Human Factor Media
Zack Slingsby is the Founder of?Human Factor Media, focusing on redefining branded storytelling. Zack is a writer, Short Film Creator, and Founder of Human Factor Media, which is an award-winning branded storytelling company that has worked with leading brands and publishers to create videos people want to watch. He graduated from Fordham University, received his MFA from the New School, and published in over a dozen creative and industry publications. He believes the ingredient that makes a literary story great is the same that makes for a great video.
Zack, it is nice to have someone so creative as you on the show. Let’s go back to your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, college, wherever you want. Were you someone who loved to read? Obviously, you have a lot of books in your background here. I’m curious as to your own interest and passion for where storytelling got.
My love of reading came a little bit later like early college. Growing up, I loved shows. The emergence of basically TV shows had literary qualities, starting with the West Wing and Sopranos. Everything from the late ’90s through 2010. It was such a great time for television. That got me obsessed with storytelling. I would write the scripts for my favorite shows. Growing up, I would write my own versions of them alone for many hours while my friends were out doing more normal things at that time.
When I’ve got the MFA program after college, which is called the Master of Fine Arts, for those whose background may not be creative, I had been very obsessed with the traditional path for a creative, which is, do great work and try to find an avenue that already existed to push that work out there. In my case, it was literature. Everyone in the MFA is pretty sure that within a year or so, they will be Hemingway. They are pretty positive that it is common. You need to get discovered and write a perfect paragraph. You are side by side with these people. You build each other up and think, “It is not good. It is going to be me. It won’t be these other 30 guys. It will be me.”
Very quickly, that gets deflated. I had a good amount of early success. I finished a book, got an agent, and published some short stories. My book went out to press to be sold to a publisher. We went to all the big guys, and you have to get unanimous consent from an acquisitions board. With some of the big ones, Random House, Picador, and these guys, we had 9 out of 10 people say yes or it is 8 out of 12. It is short of where you want to be. At that time, it was in my early twenties and crushing. As I’ve got older, I went to Washington and started writing.
I saw the way branded content was going. It was a vehicle for storytelling. I thought that I would be very happy to have a career like that. Some friends and I started this thing where we tried to make creative and funny videos, and over time it evolved. We are this group of creatives who make story-driven videos for brands. I do not know if that was a longer answer than perhaps you intended.
Everyone’s story is not usually linear. You took your love of literature and created something that pulls people in. That is what a good story does, whether you are watching it as a video or listening to someone tell you a story. What are some of the mistakes that you see people making when they create branded videos these days? Is it that they are trying to make it like a commercial? Is it they are making it too long or they are trying to be funny, and they are not? What are some of the things that you see entrepreneurs do that aren’t working?
There are different tiers to this. There is a startup, a brand, and obviously, the established brands. We have gotten worked for both kinds and done a lot of work with nonprofits and startups. We have also gotten to work with some bigger brands like LG, Planet Fitness, and New York Post. Let’s say on the startup front. There is this need to focus on the product because you feel this is your one chance. You have this certain amount of money and are going to do a blast. You have to get home the differentiating features of your product or service very quickly.
I am totally sympathetic to that and understand how that could happen. It is not always the wrong strategy either. Maybe that is where you are but at a certain point, that brands have to ask themselves if they see value in being even tangentially entertaining and some scale going into the entertainment business. The age of the traditional ad, we all agree, is behind us. We need to find a way to access a wonder and awe in the people we want to reach.
Teaming up with actual storytellers to do this tends to be a strategy that is rewarded by the market. Laughter is older than language. Music is older than human speech. When you only appeal to the rational side of consumers, you are leaving all these other things on the table. The new trends are bearing this out more and more.
How did you come up with the name of your company, Human Factor Media?
I do not know. There is a novel by Graham Greene called?The Human Factor, which is about spies. There was one passage in that where he said that he could empathize too much with both sides. He can empathize with the communist and the capitalist. It drove him crazy because he could see the human factor in both camps. More to the point is we are trying to find something resonating about a story that moves beyond the product. Those are the stories you could eventually find on a streaming platform.
We are trying to find something that relates to people as people. There is an old definition of commerce that you want to lower uncertainty about one another so that we can exchange value. I thought that is what great branded content does is lowers the scale. I know this is primarily an audience of entrepreneurs. I’m sure you know more than I do but the great salespeople I have met were not even doing sales anymore. They found something else to do that simulates the effect of sales. They are not saying over and over, “Can I have five minutes of your time?” They found some creative way to lower the skepticism of the prospect. Narrative video is simply a way to scale that strategy.
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It is interesting because, in the core startup world around trying to get investors, the phrase is, “How do you mitigate the risk for an investment?” You are saying the same thing needs to happen even at the consumer level and the B2B level when you are selling a product. Are there certain things that you think a story needs to have so that it, in fact, resonates?
It has to be motivated the way the story is motivated, which is to say that it is not motivated to manipulate an end product. It has to be motivated by a genuine desire to tell that story or create that piece of art, for lack of a better word. That won’t be the priority of every brand out there and fair enough but it will have to be something where you say, “We are telling the story of this woman or this man on this journey.” That has to be all we are in this for and the whole point of this video. It can’t be that 2/3 of the way through, and we give you a list of the reasons why this razor is better than the razor that you are currently using.
Are there any rules about how long a video should be? Thirty seconds is too short. Ten minutes is too long. Anything like that?
I do not think so. I think that people say that maybe. When we do a campaign now, we do long videos, sometimes five minutes. We did a documentary that was 30 minutes. Sometimes they are long but we always break down tons of small content from that. You can take 15 to 30-second clips out of everything. We try to cover the scorcher of the content strategy. I do not know. It is a weird time. TikTok is 15 seconds but Joe Rogan’s got 4 hours and he is the most popular media figure out there. It is so bizarre. What do you think about that, John? Have you had any experiences?
A good story pulls you in and keeps your attention if there are open loops, hooks, and something unexpected. It depends on what platform the story is but in terms of businesses that have hired you, as you mentioned, Planet Fitness and LG, can you tell us a story of what the scope of work was or what problem they were trying to solve, and how were you able to use storytelling to solve that problem?
Let’s say Planet Fitness was integrating a new product into several locations. That was more along the lines of traditional branded storytelling, and they had something they wanted to impart to an audience. It had something to do with the brand itself. It wasn’t a documentary or comedy series as we have done for other companies. In that case, in terms of content length, we did, once again, everything that was the long stuff, 3 to 4 minutes stuff. For the short content for LG, we were brought in similarly to do a product integration video. We’ve got to talk them into letting us do a 90-second to 2-minute vignette to go along with it.
A common pattern is we will start the conversation on the level of traditional branded videos and we will say, “Give us some percentage of the budget over here to do something that is a little more experimental, run that through your channels, and see if there is any value to this.” Oftentimes, the client is surprised and wants to experiment more.
We have case studies on a ride-hailing app that did a comedy music video side by side of a product video. We did this with a couple of nonprofits, a water company that we are doing a documentary for now, and a jewelry brand that did a series of funny videos. In some sense, this is a trend but also, by and large, most companies are still making ads. The market is wide open for these experiments.
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