SPEAKER_02 0:00

Revenue uh about a year and a half ago when we started with Agency Mavericks was was basically a million dollars. Um and then now we are at 2.5 million. Wow. Wow. So it happened fast. We like doubled.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast. My name's Troy Dean. I'm your host. Thanks for joining us again. This week we have a special guest, Darren Rayner from Magnifier Media. They're a video production agency based out of Canada. Full transparency, Darren is a client of ours. He's been in Mavericks Club for about 18 months now. He's had a lot of success. He's taken massive, massive action on the things that he's learned from us. It's been an absolute pleasure working with Darren. He's grown. He's more than doubled his business. He was seven figures when he started working with us. He's more than doubled that in 18 months. It's been a phenomenal journey for him. He talks about that in this episode. And he's got some great tips on what we can all be doing with and without AI and what we can all be doing across social to help us grow our businesses. Before we get into the episode with Darren, uh Jonathan Holborn left us a voicemail on the podcast. Here's what Jonathan had to say. The heartline.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

My question is what have you done to be able to find and vet services where you know they are unique, apart from Victor, where Victor cannot do it? But then there are things that Victor can do where you don't need these other services that are starting to pop up left and right and advertising that they're special when they're really not. Has that been through trial and error and you just happen to have a stack that you go to? Or do you do you see where there's some uh there's a way to judge and the judgment is what I'm looking for?

SPEAKER_00 1:47

Okay, great question, Jonathan. Here's the way I approach this. Whenever I full transparency, whenever I think about buying a tool or a piece of software or an AI to do a thing, I give the link to Victor and I say, hey Victor, do deep research on this and tell me whether or not I need to buy it. And Victor does a couple of things. It's Vic really good at figuring out whether or not it's a low-ticket offer. It reads the source code on the website and it can see if there are any upsells on the other side of that thing that you're looking at. So it'll tell me what the thing's actually gonna cost once I go through the full funnel. It'll tell me a little bit about the trustworthiness of the company selling it. It'll look for reviews on trust pilot. It will tell me what the thing does and if it's gonna cost me any more in credits once I get into it and start using it. And then it will tell me what Victor can actually do with the current integrations that it's got. 90% of the time, I don't need to buy the thing that's in front of me. And Victor will also try and find some GitHub repos or some other alternatives that allow me to do it without buying the tool. Now, there are some uh exceptions where a tool is just so good at what it does that it would take me longer and cost me more to try and do it with Victor or with Claude or without the tool, right? So recently I had a conversation with Victor about uh sending emails out of high level versus using a different platform because we send a lot of emails. And frankly, if you're sending four or five hundred thousand emails a month, high level can get expensive. That's just the way it is, right? You pay per thousand emails that you send. And so I was like, well, do we really need to be spending that much on high level? Can we use a different platform? And Victor did a deep dive research on this and said, Look, the time it's going to take you to warm up a domain, uh, you know, you're better off just staying with high level and just sending better emails, adding more value, getting more calls booked, and growing revenue so that it's not an issue. So sometimes Victor will say, use the thing, use the tool, it's really good at what it does. Sometimes Victor will say, you don't need it. So, Jonathan, I hope that answers your question. That's my process for using Victor to audit and research before I buy anything. Uh, sometimes it's just faster and and better to pay the money. And I always take the approach there's good, cheap, and fast. You can have two out of those three, but you can't have all three. So if you want something good and fast, it's not gonna be cheap, right? I.e. Victor. If you want something fast and cheap, chances are it's not gonna be good. And if you want something good and cheap, well, it's probably gonna take a long time. So that's the criteria. I hope that answers your question, Jonathan. For the rest of you, please go to the agencyhour.com slash fan mail and leave us a voicemail and I'll play it on the episode and hopefully answer your questions. All right, let's get back to this week's episode with Darren Rayner from Magnify Media. First of all, we should back up a little bit. Who are you and what's the name of your agency and where are you based?

SPEAKER_02 4:47

I'm Darren Rayner. Uh my agency, my creative agency is called Magnifier. We're based here in beautiful British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. We are a small team of uh seven full-time I our seven full-time team is I call it the creative brain. We're the directors, the writers, the editors, we're all the creatives in-house here. And then we expand and contract with freelancers. But essentially we're we're full service creative studio that laser focuses on helping brands in outdoor and sport um achieve their goals across social media using video and photo. Um, so we're filmmakers um and we create video content on an ongoing basis for the brands I mentioned, which are Red Bull, Lululemon, Arcteryx, Meta, uh Brooks running, and the list goes on.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

How so if you're a video production agency, how do you like what were you doing before paid discovery? What was the usual process when a client comes to you and says, We need some video, Darren? What's the usual process for any normal video production agency and what you were doing for years? What's the normal process there?

SPEAKER_02 5:53

Client clients would come to us and um essentially brief us in with a broken brief, of course. Um they brief us in the best they can, but they generally don't have all the information that they need in order to brief us in clearly and concisely. Um and then they would ask for some sort of either a propo proposal, a scope. Um often it's as far as like an entire creative deck and strategy. Sometimes it's as simple as a budget. Um and that's how we, you know, we we would hopefully in the best case scenario, I just need to deliver a quote because I can whip up a quote in one or two hours. But often we were putting in days to develop a creative deck and try to wow them, essentially.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

And why were you trying to wow them?

SPEAKER_02 6:41

Well, because I wanted to win their business, right? Yeah, I wanted to win their business, and the only way I knew how was to was to use our creative deck and our visuals and our and our pitch to try to to try to win them over.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

And what and what was the conversion rate like on that?

SPEAKER_02 6:59

I don't know what it was like then, but it has significantly improved since I've been um been working on the paid discovery method.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

So paid discovery okay, so for those that don't know, paid discovery is is what exactly?

SPEAKER_02 7:15

Yeah, paid discovery is a way to, you know, when clients come to us, a paid discovery is a way to filter out if they're serious and then have them um put a few dollars towards us putting our best put foot forward into a pitch or a creative deck. And by them paying, it one shows that they're serious about the project and it's actually happening. And two, it allows us to allocate resources to put together something that's actually good. Um and it allows us to put time aside and put my team aside into delivering visuals that are actually gonna uh work for them and do the best work for them. But yeah, the goal is like low ticket, so like low enough cost that they want to say yes, but enough that, you know, enough, enough that we can we can cover our bases, but also that we know that this project's actually happening. What happens a lot of the time is that um clients uh go out, and I, you know, I might do the same, I might do the same thing if I was in their shoes, but go out and talk to a bunch of people to see, you know, product a bunch of production companies to see who's interested without knowing that the project's actually green lit. And then often brands who move really quickly cancel, cancel things, move, move on, change their mind. Um the paid discovery, one of the biggest benefits is actually that I've filtered out the folks that are serious who actually have something that's actually going to turn into work, and the folks that are just kind of interested.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

How many times before doing paid discovery, how many, how often was it that you reckoned that you were just there to make up the lineup? Like they'd already chosen the vendor, but they needed three quotes, and so they just came to you to get a quote so that they could satisfy whoever was paying the bill.

SPEAKER_02 8:57

Yeah, it's probably half the time. Probably half the time where it just it it it never ended up happening or the project was gonna go somewhere else and we just need to be an another another count. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

And and so in the web world, this is really common, right? Paid discovery is well, actually, it's not that common. I think it's more I think it's less common in the video production world. I don't know many video production agencies, and I know you're a bit more than a video production agency, which we'll talk about, but I don't know many video agencies that are doing paid discovery. Um I know many web agencies that are, and that's because there's a lot of technical shit in web, right? It's like, well, we need to integrate the website into this weird API thing that we've never heard of, and there's this other CRM in the back end, and there's gonna be 14 people approving a blog post before it goes live, and so we've got to build that kind of editorial publishing workflow. So there's a lot of technical stuff that needs to be worked out before you can give someone an accurate price on how much it's gonna cost to build a website, right? And I know I I know there's probably some scope variables with video as well, but um what I'm curious about is like, do people look at you like you're insane when you try and charge them for paid discovery to make a video? Nope. Never. Nope, never. Okay, so so what what what if like do you get any pushback? And if so, like what what what did you what are the usual objections that people have?

SPEAKER_02 10:20

It's just if there's any if the I don't know if we've ever had any pushback. It just it reveals that they didn't that that they weren't even greenlit on their end to proceed. Right. That's what it reveals. Right. Um so I I haven't necessarily had pushback, but also because of the cost of the paid discovery, which ours isn't ours isn't low cost, ours isn't cheap anymore. It's just that it's it's it's it's probably low cost for our clients. Um and so yeah, essentially just it's it it it shows who's serious and who's not and and and that's really it, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:57

I'm imagining that it doesn't work all the time. I'm imagining that there are there's some times where you know, like I like if a real estate agent came along and said, Hey, listen, I've got this new property that's on the market, I need you to go and do a bunch of drone shots and a walkthrough and a 360 and whatever, right? Well, you know, and I go, well, it's gonna cost you 1200 bucks to scope it out. He's gonna go, well, what do you what are you talking about? I just scoped it out. I just like go look at our website, that's you know, so it I I I imagine it doesn't work all the time, right?

SPEAKER_02 11:27

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Are there clients that come to you and they and like the brief is so tight, they know exact they've got a shot list, they know exactly what they want, where it just it kind of would be counterproductive and wouldn't make sense to pitch them paid discovery.

SPEAKER_02 11:41

Yes, absolutely. Just in the case that you're saying, like if they know what they want and we're just trying to provide service, like a a small portion of our services and not the whole the whole pizza, essentially, um, then then what I do in order to not waste either myself or our prospect clients' time is I just I can quickly in in a few moments tell them what the ballpark budget is and see if that's like do you want me to proceed with getting line item budget? Does 10k work? Does 30k work? Yeah. Um, and you want me to proceed with this? And and and that that's that's been another way where I've like minimized my time of putting together documentations for for no real reason. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

And then on the back of what I now what I'm curious about is because I know how this works in the digital space, right? In like web and SEO and paid ads and content, all that kind of stuff. But how does it work? I'm curious. Once you've gone through a paid discovery workshop or a session with a client, how does that impact the shoot and the post-production and the deliverables? Like how does that, what's the flow and effect of doing that up that work up front?

SPEAKER_02 12:46

Well, so once we've delivered our creative deck, our you know, what you call you've called a roadmap, but in our sense, it's like creative ideas that can help them win on social media. Then now, I mean, there's a few things that have happened. Now we've had a number of meetings, likely with stakeholders and senior, senior leaders who now know us, they start to like us. There's a relationship that's begun to build. And so by the time we've actually delivered the ideas, assuming they're great, which thankfully, because of the team here, they always are. Um, then it's just essentially we're now in the boardroom with them, defining their ideas at phase one. We're not being handed you know broken briefs and broken ideas later down the line when the deadlines are in a month or in two weeks. So we're in the ideation phase together. And then it's essentially, for the most part, it's green light. Let's get to work.

SPEAKER_00 13:38

And and then so, you know, does it reduce the kind of the amount of surprises that happen on set?

SPEAKER_02 13:43

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, knowing their the three quest, the three biggest questions I ask is what are your goals? What's your audience, and what are your KPIs? There's a whole bunch of other questions I ask that are in the details, like which platforms? Is it Instagram, is it TikTok, whatever? But goals, audience, KPIs. And when we define those ahead of time, and when my entire team knows what their actual goals are, is it just views on TikTok? Is it brand awareness? Is it um successful shoe launch? Uh, is it conversion? Um, once we know that, everything that happens after that just needs to ladder up to the goals. It's like it actually like simplifies everything. We're not like I always say, like our goal isn't to create the most, um, we're not the type of people that just want to go out and create pretty visuals. Like that exists. Pretty visuals exist. Anyone can make pretty visuals. Our goal is to help our clients like move the needle and deliver results. And so if we know the results that they want, we can work together to like achieve those.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

And and I'm curious, like this is something that even, you know, this is something that people that that like conversion rate optimization specialists are nervous about getting measured on conversions, right? And like they're the ones, like they're they're they're they're the pointy end of the stick, right? Like people that build websites, people that build websites, like well, I built your website, man, here it is, and like whatever happens now is up to you, right? People who do SEO are also like they measure, like, you know, I've been talking about this in the podcast recently, it's like they measure traffic. It's like, well, traffic's traffic's disappearing because of the AI search results, right? Like more than 60% of Google searches now end without a click, right? So as a video production agency, how do you feel about like getting involved in the conversation with a client about conversions? Because there's a there's post-click or post-watch, if you like, post-video view, there's uh there's like 9,000 things that you can't control. So how does like does that make you nervous that well they're gonna judge our work if their launches are flop, but the reality is that the supply chain shit itself and they couldn't get stock and everything got expensive because of the war in Iran and you know, like whatever the thing is?

SPEAKER_02 15:59

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, uh a lot a lot of what we're looking to do is we're helping to build brands. So we're looking for brand awareness, consideration, interest, conversion. You know, I did mention it, conversion it is sometimes part of the picture. Like sometimes we develop uh paid content, like creative that's gonna go to paid, but it's like that's that's not that's not generally the main purpose. It's usually uh long-term brand building, brand recognition, helping with brand recall that will then down the road uh create conversion. So um, yeah, yeah, we're not totally in the conversion game.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Got it. Yeah, because it's I mean, it's it's it's all connected, right? But yeah, um, I was just um, you know, like if you're growing, and so you're sort of more top of funnel, growing brand awareness, like getting the brands in front of more people. I want to talk about some of your clients in a minute and and like how you get in front of people. Um and so if you were doing like creative for retargeting ads, you know, or video for like can't abandon sequences, then you'd probably be that that conversion piece, you'd have more pressure on you for that conversion piece. But I understand now you're sort of doing more type of funnel reach. Um some dude, every time we so full transparency, you're in Mavericks Club, right? You've been in, I don't know, how long you've been in Mavericks Club now? Uh year and a half. Yeah, is that all? A year and a half. Cheers, I feel like you've been around for 10 years. Um Well, I think it's because you just and like I'm not saying this to for any other reason other than it's the truth, right? You just take such massive action that you're always popping up in Slack with these wins. Um but you're always so humble when you introduce yourself to other people in Mavericks Club. And I'm always doing going, hang on a second, dude. Tell us who some of your clients are.

SPEAKER_02 17:37

So Darren, tell us who some of your clients are. Yeah. Yeah, we work with we work with brands in uh we kind of niche down, especially since I joined Mavericks. I really niche laser focused into social media and brands in outdoor and sports. So the brands we work with are uh Red Bull, Lululemon, ArcTaryx, Meta, uh Brooks Running, uh Mountain Hardware. These are all brands that are often retail brands and and and CPG brands, but they all uh have outdoor and sport in their DNA. Um and that's what we know, and that's what we uh have doubled down into.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

What's CPG just for the uninitiated? Um consumer package goods. Consumer package goods. Um uh so so how do what have you done to get like how do you get these clients? Like, I don't imagine you're going to BI breakfast on a Wednesday morning. I don't imagine that's where you're meeting your clients. So, like, how do you get in front of more people? Kind of teeing you up here to talk a little bit about what we've worked on together. Um, how do you get in front of more people? How do you land these clients? How do you attract them? Because I know a lot of people listen to this going, how the frickin' hell do you get into a conversation with Red Bull and Lululemon and Meta?

SPEAKER_02 18:54

It's a great question. Uh, and and I and I and it's hard to really know what I did in the past, like previously, but uh historically it's been like long-term, long-term relationship building. How? Um partying, being out, being out in like being out at events, leave the building, like leave the house, go outside, meet real people. Yeah, like a lot of the folks that I kind of spend my 20s with are now brand marketers and VPs of marketing at these organizations I've mentioned. Um that does take time, but it's it spreads because they refer, right? So referrals has been number one historically. Um what I've done recently is um our presence, like building authority and showing expertise uh online through platforms uh like LinkedIn, primarily, uh Instagram as well. But essentially what I try to do is brain dump value that's specifically communicating to my ICP, my ideal client persona, which is a brand marketer. I'm brain dumping anything I've learned and I'm just delivering value. I'm just giving it away for free. I'm rarely, rarely asking for anything. There's rarely a call to action. It's just here's what I'm seeing right now. This is what I think is cool. This is what I think is performing, this is what I think is working. There's here's my opinions. And I just do that on an ongoing basis. And now we have like a whole system with recordings that we do on an ongoing basis. But when I started only about a year and a half ago, it's when I started with Mavericks, is I just did it scrappy. It was words on LinkedIn, there was no video, sometimes add a photo, and that's fine. Like that's where I started. And it really like LinkedIn has really started to become uh my I should, it's never LinkedIn, it's not the platform, it's like our strategy within LinkedIn has become the biggest lever. Um, lead magnets have also worked for us. So developing this is again like developing free resources. So usually it's a what's coming up right now is the outdoor and sport social report 2027. So I looked at a whole bunch of data for 2026 and I used that data to inform what 2027 looks like for brands on social media who are in outdoor and sport. So and I found a whole bunch of interesting stuff on um world building, developing a series for social, um, how to create content that doesn't look like an ad, because if it looks like an ad, it's not gonna perform. And I put all of that into a into a report and I'm giving that away for free.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Dude, can you send me that by the way? Dude, there is so much I want to unpack here. And I am not gonna take credit for any of this because you're a very smart guy, you're a massive action taker. I know you learn stuff from us, but you t you you do exactly what I keep telling people to do take it, tweak it, make it your own, right? Put your own spin on it. Um, couple of things the outdoor sport social report. It's fantastic. It's and it's a rhyming couplet, too, dude. Like bonus points for that. Um The framework that you just talked about is a framework that I actually uh I have not taught, but it's a framework that I've learnt. Your your LinkedIn strategy, which is to your content strategy, which is like look at what's happening in the broader marketplace, right? So that's what I call the journalist. So you basically just go out and report on what's what's working, right? Might be your clients, might be other clients that you're other brands that you're watching and having success, and you kind of do a case study and you model what's going on, right? So that instantly, without even trying, that instantly uh helps you become an authority because you've just done the work. Like you think about any news reporter, if you met a news reporter in real life, you would want to meet them. You'd be, oh my god, I see you on TV and I like consume all your content, I'll read your articles, and like you are the person that brings me the news, right? So instant authority. The second piece is you're then saying, here's what here's my take on it, right? So so now, and and again, without sort of you know using the buzzwords and you know being a wanker about it, like like we say in Australia, but that that kind of now positions you as you as a thought leader. It's like, well, here's what's happening from a journalistic point of view, here's my take on it, because you know, I have some opinions and I have some experience, and here's what I think you should do next. And here's the report, here's the playbook for 2027, right? That's gold. That's a really good framework. Um talk to me about the 25 conversations in 25 days or whatever it was.

SPEAKER_02 23:28

Yeah, I think you, you know, at one point in time I learned to to if you want to sharpen your offer, if you want to learn from your ICP, your ideal client person or profile or persona, um it's best to just try to book a 15-minute call with them and ask them a few questions. Um Radical. And so I'm yeah, yeah, I'm doing that on an ongoing, I'm doing that on an ongoing basis. Um, and I have some automations that help with with outreach, but these are folks that are that I think that I could provide value to, and they could provide value to me. And what I'm trying to learn is um, hey, listen, I'm gonna steer the ship in this one direction. This is my new offer. What we're trying to do is create an always-on content engine because social media never sleeps, and campaigns spike and fade. So these are the two forks in the road. Uh, which direction do you think we should go based on your knowledge of brand marketing? This is a question I'm always asking and I want to learn because I don't have a definitive answer for it. So speaking with these folks, these smart marketers, helps me sharpen my offering. And then they can ask me anything in return. So often they're just asking for social media strategy and social media tips and like, how do you go about this? Just because they know they generally know uh what Magnifier is by the time they've gone onto the call. Um then there's just a percentage of folks that uh after the call will say, Listen, we should keep talking. What you what you do at Magnifier could actually benefit us. Um and so far, there's not a huge number of those folks, and that's never like the only purpose of the call, but that has converted probably um six or seven hundred thousand dollars in the last 12 months.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

And and sorry, sorry, just for a moment again, what did you spend on advertising to get that revenue? We haven't spent anything yet. There we go. There we go, ladies and gentlemen. There we go. I hope you're making notes. So we have a challenge in Mavericks Club called 100 Conversations in 90 Days. It's deliberately supposed to be a lot, right? It's like I take a little bit of a I mean, you know Love you, Mohim. Hormozie puts out a lot of great content. I'm not sure how much of it is unique or original, uh, but you know, he's put he's it's incredibly valuable if you just hang out with him and kind of learn from consuming his content. One of the things he constantly talks about is you just have to put in an unreasonable amount of effort into something, and and eventually you'll win, right? You just can't not. It's like energy in, energy out, which is why we set that charge. A hundred conversations in 90 days, right? It's seven and a half conversations a week for 13 weeks, which is a quarter of the year, it's three months. You do that, you have a hundred conversations with you who you think is your ICP, and what happens is your ICP reveals themselves because you talk to a bunch of people that you know you just do not want to work with because they're just a lunatic, right? And they're a pain in the ass, or their expectations are too high, or they're going to micromanage you, or whatever, or they don't have the budget, so you rule them out, and then you kind of dial in your ICP, and then your offer kind of writes itself because you watch what people connect to and what gets them to convert. And so there's a whole bunch of other shit that you don't need to do now and you don't need to talk about because nobody wants it, even though we thought it was a good idea. So that's the challenge that we set. Um, you did you put a post on LinkedIn, I think you shared it in Slack, it had a bunch of comments, you booked a bunch of calls from it. Um, and uh and so you know, again, that's like I just think that's you know, Gary V talks about just opening your phone and just making a video for everyone in your phone, right? Hey, it's Troy here, I've got this new thing I'm starting, and we you're in my phone, we must know each other somehow, right? Like uh if you know anyone, not you, but if you know anyone who needs this stuff, let them know, right? Like, it's right there in front of you. Like you the people that you've got access to are the people that you should be talking to. Rather than like running ads or doing cold outreach and trying to convince strangers to get into bed with you, why don't we just talk to the people who we already have a relationship with? Uh so well done. Um, just to kind of also put a uh sort of a bow around this part of the conversation, what's revenue look like from when you started with us to where you are now? And again, I don't know, I'm not taking credit for this, you've done the work, but I'm just curious like what you can attribute that to.

SPEAKER_02 27:40

Revenue uh about a year and a half ago when we started with Agency Mavericks was was basically a million dollars. Um, and then now we are at 2.5 million. Wow. Wow, so it happened fast. We like doubled. We we we doubled 2025 to 2026, we doubled very quick. Um, what can I attribute to? It's like it's never one thing. It's it's it's like all these things combined. It's hard for me to really like pinpoint. I wish I could pinpoint and double down, but LinkedIn is like our presence and our strategies and our communications through LinkedIn is probably number one right beside referrals. Um and then uh from there, I believe it's having a sharp offering on our website, which I learned from those hundred calls in a hundred days ongoing. Um and then uh and then I believe the the you know the curious student approach, which is well, which is what I call the hundred calls in a hundred days, same thing. And then and then our you know, giving free resources and free information um on an ongoing basis to uh to folks that that like sign up for our free free resource. Yeah. Those that's probably in the order of what's working the best.

SPEAKER_00 28:51

Yeah. So so um you know, I'm genuinely curious about this. This, you know, like why did you what at some point you felt like you couldn't figure this out on your own? And you you you joined us and you know you've had a lot of success. Well done. Um why? Like, why didn't you just I mean you're a smart dude? Why didn't you just go, I'm just gonna double down and figure this shit out instead of you know investing in mentoring?

SPEAKER_02 29:16

I just like I was just stuck and didn't know. I I don't know, okay. So, first of all, I know nothing about sales. Like I'm not saying like I know nothing about sales. Now that's kind of what I do here. Like, I don't use the S-word because I am still very involved in like the creative development from the very high level onward uh downwards. But I am not a salesperson, and um a lot of the stuff that I learned here um learned at agency Mavericks was essentially sales strategies for my exact business. It's like a small digital agency. And so if I wanted to do it the slow way, I would use Google and I would maybe consume hormose in my spare time or whatever, but I needed to do it quickly because the business was up and down and then down again and then up, and then like it was scary. Like the SIP, the ship, the ship was beginning uh to sink and it was not fully afloat, and uh I didn't know where to steer it. Um, and so learning from other folks in the same exact situation um is always helpful, and just learning certain strategies and then taking that and making my own has been uh a game changer.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

Uh you you uh it's interesting because your business model or the services that you deliver um are typically like we typically attract web design SEO content, you know, at agencies. So you're a little bit of an outlier there. But in terms of mindset, well you were an outlier, I don't think you are now. In terms of mindset and action, uh you're the perfect client for us, right? And um which is why when you reached out and we were having a conversation about getting on the podcast, I'm like, yes, because I just want you know, if people can hear if people can identify them a little bit of themselves in you, right? That that very I mean, full transparency, you are exactly the kind of client that we want more of. Um people who can probably figure it out themselves, but just don't. I mean, I I spend half of my I spend most of my life feeling like I've missed a memo, right? Like everyone else got the memo. And I missed a really important meeting and I'm gonna get into trouble. I I spend most of my life feeling that's like so I need to be around people who I think have got shit sorted out just so I feel like I'm not missing out on a little nugget or a like a really important email that I sub that everyone else in the world got except me. Um so uh thanks for being a part of it, first of all, and thank you for taking so much action and um and thanks for being a great um inspiration in our community because I know when you share things in Slack and people see it, it inspires them to do more and and to take action. Hey, if at any point you are hanging out on our YouTube channel or listening to the podcast or consuming our content, perhaps getting our emails, and you just know that it is time to take your agency to the next level, then go to the agencyhour.com slash headless and see if you qualify to work with us inside Mavericks Club. There are three things we do for the agencies that we work with is we help you dial in paid discovery so that you can get paid to lay out a strategy and a plan for your clients, and this will help you attract the best clients that you've ever had and reduce scope creep and help you get paid up front. We then help you turn those clients into recurring revenues through growth plans, and then we help you dial in AI so that you and your team are not spending the rest of your life looking at a computer screen smacking away on a keyboard. So go to the agencyhow.com slash headless and see if you qualify to work with us. I want to pivot a little bit now and talk um, you know, the the outdoor sports, social report. What are your and purely this is me purely selfishly just wanting to pick your brain now so I can learn. What is what's changed on I mean, social media is changing every week, but what's changed recently and what's working now that you think we can all harness or that we can all apply?

SPEAKER_02 33:14

The biggest change in 2026 right now is that with the rise of AI, it has become very cheap, if not free, to create polished content. So what's happened is I actually thought that I actually thought that this whole AI creation of content was going to damage our business, and it's actually gone the total opposite direction because audiences are losing trust in brands that are using AI to generate entirely AI generated content. It feels fake, there's no real human there, it doesn't feel uh authentic, and there's and the trust is lost. So what's actually happened is is we've, as audiences, we've doubled down and we're more interested in um human craft, uh, human connection, and the things that make people human, the real human condition, failure, success, hardship, making it to the peak, falling down to the valley, blood, sweat, and tears is what's resonating with audiences across social and across all of marketing. It's actually going the opposite direction that I thought. And so what I try to tell every brand marketer right now is to double down on human craft. So talk about how the sausage was made. If you if you're Nike, talk about how the shoe was developed. Um, show me the what went behind that that amazing photograph that ended up being in the campaign. Show me behind the scenes of a film, of a film production set that shows the crew working and the craft that goes into it. We've seen brands like Apple do this, where they their new logo was done practically when it looks like it's CGI or visual effects. Aura Ring just came out with a miniature, it's a commercial using finger puppets because it's a ring, right? And it's all miniatures built that looks like it would have taken months of planning. Um showing the behind the scenes of the craft that's going into either the product being made or the marketing visuals uh being made is what's um starting to pop off and what's going to continue to uh perform uh with audiences on social.

SPEAKER_00 35:15

So note to Troy all of those AI uh, you know, clone avatar software things popping up in your feed, just ignore them, right? Like manage your FOMO and you know, don't try and duplicate yourself with an AI clone and put out 8,000 videos a week that aren't you. Uh because it's appealing. It's appealing, dude. Like it's like I make video. Like my daughter was driving to school the other day, my daughter says she's six, and she goes, Dad, what do you do for work? I'm like, Oh Jesus, this is a long conversation. Um, there are, you know, my son thinks that I make videos, I give most of them away for free, and I charge for other videos. That's he thinks that's the business that I'm in. And um, and it's appealing. It's like uh making videos is it takes time, right? And it's a it's a long process, there's a lot of hard work. Like, it's really appealing for me to go, I want to make a new video. I'd love to just like have a perfect AI clone of myself, give it a script and spit out a video in a couple of minutes. Problem is I can't get any of those softwares to sound Australian. They all make me sound like I'm either South African or New Zealand, so I can't solve that problem. Um, but every time I every time I start on that journey as well, I have this feeling that like I'm gonna know it's not me. You know, and I think, and I say this humbly, if you've got the skills to sit in front of the camera or behind the microphone and connect with people authentically, then you should do that. Right? I I think people who are using AI don't have the skills to do that, they don't have the personality or the desire or they're too self-conscious to be on camera or whatever it is, right? And so I keep reminding myself I've got the skills, so just do it. Just like be human, be authentic. Um so so so where does AI fit into the workflow then? Like how because I mean the horse is bolted, right? We can't uninvent the car. AI is here, it's here to stay, it's not going anywhere. Are you using it in your workflow? Where do you use it? Where should we, as content creators and marketers, where should we be using AI to help us rather than just producing AI UGC, right? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:14

So even though it sounds like I'm kind of bashing AI, it's actually we use AI everywhere else except for the creation of the product. So everywhere else, right? Yeah, um, thankfully, like it's helped me out so much because my job is essentially like bringing in business, growing the business, and then defining the very high level, high-level creative, the SOW, the contract, and then like handing that off to my team of professionals who crush it behind cameras and and uh in post-production. So for me, like a lot of what I'm doing is like documents and like gathering information and and and writing and writing emails and uh cash flow forecasts and financial things. So AI has helped me and the rest of the team with all of that remedial stuff. It like blows my mind thinking how much computing we were doing, whereas now I'm just talking to the computer and the computer's doing the computing. Um so yeah, it's everywhere but my product is where we use AI.

SPEAKER_00 38:18

Yep, yep, perfect. Love it. Yeah, same. I mean, uh, it's you know, we're I'm all in on clawed code and Victor is and Whisperflow is my stack. I mean, it's just like I just talk to it all day long and it does the computing, right? Um I'm I probably won't share this because I won't share it publicly because uh the video because it's my son and he's only nine. But he was in, he was home from school yesterday and he was in the office with me and I said, Right, um, I need some help. I said, I've got to fix my camera settings. I'm on a mission to make uh my content look like it's television production quality, right? Even though I'm shooting on uh small sensor A6400 Sony cameras, I'm not shooting on full, you know, full frame. So I've got some restrictions, but that's okay. I don't want to spend 20 grand on new gear. I just want to use AI to do the post-production, the colour grading, all that kind of stuff, and make it look and sound as high quality as I can. So I put Oscar in the seat here yesterday and I said, right, sit here. I'm gonna play with my lights and the camera. And anyway, then I put together a script for him and I put it on a teleprompter, and it was all about uh the in in Australia here we're in trade season for the AFL, which is the football where all the players get traded. And so we had Claude write up a script, a summary of it, and put it on a teleprompter. He read the teleprompter, he fucking nailed it. Like, first pop, reading it, first time ever reading a teleprompter. I was like, dude, you've got a real knack for this. And then I gave it to Claude and Tesseract to edit it and all the motion graphics and all the lower thirds, and everything was done by AI. It blew my mind. I was like, holy shit, this is a new frontier. Um so, so with you know, and again, this is for my own FOMO and my own probably undiagnosed hyper focus ADHD. If you've got limited resources and there's TikTok and there's YouTube shorts, and there's Instagram reels, and there's Facebook, and there's LinkedIn, and there's YouTube long form, which I'm a big fan of, and there's the podcast that we put out. How do you create content that works on all platforms or all channels, or should you be doing that?

SPEAKER_02 40:18

Yeah, there's there's there's a ton of different strategies of how to create content that's specifically built to perform across the three the three major audiences, which is TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts. Um and without going into all the fine details, you know, TikTok is is really incredible for brand awareness. YouTube is great for education. Um and Instagram is good for more premium uh catered content to your existing audience, a little bit of your new audience. Um, but essentially, uh one way we've gone about it, because we we we knew that brand marketers were struggling to create content across all platforms because they got overwhelmed as soon as TikTok was on the rise, and now their leadership's saying you need to be on every platform, which is like bananas to just think about. So, what we did is we developed this this process while we're filming our main objective, like our hero film, our brand anthem, or our big moment, or our athlete announcement. Um, that's the hero asset. Well, we're while we're in production for that, we develop about eight shoulder assets throughout each production day. And what I found is those eight shoulder assets, those are strategically uh optimized or planned and created to perform uh across TikTok and Instagram and YouTube shorts specifically to those platforms. And what we found is when we created these eight shoulder assets while um creating the hero film, um, those eight shoulder assets outperformed the hero by about 20x in terms of reach. Um, this was like crazy information, crazy data that I pulled over six years of us kind of doing this approach. And I couldn't believe it. And then I looked online and I saw other brands kind of doing the same approach. We call it the content pyramid approach. Other people just call it whatever they want. Um, but this is an approach where you don't have to worry about trying to reallocate new dollars and time and budget to a whole new thing that's going to be built for TikTok. You can take your existing uh content capture and you can develop ideas that ladder up to TikTok specifically and YouTube Shorts specifically without needing extra people on set, new talent, new crew, and you can do these types of these types of shoulder assets in between uh takes of the hero.

SPEAKER_00 42:33

Got it. So, so I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of just go a little bit deep on this. Purely self-interest here, right? Um but like give me an example of how you would what what is different about TikTok? I get Instagram. Instagram is is like purely aesthetic, and it's like, you know, Instagram is for like that's where the beautiful people hang out, right? Um, which is why I'm not on Instagram. Uh YouTube Shorts, I get completely educational. I love YouTube as my favorite platform. TikTok, I I'm not, I don't, you know, I'm not there, I don't use it. Uh is it about dancing? Is it someone said to me recently, think of TikTok as FaceTime. You you like you the way you interact with people on TikTok is you're looking straight down the barrel and it's just like you're on FaceTime or something. So give me an example. If you're doing something, if you're like shooting some behind-the-scenes stuff with these shoulder assets, what would be different between YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram?

SPEAKER_02 43:23

Sure. Yeah, with with Instagram, what you could do is you could take the the hero campaign, the hero asset you're building, and you could uh take moments of that and tell a slightly net news story uh that's built to perform on Instagram. So it's got a hook, it's got kicks, it's short form, um, it's built to perform. Uh TikTok, what I would do on that same shoot day with TikTok is I would have the talent or the athlete or the ambassador um show me a day in the life of this talent throughout a shoot day with with with uh Nike or Arterix or whatever the brand is. And so you're breaking the fourth wall, you're showing set, and you're bringing personality into The content. So it's designed to it's it's essentially brand awareness and entertainment and personality, and you're breaking the fourth wall. That would be a good example of something on that same shoot day for TikTok. Uh for YouTube Shorts, what you could do is you could have the lead designer on set, the designer that essentially developed the new shoe that's being launched for Nike or whatever the brand is. And the lead designer tells you three things that are important about the design of this shoe and why uh this was his or her best shoe that they've ever designed.

SPEAKER_00 44:31

Dude. Dude. That's a that is that is a master class right there. And you have just given me this, you've just given me a great idea. I have two cameras set up here on the podcast. I this one's off at the moment. I'm just looking down the barrel of camera A. I'm gonna turn camera B on from now on and shoot me side view on the podcast so that when I capture some gold, if I do, that I can share that. I'm also just decided I've got a a stand with an iPhone holder on it. My phone should be there, just off camera. And before we go live, I can just look straight down the barrel of the iPhone and treat that like TikTok, treat this like the long form, cut stuff out of the podcast for Instagram with a hook, treat camera B here as maybe behind the scenes stuff uh for Instagram or YouTube. At the end of the podcast, I can also turn to camera B here and look straight down the barrel and do some educational stuff for YouTube. So, dude, I've just been trying to like take the long form video that we make, chop up the shorts, and then put the same shorts on each platform, right?

SPEAKER_01 45:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:35

And now with Claude Code and Tesseract and DaVinci, because Claude Code's completely operating Da Vinci Resolve now, right? So the reality is by the time I get off this shoot with you, within about an hour and a half, this entire thing's edited by Claude Code in DaVinci Resolve with all the lower thirds, the cards, everything done, right? And then we just go into shorts production. It's like it's insane. Okay, so that that's that's an insane masterclass. I hope you're all paying attention and making notes. Um if a brand if a brand could only invest in one social strategy for 2027, I'm looping back to your outdoor sports social report, which I love the name of, and I'm gonna steal. Uh, what would it be? What's the one social strategy for 2027 that that we should be focusing on?

SPEAKER_02 46:23

Brands should focus less on creating campaign polished advertising visuals and dumping that on onto their social accounts because we all know that doesn't perform and it never has, and they should focus on creating uh something recurring or world building. So world building is creating a consistent look. It can be for 20 years like Yeti's done, or it can be for six posts over the course of a month, like Satisfy Running does. But create a world, a repeatable look, a repeatable uh uh vibe, or a repeatable series, so a hosted series that can live for more long term, three to 12 months. This has been something that has um been performing with brands outside outdoor and sport. So brands and fashion is what I look look into a lot, but no one's doing this in outdoor and sport. In fact, it's like 0.73% of the accounts that I audited across 4,000 posts uh showed that brands were uh were focusing on a recurring format or world building. So that's the number one focal point that I think brands should focus on in 2027.

SPEAKER_00 47:26

Love it, love it, love it, love it. And if you think if you think about, you know, uh, like I'm thinking about Brunson with his book Expert Secrets, and he talks all about like I mean, you know, I mean, you get you gotta you gotta remember this is marketing, right? Marketing's all about seduction manipulation, right? So use it for good. But he talks about building a cult, right? And he talks about the the reason that cults work is because it's world building, uh, they have their own language, they have their own lingo that no one else understands, right? It's a bit like Mavericks Club, right? Um, you know, it's it is a little world that you can inhabit. And uh, you know, also the thing that uh that we've learned about YouTube, which we're not doing very we're not doing very well, but we're working towards that, is that the cut your content should be binge worthy, right? Like short short uh episodes, short form, I mean long form content these days on YouTube is anywhere sort of from seven to twelve minutes, but it's it it's like a cliffhanger, it's binge worthy. At the end of it, it's like I've got to watch the next video because that was super helpful. And people can get through a seven-minute YouTube video. I follow a bunch of music channels, right? That are really good at doing this. Um they do long form stuff, but they'll also do like, you know, a guitar player will do like, well, here's here's the A minor pentatonic, like you've never heard it. And it's like an it's like everyone knows the A minor pentatonic, but here's my take on it, here's something you've never heard. And then the end of that video is like, now if you want to see what I do with the E-minor pentatonic, watch the next video. And it's like, well, of course I'm gonna watch the next video. And before you know it, your entire YouTube feed is this new guitar player, this new guitar teacher that you've never heard of, and of course he's got a course. So yeah, binge worthy, binge-worthy content that is consistent, consistent look, same host, right? Um it's it's it's uh I think brands need to start thinking uh like YouTubers, right? Like if you're on YouTube, brands need to start thinking like YouTubers. YouTubers have said that the future of YouTube is television and the future of television is YouTube. YouTube's the number one streamed platform on on large screen TVs now, right? So uh so you're right. Like, don't so why do you think brands are still like making big ads and putting ads on the internet? Like, is that just like old thinking that hasn't died yet? Or is it I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 49:44

Like there is a time and a place for ads, and you know, Super Bowl commercials, commercials are a great example of like effective advertising, but then there's like everything else, which is just like meh, like just like stuff that just no one wants to see because no one wants to really be advertised to, that just still so many dollars are being put and allocated towards that type of content. I don't know why brands are still doing it, but what what I think is important going forward into 2027 and beyond is brands need to think about how much value they're providing like in their content. Value we call we can say value per second, VPS, we could call it. There needs to be value every single second of organic content that's going out. And so if you're not providing value or you feel you're being sold to, then people are gonna swipe past. Ads, you know, like TV ads, like you have to sit there and wait and watch the ad. No one wants to sit there and wait and watch the ad. And also, who's watching TV? I don't know. I haven't watched TV in years. No one. So organic content needs to be built to perform and deliver value.

SPEAKER_00 50:46

Right. And like the, you know, it's funny we work in advertising, right? You know, the product is so bad when people will pay not to see it. I pay YouTube 15 bucks a month or whatever it is for YouTube premium. So I don't have to watch ads, and yet I work in advertising. It's like there's something broken here, right? Um, the product is so bad we will pay not to have to watch it. And so uh I think the de I think the problem is that brand marketers get advertising budget and then think they have to spend the advertising budget on ads. You don't. The purpose of an advertising budget is to create, if you're in, you know, depending on the the business you're in, but really is to create marketing qualified leads to to go in store and buy something or get online and buy something or go and have a chat with someone about a test driving a car, or if it if you're in the consulting space, a marketing qualified lead that goes in the sales calendar. That's the purpose of an advertising dollar. Whether you spend it on ads, whether you spend it on media buy, whether you spend it on producing great organic content, you know, we've all been in that situation where you're in someone's funnel and you have to, there's a few mouse clicks to get the link in bio to find out what this person actually does and reach out to them and go, hey, can I hire you to do a thing? Because you clearly know what you're talking about, right? And I think that's the way brands need to start thinking about it. I mean, some of the there are examples of this, right? There are examples of of brands doing this, like branded content, right? Where a brand will sponsor a short film or a brand will pay for a short film that gets played before the feature film in a cinema. It's not an ad. I think there was a great example of this. I can't remember, it was years ago. BMW made this uh short film that was a ra about a guy in a rally car. I can't remember the story. Anyway, it was like a seven-minute short film that was amazing. It played before feature films, and it was sponsored. It was the cars were all BMWs. But it wasn't an ad, it was a great piece of it was a great piece of cinema, right?

SPEAKER_01 52:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:41

Um so there are examples of this. I just I think it's just and I'm seeing in my feed there's UGC content content everywhere, and it's AI, and it's about skincare, and it's about these new shoes, and it's about this new handbag, and it's just it's mind-numbing, and I you know, I can't swipe past it quick enough. So I think everything you've said here is you know, dial in the humans, create value per second, right? Use AI to improve your workflows and and every other part of the business except the actual what's happening on camera, right? Um, stop making ads and putting them on the internet because they don't work, and we know they don't work because we can track everything, right? Um, so start, you know, start and start building binge-worthy, world-building, consistent, recurring theme content to build a try, build an audience. I mean, this kind of thinking's been around for a long time. Why do you think brands are taking so long to adopt?

SPEAKER_02 53:38

Yeah, I don't I don't know. Big large big brands are slow to move. Um, you know, smaller brands can be more agile. I I'd say Red Bull is the is the exception. Red Bull, I've, you know, I've I've I there've been a client of mine for 12 years, and I I like to say I went to the University of Red Bull 12 years ago, and I learned a ton from Red Bull. And Red Bull is doing kind of exactly all those things that you you just listed. Red Bull, Red Bull is doing and has been doing for like, I don't even know, 15, 20 years. They create entertainment. A lot of people were very confused by their business model because it is confusing. They develop incredibly entertaining media content that goes everywhere, and they have an incredible strategy as to why it goes in different places and where it goes. Um, and at the end of the day, it's just purely entertainment, inspiration, maybe a tiny little bit of education. Um, but then they sell sugar water, right? So it feels like there's a disconnect between these two things, but there isn't, right? They're the number one leader of sugar water in the world, and they are a media house. They are a massive media house um across the world.

SPEAKER_00 54:46

Yeah. And you don't have to do at you don't have to do it at that scale, right? There's no uh there's a there's a channel I watch called uh I think it's called Bat Pedal Show. They review guitar pedals, they interview musicians, like they've grown the channel to a point now where they get Noel Gallagher to come in and spend a couple of hours playing guitar and playing all the other Oasis tracks and talking about his guitars and his amps, right? It's super nerdy, super nerdy stuff if you're a Museo. And I love it. I will binge that show. I'll watch it. They also have product. I own some of their they've got some accessories that go along with pedals, right? Um, that are super expensive, they're super premium, but they're physical product, and they're manufactured by a white label manufacturer in the UK. They put their brand on it, right? But their their kind of their content budget wouldn't be anywhere near. I mean, they've just got like a little podcast set with some guitars plugged in and they bring guests in, and if there's no guests, they just review pedals. And they're not even reviewing their own pedals, they're reviewing everyone else's pedals and go, oh, by the way, every now and then they go, oh, by the way, we made this thing which might help with you know reducing electricity hum in your studio, plug this thing into your PowerPoint first, and it's it's branded as their brand, right? And so uh they didn't start off with product, they started off as a YouTube channel, and they've monetized their audience through physical product. And I think there's something that we can learn there. If you've already got product, figure out how to grow a loyal audience through video, and then you've already got a way to monetize that. And I think that's that's something that we can learn there, anyway. Um, dude, I'm respectful of your time and also the fact that this show is called the Agency Hour, and we've been here for a long time, and I could just keep having this conversation with you. Magnifier Media, M-A-G-N-A-F-I-R-E. I'll put everything that we've spoken about, links to everything we've spoken about, in the show notes for this episode. Uh, Darren Rayner, thanks for being a part of it. I appreciate you being on the agency hour and dropping heaps of value for our audience, man.

SPEAKER_02 56:41

Yeah, thank you, Troy. Really appreciate this. Great chat.

SPEAKER_00 56:44

Hey, thanks for listening to the Agency Hour podcast or watching if you're on YouTube. I appreciate all of you uh reach out to Darren. Uh, just go to Magnifier. Uh, I'll put the show notes. I'll put the link in the show notes here so you can check out the work that he's doing. Uh, if you want to work with us inside Mavericks Club, go to theagencyhour.com slash headless and see if you qualify to work with us. We do have some qualification criteria. We only take a handful of clients each month, so go to theagle.com slash headless and see if you're qualified to work with us. Subscribe, like, do all those things with the podcast, share it with someone you think may find it helpful. And if you've got a question, go to theagencyl.com slash fan mail, leave us voicemail, and I'll play it on the episode and I'll answer your question. All right, I'm Troy Dane. Let's get to work.