Southend Productions

How we brought a global brand to life for over 1,500 people at once.How we brought a global brand to life for over 1,500 people at once. Harp Edition 🪉

Concepting > Storyboards > Rehearsals > Production > Post-Production > Motion Graphics

Brand marketers...This one will make ya rethink your entire content budget. 🔥 Hot take... is not an energy drink company.

They haven’t been for a long time. They’re a media company that happens to sell energy drinks. And the gap between how THEY think about content and how most brands think about content is staggering.

launched in 2007 as a full-scale media operation, producing entertainment that stands completely on its own merit. Not branded video. Not a content series. An actual media company, built inside a beverage brand.

Then came Stratos. 🪽

Felix Baumgartner jumped from the edge of space, broadcast live to over 8 million concurrent YouTube viewers. In the six months that followed, US Red Bull sales jumped 7%, adding $1.6 billion in revenue.

You might say “PR STUNT!” I say content strategy with results.

With 27.5 million subscribers, Red Bull averages on a monthly basis around 1.6 million views, with individual videos ranging from about 209K on the low end to over 25 million at their peak.

And worth noting for context, their videos average around 22-27 minutes long, which makes those numbers even more impressive. People aren’t just clicking, they’re actually watching.

So, here’s the playbook most brands are sleeping on:

Red Bull doesn’t sponsor events. It creates them. There’s a massive difference between putting your logo on someone else’s moment and owning the moment entirely.

And the standard they hold themselves to? Content that audiences seek out and consume voluntarily because it has intrinsic value, not because it’s attached to a promotion.

What lifestyle does your brand actually enable? What experience could you create that your audience would show up for? And if you stripped your logo off your content, would anyone still watch it?

That last one will tell you everything.

If you’re interested in breaking down Red Bull’s playbook and applying it to your brand’s content strategy, DM me and let’s get to chatting!

The ION Networks Detectives are back again and undercover at a swanky gala this time, searching for the hot luxury item from Domino's Pizza

Scripps didn’t hire us to come up with a concept for this one. They hired us to pull it off.

This was our second ION Detectives spot for Domino’s, and the brief was straightforward on paper: a gala scene that feels big, glamorous, believable. BUT! …Our budget couldn’t get us a mansion big enough to actually shoot a gala at scale.

So the job became: find a location with the right bones, then figure out how to make it read as ten times bigger than it is. Camera angles, extras, blocking…all of it doing the heavy lifting a bigger space would’ve done for free.

That was the success. “Here’s the vision, now make it real with what we’ve got.”

We packed a good amount of setups into a single shooting day. The kind of day that can spiral fast if nobody’s steering it. That kind of trust only happens because we show up and deliver with a crew that backs us up!

…AND that’s the partner we want to be. Bring us the vision. We’ll figure out how to make it happen.

Full case study coming soon!

Special thanks to the cast and crew that helped bring this one to life!

Client: The E.W. Scripps Company
Production: Southend
EP: cAlvinAfloriAn
Director: Zeus Leyva
Producer: Mandy Wright
1st AD: Joe W. Thompson
Production Assistant: Sarah Murphy Castleman
Production Assistant: 5K | ATL Photographer | Videographer
Production Assistant: Grace Delikat
DP: Mick Hawkins
1st AC: Jon Devin Haight
DIT: Bob Gural
BTS: Garrett Brown
Gaffer: Allen Meredith
Key Grip: johnny
Best Electric: Brady Holcomb
Audio Engineer: Joe “Grizz” Grizzle
Art Director:
Art Assistant: Reed Elliot
Wardrobe: Stephanie
Key HMU: The Kennedy Look | Makeup & Hair

Talent:
Michael Rubino Detective Jay
Taisha Perez Detective Angela
jay byars Byars as Host
Atlanta Harpist Tyler Hartley as Harpist

Connecting emotionally with the audience is something we aspire to do with every piece we produce. For a moving company to focus on the aspect of “things matter” makes sense, but to do it in a way that communicates care, trust and relationship takes a little extra.

With this paid ad campaign we partnered with Marketwake to help All My Sons Moving & Storage share with their audience that things do matter and that realization is not lost, but instead carries through in every aspect of All My Sons especially when getting you from one place in life to the next.

Huge thanks to Marketwake | Digital Marketing Agency for partnering with us on this one.

Agency: Marketwake | Digital Marketing Agency
EP: Marley Barnett
Creative Director: Mapi Tamayo-Smith🦖
AM: taylor wesley sheffield
Assistant Creative Director: austinhall
Production: 👋
EP: Nathan Cheuvront
Director: Joe W. Thompson
Producer: Mandy Wright
DP: Mick Hawkins
1st AC: Neil Dearman Camera 
Photo: Angie Webb
Lighting: Smallfoot Lighting
Gaffer: Marcus Kyle
Key Grip: johnny
Best Boy: Allen Meredith
Art Director: danny
Key HMU: Anne-Marie Kennedy ⋆ ☽⭒
BTS: Garrett Brown
PA: Sarah Murphy Castleman 
PA: Frances Sassport
PA: Logan Thompson

Talent Agency: Forward The Agency
Talent: Isabella Herrera Tammy Shipway Devan Plummer Glenn Bell Britton Chamberes

Brand Managers and Comms Directors! YETI didn’t build a $1.8 billion brand by running ads... 🫢

They did it by telling stories nobody asked them to tell. And they’ve been doing it for over a decade, long before “branded entertainment” was a buzzword anyone was casually dropping in a deck.

“YETI Presents” is one of the original playbooks for brand building through story. Cinematic short films about real people, real pursuits, real lives. No product pushing. No call to action. Just genuinely great storytelling that lives on a brand’s YouTube channel.

And here’s where it gets really interesting.

That content eventually became a live touring experience. A 12-stop national film tour debuting never-before-seen YETI Presents films, with all ticket proceeds going to conservation groups. Their YouTube series became a ticketed event.

That goes beyond content marketing. That’s IP. That’s a brand becoming something people pay money to experience in a theater.

On a personal note, when Nathan Cheuvront and Joe W. Thompson were building Southend back in 2017, YETI Presents was something we kept coming back to as proof that this approach was real. We built Southend specifically to help brands do this, working alongside Creative Directors, Brand Managers and Comms Directors who already know they have a great story to tell but need the right production partner to actually pull it off. Someone who gets both the creative AND the business case behind it. That’s exactly what we do.

YETI’s own content team puts it simply: the priority is “a really good story about a really good person” over product placement.

That’s the whole strategy. And most brands still can’t bring themselves to do it.

So the simple question worth sitting with today:

What story does your audience actually want to watch?

Not what product do you want to promote...What story would make someone stop the scroll, sit down, and CHOOSE to spend 20 minutes with your brand.

YETI figured that out early. The brands that figure it out next are going to build something ads alone could never do.

How we brought a global brand to life for over 1500 people at once.

Concepting > Storyboards > Rehearsals > Production > Post-Production > Motion Graphics

A little bts of the scenes we produced, filmed and edited for the most recent ad for in partnership with

Full ad dropping end of week.

Huge thanks to team. Creative Director and her vision. and his let’s make it happen and however I can help attitude. And last but not least and and their relentless push to get this across the finish line.

How are you building trust and credibility for your brand with your audience?

Client or Customer Success Stories are the easiest way to get started with branded storytelling for your brand. They can be emotional, entertaining, intense…but at their heart, they are authentic. Authentically human. Authentically YOU.

Paulina’s Story is 1 of 4 stories in the “We See Neighbors” campaign we produced for and they’ve been serving their team well!

Telling stories doesn’t need to feel overwhelming or complicated. They just need to be real and give your audience a reason to watch.

We can help you develop memorable, story-driven branded content that inspires and moves audiences, so that when they need your product or service, you’re their first stop.

🏆 ADDY Award Winner 🏆and continues to make its way through the awards circuit!