Texas Materials Group: word to the workers
Whenever you walk on a sidewalk, drive on a road, or sit in the car at a fast food parking lot praying no one you know sees you eating alone in your car, consider this: somebody has to pave all that. If you live in Texas, there’s a good chance that asphalt or concrete surface was made by a Texas Materials Group company, and, more specifically, by their employees.
The company felt the need to commend these hard workers by sharing their stories, so that ungrateful slouches like us can appreciate their skill and tenacity.
First, establish a place of honor.
You can’t tell a story without an appropriate medium: blogs, videos, Instagram stories, printed pamphlets and shadow puppets are all viable methods for conveying a message. In this case, the client was gathering taped and written interviews for us to edit and distribute. Even so, there is no guarantee anyone will find that content.
You can post a video to YouTube, but then it’s just one little content fish, lost like Nemo in an inhospitable media ocean. We needed to give our written and taped interviews a home. Something to give it context and longevity. The Employee Appreciation and Women in Construction pages function like standalone blogs, but they hold their content in a place of higher esteem, and bring a cohesion to these campaigns.
Shoot, cut, release.
When producing a lot of interviews that were filmed in less-than-ideal circumstances and need to be published in a short period of time, you have to focus your time and attention where it counts. Interviews shot by the client on location were coming in within a week of the release dates. We needed to clean up the audio, cut together the best clips, and add music and B-roll on a tight deadline, which doesn’t leave much room for flashiness. One trick was to edit an intro and outro for these series’ which could be reused.
This story isn’t over…
Every year, there are new stories to tell, people to highlight, and issues to address. Just recently we produced some simple PSAs about work zone safety. Content strategy never begins or ends with one campaign, its effectiveness requires consistency. That gives people a reason to follow along, develop loyalty to a brand, and eventually buy stuff from it.
What does the client say about us, though?
“My company has been working with Sam and his team for the past five years, and I honestly cannot imagine working with anyone else. I trust them implicitly and I rely on their expertise, judgment and extensive knowledge every day. They've helped take us from literally having no website and no social media presence, to a streamlined, consistent, and seriously impressive brand identity and online presence. More importantly, they always have a strategy in mind to help our company achieve its goals, and there have been so many instances where they've taken an idea or goal I brought them and then upped the ante with approaches that never would have even occurred to me, and that added enormous value. Their design style and art direction is spot on, they know SEO and social media strategy inside and out, and most importantly they are just as invested in the success of my company and its stakeholders as I am, and it shows. I can't recommend 8AM Creative highly enough.”