Stop trying so hard

Speaker A: Hey there. Welcome back to Death to the Corporate Video. My name is Guy Bauer. I'm the founder and creative director of Umalt, a B2B video ad agency. The best B2B video ad agency, if you ask me. And I'm completely partial. All right, so today we're doing some self directed therapy at myself. Um, you're going to hear me, uh, admonish myself, but I think in, uh, the act of me doing that, you may gain some value out of this. Um, if you don't, I guess the value is just like, oh, wow, Guy does this. Um, Okay, M. All right, that's weird. But, um, for real, I think, like, what I'm thinking about this morning when I went on my walk is stop trying so damn hard. I feel like. And this has been brewing inside me for the past five years, but it's almost like every time I try to make a hit, it's not a hit. And every time I just relax and I kind of don't care about the outcome, it's a hit. And it's so bizarre. But I have to think that it's something internally, that subconscious or something or other. Um, and I think all of us fall into this trap. We analyze every word of a script or, you know, if anyone has sort of done anything like this before, we poo poo it and we throw it away and we do things that we think are benefiting the creative as a whole by trying really hard, by working into the night and not resting and sleeping and, uh, just doing sprints every day. Work, work, meeting, work, work, meeting, meeting. Uh, we optimize, we show it to people. We try so damn hard and it ends up just not having a soul because it's, it's. I don't know, I don't know why, but it just. And you know how like you watch a thing and you just say to yourself, oh, uh, they're trying really hard. So that's it. That's my admonishment to myself is. And I do have a couple examples, and one recent example is the spot we made for a Ronzi. Um, and again, I want to clarify when I say I didn't try that hard, it's not that I was lazy or didn't work on it, but I kind of let myself free in having fun and being playful with the writing. I don't know why. Maybe I was just in a mood where, I don't know, I just felt comfortable. Maybe it was the client. Um, Aronzi is a very good client that put a lot of trust in me. Maybe it was that I just felt trusted that, um, I was like, all right, well, let's just have fun with this. Um, but, Aronzi, to me, if you check it out, it's on our YouTube page. O R A N S I. No, it's not on our YouTube. Just Google that. It's on YouTube. It's got, like, over a million views, tons of likes. I mean, it was sponsored by the brand, but, you know, anytime you see a spot with, uh, a million views and it's got four likes, you know, don't get confused. That video is not really hitting. But this one has over a million views, and, um, I think it has quite a few likes. I'm looking it up right now. Um, and now I lost my place. 1.8 million views and 1.4 thousand likes. So not an organic view to, like ratio, but by no means a dud. Like, tons of people liked it. Um, um. And when you check it out, it's not like it's the most. Oh, my gosh, this thing deserves a Cleo and every award. Uh, and it's so groundbreaking. It's. It's not. But what it is is it's watchable and it's fun, and it just is casual and it feels good. And I feel like if we had been trying real hard to make the best thing in the world, it would have taken itself too seriously, wouldn't have done, like, silly jokes, and it would have been tried to be more important. And even if we were trying to make something funny, we would have done it where it's weird and doesn't really make sense and kind of ephemeral. I know what we would have done if we tried really hard on that spot. So that's just the spot that's in my mind right now. Um, but there's a lot of work in our portfolio where I was, I think back to, and I'm like, how do I get to that headspace of just not trying hard? And that's so weird, though, because we're compensated for our work. And so what's the. I mean, honestly, you're listening to me talk to myself right now. Um, and I think what it is, is almost. It's got to be a process thing. It's got to be a process thing where. And this is already baked into our process, and I recommend you break it into your process is the process of sleeping on it and walking away for a couple days and then coming back to it with perspective and kind of a reset palate. Um, that's one way to systematize this. And I think another way is just allowing for bad ideas. And um, this is a thing I learned from, uh, the audacious school of audacious, the aggressive, uh, I forget the name of it asap. Uh, Jason Bagwell, he, uh, talks about just come up with a million ideas and they can all be crappy. Get the bad ideas out. Stop trying to write the best idea from the get go. Start with all the bad ideas, just get them out on paper. And I adopted that. And I feel that that's one way to calm down and not try to make the best thing in the world. But so I think the biggest takeaway for all of us, if you're a brand, if you're another video agency, if you're an internal, uh, video, um, uh, at a brand, I think it's a few things. One, put steps in your process to stop working. Like on this day, we don't do any writing or development. We go do something else and then we come back to it with fresh eyes. So I think it's automatic stops and it's kind of. I tie everything back to aviation. If you're a longtime listener of this podcast, and that's what NASA does too, in countdowns, they don't just count down straight through. There's automated stops where the countdown stops for a designated period of time. And uh, obviously they're not sleeping on it or anything like that, but I bet you it has some kind of tangential thing to. What I'm talking about here is the act of stopping stops your digging a useless hole, if that makes sense. Or going down a path of busyness because it feels good to be busy, but it may not be good busyness. So I think it's put stops into your schedule and then stop trying to come up with the best thing in the world. Write everything down. Don't poo poo ideas. Create, uh, an environment where you know the whole thing. No, uh, what is it? No bad ideas. A good. No, there's no such thing as a bad idea. Now we all know there are such things as bad ideas, right? Um, but don't, I think, uh, what the uh, Jason Bagwell guy says is have, uh, a phase one is. Phase one is put all the bad ideas on paper. Do not editorialize. So many of us want to say something in a meeting, but we go, that's stupid or that's not practical. That's not going to work. No, we, you know, we're not going to be able to license that Song so we don't say the idea and then the idea is never said again. But little do we know that maybe perhaps, you know, five minutes after you say that bad idea, that's not practical, that then someone else goes, well, you know how you came up with that idea? Well, what if we just made a song instead of licensing a song and yada, yada, yada. So he recommends a two phase approach. Phase one, bad ideas, all ideas. Phase one, all ideas. Phase two, edit, edit and find the good idea in those bad ideas. Those two things. And that's what we do at umalt, to be honest with you. So I'm trying to find a third thing with this podcast and this internal admonishment is how do you get in an area of relaxation and how do you systematize that? So if you know, or if you have any suggestions, let me know. Because obviously as umalt, we're being compensated for our work. So it's not like this is we're doing it for fun, we're doing it for money. And so how do you get into an area where you're not trying too hard but knowing that you're, you're being compensated? It's a weird thing. And probably as an American it's even weirder because we have such puritan roots here that uh, and I don't know, I have like such guilt that if someone's paying me to do something, I'm gonna overwork it rather than underwork it. But how do you re gear your systems to where, uh, your people feel like they don't have to try so hard and can kind of shoot from the hip? I'll tell you another classic example at New Malt's history. Our Google Hammer spot was developed. Our client, because of GA4 coming out, our client needed this spot. We had like three weeks and maybe that's being generous. It was like two and a half, three, something like that. And so there was no time for our typical 12 week process. So I got on a call with the client. Uh, they had seen our Sunset GA4 parody movie trailer. Um, so they wanted something similar. So on the call with them I looked through, well, what's coming out that we can parody. And Oppenheimer was coming out. And so on the call in two seconds I said, what if we just did Oppenheimer? Uh, we had a guy that's like, uh, Oppenheimer, but instead of blowing up a nuclear bomb, he wants to blow up, uh, Google Analytics. And on the call the client said, that's great, awesome. And I said, cool. Script coming tomorrow. And then 24 hours later, script came, and it turned out to be one of our most successful spots. Nominated for a webby, all that stuff. So how do you get to that space where it's just go, I don't know. Let me know if you know guy umalt.com umault um.com uh, thanks for listening, and I'll see you on the next one.