You can rest assured that this is not an ad but a summary of what I learned recently from releasing a video that is supposed to spark the beginning of a great new series but instead primarily resulted in this lesson.
First off, you won’t find the video here but you can search for it if you want.
My name is Joshua Autrey Serrano and to put things into context, a hobby of mine is publishing the photos and videos I take of local restaurants, hotels and attractions on my website about Southern California.
“Minimalist Van Life” is a documentary series for that website about a best friend of mine, Randy A. Lewis, who has expressed a desire to free himself financially through minimalism and a nomadic lifestyle.
So the lesson starts here: I took a risk and started production far too early. It has not created problems but the mark made is permanent. There is no way to remove the distributed releases from other people’s websites. There is no way to erase people’s first impressions. Fortunately, the first mistake I made has a silver lining.
In an attempt to invoke an emotional response, the message implied the series might be useful to people in certain financial circumstances. In retrospect, that was a mistake for two reasons. One, sponsors do not want the attention of irrelevant audiences and the content of that release implied a primarily low-income audience. Two, there is already an aspiring van life community that was not only not addressed but negatively associated with hardship.
Honestly, the first lesson is to stick to the truth. In reality, I admire people who live in vehicles for the reason that lifestyles like their’s have an adventurous tone with an entirely different set of risks than traditional home dwellers. I should have said that instead.
On top of that, the goal was to associate the series back to the host website because it all ties into the plan we have for marketing. What happened was that the plan somehow got ignored. What was supposed to set this series apart from other series is its involvement in local communities. Everything is still set up to execute as planned but the opportunity to tell people that in the release has sailed.
A secondary lesson is that the best marketing is accomplished by knowing the industry you intend to work with well enough. People hate marketers so take that into consideration.
Money = Value 