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Brad Inman, TurnHere

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Brad Inman: I started out as a freelance writer and I remember I got my first important gig that was semi-permanent as an independent contractor or freelance writer was with the L.A. Times to write a column four times a month, $200.00 a week, and that was the difference between me getting by and not getting by.

So my experience professionally for 20 years has been organizing freelancers and so from a business standpoint what I saw was this incredible network of very talented filmmakers who were waiting in line for the next big shoot on television and in between were waiting tables or they were being told upload your stuff for free and maybe you’ll make some money, and having been a freelancer, we said, “No, we’re gonna pay filmmakers. We’re gonna pay them the going wage and we’re gonna try to keep them regularly busy with more and more work.”

Andy Plesser: So, Brad, since the last time you appeared on Beat TV, you’ve taken on some new corporate clients. My question is, “Have you adapted the Turn Here style to the realm of industrial corporate videos?”

Brad Inman: Our corporate work is not a big part of our work but as an example, Intercontinental Hotel. They came to the conclusion that, you know, one big major television ad that says the same thing over and over again, shooting at us, you know, through the television waves over and over and over again was work but the Internet was about search, useful information. At the same time, they wanted to extend their brand into this new medium.

So they came to us and said, “We’d like to shoot some videos, we think, of our hotels in locations around the world.” They have 140 of them. And we said, you know, “What if we use the Turn Here style and took your concierge in the cities – whether it’s Singapore or Berlin or Santiago, Chile – let’s take them and have them give us a tour of not the hotel – everyone’s got thousand-count sheets but, you know, where’s the good places to eat? Where’s the good places to go out? What are some things you gotta see around the city where the hotel is located?”

So we used the concierge to be the narrator, again, local trustworthy, you know, character to give that kind of authentic experience. So it’s not like we’re shooting corporate video as much as we created for them these stories, these micro-media that are searchable on the Web, that people can find and find useful information.

Andy Plesser: So what’s next for Turn Here? I understand you’re experimenting with some new publishing platforms. If I’m not mistaken, you just opened a You Tube channel.

Brad Inman: Yeah, we created – we realized You Tube was a search engine for video. I’ve always contended that Google bought You Tube not because of its video or even because it was user generated. It was a search engine for the next, you know, wave of content which is video and so we looked at You Tube as this powerful search engine. So as the early days of search generally, if you had a Web page, you’d want to get it indexed and get it up there quickly.  So we created a channel on You Tube. We created a real estate play list. We created a travel play list, a local merchant play list.
We have all our videos up there, you know, very searchable and accessible and there’s a lot of user-generated tools on You Tube that make it powerful where people can register for your play lists. They can store it. They can send email messages. They can comment. They can rate them and we just began to do this and we’re – you know, already – take the small merchant videos or the neighborhood videos. They’re getting a lot more streams than if we’d just, you know, done it from our own destination site.

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YouTube, TurnHere, Brad Inman