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Welcome to The Vermillion Podcast, a free audio library of business strategies, creative inspiration and industry knowledge for actors, filmmakers, writers and anyone looking to activate their creative potential. I'm Nisha Culver, a writer director who helps artists build the careers that they dream of. I really hope that this podcast inspires you in some way. Thanks for tuning in.
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When I first moved to New York.
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The very first job that I had was working as an assistant publicist in a PR firm. And it was really educational. I learned so much about how the world works and how press works and how brand works. And the next few years, I was actually in corporate working in advertising.
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So there I learned about
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the
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advertising side of things and marketing and how all of that functions.
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And it was after
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maybe four years of that
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corporate trajectory in, you know, let's call it optics,
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that I
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started to do these public performances that got a lot of press.
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And when I say a lot of press, I mean, I was on the cover
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of the New York Post,
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The Village Voice,
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Am, New York.
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yeah, I was featured in the New York Times.
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this. How old I am. I was on the front page of Gawker.
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I was in vice, like, several times.
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And I really learned the secrets of brand.
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I learned intricately from the inside out how to build a brand as an artist and as a person. You think of brand and you think of Nike,
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Uber,
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Balenciaga.
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But brand is people, too.
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And if you're a performer, if you're an artist and you want to be paid for your services, you have a brand.
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So I think it's better to get ahead of that than be running to catch up behind it with your brand out in front of you. I mean, countless examples of
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celebrities who don't understand that their brand is already happening and it's,
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an amalgamation of their behavior and photographs and quotes. And, you know, you just want to be in charge of all that, and you don't want it to get out ahead of you into
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get chaotic and out of control.
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You want to be in charge of your brand. So just early on, it's good to understand it, to embrace it, and to treat it as an expression of your artistic voice and not a hindrance, not a chore. Not like doing the dishes. Brand can be fun.
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And I'm going to break it down for you in a way that hopefully shows you a quick and easy way to understand your own brand, and also some questions and answers
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That you can ask other people about your brand so that you can understand it through other people's eyes. Because I always say
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brand is
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50% what you like
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and 50% what the market will pay for.
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I broke down the word brand into five basic tenets.
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And it's really easy to remember because each one starts with
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one letter of the word brand. So maybe that's kind of cheesy of me. I don't really care. I like acronyms.
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So
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brand
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is composed of the following five things.
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Number one,
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if you want a successful brand, it has to be beautiful.
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I don't mean necessarily Hollywood idea of beauty,
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right? That doesn't have to be
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conventionally attractive. It doesn't have to be,
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quote,
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young or,
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slender or whatever. The
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prototypical,
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advertising idea that we're sold of. What? Beautiful is ruggedly handsome, right?
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It can be.
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For instance, Christopher Walken
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is beautiful at what he does, or
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Willem Dafoe or
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Jane Goodall,
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who recently passed away.
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She had a great brand,
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she had a beautiful brand.
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So
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being beautiful
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is about creating an emotional story in the audience's
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and that emotion is going to elicit beauty in them.
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Things like
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magic,
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intrigue,
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provocative, mystical,
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charismatic,
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fascinating.
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It can be sexy, sure,
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it can be sensual,
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but it can also be,
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confronting and,
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exciting in a really subversive way,
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one example of a beautiful brand is Rosie O'Donnell.
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Not conventionally attractive by almost any Hollywood standard. And yet
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the shamelessness with which she says what she thinks and doesn't back down and doesn't apologize is, in its own way, beautiful.
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So find a way to be 100% yourself. Have your personality turned up to 100. And
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try to be you on your best day.
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That
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is beautiful.
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So anything that represents your brand, you want to try to hit that mark.
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Second, tenet is are respectable,
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respectable.
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This just means credentialed.
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So this is where you can integrate other brands that you have interacted with collaborated with. This would be like press or awards. It could also be friends that you have. So getting friends to vouch for you or refer you, that would be a collab in a certain way.
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So
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for those of you that are aware of my know, like and trust scale when trying to sell something
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The beautiful is
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respectable is the trust part, that's where trust comes in. So
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the more that you can like Laurel's right. They see a Laurel or they see Netflix, or
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they see you're in a scene with De Niro or something like that, that creates a respectable factor for you and your brand, and people are more likely to want to buy in, right?
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To
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watch what you're doing or to want to hire you.
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So wherever you can, try and take the most respectable, low hanging fruit and put it in the front, because that's really going to help people to want to engage with your brand.
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In
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coming back to know like and trust the no
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is going to be a available bra available. This means that
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people know you exist.
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People know that you're out there,
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and you have to tell people that you're out there and doing the thing that you're trying to get them to buy in, too, right? So.
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Do people know you exist? And is it clear that you're currently
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doing the thing that you want to be hired for?
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So if you're an actor,
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are you letting people know that you exist and that you're acting and stuff and that you're available to be cast in their projects? Are you doing email marketing? My favorite. Are you doing social media of some kind?
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Are you sending texts to friends or possible directors or, you know, friends that you have in casting and just keeping up relations with him? Or are you letting them
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remember that you are out there? Are you getting your own press? Actors always ask me. They see the press that I've gotten for my movies and shows. They're like,
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who's your contact at deadline?
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I'm like, I don't. I don't have a contact. Journalists are just trying to
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get through the day by doing as little work as possible. I just send them the press release
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pre-written, I write it for them, and then they print it.
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Guys, it's really that easy. You don't need to hire a publicist. I know I was one.
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You just get your own press.
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You can do your own social media. You do not need to post every day, but you do need to find a way that works for you, that's enjoyable for you, where you can be letting people know on a regular basis you exist and you're doing the thing that you want to do. So for me as a writer director, this has been a long journey for me and I practiced the A available on my business for million
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for four years now.
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I've been getting really good at just the the craft of marketing myself and the enjoyment of marketing myself and the creativity of it. And now I can take the systems that I have in place
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social media, email, word of mouth,
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and I can say, you know what? I think I finally have the courage to employ these systems for my writing and directing.
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I did it before like maybe eight years ago,
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I think it felt a bit forced and it felt a bit desperate. And I think it probably looked desperate, like I remember
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just taking some pictures on the red carpet and like trying to retouch them. You know, it's supposed to be a candid red carpet picture and like, retouching, you know?
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I'm like,
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I don't want to do that. I have so much more confidence now, and I feel like I can just let people know that I exist. And then I'm a writer director, ready and eager to work with them.
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and that
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I'm entering a whole new era myself as an artist. So
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at any time you can reinvent yourself and rebrand yourself using these five steps.
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So the available part is incredibly important.
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All right, let's move on. N stands for need. Brand. Need. What need do they have your audience, your customers that you can solve
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so
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given the example of performers the need is people need entertainment.
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They need to have a break from their day, or they need to step away from the breaking news.
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Awful,
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updates about the world and just have a little laugh for a moment
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to go away from whatever they're thinking about for a moment. So
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can you deliver that moment of entertainment to your audience successfully?
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If you're like me, a writer director,
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Well, who's hiring me?
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Producers or executive producers? Creators. What need do they have?
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They have a need for their production to be as good as it possibly can be for the budget, and to go really far with festivals and eventually distribution.
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Okay, I can solve that. They have a problem that I
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can solve,
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and I have demonstrated through my marketing
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that I have a history of solving that problem.
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So it's not just that you've done it once, but you have a proven track record of being able to meet that need
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and
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exceed expectations of somebody in your role.
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That's really the way to beat out the competition is not only can you meet the need, but you can meet it better than your competitors.
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And I have demonstrated that, and I'm happy to tell someone in an interview that that is what's going to happen if they hire me. And I don't think I've ever
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really fallen short
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on that,
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claim.
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So
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N stands for need. Think about what your audience or your customers or your employers need, and then meet that need.
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Finally, D stands for demand.
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This is meant to demonstrate that you are in demand because great.
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You have a beautiful brand. It's respectable. You've told people that you're available for hire. You've shown them that you can solve their problem, but
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you need to show them that you are not just
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hanging around waiting for the phone to ring.
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You want them to want you. You want them to feel urgency to hire you. You want them to think that
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they may not be able to get you next week. And if they sleep on this, you might be gone
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and that you're on your way up and they better catch you while they can.
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So
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you do this by creating a sense of scarcity.
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How you do that is up to you. But you can also do it by creating really high quality and elite feeling marketing materials.
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You can tell people that you have only a limited amount of time, or you're taking on new projects, or you have a window right now, but that you're going to be busy starting in
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in the winter or whatever you want to say.
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But creating that sense of urgency is actually really,
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really
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helpful.
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And if you give people the sense that you're available now, but that won't last forever, you can also charge more that way.
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So if you're feeling like you're not getting paid enough
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for the value that you bring,
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consider shifting your marketing materials to indicate that you are in demand and see if that doesn't justify the raising of your rates a bit.
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Something to think about.
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Now, I did all of these five tenets in a recent Instagram reel
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to show off my brand as a writer director. Did I feel like making a real no.
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I had a lot of other stuff to do, but,
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you know, I was eating lunch. It was like
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a little bit of time where I could do something sort of half focused,
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and
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I took all the beats from this movie.
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I just directed.
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I put it all together through some captions on there, and as I was compiling the footage for this piece of marketing,
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I was really considering
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is this beautiful?
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Is this respectable? And I tagged, like 20 people who worked on the film to show the cross collaboration. Right?
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Is am I making myself available? Yeah, it's a public real.
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Am I solving a problem? Yeah. I'm showing people that
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you think that this little short film is not going to go anywhere wrong. Look at how good this looks. I'm going to make your short film look amazing.
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And then it also showed that I was in demand because I had this whole
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crew in the video.
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And so this whole crew of people kind of swirling around me and me very clearly positioned as the director and as someone who looks like I know what I'm doing because I do. So the whole thing
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really took off.
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was getting DMs from people who were like, hey, have you been? I saw this when I was on the subway.
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I had to stop and like, tell my friend, like, look at this video. Look at this amazing filmmaker.
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So it exceeded my expectations for how
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how far this piece of marketing would go.
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Just to show you that if you follow this brand,
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try it on one piece of marketing and see what happens.
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Okay,
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now I'm going to give you
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a few questions to ask.
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Let's say three friends.
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This is going to be incredibly insightful. And ideally they're not just like actors, fellow film and TV and theater people, but you can like pull from outside of that group to wildly different perspectives is great. Different ages, different genders.
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I want you to find one piece of marketing material for yourself. This one could be a photo, could be a video, could be a website, a piece of press, whatever you'd like.
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Show this piece of marketing
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to these three people.
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And ask them to answer the following questions.
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What are three words
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that you would use to describe this person or their brand?
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Three words.
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This is based on the marketing material that you show them.
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Second question fill in the blank.
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Your name is the kind of whatever it is that you do that blank.
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So for me, it would be Nisha is a kind of writer director that.
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Makes a killing at the box office or whatever. Whatever they say, right? The first thing that comes to their mind after looking at the piece of marketing.
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It's so interesting to hear what people come up with,
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because it's not always
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glowingly positive. Right. It might be, I don't know,
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see what they say.
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Third question is what would you need to see in order to make
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your name
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your number one choice to hire, as in
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whatever it is that you do?
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So for me, it would be, what would you need to see in order to make Mischa your number one choice to hire as a writer director?
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And if I were to diagnose myself on that question, I would want to see,
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more on the respectable side.
00:17:18:04 - 00:17:27:01
Unknown
So laurels from major festivals or a little logo from, like, a Netflix or an HBO or, you know,
00:17:27:01 - 00:17:28:17
Unknown
Amazon Prime,
00:17:28:17 - 00:17:33:09
Unknown
something that shows that I've directed at a very high level, even just one,
00:17:33:09 - 00:17:38:07
Unknown
or famous person faces in my materials. That would really help.
00:17:38:07 - 00:17:39:16
Unknown
So,
00:17:39:16 - 00:17:47:17
Unknown
I hope that this is a quick and very actionable lesson in brand.
00:17:47:19 - 00:17:52:18
Unknown
If you do these five things, your brand will probably be successful and you will probably make money.
00:17:52:18 - 00:17:53:18
Unknown
So
00:17:53:18 - 00:18:05:27
Unknown
DM me if you find this helpful and you start executing on this. You can DM the vermillion account with questions at any time like we are there. We try to be helpful and try to be available.
00:18:05:27 - 00:18:08:28
Unknown
And I really want to know if this works for you.
00:18:09:01 - 00:18:12:17
Unknown
Good luck and have fun building your brand.
00:18:13:08 - 00:18:38:20
Unknown
The Vermillion Podcast is sponsored by Vermillion, a home for artists. We offer classes, coaching and community for creatives and innovators in the arts. If you're ready to find your voice and build the life of your dreams, we are here to support you every step of the way. Check out Club vermillion.com and schedule a free call today.
