The bad bad bad middle

I told our content team today that I’d be happy to spend $10,000 on a video.

In the same meeting, I told them some videos should take fifteen minutes.

I’ve been thinking about where we should spend our time and money once AI can do the easy stuff.

Today’s example comes from our content team, but I’m asking the same question across the business (and you should be too).

The $10,000 idea? Fly to Bogotá and hire a videographer to follow our head of recruitment around. Show how she works. Spend two months making something we’re proud of.

The fifteen-minute videos? Get a topic out there and see whether anybody cares.

What I’m losing patience with is the shitty middle.

Five days of work and 50 man hours to produce something that looks like it came out of a basic AI prompt.

If you spend a week on something, and I spend one prompt on it, and I can’t tell the difference, we have a problem.

Fast cheap and ehhh. Slow expensive and ART.

EXTRA TIME, EFFORT, and EXPENSE should produce something MEANINGFULLY and NOTICEABLE better.

When Bruno (our awesome Brazilian video editor) edits a video, I can tell the difference. I’m happy to pay for that. But I need him deciding where his attention will make the work better.

Some of our content should be fast easy cheap experiments. We’re trying to find out which topics people care about. We need to publish enough to learn, and we can’t do that if every attempt requires several days (or weeks!!) of production.

Mati our Youtube guy was talking about making seven-minute videos in thirty minutes. He knows they won’t look like Bruno’s work. For the channels he’s testing, that’s fine!

The Bogotá idea deserves a different budget because we’d come home with something we don’t have: footage of our people doing their jobs. We could use that for months. I’d happily pay for a good videographer and give Bruno time to edit it properly.

I get frustrated when those two assignments end up with roughly the same process.

So I want the team to decide what they’re making before they start.

If we’re testing a topic, tell me how quickly we can get it out, what we’re trying to learn, and what tradeoffs we are making

and if you want to make ART - then MAKE ART.

And if you need five days for a video, walk me through what needs those five days and why it is ginormously worth it.

Look at whatever your team spent five days on this week. How much of that time made the work better? What could you have finished in fifteen minutes, and what deserved more time than you gave it?

Yallah Habibi,

Jon