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8:00AM

Creating Authentic Marketing 

(This is an excerpt from The Music Bed Blog.)

Tom Aiello and Daniel Chesnut (otherwise known as Process Creative) are breaking a lot of rules. While most marketers would tell you people have just 30-second attention spans, Tom and Daniel are creating branded narratives that are often 10 times that long. And while most marketers would tell you it’s all about the product, Tom and Daniel say it’s all about the story. “Mostly we try to create marketing that would work on us,” Daniel told us. “And for us, we want marketing that feels like a gift.”

We recently sat down with Tom and Daniel to talk about their video The Encounter Collection, their creative process, and what it means for marketing to have a soul.

Here’s Tom and Daniel.

TMB: So, together you guys are Process Creative?

TA: Dan and I started the company. Originally it was just a passion project. A friend of ours, Stephen Kenn, designs furniture, and we wanted to tell an authentic story about it. So we did a passion project, not really thinking anything of it, and it turned out really well. We got a big response from it. We decided maybe we could start a company doing this. Actually, we didn’t want to start a company, more of a collective — just a way to tell cool stories — and then it developed into a business. We’ve been riding that wave ever since.

TMB: What’s your guys’ background?

TA: We’ve been doing films, separately and together, for six or seven years now.

DC: We met while we were working at Hurley and Nike. Back in the day, we worked on their production teams doing in-house commercial stuff, telling stories about their athletes, a little bit of everything. Then I went freelance, and Tom stayed and did tons of awesome documentary-style stories. We reconnected a couple years later on that piece Tom mentioned earlier. It was just a good time to come back together, and it blossomed.

TMB: How did The Encounter Collection piece come about?

TA: Actually, that was Stephen Kenn again — the guy we did that original passion project for. He’s one of the most inspirational dudes you’ll ever meet. Every conversation with him turns into a story. That “live life to the fullest” idea just oozes out of him. The Encounter Collection film was inspired by him. It’s very much about who Steve is and who his dad was and who his grandfather was. Each generation took each kid on a trip to become a man. We took that idea and wrote a rough treatment. We always leave a lot of room in our treatments to be creative later though.

TMB: I’m curious to know your process — how you arrive at a treatment in the first place.

DC: It’s different with every client and every project. The Encounter Collection project was unique because Steve has a story behind every single product he makes. He literally won’t start a project unless he has a purpose behind it. He comes to us and expresses that purpose.

So our process for The Encounter Collection was basically Steve coming to us and saying, “Hey, I’m going to do a bag collection and here’s why.” And that purpose for this particular project was to leave a lineage for your child. He wanted to create something that was worth passing on, something you could build memories with. You could share stories of your time holding that bag, taking that bag on a trip, what you put in that bag, what you use your bag for. He wanted to create a product that was worth keeping.

The three of us literally sat in a room for half a day, talking about our relationships with our fathers, our memories, our stories. Those conversations turned into five different concepts, which turned into five more, which we then boiled down to one.

TA: Usually with our treatments, we try to create a story around an individual. We write a story without even knowing if it’s true or not. And then we’ll call up the person and say, “Hey, would you ever do this? Is this true?” A lot of times they’ll be like, “Yeah, I actually do that,” or sometimes they’ll say, “No, that’s not really what I do, I actually do this.” So we rewrite the treatment to fit that.

We like to create emotive stories around someone’s daily life, but stories that are also intentional about showing why people live the way they do and why this certain product fits what they’re doing.

DC: One thing we take pride in is being able to create a narrative feel within a documentary environment....Read the full article here.

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