03:25 How brands are balancing quick-turn content creation with long-form storytelling - Cristina Pandol compares it to dividing your paycheck between checking and savings accounts

06:50 The challenge of brands wanting 45 deliverables on the same timeline and budget as one piece of content, and how this affects brand consistency

09:40 Advice for creating content at speed without sacrificing quality - including the importance of transparent communication and accountability for unrealistic expectations

13:35 How AI is currently affecting content production - from legal ownership concerns to its potential for handling mundane tasks while freeing up creatives for storytelling

16:20 Practical strategies for pushing back on unrealistic content demands like "five deliverables by next week" - education, transparency, and offering alternatives

 

0:00:00

(Lydia Chan)

This is the Audience Connection Podcast presented by Casual, the video partner for global brands. Nine offices, four continents, creating impactful stories on a global scale with a local touch. I'm your host, Lydia Chan. Welcome back to the Audience Connection Podcast. In this episode, we're doing something a little bit different. A few months ago, I moderated a panel on the ever-increasing demand of creating content with condensed timelines, and it continues to be a relevant topic affecting our industry, so I wanted to dig up this panel and share it with you all. 

My amazing panelists were Cristina Pandol, Executive Creative Director at the Golden State Warriors, and Mandy Sprinkel, a seasoned creative producer working across branded content. Together, we unpacked what it really takes to create high quality content at speed, without burning out teams, sacrificing creativity, or diluting brand consistency. And yes, sometimes the answer is slow down. And to think about balancing quick turn creative with long form storytelling. We also touched on how to push back on those unrealistic demands by laddering the conversation back to a clearer purpose. Yes, there's pressure to move fast, but it shouldn't mean repurposing the same thing 45 times. So if you've ever been asked to deliver five assets in five days, you can surely relate to this one. 

 

0:01:32

(Mandy Sprinkel)

Hi, my name is Mandy Sprinkel. I am a creative producer. I work with lots of brands across many mediums, but I specialize in creative production and branded content. 

 

0:01:47

(Cristina Pandol)

Hi everyone, I'm Cristina Pandol. It's nice to meet you. I'm the executive creative director for the Golden State Warriors, but I'm relatively new to sports. My background is actually film and TV with some retail fashion early on. 

 

(Lydia Chan)

So this panel is really about, you know, with limited resources, right? How are brands kind of keeping up with this unmanageable pace of content? I'll kind of start with you, Mandy. I mean, how has your role, or how has it changed for you over the past couple of years with this pressure to produce with speed?

 

0:02:21

(Mandy Sprinkel)

So, obviously we live in a culture that's moving faster and faster. Trends are changing constantly, all the time. And so, with the pressure to go faster and get more content out, I think one of the things that's happening is we're having to adapt a lot with smaller, more nimble teams. People are becoming multitaskers like we never had to be before, trying to get rid of the need for these large crews so that decisions can be made faster. We're also looking at creating content in a way that things can be reused or repurposed for other types of content.

 

0:03:02

(Mandy Sprinkel)

We can no longer just think about what we're making right now. We have to think about the other deliverables or the other things that might come down the line and the way that we can repurpose and reuse things in the future. There's a million different things that weigh in. The roles have changed with condensed timelines, obviously smaller budgets. It's just constantly changing. Less money, less time means sometimes the quality of what we're putting out could be in danger. And so we're always keeping an eye on ways to make sure that that doesn't happen.

 

0:03:32

(Lydia Chan)

What about you, Cristina?

 

0:03:34

(Cristina)

I mean, the repurposing or recycling pretty much hits home. I think you have to be really smart about what you're creating. So there's a lot of things that I think normally would probably not be templated or frameworked, let's say, but there are things that just have to get out quickly, especially speaking specifically for sports, there are things that if you miss the cycle, you miss the cycle. So those things follow almost what feels like a template in the way that you would execute like a clip or like update texts, like they're very much executionary and they probably set the life out of a lot of our creatives but then there's also a place for longer form storytelling.

So there's a degree of like, you know, splitting the mentality of, okay, well I just have to execute this so that I can focus on this but yeah, recycling is, I mean, repurposing but yeah, we call it recycling. 

 

0:04:26

(Lydia)

So how does that affect a brand? Right? How does that affect brand consistency? How does that affect brand building? Talk a little bit about that. 

 

0:04:37

(Cristina)

Yeah, I think from a brand standpoint, both are valuable. The quick turn, fast pace, slow production, you know, things valuable because you have that speed, you have that timeliness, you have that accountability. The longer form stuff is also very valuable because then it's the proper storytelling, it's a different audience. Some people watch both, some people just watch one, some people watch just the other. So there's a value in both. The fast turn stuff is always just frustrating because it's always stressful, but the value is there, so it shouldn't be dismissed. The way I think about it and the balancing act between how much a brand should invest in short-form or quick-turn, let's call it, and long-form is kind of like what you mentally decide to do with your paycheck. It's like, how much do I put in my checking account and spend right now, and how much do I put in my checking account and spend right now? And how much do I put in savings? Anyone who is only doing one or only doing the other, not a smart way of living. So same thing for a brand. If you are only investing in what I'm going to call savings account work, so like long-form stuff, you're missing a lot over here. Or if you're spending your whole paycheck and you're not putting anything in savings and also missing a huge investment piece. So it's kind of like the same way you would think about investment of your own finances. It's how much goes here and how much goes here.

That percentage breakdown is probably a very different brand per brand, but there has to be a degree of a balance and it can change depending on the cycle of whatever the industry is, the business, for example. like we obviously invest a lot in short form when we're in season, but it's predominantly long form when we're out of season because there's no need to be fast. So we have a window of time where we can tell those longer form stories or we can produce them and pocket them to then sprinkle throughout the year. So it's, yeah, I think about money a lot.

 

0:06:24

(Lydia Chan)

I really like that comparison. So Mandy, how have you seen, I guess, that division happening? So are you seeing a lot more of the, hey, spend it now in the production space, or are you seeing an increase in perhaps, you know, the off season work, right? It's like, hey, let's invest in these longer form storytelling.

 

0:06:49

(Mandy)

I'd say it's about, it's hard to say because I feel like it goes in waves. I've seen a lot of investment in the longer form stories, but within those longer form stories, we're seeing the same budgets come in, but they want 45 deliverables. So they're investing in the long form and the short form at the same time, but not increasing the budget or the timelines that we have. And I think that's one of the bigger challenges that are coming with the speed to market is that they want a lot of stuff and they want it fast and they want it for the same price that they used to get it for one piece of content. And a lot of the challenges come when they decide what that timeline is and what that budget is and the creative's not established. I do see a lot of money being invested in the longer form off season. And like you said, in season when there's trends to respond to, but I feel like people are kind of moving away from it because they're understanding that trends can come and go a lot faster. And people are a little bit wary of moving too fast for fear of diluting their longer term brand goals.

 

0:07:57

(Cristina)

Yeah, the 45 versions of it.

 

0:08:00

(Mandy)

Like that's middle place.

 

0:08:02

(Cristina)

But it's very accurate, and I think that's what often people are doing. They're like, oh, I want this amazing thing, but then cut it down and make it all these different aspect ratios and different... And then suddenly you're like, oh, that one deliverable that was optimized for whatever the channel, the audience, this and that, now is plastered everywhere.  And it's like a spaghetti on the wall kind of tactic, when it's like the brief was for this and probably the original, what I might call hero piece, worked really well or hopefully worked really well. The rest of it is not. So then it also de-incentivizes people to, to your point, invest more across the board because they're not seeing the return across the whole game of the 45 assets, which I think was what kind of the prior panel was speaking to in terms of like quality versus quantity. And it's like, oh yeah, you can get 45, but should you get 45? Probably not.

 

0:08:51

(Lydia Chan)

So how would you convince marketers or whoever is throwing the spaghetti on the wall to not throw the spaghetti on the wall?

 

0:09:03

(Cristina)

I love letting things burn. And then I told you so, it's not very mature. That's my tactic. 

 

0:09:11

(Mandy)

I'm kind of with her. It really depends. I think about what their audience wants to do who they're trying to speak to, what their messaging priorities are, what their primary platform is. There's a million different things. And I think it's just about talking to them and figuring out what they have to work with. Of course, you have to do it really fast. You have like 10 minutes or 11 days or whatever it happens to be. But it's about digging deep and finding out what their priorities are. And then that information helps you to talk through it with them and give them that informed advice about what makes sense. Don't waste your resources. Don't waste the little bit of time that we have. Don't waste our sanity on 45 deliverables when three is going to get you what you're looking to do.

 

0:10:06

(Lydia)

Yeah, so talk a little bit more, like I guess advice, right, for us practitioners here. It's like, how do we, what are sort of any tips that we should keep in mind when we are looking at creating content at speed, but how do we do it the best way we can? I guess one of the things that you brought up, Cristina, in our pre-chat was, I think you said you've been in this role for two years, but a lot of folks within the Golden State Warriors have been there for a really, really long time. And I imagine that helps in speed to market, right? Because you just kind of get into the flow, right? Of knowing what we're putting out there. But also then that stifles, I think, creativity because then you're just templating, as you say.

0:10:54

(Cristina)

Yeah, the worry system is kind of insane. The retention is wild. We just last month celebrated someone's 24th year with the company and then 20th year. And this is within a creative team. And most creatives last like three years and then they like go on to the next because the pay is terrible or they're just interested in something else or whatever pulls them some other way. So the whole team is veterans, so they're a very well oiled machine and they know how to do things. To your point, it then stifles Innovation 'cause they're like, well, we've done this this way literally for 20 years. So like, that's cute that you think that process will work. And so changing is a little bit tough.

Um, so it definitely stifles creativity, but it maximizes efficiency. So it's like always a balance of, okay, well how do we make this as quickly and as fast as possible, what I call like the mundane or the bread and butter work so we can focus on this. Um, and it always feels like a little bit of a bartering system. It's like, well, I know you wanna work on this, so why don't we just do this faster or do this shorter, or we'll push back on this, or whatever it is. Um, and then again, because I have a team that's worked in the industry for so long, there is a lot of credibility when we push back. So like, well, I love to let it burn. I genuinely, I'm like, it's not to perform, but we can't wait to make up for you and talk to you about it at the end. And it really just reinforces that. It's like, well, we're the experts here because of just the track record we have that, that I told you. So works sometimes. Not always, but 

 

0:12:23

(Lydia)

yeah, my team got me a, uh, I told you so Cup. So I'll, I'll send you, I'll send you one. Um. Um, yeah. Mandy, any kind of, um, advice, tips that, you know, you've, you've sort of developed for yourself, um, throughout, again, just this past few years where we're just trying to create content at speed? 

 

0:12:44

(Mandy)

I think it's really important to, I mean, I think developing rapport with whoever you're talking to first and as quickly as possible is the most important because being able to be transparent and just be like, look, this is what we're dealing with. This is what you have, this is what you're telling me we have to get this done and to be able to speak honestly, it is the most important thing.

If you're talking about trips, tricks for production. Well, I think anybody who's survived in production longer than a couple of years knows that we are all conditioned to make miracles happen. But I think we also wanna hold people accountable for their unrealistic expectations. Um, and I think that's really important not to set bad precedent, um, because if they don't come, if they come back, they're gonna expect the same thing. And so for me, that rapport then kind of leads into that where I can tell you I'm gonna do this, but we're gonna be struggling. And um, but if you do it and you move mountains and you make miracles happen and you work your team to the bone and they don't see it, and you don't tell them, then they're gonna come back and expect the same things the next time.

And I think it's really important that we don't let people continue to do that to us 'cause people get burned out. We have high turnover. Um, and also with the short timelines, innovation suffers. Yeah. We're not able to take risks. We're not able to execute those big ideas because again, while budgets are getting smaller and timelines are getting shorter, the need for the big ideas and the creative ideas and the things that make one brand stand up from a competitor, those things are just getting greater and greater.

So we don't want to continue to let creativity suffer because we're trying to be fast. 

 

00:14:36

(Lydia)

For sure. And as you guys mentioned, it's about finding that balance, right? It's like how do we not spend too much energy and time and budget on just this content that we're spitting out and, you know, leave the creativity for, and the budget for the longer form brand storytelling.

Um, so how has AI affected speed to market and how we produce content at speed?

 

00:14:55

(Cristina)

I have a very active imagination. I would use AI, LLMs, machines, generative for almost anything. We're pretty restricted on our use because from a legal standpoint, it goes into question who then owns the asset. So while that we have a lot of ideas of, great, let's do the hero 9x16 and then have a, you know, a generative AI knock out the 4 3 1 1 subtitles. No subtitles, this language, the other language, et cetera. What I would call the like production artist or executionary work because the core editing and storytelling is done on the hero, graphic or hero video, depending on if it's still or, or motion.

We can't use it because who then owns that if a machine created it. So the legality of it keeps us from using technology, which kills me. But, um, I think we're at a point in time where it's like pivot or perish. Like I am gonna date myself. But back in the day before, like. Illustrator and Photoshop and all those things. Everyone was working on like paper and scanning stuff and making designs, and then all these technologies came about and people were like, oh my God, it's gonna destroy everyone's jobs. And now we just adopt it and we all get faster and better at what we're doing. So that is my concern, at least with my team, if we don't start using all of the technologies as they evolve and being very smart about how they make us better.

So it's like, let's. Replace what is the mundane work, these executionary works, all the different aspect ratios and versions and this and that, and still just have the focus time on the what I think are the hero pieces of storytelling. Like for example, if we could just use a generative AI or some sort of, yeah, it'd be a generative AI to use that. We just fed it the game and said, you know, cut me a 32nd highlight of this. It's a glorified clip real. I have no problem replacing that job so that that editor can then actually work on some proper storytelling because we don't have enough time being spent on the longer form stuff. And that's not something that a machine can replace a creative for, but like.

They can do a clip real, no problem. They could do subtitles, languages, they could proofread something, they could, you know, do all sorts of different things. Um, we've tried for all sorts of different things, but we end up then have to doing, have to do it manually because of the risk of who owns that asset or like, and it even boils down to we'd like to use like photo recognition software and train a machine to be able to tag our footage and photography from a metadata standpoint. But then it becomes a question of, well then who owns that tag if the machine created it? So it even boils down to like, things that I would assume are like media management. 'cause again, you have one game, tens of thousands of photos and like definitely minutes of footage come back. It's a lot of human bandwidth to tag and get that all ingested for then others to be able to use it properly. And we pay a lot of money for that capture, and we're not even being able to use our own assets properly because we don't have the human manpower to properly tag.

So again, if we were able to use technology, then everyone in my team now has a whole big archive of arsenal at their fingertips where they can type in whatever they want and it spit back out because it's been properly tagged. So I would love to use all sorts of technology, so many ideas. 

 

00:18:23

(Lydia) 

Very interesting. Mandy?

 

00:18:26

I think, uh, for expedient sake, there are a lot of things that we currently use when we don't have enough time in the ideation stage or in development. Obviously it helps a lot with pitch decks. Uh, we can generate images, give clients or other people. Let them see what we see in our heads. If we can't find the right stock image or they can see how we wanna shoot it, what if we might want it to look like it helps with transcriptions, which is tedious and mm-hmm. It helps with sorting footage, it helps with cleaning up audio. There's all kinds of things that we, we can use that for to help make things faster. I do wanna say that everybody that I've talked to about AI scared me to death. Um, however, I do agree with what was said earlier about, um, you know, and this is my hope, is that stories and storytelling is gonna get more innovative, it's gonna get more interesting because, you know, what we're seeing that is generated from AI, it is, it's the same, it's mundane. It's over and over again. 

And so, and I think that storytelling in general outside of AI has gotten a little lackluster, and I think this might be the push that storytellers, creators need to kind of step outside what we're seeing and do a little more, be a little more, get a little bigger, get more, get more interesting, and stop just regurgitating the same stories and we've heard in the same style that we've seen over and over again.

So that's, that's my hope outside of the scary stuff that we're all thinking. Yeah. 

 

00:19:58

(Lydia)

Okay. Final question. Um, someone comes to you and says, we need, uh, you know, these five deliverables by next week. What advice do you have to all of us to push back on that? 

Well, what can we say? What, what's the scripts?

 

00:20:19

(Cristina)

That's cute. Put a really big price back. Uh. Sounds cute. Can't wait. Can't wait to see those get made. 

 

00:20:22

(Mandy)

You know, like I said before, I think it's just, it's talking back and it's giving information. It's making people understand what it takes to do a thing in a certain amount of time with a certain amount of budget.

It, it's appealing to someone's common sense. I mean, everyone's got it somewhere. Even if you gotta dig really deep for it, if you explain to them the process and what it takes to make a thing. That is, that I've found anyway, is at the, at the end, that's what always gets them there is, hey, if you want this to happen, and then you give them scenarios. If you need five deliverables and you need it by this date, here are the possible outcomes. You're gonna sacrifice quality because X, Y, Z, or you're gonna sacrifice something else or we're gonna get 'em all done. But you know, and you explain, and this is why. And so information communication is key. And I've found if you do the job at explaining what it takes to get it done based on what they're asking for, and you're willing to make a compromise, you can usually get them. At least part of could be there. 

 

00:21:40

(Cristina)

It also probably boils down to like, are you a big firm? Are you a small firm? All you, all those things. But like thinking back, 'cause now we're an internal team, so it's a very different cadence, but if you're dealing with external people, I've always, my best result there has always been like, we can't do that if you find three more days or you find whatever, however many more days. 'cause again, assets, depending on the size, the length of this or that, but like it's amazing how many people just come back. Weirdly people like being told no, but like a nice No, but not a no. A like, yeah. Yes, but, but come back in three days.

Yes. That's like a half, yes. 

 

00:22:19

(Lydia) 

Education is a big, big part of it. Um, well, let's give a hand for, uh, you know, Mandy, Christina, thank you so much. 

Thanks for tuning into the Audience Connection Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. If you'd like to connect with me about how I can help you tell better stories and connect better with your audiences, drop me a note, lydia@casualfilms.com.

We'll be back with more episodes soon. See you next time.