What Music Videos Taught Me About Working With Brands
I came up in the entertainment space, directing music videos and shooting portraits.
In that world, a music video isn't judged by whether it sold records. The record is its own thing. The video is something else. Success gets measured by views, and by whether the artist comes across the way they're supposed to come across.
So that's what I optimized for. Does it look incredible. Does the artist look like a star. Did it pull numbers.
That's a real skill, and I don't regret a minute of it. But it built a habit I carried straight into brand work without realizing it.
What I didn't know
When I started working with brands, I brought the same instincts. Make it beautiful. Make it feel elevated. Make people stop scrolling.
And the work looked great. That part was never the problem.
The problem is that a brand isn't measuring what an artist is measuring. A brand has inventory. A brand has a launch date. A brand has somebody internally who has to explain what they spent on content and what it did.
I wasn't thinking about ROI. Honestly, it wasn't on my radar at all. I figured if the images were strong enough, everything else would take care of itself.
It doesn't work that way. Beautiful content that isn't pointed at anything is just an expensive mood board.
What changed
The obvious answer is that my work changed. That's true, but it's the smaller half.
The bigger change happens before I ever pick up a camera.
I used to show up with a look. References, lighting ideas, a treatment that would get the brand excited. Then I'd shoot it, deliver it, and hope it landed.
Now I show up with questions.
What are you actually trying to achieve with this content. Not "what's the brand about," but what needs to happen after it goes live. Obviously you want it to look good. Everybody wants it to look good. But what's the end goal.
What product needs to move right now. Where is this content going to live, because a campaign hero and a paid ad and a product page all want different things, and pretending otherwise is how brands end up with a folder of images they can't use. Who is it actually for. And what does a win look like to you, so we can both tell afterward whether it worked.
None of that is glamorous. Some creatives find it uncomfortable, because it feels like a constraint on the work.
It's the opposite. When I know exactly what a piece has to do, I can build it to do that thing, and I can push harder creatively because I know where the edges are. Constraints are why good commercial work is good.
Why this matters if you're a brand
Here's the part worth taking away.
Whoever you hire will optimize for whatever they think success is. If they came up making pretty things, they will make you a pretty thing. It might even do numbers. But numbers aren't sales, and views aren't customers.
So ask the person you're hiring what they want to know before they shoot. If the only thing they want to talk about is the look, a look is what you're going to get.
You should get a look and an outcome. Those two aren't in conflict. The best-looking commercial work almost always had the clearest job to do.
Where I landed
I still care about the image. Deeply. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want every frame to be beautiful, and brands that settle for content that converts but looks cheap are making a different version of the same mistake.
But beautiful is the standard. It isn't the goal.
The goal is that the brand is better off after we shoot than before. That's the only version of this job worth doing, and it's the reason relationships turn into something ongoing instead of one and done.
Brands don't stay with you because you made something beautiful. They stay because something happened.
If you're a fashion, lifestyle, or beauty brand and you want content built to do something, that's the conversation I want to have. Work at jd2pictures.com.