- Duration: 41 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JQPTE7VMDNKA6C4THG55FDE8 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JQPTE7VMDNKA6C4THG55FDE8)
Transcript
[marc scarpa]: Hey, Michael, multi-step process for Zoom always, isn’t it? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it always is. [marc scarpa]: Three clicks to get into the call. I know. Why can’t one of these geniuses invent no-click interaction? [Michael Houck]: You know, it’s funny. When I joined Uber in 2016, we used Zoom. And all my friends at other companies, they were using WebEx. And Zoom was the simple one. Zoom was the straightforward, easy-to-use one. The product hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s gotten more complex in the last eight years and now it’s the complex thing. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [marc scarpa]: Well, Skype for me back in the nineties when it came out was the best. You just made a phone call and then there they were in video conferencing. And I think Skype is still better than all of them personally, but no one uses it really anymore. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. It’s it was so simple. I used um later but but a bit and uh yeah it was just you press the button and there’s the other person and that’s it yeah make a phone call there they are you took over your contacts and you were done well look man hey I’m I’m pumped to be working together uh I checked you out seems like you’ve done some amazing stuff so excited to to jam and partner up um it seems like you and tim have been working together on a bunch of stuff too so good to good to be uh yeah good to be connected Same. [marc scarpa]: You guys have done some great work. So, you know, I think, you know, we’re both contractors, right? And so, you know, our, our goals here to make sure that we can help each other, obviously, but also to make sure that our, our, we’re able to support our respective folks with inside Draper. What I’ve learned over the, you know, year or almost two years now that I’ve It’s a small family operation in many ways, but there’s a lot of people there. And a lot of them, it’s very siloed. And, you know, they’re just, it’s an incredible company. I mean, Tim is just such a, he’s just a force, you know, the third generation venture capital investor, his home runs are up there with Barry Bonds. And he’s a really polite, nice guy. Every interaction I’ve had with him has always been favorable and educational, right? And he’s very good at telling you when he’s not into something, or if he doesn’t understand something, he’ll tell you as well. But he’s really into the digital twin stuff, which is great. And now we’re moving Draper TV off of its existing platform to a new enterprise solution that will allow them to have more control over their ecosystem, but more importantly, allow them to actually get a 24-hour television network up and running vis-a-vis various carriers, whether they be Samsung or LG or Comcast or whomever they may be. That’s a longer game project, but we are looking at launching that. We’ll have a soft launch by the of this month, meaning April, we already have it running. There’s some VOD stuff that needs to happen. And we can start talking about it probably in May. The big target date for that launch is going to be in the beginning of June. There’s a specific over-the-top OTT conference that happens in Colorado that I’m trying to get them to wrap their heads around as that’s the one that we want to launch at because That’s where all the buyers are. Well, a lot of them are there to carry the channel. So there should be some social media lead up to that, some PR lead up to that, and so on. Outside of that, my contribution is really just all with the AI stuff. So we have created this doppelganger of Tim, and we do a show, as you know, every day, Draper Decentralized. Tim wants to expand the usage of that doppelganger, so we’ll use that doppelganger for things like, you know, rappers and his audio books we’re working on now and some other sets of the Draper, you know, empire, if you will. But it can be used for social, too. So if you and Michael come up with some ideas or you want to bounce some ideas around where you want to do something that’s outside of the format of Draper decentralized, meaning it could, you know, any time that you basically want Tim to actually say something on camera, you might pause and say, hmm, it might be easier for us to get him to just have his digital twin do that, in which case, you know, we can make those for you. We have a contract, and I may be giving you too much information, but I just love to downplay everything, and then you can take it from there. We have a contract just to do one Draper decentralized a day, and then we’re working on an engagement for the audio book, which is a separate engagement. So if you guys came up with something where if you need something like once or twice here or there, or just like simple things, it’s don’t even worry about it. We’ll be happy to do it for you. We’re not going to charge them for it. And it’s not really a big deal for us to do that. Right. If you come up, what’s more interesting is if you come up with a format for stuff like we did with Draper decentralized and you say, well, we want to have a series on, you know, every single time he makes a public appearance or we’re going to do this kind of quirky campaign on social media and we need the doppelganger to say a few words on camera beforehand and, and, or you want to do stuff in multiple languages or whatever it might be. Um, then we can look at like, okay, this would be an and it comes down to really how many minutes of content needs to be created because we have a couple of platforms that we use in order to make it work. It’s not just one platform fits all. And then I have two people that work on making those every day, but they’re relatively inexpensive. We can use them for not only Tim, but your company is really highly well-regarded and you have a lot of other customers. So you could think of us for that as well. And I wanted to ask you a few questions about your business because we have clients and it could be an opportunity there for us to make some referrals to you. Because I got to tell you, bro, it’s really hard to find a credible social media agency that really understands community engagement, that thinks outside of the box, that wants to do creative stuff. A lot of them take big fees on a monthly basis and then outsource overseas. And it’s like, there’s no personal touch. And I don’t know, I’m in the media. So I look at it and I go, well, this is not really benefiting the client. And a lot of it, they’re just doing buys, right? They’re just buying traffic. So anyway, I wanted to educate myself more on what you’re doing. And now I think I’ve educated you on what we’re doing. Is a television network that operates outside of Draper TV. But our back end, in short, will be the thing that will be powering Draper television. And yeah, it’s been a great relationship. Sarika and Sudha are awesome. The whole team there is awesome. It’s great that Michael’s on board. And they’re just nice people. And I really love working with them all. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s been my early vibe, early impression of working with folks as well. Michael, I think is pretty new to the content side of things and, and, and all that, but she seems to, Tim seems to be giving her a lot of, a lot of leeway, like rewriting some of the thesis and wanting to get that out there. So it seems to be high trust between them. And our interactions with Tim have been great as well. As you said, super nice guy, very inquisitive and very, very kind. He’s great. That’s what you gotta be, man. You gotta be But yeah, look, I mean, high level, I wanted to say like, I’m super excited about the digital twin. This is something that I actually, I have a friend who is doing something similar in this digital twin type space. I don’t know necessarily if they have the same experience as you, but they’re making a go of it. And so I’ve seen this space sort of emerge over the past few months and I’m very, very bullish on it. So super excited about what we can do for Tim’s channel channels with the digital twin. And so, yeah, excited to partner up. And to your point, we have a lot of these ghostwriting clients across various industries and spread between LinkedIn and X. And I think a lot of them could probably use some more visual content as part of their mix as well. And digital twin is probably the most scalable way for them to do that. So definitely think there could be some sort of bidirectional referrals happening here because we haven’t found, I think, the right partner for the Digital Twin stuff yet. And it is something that a lot of our clients either are asking about or would be interested, in my opinion, as they learn more about it. [marc scarpa]: Yeah, you know, what’s interesting is there’s probably about, I mean, there’s dozens and dozens of these Digital Twin platforms out there now. There’s really only, in our research, maybe four or five that are credible, but there’s another, there’s- That might be, that might be generous. Yeah, we’re certainly using one that’s super credible, but the point that I was trying to make is even if you work with like, you know, Haygen or some of these other ones that are really well known, there’s a lot more to it. Like A, you have to know how to use their platform. B, in our case with all the Draper, we’re using five different types of AI. You know, we have one that’s writing the scripts. We have one that generates the digital twin. We use generative AI or generative video for B-roll and graphics. We also do provenance on all of the assets. We do fact-checking and so on. And then we have the Getty editorial tie-in, which allows us to get real-time B-roll. So for social media, if you have customers that are entertainment specifically, you know, that’s invaluable because you’re not going to be able to send a camera to an event, right? But we can do a story that’s quote unquote editorial about something that is a really good social media clip hosted by X digital twin that represents your client. It could be including B-roll from that event, whether it be the Met Gala, or a movie premiere, or whatever it might be, because we have access to all that content and that footage. And it just is a part of our proprietary workflow. And that’s the difference, right? So there’s not one solution that fits all for this stuff. And so we really kind of, we’re producers. We make content, and we know how to distribute it. Media side, our own defiance media, by the way, could use a lot of help. We’re really just posting right now. We don’t have a lot of engagement going on. We’re an independent media network. So as we develop a relationship outside of Draper, I’m going to ask you questions and hopefully I’ll refer some business to you so that you guys can take us on as a client as well and maybe give us some nice inside baseball Here’s this great corporate client that you can retail. Can you now charge me 75% less? So I’ll earn that. I’ll earn that with you at some point. But you know, it’s not been a strong point for us because we’ve been focusing really just on TV and getting our distribution of 150 million households. But it’s something that we need to do better on. And so any kind of tip you have would be great. I have got two people basically in the Philippines that are posting our stuff right now. And I think they’re doing a really good job. They get all the metadata in there, do everything they’re supposed to do. We’re not spending money on boosting posts, which I think I would imagine you’re going to include some portion of your budget or you’re going to allocate some portion of your budget for the Draper that you’ll be boosting his posts because really it seems to me it’s like impossible now to get any kind of real traction on social media without doing a post a boost on posts unless you’re putting up some shocking ridiculously out of control content and that’s just not what you know we’re dealing with here with Draper TV or or Meet the Drapers as a show or Draper Deceptive or the, by the way, we’re going to have probably another dozen shows that will go up on Draper Decentralized. I mean, Draper TV. So you’ll have Draper TV. Draper Decentralized is the news show. You got Meet the Strapers, which is the contest show. But if you go to Draper TV now, you’ve got content from Adam Draper. I’m trying to get Jesse Draper to bring back Valley Girl. You’ve got, you know, Crypto Megan. We’ll be putting a ton of stuff up. You gotta look at Draper TV really as CNBC or CNET or Bloomberg, right? And it’s just like, here’s the network, it’s all driving back to that network, but here are all the great shows that you can see if you go to the website and or the television channel. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so lots to flag there. I would say, yes, I see the value and especially as we sort of add more shows, it’s gonna be this comprehensive thing that will work in into the strategy in a lot of ways. And sorry, I’m trying to go back to my notes. Yes, also think that could be the same thing sort of vice versa. We’re interested at some point in doing a digital twin for me as well to grow the agency even further and be using that in our own content strategy. So similar to us considering helping you guys out on socials, consider the other way around too. So we can talk about that down the road. No urgency there, but cool thing to think about. [marc scarpa]: Consider it, I’ll give you the inside baseball rates and vice versa. We’ve got to work with each other here to make shit happen. And the goal is to make the clients happy. And at the end of the day, to deliver just fantastic results. And that’s all I care about with Tim because he’s the type of customer, he’s not really a customer, he’s a partner. And, you know, he’s the type of partner that you want to work hard for because they’re just they’re just great people. And they and his impact on the industry is so profound. [Michael Houck]: There’s plenty of stuff to talk about there. Yeah, I agree. I agree. He’s he’s he’s the legend. And so we want to, you know, we don’t want to post the rage bait, to your point. [marc scarpa]: Intervening in, you know, his, you know, beating a stick on his his investment portfolio CEO. That would go viral, but that would never happen. Maybe somebody else on his team would do that, right? You did not improve our IRR. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, exactly. [marc scarpa]: Damn you. We’re clean for you. [Michael Houck]: As far as post boosting goes, so we actually have a creator network of about 450 creators across X and LinkedIn with millions of aggregate followers in different niches. Um, and we can deploy them. I don’t like to do that early on with a new client. In my opinion, we want to see what their initial engagement is with their audience once we get the content in the right place. And so we do that for, you know, I’d say a month or two before we start adding in boost, but the, we will leverage that network, um, on certain posts strategically at the, at the right points. Um, okay. So let’s see what else. Um, Okay, so as far as the strategy for, and our initial approach, we are for this first month, just focused on Tim’s LinkedIn and X and also the Draper Associates LinkedIn and X. And what we’re doing is we’re creating one sort of like thought leadership, long form posts per week for each of those accounts. And then we’re also sort of, you’ll be managing the kind of scheduling and maybe optimizing profiles and things like that too. But we just want to get those initial data points. Because what I’ve seen on Tim’s account in particular, you know, he has like 240,000 followers on Twitter or something crazy like that. When he has something that hits, it can do numbers on its own. And we’ve seen, I think, one or two posts in the last month that have done pretty well. But the problem is, I imagine that the amount of impressions that those posts are getting is damn because we have a lot of other posts going out on the account that are not doing numbers. Maybe they’re not formatted the right way. Maybe they’re not written the right way. Maybe they’re posts too close to each other, especially on LinkedIn, you have that problem. But what we want to do first is quality over quantity. And then as we learn about the audience, the idea would be increased quantity from there. So I want to include video as a meaningful part of that. I don’t know that it makes to do daily right off the bat. I don’t know what your thoughts are on that. But we definitely want to incorporate the Draper decentralized videos. I hesitate to do daily right off the bat. So what are your thoughts on that? But also, another thing is I’m going to share this in the chat. This guy, he’s a friend of mine. He runs a big AI newsletter, one of those ones that got hundreds of thousands in 2022 into 2023. And now it was just coasting on sponsorship revenue. He had these videos that he posts on Instagram and I think TikTok, these are digital twin videos and they’re sort of optimized for like engagement in a really, really interesting way. They hit the hook really quickly. They use a lot of B-roll, you know, it’s fast moving, the cuts are quick. And I think that they sort of take what does well on TikTok and are applying it to these like sort of digital twin, uh, real videos. So I’m curious what your thoughts are on content like this. Cause I think that that will perform on X and LinkedIn actually, um, better than like the, uh, ones where Tim is giving the like, you know, nine or 10 second intro at the start where he’s like, you know, it’s so funny. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: You said that. [marc scarpa]: Um, so, so, I’m glad you mentioned that. The intros, we had a call about that today. It’s been something that I’ve wanted to cut for a really long time. [Michael Houck]: I imagine, yeah. [marc scarpa]: So now, not this batch, but the new batch that’s coming up that you’ll get next Monday, it will just say at the beginning, hi, I’m Tim Draper’s digital twin, and then it will go immediately into the story, and then the story will play out, and the stories are about his companies. They have a lot of graphics. There’s a lot of cuts. It’s fast paced. Once you get past that first 13 seconds, it kind of gets into it really, really well. For legal reasons, we have to have him have that first two seconds say, hi, I’m Tim Draper’s digital twin. And then after that, it goes right into the story. So this is probably the last batch. Well, this is definitely the last batch that will have elongated intro. The outro, we want to cut down as well, but I’ll do that the following week, right? We’ll just do it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [marc scarpa]: So it will go from, Hi, I’m Tim Tate’s digital twin. It will go into the story about the company, which has, it’s all graphics and just his voiceover. It’s B-roll graphics and generative AI. And then he comes back with his digital twin at the end. And, and then it wraps up. So I think that those will play really well. In terms of frequency, he’s paid for them to be played every day. So that’s a contractual thing. I would appreciate it if you didn’t mess with that. I think that, you know, we’re making them every day anyway. So if you decide all of a sudden you only want to post one a week, he’s going to ask, well, why am I paying for five videos a week for the next year? And we’re only posting one. And then it’s going to become a whole conversation of, well, maybe we don’t need to make, then it’s going to be like, well, we’re going to cover five companies in one video as opposed to one per day. We intentionally made it one per day because he didn’t have anything else that he was posting. And you know, as well as I do, that all of these social media platforms love frequency of posts. And you could probably post up to two or three things a day per platform and not have it really mess with anything. Right. But I do agree with you. And we’ve already taken that action to trim the opening so that it’s shortened to the point and it gets right story, man. So, yeah, we’re in sync on on that one. But I think, you know, it would be advisable to just keep posting them every day. We ironically get the most traction on. For him. On LinkedIn as well as Instagram. But we also have our biggest following, ironically, on Instagram. But that’s just our traffic. The place that we also get a lot of traffic for him is not on social media. We also syndicate the videos out to other news sites. So we might get 50, 60, 100,000 views on one of his videos because they’re being syndicated to another news site. So, for example, he’ll do a story on one of his companies, and that company has spent a lot of marketing dollars on, you know, with publicists and just in general, and that particular newspaper, or let’s call it digital newspaper website, doesn’t have a video asset for that, but it’s still the same story. So, our video will then be embedded in there, and he’ll get views that way. And I can show you those numbers down the line once you get kind of set up and stuff and we’ll go through that. Might be a really, it’s called Video Elephant. It might be a great resource for some of your clients too. But Video Elephant will only take your content if it’s editorial. So we do everything, everything that we’re doing is editorial, right? And that’s another really important thing to understand because they’re not, They’re not infomercials. They’re not clickbait videos. They’re done with editorial integrity. Tim does not write the stories for us. He doesn’t even tell us which companies to report on. We do, and then our journalist goes and figures out which story to run based upon who’s got something to say at that moment. And then, you know, really what you got, Tim, there is kind of a spokesperson for the company. So we’re going to shorten the videos in the front. We can shorten them in the back. I’m open to that suggestion. We can change the nuance of what he’s saying as time goes on and working with you guys. If you feel like, you know, you’d like those scripts to be written slightly different the way that. [Michael Houck]: Sorry, marc, you said you’re having AI write the scripts. Scripts today? What is that process? How is that working? [marc scarpa]: Actually, it’s they don’t write the scripts per se. We have journalists that writes the scripts with using AI. So we’ll take the press release, we’ll put it into AI, then our editorial director will, first of all, the editorial director chooses the story, right? Right. So it’s based upon a variety of different factors, what the announcement is, whether or not there’s an embargo against the Is the announcement timely for things that are going on in the world right now? It’s a variety of different factors. She’s then figuring out a point of view on the story, which is what a journalist does. Obviously, all of our stuff is pretty positive because it’s Tim as the news anchor, if you will. Then we’ll use ChatGPT to formulate a draft. We’ll then go in and rewrite that a bit. We’ll fact check it using other AI. And then we’ll ultimately send it to the digital twin platform for it to become a script. Then from the script, we edit the video together with the B-roll and all the other elements that I mentioned. So in terms of the tone of how he’s talking, what he says when he’s actually reporting on the company, like if you look at something right now, for example, If you have suggestions on that down the line, happy to take them. And of course, the way that you publish the information regarding the story to social media, the way that we do it is just the way that we’ve been doing it and it works. The way that he’s been doing it has been completely not at all. So if you just copy and paste what we’re doing, great. But most likely what you’re going to say to me is, hey, the way that you’re doing it is good. Here’s a better way for you guys to post it in your ecosystem. And this is how we’re going to standardize how these things get posted in terms of hashtags and so on on a per platform basis. Give me that format and I’ll send it over to our people in the Philippines and they’ll do exactly what you want. With regards to all of Tim’s posts. And that’s, you know, outside of the actual content of the post and what he’s saying, obviously. But what I’m saying is a step two is if you decide that, you know, let’s say Okidoki is a catchphrase of Tim’s that all of a sudden he likes to say, right? And you tell me we need to have Okidoki in every video because that’s a thing, then we’ll incorporate it. Like those kind of like little nuances are really not a inconvenience at all, Michael. And I’m pretty straightforward. I’m from back East, so. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m from Philly, so we give it to you straight. [Michael Houck]: But I do want to tell you again, so like looking at, let’s just let me do a screen share so that we’re, I’m sure you’re clear on this. [marc scarpa]: If you can give me power, that’d be good. [Michael Houck]: Sorry, just a heads up. I do need to hop to a call with Michael in about So just a heads up. Right on. [marc scarpa]: But I think you’ll be pleased. So like in essence. Hello, I’m Tim Draper’s digital twin. Okay. So that’s all you’re going to hear from him from now on at the beginning, right? And then it’s going to jump. Rises at the forefront of a growing trend. Right into the story. [Michael Houck]: So, okay. I have cut out 11 seconds of the intro. Yeah, I think I want to check in with legal about the two seconds because ideally we can remove that and maybe put it on the screen as a written thing instead of him saying it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: We have that already at the top, right? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: But the problem we’ve already been through this. [marc scarpa]: I’m going to save you the time and if you don’t feel it’s going to be really complicated and you’re going to complicate everyone’s life. OK, it’s already there. And you see this beginning, this intro is a template. Right. And so the beginning intro is a template and the end of the video is a template. The stuff in between, which is the story, is what we do on a daily basis. I understand. Yeah, I understand that. So for us to keep this here for two seconds where he says, hi, I’m Tim Japers, digital twin. We establish that it’s his digital twin. We’ve got the writing there. And then we go into the story. Then at the end, we have it again. For more content that sparks creativity and ignites entrepreneurial spirit, visit drapertv.com. So that ending, if you want to change the ending, We can do that. We can make it shorter. It’s not terrible. Yeah. I’m less concerned about the ending. [Michael Houck]: It’s really the start is so important because you have to keep people’s attention. They swipe so quickly. So let me let me dig into it. I won’t I won’t get legal and complicate anyone’s life or anything like that. But let me just do some some thinking on mine. I unfortunately do really need to jump to this call because we’re introducing her to our writer. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: But no. [marc scarpa]: No problem. So will you begin posting these videos as of today or no? I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Let me chat with our writer and our ops person after I get off that call and then I can shoot you a note later tonight with next steps and more thoughts. [marc scarpa]: I need to know before then because Mitch is assuming as of my call with them this morning that you guys were taking over posting of Draper Decentralized as today. If not, then Mitch will continue posting them kind of the way that they’ve been done, which hasn’t been great. That’s why I sent you all that stuff in the email. [Michael Houck]: No. Okay.