Video – Simon Gerzina

Alexandria RE Philanthropy

Alexandria is a real estate equities business that designs and operates campus facilities for pharmaceutical and life sciences tenants. But beyond running a growing, profitable business Alexandria has set a greater mission: contributing to the end of disease and hunger through a commitment to meaningful philanthropy.

Alexandria contracted BrightTALK Studios to develop the story of that commitment, then tell it elegantly and successfully in video for use at corporate events and online.

As producer/director, I was responsible for all project creative and editorial, including scripting and subject interviews. Interviews were conducted with Alexandria staff, partners and customers over a series of filming days in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Pasadena. Production and post-production were conducted in-house.

Directly customer stories

Directly provides on-demand customer support to businesses by providing a platform that enables them to harness their most-engaged users and communities. It’s a complex model, but the most effective explanation is allowing their customers to tell the story for them.

As producer and director, I worked with Directly to launch a series of customer case study videos, putting businesses like Pinterest, Republic Wireless and MobileIron on-camera to tell first-hand stories of the success they had experienced. Filming was conducted over a series of days in San Francisco and Raleigh-Durham using small, agile crews with post-production done in-house.

Additional filming was conducted at Directly’s annual user conference, yielding multiple presentation and highlights videos.

The campaign was so successful that Directly contributed the following testimonial at the conclusion.

BrightTALK @ Summits

BrightTALK Studios has a long history of producing video for customers from physical events, but the success of that content relies on the customer to connect the dots throughout their content or demand marketing campaigns.

At the end of 2017, I led the launch of BrightTALK @ Summits: a live video product that convenes production at existing industry conferences and events in order to drive demand marketing value to customers. BrightTALK is responsible for all editorial strategy and video production, programming expert panels and interviews on key topics and driving audiences to the resulting webcast content. Sponsors are able to place their experts on panels and receive qualified leads from the audiences engaged on a CPL pricing basis. In this model, customers are paying for marketing ROI rather than video production and aren’t responsible for any of the production logistics.

I was responsible for the initial product strategy, defining pricing and cost models, forming the production strategy, training all contributors, sales enablement and personally producing 10 events. Events have been produced in San Francisco, London, Las Vegas, Toronto, Amsterdam, Orlando, Copenhagen, Sydney and more.

By 2019, BrightTALK Studios is producing over 20 BrightTALK @ Summit events per year worldwide and the product has exceeded bookings and revenue targets consistently since launch.

Cloud Leaders event series

In establishing their Cloud Leaders roadshow of customer events, Cloud Checkr sought to ensure that their investment could yield greater ROI than just the in-person attendees that they could achieve.

BrightTALK Studios was contracted to capture, edit and publish presentation and panel content from each of 7 events in the series, but also to create highlights and sizzle videos that could be used in email and social promotions to drive attendance to upcoming events.

I was responsible as overall executive production for the program and acted as hands-on producer for their Portland, OR event production.

BrightTALK Studios

For 10 years I led BrightTALK Studios, a video and creative agency within a marketing platform and data company. We were responsible for providing strategy and production of video, animation and live webcast content for global customers across a range of industries. With a team of 20 staff creatives between New York, London, San Francisco and Sydney we provided fast, efficient and cost-effective end-to-end creative services.

During my tenure, BrightTALK Studios saw year-over-year growth and an expansion from customer-commissioned branded content to content sponsorship business models.

HSBC Entrepreneurs Exchange

HSBC has had a long history with BrightTALK Studios globally, so when they envisioned an exciting new event initiative marketing their small business services we were the natural choice to produce it.

Entrepreneurs Exchange was a series of town hall events held across the UK featuring presentations and panels from noteworthy business leaders for audiences of rising entrepreneurs. The wrinkle was that 12 events in different cities were all to be held simultaneously with both in-person audiences and live-streamed to allow for remote attendees.

BrightTALK Studios was able to deploy 12 different production teams, as well as being responsible for webcast distribution and post-production.

Jupiter Asset Management

With a change in marketing leadership, Jupiter Asset Management sought out a reboot to how their brand identity was employed in video. Their goal was to create a richness to both their brand-level and shorter-shelf life video content, balancing out talking heads with thematic and visual storytelling.

We pitched a series of conceptual devices before settling on “The Artisan Approach”, focusing on their nature as a smaller organization relative to their competitors. The creative would balance interviews, graphics, original photography and stock footage. With the concept agreed, a program of product-level campaign videos were put into production.

Invesco Interactive

Invesco engaged BrightTALK Studios in an effort to move their thought leadership publishing beyond their traditional print and webinar content while also developing a brand voice that was more dynamic and engaging than it had been in the past.

We developed and launched Invesco Interactive, a quarterly live panel series, hosted by Tom Keene of Bloomberg News and featuring Invesco’s experts as panelists. Each episode would focus on a lively an unscripted discussion with questions submitted by an online audience in real-time. All episodes were produced from practical locations in New York.

I was responsible for the initial creative pitch, series development, location selection and the ongoing producing and directing of each episode.

BNY Mellon recruiting video

For every business, attracting the best talent is both a challenge and opportunity. Talent marketing is a growing but essential discipline to adopt.

I worked with BNY Mellon Wealth Management to tell the story of one of their most-essential sales functions using key executive voices as a crucial part of a talent marketing campaign. The process included pre-interviews with their leaders to understand and refine the business POV, articulation-training sessions with each subject to ensure consistent messaging and delivery, then full production and post-production. Interviews were captured at BNY Mellon’s offices in New York over multiple filming days.