Orama Update #1 - Make it like George Lucas (or Gary Vee)
You may not sell figurines, but you may find a treasure hidden in your main content
Welcome to the first Orama Newsletter. I’m George, Founder/Producer at Orama, and this is a newsletter that I will send monthly mainly for clients and partners, with two goals:
Share thoughts & insights about the world of video and podcasting for brands
Keep you in the loop with the latest developments.
I promise to keep it short. Speaking of which, you're on the list (I know, it’s a cardinal sin of marketing - but I had to get started), but if you don’t want to receive it anymore, you can unsubscribe at the end of this email or click here. And if you want to share it with a colleague, they can subscribe here👇🏼
George Lucas is the richest filmmaker alive.
After the success of American Graffiti (1973), he started pitching the idea for Star Wars (1977) to the studios, but it was a struggle. It was not a great time for the US economy and movie budgets, and the idea was literally too “out there”. Disney didn’t want it. Warner didn’t want it. Eventually, he secured a deal with Fox. They agreed by allocating a relatively small budget of around $10m and keeping all the movie's rights. This was unusual as movie directors usually keep some distribution rights. But instead of fighting for what looked like the main prize, Lucas negotiated to retain all merchandising rights and even accepted a smaller salary. It looked like an excellent deal for Fox. Merchandise wasn't a meaningful revenue stream back then.
Eventually, Star Wars became one of the biggest franchises in cinema history. However, the franchise rights held through his company, Lucasfilm, made Lucas richer than other Hollywood giants like Steven Spielberg or James Cameron. Disney acquired it for over $4 billion in 2012.
The story doesn’t tell whether he knew what Star Wars could become (he’s a genius, right?) or was leveraging the one thing he could control
You’re not George Lucas and you don’t sell figurines for your show (not yet!), but as a creator of content for your brand, you too can find riches with derivatives of your main content.
I’ll go through two types of opportunities enabled by tech for brands creating regular long-form content via podcasts, video interviews or newsletters.
Speech-to-text tech is a big unlock
Cloud storage and speech-to-text evolution have transformed how we store, use and crate audiovisual media, but few people fully use the opportunity.
As a reference, ten years ago, I had just left a career in financial markets to launch Orama, and the first project was for a food channel. It required filming Michelin-starred chefs in various locations, editing, creating transcripts and translating them. It was a logistical nightmare of hard drives and manual work.
Today, you’d store everything in the Cloud, and more importantly, speech-to-text technology has become mainstream, making transcription and translation straightforward.
High-end editing is not quite ready to be cloud-based, but it’s coming next.
These changes allow two shifts in the workflow that unlock massive opportunities:
Store audio and video content to transform it into active libraries rather than piles of hard drives (OK, I still have loads of hard drives, but all they do is gather dust)
Make it easy to select extracts from large quantities of content
Creating short-form content
If you’re a client, you’re probably familiar with this, and you can skip to the less obvious, but finding opportunities to create more short-form content is usually one of the first things we look at.
We see clients getting thousands of views and boosting growth even without a large starting audience to the point where the short form can become the main content of a channel.
You can extract short-form clips from any long-form content: podcasts, webinars, conferences, testimonials, etc.
If you go for vertical or square formats under 60 seconds, it can be posted across Instagram & Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and LinkedIn. You don’t need video content. Any audio can be transformed into short clips.
Longer segments also work well. Here’s an 8-minute edited clip from my podcast. The masters of this art are podcasters Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan.
And if you have a well-organized library of transcripted content, you can source relevant segments from the past and post them based on what’s trending today.
Short-form content is not quite at the Star Wars figurine level - but it's up there in terms of efforts/results.
Other ways to maximize content
While snippets, or “Shorts,” have become common, here are a few more ideas I see more rarely. To keep it concise, I refer to one Creator and one example of how brands can copy the idea.
Video->Audio
Ex: YouTuber Patrick Boyle posts the audio content of his videos.
For brands: If you record testimonials - you can transform them into podcasts with little effort. Just don’t call it a testimonial podcast! Say you are going to your client’s office with a camera crew to record 5 minutes worth of soundbites. Try extending the conversation into a podcast about their success story.
Text-> Audio
Ex: The Pomp newsletter (Anthony Pompliano) comes as a podcast.
If you have a newsletter and read it, you have a podcast. This could be a way to reach a different audience, like those who listen to podcasts when they drive.
Everything → Text
Using transcripts to create articles is quite an easy one. In the Fintech space, I like how Lex Sokolin (Fintech Blueprint) or Solenne Niedercorn-Desouches (Finscale) create an in-depth write-up around each conversation. If you’re short on time, you can also use my technique: copy-paste three quotes, add comments and voila!
You know you've made it when you start selling merch from your show. If you’re not there yet, maximizing your content and transforming it into different media through an efficient storage and transcription process (or getting someone to take care of it for you) might get you there someday.
PS: after posting this, a conversation reminded me that there is a modern apostle of this re-purposing and multiplying the content: Gary Vaynerchuck. And he’s more relevant than George Lucas.
Thanks for reading - See you next month! And by the way, in case you know me from InvestOrama I still write it as a separate investment newsletter.
