getting followers. And all of these are building a community and all of these have a completely different goal, which the creator should be completely aligned with. And be truthful, if that's something that they focus on and that's something that they can actually deliver on. So what is your ideal customer of a brand like, what do they do right when they're briefing and sort of come to hire you?

Yeah, I'm somebody who I would say this is going to sound weird. I'm not like, innately creative. I actually don't come up with ideas out of thin air. And so I like very specific instructions and I would think most people probably do appreciate that. So I kind of like to have a breakdown of, number one, where's this content going? Is it going to be on TikTok, Instagram? Is it going to be for paid ads? Because those are different types of content. What are you trying to achieve with this? Are you trying to get more followers, more views? Are you trying to convert people? Because that's going to change how I'm going to approach the content that I create. So I want to know that first and foremost, obviously, I want to know technical things like do you want an iPhone? Do you want a professional camera, vertical? What aspect ratios they would lay all of that out for me and then what do you want me to wear? What type of lighting, what environment would you like to see? And then audio is a big thing too, so I prefer not to put any sort of music behind any of the content. That way they can have more opportunities with it when they upload it to TikTok or Instagram. But what type of things do you want me to say about the product? So definitely including things like three different hook ideas. What are your top features and benefits, what are some call to actions that you would like? And it might just be going to the website or it might be follow for more knowing. What are you trying to achieve? That way I can give the brand as many different opportunities to achieve whatever objective they're trying to achieve. Those are kind of the main things that I look for in a brief.

Yeah, for sure. And then how do you handle, say, a revision process? So you have a lot of experience, you get a line with the brand and then something happened that the brand didn't breathe and so you feel bad for the brand, but at the same time the brand should have done their homework and their prep in the beginning and work is not free. So how do we look at a revision process and what advice you have to brand so whoever is listening to this brand can understand that from the creators point of view?

Yeah, I think it's definitely hard if you go into a project with not a lot of information and you're kind of left to do whatever and then they come back and say we don't like that. But if there's something you don't like, it could be a very specific thing. That's an easy fix. If it's an easy fix, I have no problem going in, switching a clip, changing a voiceover, a pronunciation of something. If it's my mistake, no problem. If it's something that wasn't drawn out, sometimes it could require refilling, which can be difficult because that reconnect was like putting the same outfit on his hair.

The same waiting for the same hour of the day for the sunlight.

Exactly. No, that's why like, it can be a little bit complicated. So, you know, I think the more information you provide, the less that's going to happen and less frustration you're going to have with your creators as well. And on that note, one of the ways that I've found to kind of help prevent that is I create a lot of my content, like I create a ton of clips, varying clips of the product, of me using the product. And I do primarily voiceovers. And the reason I do that is that if there's an issue with what I said, there's an issue with the order, it's a really easy fix and it eliminates my frustration, it eliminates time for the brand to have to wait for me to reshoot on another day. And I found that that's super, super helpful. So if you find that you need content quickly, you don't want to have these issues. I would say you can encourage your creators to say, hey, create a bunch of content and just do a voiceover and create your hooks, your features and benefits and your calls to action. And then if there's any issues, we can quickly fix the voiceover.

Yeah, I love that because you can just fix the voiceover and not have to reshoot. But I'm curious, is there a world where a brand and a creator could potentially bring up how we're going to resolve a revision? Here's the guidelines. Here's my policy for revisions. And if you want more, if you want one or I have none, what are some of the best ways to sort of address the elephant in the room of like, the worst case scenario is not being satisfied at the end, right?

Yeah. I mean, if you don't have something set in place, it could kind of be an endless, oh, fix this. Well, we didn't notice this last time. Fix this. My policy personally is there's one revision and then that's it. So at that point, you can either choose to charge for another asset or you can bill hourly for the editing. So those are kind of the two ways to handle it. If it can't be resolved within one revision, that's how I typically handle it.

And so now if we step into from the brand's perspective, what advice do you have for brands into vetting the creators and choosing the right creator for them? Within Trend? We're a huge network. We have a bunch of creators. Jen is one that gets hired a lot. So you're doing something right, and I love it. But for brands that want to find, I see so many different needs, it all depends on the goals. Again, are you trying to attract a certain demographic to your brand? It's not all just the quality of the content. So what are some of the benchmarks by which you suggest brands to judge a creator by in order to approve to hire them?

Yeah, I mean, I would definitely, obviously look at their portfolio and see if the style of work is resonating with you because everybody kind of has a different style of how they create content. And then if you are putting out listings on Trend, be sure to call out who you're looking for. I see projects that are like, we want someone with a child or a dog. I don't have either of those, so I'm not going to apply. So call that out, obviously, and that people are like, if they are a mom, they're going to be like, apply. Right. But also look at their performance of their content. So if you have someone approaching you wanting to do UGC content for you, go and see if you can look how the content is performing on the brands that they perform content for. So go look at the views, the shares alikes, if they have that data on the back end and are they using it?

Yeah.

Right. So where is it being used? Are they primarily doing ad content? Are they doing TikTok content? Look at those different things and evaluate. Do those align with what we're trying to deal with our content? Because I think those are super important things to look at. And then obviously, the quality a big thing that I hear frustrations from brands is like how much care is put into the environment to make sure everything looks nice, is aesthetically pleasing, and how much they're paying attention to the brand. I always spend a lot of time looking at the brand's website, reading reviews, understanding what's important to that brand, what the colors and the look and the feel are. And so do you see the content they're creating? Does it look like it should be created for that brand or are they just kind of haphazardly creating it? So those are things I would look at.

Yeah. So if you're looking at yes, I mean, I love the performance angle. I hadn't thought about that. And that was probably what I would do as a brand, is. I see they worked with X brand. Is that brand actually still using their content? Did they ever publish it? What was the engagement on that? And that way you don't need to do the vetting of the creators. You don't need to ask them much. Just watch what they've done and that will speak volume. So when it comes down to then pairing up and negotiating and establishing the rates, are these the same benchmarks that you look at when we discussed earlier? What platform is it for? Like, what are some of the things that determine what the rate should be? Especially because if we think of being a photographer at a wedding, most of these rates are like based on a half day, a full day, and that's very industry standard. But this is very different. And I know trend has like pre negotiated rates and everything because we're trying to do it at such scale. But what advice do you have for brands when negotiating or trying to better understand what the industry norm is for studio content versus UGC, et cetera?

Yeah, I think it kind of goes back to what the level of expectation is and where it's going to be used. So something that's going to be used for a paid ad, the understanding is that it needs to be at a different level. So you may need to be able to modify this content to change out the hooks, change out the call to actions, and then there's going to be a lot of dollars behind it. And so you should expect to pay more for something that will be used for paid ads and then something that's going to go on social media and maybe it's like a quick kind of trend thing. Might not cost as much and it might be easier for the creator to create it and quicker. And then in terms of more of the high end stuff like studio content, it is kind of the same thing. It's a level of expectation. So if you are looking to hire a creator, I think the best thing you can do is really share examples of what you're thinking so that they can look at that and say, okay, how long is this going to take me? Do I need to purchase any props? Do I need to travel? What is that going to look like? Because they can then give you a proposal that's going to make sense to them for the level of effort that it's going to take. And that's really what it comes down to is how much effort is it going to be on the creator's end? So if you do have content that you want to get created and it's a little bit lower effort, I don't need to leave, I don't need to go very far, I don't need to show my face. The price probably could be lower. Right examples is helpful.

Yeah, I like the effort part because some content brands might want to even hire you for content where the product isn't even involved. You might be doing a walk through an explanation of something or like, do you already have the product? You might not even have to wait to get product and deal with the logistics side of all that. So I'm curious for brands that might be listening, that if they're thinking, all right, well, I want to hire my first creator for shooting content. What is the standard engagement in terms of assets that brands mostly ask for? The brands ask for if it's photos versus if it's videos. Do they ask for because if it were a wedding they go they shoot all this content for a half day or full day, then you pick it. How is that different from the process of what you see from brands engagements?

Yeah, I think for the type of assets that I create, especially for like photo, studio photos and that sort of thing, it depends on what you need. So if you're like, hey, I just need my product on white, you're going to see rates anywhere from fifty dollars to two hundred dollars per image. As you start needing things like props, set design, that sort of thing, those could start to go up per image. And then video in general is kind of going to start a little bit higher per asset because it's just more complex by nature. And so I think any video assets going to start at 100, it could start at 250. So it really just depends on what you're looking for. But that's kind of how brands should. Sort of think and then as their complexity goes up and as they start needing props and things like that, those things are going to get billed out. And so it could be $700 for one video asset or $1,000. It just depends.

What are engagements that you say no to? Like, is there a length that I just know it's not going to be worth the time, or is this something I don't do.

Things that I would say no to? Let's see. I don't do the traditional two to three minute video content anymore because we live in such a fast paced social media world, I don't even actually see the point. I don't see the value for brands. And so I have had brands approach me and say, oh, we want a two minute video. And my response is, like, why do you need that?

Because unless no one's attention span yeah.

And you think it's going to live on for ten years, I don't really see the value. And it's it's actually more difficult to try to come up with two minutes of content yeah. Than it is, you know, even I will say 15 seconds. It's hard to cram a lot into 15 seconds. So my sweet spot is like 15 to 30 seconds.

Well, now you're going to have brands doing huge, really detailed briefs and telling you the video is 15 seconds. So now you're putting those features and.

Benefits in 15 minutes.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, that happens too, right? Like, brands want all these sort of to call out every they just give you basically their entire website and say, explain our product in 15 seconds. How do you handle that?

Yeah, I think when they put together briefs like that, I personally look at it as kind of like, I'm going to cherry pick what makes the most sense for me to talk about. So it's helpful. The more information to me, I appreciate, but then I'm going to look through that and say, okay, what do I want to highlight? And what I like about Trend is with the video content, there's two assets. So if I don't hit it in the first video asset, I can hit it in the second one.

How did you find out about Trend? I'm curious.

You know what, I think I found it on LinkedIn. I actually couldn't remember. Yeah, I think I came across it on LinkedIn. Either that or do you guys run ads? I might have gone to pay that.

Yeah, we definitely do. So I think your profile stood out when we started. Also, we've seen these challenges of like, briefing and revisions, and it's the basis of our entire platform. We're trying to productize and we build with both sides in mind. As you probably have seen, Trend doesn't take a side on, like, it's the brand's world or like it's the creator's world. We always go and look at everything from both sides and try to build the best experience for both sides. This is where the content packs were launched, where we said, look, some brands don't know how to explain what they want, but they know how to point out for what they want. And so I saw what that brand did. I want to do that. Or I saw what Jen did for that one brand. I want that. And so we made the content packs. I think you were one of the first people we made the content packs with, made a few thousand from the first few packs. And so I just thought, I have to get Jen on the podcast. And I'm curious because this has happened. Have you used Trend as a brand? Because we've had some of our creators use it as a brand because they work as a social media manager for a company, et cetera?

I have not. Okay. I wanted to because I want to see what the other side looks like.

You're going to be all in there incognito mode? No, but yeah. What has been some of your favorite parts about being a member of Trend?

Yeah, the biggest thing for me from having clients that I procure via email, social media or whatever, versus Trend, the biggest difference for me is the time that I have to spend in what I would call pre production. Right. So when I approach a brand via email and say, hey, I want to create content for you, there's a lot of meetings and pre production that goes on versus when I get a client on Trend, it's pretty clear what I need to do. I get the product and I coexecute. Right. So that's what I have appreciated the most, is that it cuts down a lot of the sort of back and forth and really streamlines the process of content creation. And I think that's not only good for brands, but I think it's really good for creators too, because we do feel that we need to spend a lot of time either pitching brands or trying to sell them on whatever different content we want to create for them. And we spend a lot of time talking to them, to be honest. We just want to create. I think that's what it is. I want to create, I want to get a product, I want to get a brief, and I want to go execute on that. And so the fact that it is sort of taken out that beginning portion and you guys are basically doing all the pitching for us right at Trend. And I love that. And so the brands come to us, they're already excited to work with us, and we just go execute and then we deliver and then be a happy customer.

Yeah, no, that's great to hear. And that's why the brands are able to just hire because they've trusted us, Trend to do the initial vetting. And we don't just sort even though obviously your content is very good. We don't just vet for content, we vet for communication skills, for timeliness, responsiveness, the speed that they deliver, the content, the storytelling. So I'm glad that we got a chance to have this conversation because it just shows the depth of how much there is into getting an asset created into that collaboration, to have it be successful. Because once you have successful asset, the next part that's most important for you to nail down as a brand is your process for now, scaling this operation.

Nowadays, I say volume is everything. Social media is like playing the lottery, and if you're not putting in your ticket every day, you need volume. And in order to do that, you need an app like Trend to be able to create that volume very quickly and get that turnaround and efficiently. So I think it's good for both sides.

Yeah, again, it's great to hear it because that's ultimately what we want to do, is have a place with jobs and giving value to creators. We didn't want to be a platform where it's just for you to collect invoices and for us to make money. Instead, like, why are you here? We want to give value. And on the other side, we want to give as much value as possible to brands to tap into your environment as a content creator, your skills, your storytelling skills and everything. So, Jen, it was great having you today on this conversation. If anyone who is listening wants to learn more about you, your engagements and keep up with all the content you make, where can they find out more about you?

So my website is Nashmedia.com and my instagram is Nash Media and I'm on LinkedIn. Jen Jennings, you can find me there.

Awesome. Thank you, Jen.

Thank you.

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