EPISODE 161 | Guest: Craig Lucie, founder and CEO of Lucie Content
Drawing from a wealth of experience in broadcast journalism, our Emmy and Telly award-winning guest, now leading a content strategy firm, explores how the fast-paced, results-driven approach of a news environment can revolutionize business storytelling, with practical insights into crafting compelling narratives for anyone looking to cut through the noise and connect with their audience on a deeper level.
Explore how to create content that not only informs but also resonates, humanizing your brand and driving measurable ROI. Hear actionable strategies for future-proofing your marketing and mastering the art of content creation in today’s digital age.
- Learn how to apply newsroom ideas and techniques to your content strategy.
- Discover the three most valuable questions to ask when crafting a story.
- Understand the power of leveraging owned media to gain earned media coverage.
- Get strategies for utilizing video content and social media algorithms to maximize reach.
- Recognize the importance of calls to action, ROI tracking and analytics to ensure your content delivers measurable results.
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Learn more about how to humanize your content at Lucie Content at luciecontent.com.
Transcript
Derek DeWitt: Going out there on the internet, you’ll find a lot of advice on how to create engaging content. And one of the things that’s been a buzzword for several years now has been this term “storytelling”. We’ve talked about this previously a bit on this podcast, and yet I don’t think you can really talk about it too much, because it is so important. And yet, so many companies are really not doing very much in this direction. They’re too busy trying to keep their heads above water with all the content they’re supposed to create. But it’s actually quite easy. And there are a lot of tools and tips and tricks out there to help you.
To discuss this with me, I’m talking to Craig Lucie, who was a former news anchor and now runs Lucie Content, which is all about storytelling, and the creators of the hashtag #CreateYourNews. Thanks for talking to me today, Mr. Lucie. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and I’m excited to talk to someone else who is also, I’m going to use another buzzword, “passionate” about storytelling.
Craig Lucie: Well, Derek, thanks so much. Yeah, I’m really excited to talk about this. And I’m excited to be on your podcast. You have great stuff.
Derek DeWitt: Thank you very much. Of course, I’d like to thank everybody out there for listening to this episode of Digital Signage Done Right. Don’t forget, you can subscribe and review us, and you can follow along with a full transcript on the Visix website, which should also have some helpful links.
Okay, Mr. Lucie, before we dive into storytelling and all that, let’s talk just a little bit about your background, ’cause I’m kind of curious how you got where you are. You started off in news. You were a news anchor in Atlanta. You managed to win some Emmys and AP awards and Telly awards. You also wrote a children’s book called Hold You. And now you’ve decided, hey, with this as my background, I’m gonna start creating a marketing content company that focuses on storytelling. I guess there’s a throughline there?
Craig Lucie: Sure, yeah. So, I actually went to Southern Methodist University, SMU, in Dallas, Texas. And I was on the business track, but I was always attracted to storytelling, having a camera in my hand. And Belo, a broadcast company, had given SMU about $2 million to build a state-of-the-art studio. So, you know, that was very interesting to me. And then I went and talked to my school counselor and switched my major to broadcast journalism. And literally when I did that, my GPA went from the low lows to the high highs, and I loved it.
Derek DeWitt: That’s what Joseph Campbell said, “follow your bliss,” right?
Craig Lucie: Exactly. And so, I did that and just to make sure I liked it, I had about five internships while at SMU, in radio and then TV. And the way that the TV world worked at the time, not so much now, you had to start in a small market.
So, I started in market 128 at the time, which was Corpus Christi, Texas. I worked for a CBS affiliate. And to give you an idea, New York is market number 1, LA’s 2, Philly’s 3, I think Chicago’s 4. So, you go there really just to mess up on TV, figure it out. And so that’s what I did in Corpus Christi. I was there making $8.25 an hour. And then one day they said, we’d love to make you the weekend evening anchor. I said, let’s do it. So, they promoted me. I was making $10 an hour.
Derek DeWitt: I was gonna say it was probably like a buck-fifty an hour raise.
Craig Lucie: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I did that and, and then one day I went into my boss’s office, and I said, I think I’m ready. He said, oh, yeah, you are? Well, why don’t you come in? And he’d always say, shut the door, sit down. And he said, well, where do you want to go? And I said, my wife now but girlfriend at the time, she was still at SMU, a year below me, and I said, well, I’d love to go to Austin, Texas. He goes, oh, okay. He literally picked up the phone, called the news director and says, hey, I have a good reporter here with me, he wants to come up and see you guys. So, I did that, and I ended up, it worked out.
I worked for the Fox station in Austin, Texas, which was literally about a block away from the Texas Capitol, so I did some political reporting there. And, you know, Austin, Texas is not that hard of a news market, so it was a lot of feature reporting. It was wonderful.
Then I ended up getting an agent out of New York, and it was either Hartford, Connecticut, which is a feeder to New York, and it was an NBC station, or I had an opportunity to go to Orlando to another NBC station called WESH. And I’m from Jacksonville, Florida, so it was about two hours away, door to door, to my house. And I hadn’t been to Florida in a while, so I ended up taking that Orlando job. And that was a wild news market. I gotta tell you, central Florida; the Florida man is a very real thing, Derek.
Derek DeWitt: You gotta watch out for that guy. He gets into all kinds of mischief.
Craig Lucie: All kinds! So, you know, I covered those shuttle launches, shuttle retirement. I actually broke the Tiger Woods story when he ran into that tree and fire hydrant in front of his house. And for those that followed that story, you know, what happened after that. The tabloids jumped on board on that one, and it just kind of snowballed from there.
And then my agent was shopping me around, and I was doing interviews with the networks and a station in Atlanta, and the news director actually liked me and brought me up to the station in Atlanta in 2011. And so, I was a weekend evening anchor at the time, and then they promoted me to do the 4 o’clock news. And Atlanta’s not as crazy as a news market as central Florida is, but there are big stories, obviously. It’s a big market. And so just kind of worked my way up at that station.
And then, you know, you and I were talking before you hit record just about how easy it is these days to create content with your iPhone. And I kind of knew it, like, man, the iPhone’s gonna change it. I was on Twitter at the time in 2009, you know, getting news was instantaneous. And I was thinking, hmm, should I go back to business school? What should I do?
Derek DeWitt: Right! Is my job in danger?
Craig Lucie: Yeah. So, I decided I need to figure out plan B. And I would get news releases and things from these big companies, and they’re really wonderful stories, but in news, it’s so hard news base, you know? The saying if it bleeds, it leads, there is some truth to that. And it can take a toll on you as well. You start your day around 7:30 in the morning, going to an editorial meeting, and you’re talking about doom and gloom. And I had kids at the time, and I was just covering some awful children’s stories. You see everything in news. I mean, you’re not a first responder, but sometimes you can be, and you can see the worst of humanity.
And so, it was just time. You know, I had kind of accomplished what I wanted to do. At one point, I did want to go to New York and do the morning shows and stuff like that, but I really noticed, and I would poll my friends; they were not consuming the news like my parents were, my grandparents. They’re not sitting around the TV at 4, 5, 6 and 11. So, I made the decision to get out.
We see what’s going on in the news, especially on the national level, and they pick sides. On the local level though, I mean, we need great journalism to hold politicians accountable, let people know what’s going on in their community. I mean, we just went through the elections here in Atlanta, like a lot of folks, and I know you’re in Prague, but you know, we need to know who are these judges we’re electing? And if we don’t have the local journalists telling us that, that’s a problem.
And we see what’s happening with X and Elon Musk saying, “you are the media now.” And I do want to say, there is a huge need still for great local journalism. And every national story, for the most part, begins on the local level.
What I saw was, I would get press releases, but again, they’re so hard news focused that I’m like, these are wonderful stories, even though I’m not gonna cover it as a reporter, they should be covering it. And so, I talked to at the time, a younger gentleman, his name’s George, and he was running our digital content desk at the station, and he was also helping out Cox Communications, which owned a lot of stations at the time. And I said, do you wanna stay in local news for forever? He’s like, no. I was like, okay, well, let’s go get a beer.
So, I told him kind of what I wanted to do. I said, I’d love for you to join me, and we’re gonna take this news model and apply it to businesses. And what I mean by that is, in the mornings in news, we have an editorial meeting. That’s where reporters are pitching stories to our managers and our producers. And if they like it, they say, all right, go get it. And so, we hit the streets, and we go out and find the story, and as soon as we have some good soundbites, we’re feeding that back to the news station, to the digital content desk. And then they’re sending out push alerts through the app. They’re sending out tweets, Facebook posts to drive eyeballs to the afternoon’s newscast. More eyeballs on the newscast, better ratings, more advertising dollars. That’s how you make money in news. So, I was like, well, we can do this with businesses, especially with the power of social media. You can collaborate and, in some cases, reach a larger audience than the old newscast I was on, which was at 4 o’clock.
And so that’s what we did. We just go, and, and now with the business idea, and our slogan is Create Your News™, which we trademarked, is just that – let us come in, we ask them three questions, and they are: What are you trying to say? Who are you trying to say it to? And what do you want them to do? And we can craft a story around that.
Derek DeWitt: Ahh! That’s music to my ears, because I literally just did, not that long ago, an episode of this podcast about creating, for a year, for example, a comprehensive content strategy, and out of that a content plan. And those are the three things that I also found. You have to know who you’re talking to. You have to know what you want to say to them. And then, and that last thing is key, what do you want them to do?
Because that gives you measurable ROI, which then allows you to feed back into the cycle and therefore adjust as necessary, so that you can make sure that what you’re doing is engaging. And something that’s engaging now might not be engaging a year from now or six months from now. So, you have to have that feedback loop or else you’re sunk.
Craig Lucie: Exactly. And you know, it helps us, as marketing professionals, because, you know, unfortunately during recessions and tough times, one of the first things to go is marketing. And it really should be the opposite of that as you know. It’s like, well, okay, let’s cut our marketing and that’s gonna affect our sales because something’s gotta get cut. Well, actually, you should be increasing that part, because it will increase sales and that will lead to more revenue for your business.
So, yeah, I mean, Derek, the last part is your call to action. And so, whether it’s if you’re gonna do a video campaign, you’re gonna do billboards or even mailers. We have a senior assisted living client down in Florida, and they have other properties, but we took them all over from another agency and they were deep in these mailers.
And the more I learned about the mailers because we were designing them and then distributing them, I said, wow, actually, this is something that people physically have to pick up in their mailbox. They look at it. Most of the time they’re tossing it in the trash, but if in their case, if they have, you know, the adult child is looking for a place for mom and dad, and they, and you have a captivating picture with information that really resonates with them, on that mailer is a number, they call that number and it’s call tracked. And so, you can actually say, you know what, because of that mailer, we had 45 leads through our call tracking software, and the marketing worked. And that’s a great ROI. I mean, that’s our job for our client is to get them an ROI.
Derek DeWitt: That’s great. And also, I mean, I’m sure you figure out during those calls who it is that is calling you and for themselves or on someone else’s behalf, which also allows you to create, you know, marketing personas as well, which I also think is something that I wish more companies would do.
Craig Lucie: Yeah, absolutely. And now with the analytics on the back end of these videos, you can see where they are, how long they stayed on, where they dropped off in a video. You can change the video to prevent people from dropping off.
And a lot of, you know, we try to educate our clients, find out when they’re calling how they found out about you, whether, you know, we, you get those surveys online. But videos, it sometimes can be tricky. And billboards, too. We do billboards. Well, did they find out about us from the billboard when they were driving down the downtown connector here in Atlanta? So, we want them to ask those questions. And, you know, billboards, it’s tough to, with billboards, it’s really more about brand recognition and getting out there so people are familiar.
I mean, Chick-fil-A has, here in Atlanta, they own certain billboards. It’s like, okay, we’re all familiar with Chick-fil-A. I’m maybe not gonna go to Chick-fil-A ’cause I saw your billboard, but maybe I am and I’m hungry. It’s just tough to, it’s hard for an ROI on billboards, but they can be a great asset to companies.
Derek DeWitt: The cliche has been 50% of your marketing budget is a waste of time, but nobody knows which 50%. And so that’s the problem. I think with modern analytics, we’ve changed those numbers a little bit. I think we can know some, not all, but some, of this. And I think it’s getting smarter and smarter all the time. And we’re getting to a point where we can more effectively utilize those marketing dollars, so that each dollar has more power to accomplish the goals that we’re trying to accomplish.
Craig Lucie: Yeah, exactly. That is, that’s the beauty now with all the backend analytics that you can get. We always say Google owns YouTube. The amount of things that companies can do by just posting constant content on YouTube, it pays dividends.
You know, YouTube is the second most popular search engine behind Google. And when you start posting constant content on YouTube, you can also keyword tag it, so you’re getting the search engine optimization, the SEO. We, as a company, we’re doing YouTube shorts and, you know, making the vertical videos for the shorts, making horizontal for regular and then doing all the backend. But that helps tremendously.
In fact, we recently had a client find us over ChatGPT. They typed in, please find me a production studio within a five-mile radius in my office, and we were the first ones that popped up. And it’s just because we’re taking advantage of our Google listings and reviews, but also just the amount of content we’re pushing up on YouTube.
So, that’s the other thing that, you know, that people need to really think about is with AI, and people are using it for search now, just like they were before on Google, and how important it is to be pushing out blog content. And again, you know, video, we of course, think it’s the most powerful language out there. But when you do it, you gotta make sure that you’re doing everything correctly on the backend, so it’s optimized and you’re discoverable. ‘Cause people are using ChatGPT and Gemini, Claude, you name it. And that’s gonna be where people go. And you have to be discoverable through your content because it is scraping hundreds of websites to find you.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. I mean, this all very much supports something that you have right on your Lucie content website homepage: “Traditional PR is dinosaur territory,” which is true. When you think about it. I mean, you think about AI, the rise of AI in, what, a year? What’s it gonna be in three years? What’s it gonna be in four years? We already know all the old SEO advice, throw it away because Google has already changed so much in the last year that you can’t really stay ahead of it. You have to aim for what Google is going to become, which is a 100% AI-driven search software suite. Basically, that’s what it’s going to be.
Eventually my dream, this is my dream, I’m gonna be in my home and I’m just gonna talk to the walls and it’s gonna tell me the stuff that I wanna know. And it’ll tell me stuff in a slightly different order or in a slightly different way than it’ll tell my wife, for example, because it understands both of us have different personas and we have different interests and different ways that we respond to things. That’s what’s coming, might even come in our lifetimes.
So, I think you should be marketing for that end result instead of constantly trying to catch up and do all this, oh, now the rules are these, and now, oh they changed! Another core update! And oh, now we have to spend all this time and money changing everything again and rewriting all our blogs. Instead, if you do that backend work and you understand the principles and where it’s going, you can kind of futureproof your marketing to a certain extent, I think.
Craig Lucie: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I have a friend who, he works with Google and he oversees Gemini. And he was just showing me how you can ask it, you know, he used the example, he typed in, “Give me a marketing agency outlook in 2025 for Atlanta”. The amount of data pushed out, and you can ask it for a 10-page report, and he’s like, look, I used to pay analysts a lot of money in my business for this kind of stuff. Of course, there’s some stuff in there that you need to decipher and edit out or whatnot, but it literally, he is like, it’s gonna take it a couple minutes, and it wasn’t even a couple minutes, it was quicker. But it was much more in depth than what I had seen AI do before. It tells you it was sourcing the sites and how many it used.
And it is going to put a lot of people out of jobs. But, you know, even in our business, we’re embracing it. There are crazy AI programs now where you have these avatars and they look like they’re a real person, they’re a fake person, and they can be your company spokesperson. You know, we are constantly experimenting with it, but it, in my opinion, it’s not quite there as far as the quality of the video. And then it’s not, you know, it’s like, you can tell what article was written by AI and what was written by like a real storytelling journalist.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, that’s an excellent point. So, let’s get into that storytelling angle, Create Your News™. What is this phrase about really? What are you saying? You’re saying basically tell a story, or your story, or part of your story, but use sort of the way that the news approaches storytelling, or what, what does it mean?
Craig Lucie: Yes. So, a great example of Create Your News™, it’s more of owned media, which can then be used for earned media. So, earned media is your traditional PR. You want to be in the Wall Street Journal, you want to be here in Atlanta, in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, or wherever you are. In traditional PR, you are pitching these journalists and hoping that they come and do your story.
Create Your News™ is this – and I’ll give you an example: we have a client, they are in the media business, and they’re pretty diversified, and they were doing a big development for a film studio. He wanted to know, who should we pitch this to? We’d love to get it in the Business Chronicle and whatnot. And we said, we’re not gonna pitch it to anybody. They’re like, really? I said, yep, we are going to interview your leadership. We are gonna bring the renderings of this big development to life, jazz it up. We’re gonna talk about the economic impact to this certain part of Atlanta where it’s going. And we’re gonna drop that story from your own channels. And, we always say, if it’s good enough, they will come, “they” being journalists.
So, what happens is the journalists in these newsrooms have been shrinking. So, it’s doing more with less. When they see a good story out there, and I used to do this all the time, I’d scour the website, nextdoor.com, Facebook, you name it, small town newspapers, and I would go and do those stories. And that was called enterprise storytelling. You know, we’re constantly, as journalists, looking for stories.
So, in this case, in essence, we can, I know this sounds bad, but we can spoon-feed journalists in a way. ‘Cause when they see a good piece of compelling content, then they are inclined to come and do a story about it. So, after we dropped that particular development story, journalists called; all the broadcasters in this market called. They were doing live shots from the location of where this big development was going.
And then it gets better because for the print journalist, they will take that video, embed it, and then write an article, ’cause many of those publications want the clickthrough rates. So, you know, you have a good video that’s well produced, they’re like, this is great. Let’s write a story about this big development. And as any good journalist will do, they’ll do their own story and get all their own sound.
In the case with broadcast journalists, they’re not gonna take that prepackaged video, it’s called a VNR, a video news release, but they will come do their own version. They will come interview leadership, we’ll make them available, we’ll give them the renderings. And if they’re strapped for time, hey, here’s a bunch of B-roll for you to drop in your story if you’d like. They’re not gonna take the VNR, but they will come and do their own story.
So that’s a great example of how Create Your News™ works. It is simply creating the content yourself, pushing it out on your own channels, leveraging it, and then Derek, you can tap more into a larger audience when you start collaborating. So, in that particular case, when we pushed out that video, this was an area called Doraville in Georgia, we are tagging the city of Doraville’s social media, we’re tagging DeKalb County, that’s the county. We’re tagging all the entities involved, because then they’re gonna share it. So, you’re tapping into their audiences and their following. So, you may have 5,000 followers on your Instagram or Facebook, you name it. But once you start collaborating, someone else might have 20,000. Now you’re reaching at least 25,000 people.
Derek DeWitt: So, one way to say it could be that you’re basically creating bait, like you’re creating your own really high-quality phish lures in an attempt to get people to bite. Because they’re out there, you know, the content ecosystem is rapacious, especially with the old SEO ideas that may or may not still apply, you know, you needed fresh content all the time (I don’t know if how applicable that is these days), but still, having stuff regularly gets you up in front of eyeballs and things like this.
So, you’re kind of like going, look, here’s a story that’s kind of already made, and if you want, you could take this. And it’s very interesting that you’re tagging all these different entities because their social media managers, for example, are just like, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. I work for the county, but hey, everybody who tagged us, I’m gonna hit that hashtag, you know, at the beginning of my workday, and if I see something that looks shareable or that, with very little work on my part, I can push out there to my audience, then I’m gonna do that. So, it’s actually a very smart approach to navigating the waters of the content sea that we all find ourselves adrift in.
Craig Lucie: Yeah, exactly. I mean, and it’s challenging for a lot of businesses, nonprofits or governments to figure out what kind of content am I gonna be pushing out? Like, what’s gonna hit what’s not? You know, no one knows what’s gonna go viral unless it’s just a fantastic piece of content, but you gotta just keep pushing things out. And for like your example, yeah, if someone in a government position is running social media, and they see something and it makes them look good, yeah, they’re gonna hit share and they’re gonna comment on it, repost on LinkedIn with your thoughts.
And we can touch up on LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn, they even added their video feature. The algorithm loves video. So, anytime a company, someone, is pushing out a video update, maybe they haven’t posted in a while, the algorithm’s gonna notice it and automatically populate them to the top. And so, whoever’s following that person, wow, I saw that. I’ve had my friends like, dude, what are you doing on LinkedIn? Every time you post, when I open up LinkedIn I see it. It’s because, A) well, I’m not annoying people with a bunch of posts, I’m pretty strategic when I do post. And when I do it, it’s probably gonna be a video or I’m sharing a video from the Lucie Content channel, if you will. So, there’s a lot of strategy to it.
And you know, you’ve mentioned, yeah, I grew up fishing, so I love the analogy of bait. It can be that, you know, if you want to take owned media and turn it into earned media, yes, there’s definitely strategies. You know, my team and I, we, a lot of us, have journalism backgrounds. So, like, we’ve been in those positions, we know it’s a story, what’s not, how they’re gonna deliver it, what they’re thinking. And so, that is an advantage for us when it comes to getting things out in the public.
But the other part is, you know, you just need to be relevant. People want valuable content. So, it’s not like, hey, look what we did, pat myself on the back. Like, no they want to, okay, if you did do something, how did you do it? Push it out there. They want value.
So, like, we as a company are sending out, you know, tips and strategies for the best storytelling technique for your business, whatever it may be. That’s just what we see. People don’t want BS. If I’m gonna watch this video, how is it gonna help me? So that’s very important for companies to, you know, have in the back of their minds. It’s like, what is the value when you’re pushing something out?
Derek DeWitt: Now, I think one of the more interesting things about Lucie Content, besides this using this sort of newsies approach to things, is that you guys really are a one-stop shop. You’ll do content creation. You have a full-blown production studio with a makeup room and a big video wall. You’ll do websites, you’ll do social media strategy, digital marketing of all kinds, even media training for companies to utilize their channels and so on. Which is unusual ’cause a lot of companies will do one or maybe two of these things, but you guys do it all. So, this really is like, hey, you wanna learn any aspect of this or utilize any of this expertise? It’s all here for you.
Craig Lucie: Yeah. And that’s just been, that’s been an evolution over time because, you know, when we started, the core of what we were doing, and still the majority of what we do, is a lot of video storytelling. But we would create this content, we’d give it to the client, they would have an agency in charge of their website, and three months would go by, and their video wasn’t on their website, or it wasn’t pushed out. I’m like, what is happening here?
That’s when we just realized, you know, also newsrooms are so fast-paced and, like, people think we’re crazy, but you know, we come from a background where we gotta take like a thousand-page lawsuit and make the mom or dad who’s, you know, cooking for their kids to care about your story. So, it’s like we have to work quickly, efficiently get the story out there.
And that’s when we realized, you know, what, if we’re in this video storytelling content world, where does it live? Well, it’s living on social media and it’s living on websites, so we can’t have our success tied to another agency that is sitting on our videos. So, then we hired a web developer, and he’s really good with digital marketing as well. So, we got into the websites and now it’s super easy to create these websites. I mean, he knows code, but you don’t have to know code.
But then when you start working in the social media strategy and looking at the different algorithms, everything really does have to be under one umbrella for it to speak to each other. Because, as the saying goes, too many cooks in the kitchen. If you hand off your video and they don’t have the right strategy to push it out, and you don’t do like a drip campaign with your video where you’re pushing out some snippets leading up to the main video, and then all of a sudden they share all three snippets and then the main video the same day, your client’s not gonna get good ROI.
So, that’s kind of why we evolved. And the media training, executive training, and we can touch up on, you know, the internal comms, is super important. You know, we’ve had companies where they’ve nearly imploded internally, and the executives needed some help. And how do you convey that message that will resonate with their employees? We always say, like, humanize and resonate. We’re creating compelling content that will humanize you, your company, your nonprofit, and will resonate with your audience. And so, it works externally and internally, but sometimes people don’t know what to say. And so having been trained in media, and having talent coaches and voice coaches, image consultants, you name it, we’ve all had it.
You know, a lot of folks, they’ll clam up in front of the camera. They might clam up before they have to give a speech. And so, that just comes naturally for us is that media executive training. It’s super important that, especially in this day and age, you’re ready for whatever, should someone put a camera in your face.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, boy, that’s for sure. And you know, as Andy Warhol quipped way back when, in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. It turned out that he was right. And a lot of people are not, they think they’re ready, but they’re not. I know we were talking before we started the interview about how it’s kind of astonishing how many people think, oh, I’d be great on camera, or that I do have a bit of a design eye, or that I am a good writer, and they’re just not. And that doesn’t mean that they can’t learn it, but they’re not naturally a fit for one of those things.
You know, some people are naturally good on camera, other people are not. I know lots of people in the theater scene here in Prague, for example, who are also in the film business, some of them are great on stage, not so good on film. Others are very good on film, they’re not good on stage at all. And so, you know, it doesn’t mean they’re a bad actor, but you gotta get the right skill sets and talents and mental focus for the right context, for the right purpose, for the right audience.
Craig Lucie: 100%. As with anything, it’s just getting your reps in and practicing. We worked with a CEO, and this was when Covid was starting, and had him on camera, and I was like, oh my goodness, we have some work to do!
Derek DeWitt: He’s a nice guy, but my God!
Craig Lucie: So, we train him up and lots of reps, and it is, I swear, night and day. I always say it’s the Cs, it’s calm, cool, collected, and the biggest one being confident. And then the other are, so it’s, remember your Cs and remember your Ps, prior preparation prevents poor performance. Those are things that you just need when it comes to media training, internal and external communications.
I will tell you in my news days, if I was out on a story and got back right at 3:55 and had to run to the studio to be live at 4, you know, if it’s a complicated story or something, and if were not confident, I was not gonna have a good newscast.
Derek DeWitt: Right. And then it doesn’t communicate to your listeners who, you know, might be dealing with 15, oh, the dog just ate something and it’s choking. You know, like, who knows what’s going on there? So, like, I know, even though you’re not in the same room, I do believe even on television and in film, that there is this kind of almost empathetic, telepathic way of communicating somehow. We must do it subconsciously through our voices and our faces and things. But if you as the presenter are focused on what you’re saying and it makes sense to you, and the story is flowing through you, almost like you’re a conduit and not a creator of it or just someone parroting it, that somehow communicates to the audience. I don’t know why it happens, but it does.
Craig Lucie: Yeah. I would agree. You know, in my early days we would have these talent coaches, and they’d really want us to speak louder to the camera and give us more energy. And, you know, I hate to rip on him, but David Muir, “Breaking as we come on the air tonight!” And I’m like, I am literally in my kitchen cooking my kids dinner, like, chill out. Tell me, give me the energy, but not at that level. I hate to knock the guy. He’s made it, he’s at the big leagues.
But you know, I just listen to some of these talent coaches and say like, that is unnatural to me. Yes, I’m gonna bring the energy. But there’s a fine line with, you know, “Breaking as we come on the air tonight, there’s been a double homicide” and you know, “police are looking for”, and “cops seek the perpetrator”, you know, fortunately it’s not really like that anymore, but you have to show compassion, you have to deliver it in the right way.
You do need to bring some energy because on camera, people don’t realize it, if you just talk like this, “And it was a great day today, and I’m just so happy that, you know, I do have two wonderful kids”, that’s gonna come across as flat. So, you have to bring up the energy level a little bit, but there’s a fine line to it.
And let’s say your company’s done something bad, and you need to get out there in front of it and answer. You, again, you’ve gotta be assertive and confident. And it’s okay, also, if you mess up just to nip it in the bud. Say, you know what? We messed up and we’re gonna make it right. Here are the steps we’re gonna take. It’s mind boggling to me how many companies do not do that.
In fact, when I worked in Orlando and we broke that Tiger Woods story, I could not believe how long it took him to come out and just own up to the mistakes. And what happens there, it festers.
Derek DeWitt: Right, ’cause his people were busy trying to massage it, you know?
Craig Lucie: Yeah. Like, oh, this is gonna go away. No, that is not going to go away. But had you come out and said, you know what, we had an issue in my house, and I messed up and I apologize, and we’re gonna make it right and I’m gonna go get counseling. That’s that. We all mess up. But just when there’s the right time, own it and own it quickly and then move on. When you start letting things drag on it, it’s a recipe for disaster. And so many companies do that.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. And I know one of the things that has been written a lot about, and we’ve talked about on this podcast, with millennials and Gen Zers who are in the workforce in force now, is that they want authenticity. They want you to walk your talk.
Two things come to mind. One, like you say, companies either taking too long to respond to things, especially if they’re negative, or even if they’re positive because the people don’t have the training, they come across as flat, which then comes off as insincere.
And then you get these heavily workshopped responses, so that when the person or the company or the organization does come out, it’s this kind of, it’s almost like a boilerplate response. “We regret any inconvenience caused, and we are still learning. And we, I am sorry that my words hurt certain segments of the community who I will not name, because if I forget one of the segments, they’re gonna burn me alive and so, er, uh. So now, instead of a sincere apology, I have now read the paragraph that was written by 17 different people and the legal department, and I hate doing this.” And that comes across. So, you don’t come off as authentic at all. In fact, you may be doing more damage.
Craig Lucie: 100%. Yeah. And we do have that on our website, like that also just pertains to pushing out good content. Because again, to relate it back to my news days, people tune in to the news, not necessarily for the station, but for the people. Because you trust them and they’re authentic and they’re credible.
And that’s what you, for your company or nonprofit, when you are out there speaking to your followers, you do, to your point, Derek, need to be authentic. You need to be credible. You need to be believable. It can’t come across as cheesy. People are very quick to point out BS out there, especially in this day and age.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, that’s true. You know, it’s kind of funny that for some people, for most people I think, we didn’t evolve with cameras in our faces, for God’s sake, these are fairly recent inventions. So, many of us do in fact need some training in order to come across as authentic.
And this puts in mind, you know, the 1960 US presidential election, the first televised debates and Kennedy’s people were like, well, he’s already got this ruddy skin, which on a black and white TV looks really good, we’ll do a little makeup here and there. And Nixon was like, that’s just crap. I’m not a liar (turned out he was, of course, but), you know, I’m not a liar and I’m not inauthentic, and I’m just gonna go out there having no idea that those lights are hot, hot, hot. He just looked like he was a cake melting in the rain. And he lost the election. And that’s part of the reason he lost it, is because he looked like a weird, sweaty, blinky, pale, washed out, moist, criminal, you know?
You know, had he listened to some of his people, or a spy in the Kennedy camp or somebody, had he listened to someone and spent four hours just working through it, not to the point where it becomes inauthentic and staid and stale, but just learning the little tricks – look at the camera, look at this, don’t look at the lens, look past the lens, things like this, he might’ve won that election. But, you know, he didn’t. He didn’t wanna be fake. And yet, weirdly enough, you need practice to not be fake.
Craig Lucie: Oh, yeah, 100%. And I was actually helping a friend, he wrote a book, his name is Brandon Blewett. He just wrote a book called How to Avoid Strangers on Airplanes. And he was, we helped him get some earned media. He did a TV appearance, and I went to school with Brandon, and so I was like, look, you crushed that interview. You were natural, you were credible, you were authentic. You did; you were all those things. But man, you please go to the department store and get yourself some MAC makeup quickly, because you are so shiny.
And those are just things that people overlook. And when you are, to your point, when you are, if you’re gonna do in-studio interviews, morning shows or whatever… Now, on the higher level, you know, if you’re on the Today Show, they’re gonna make you go into the makeup room and add some foundation to you. But people don’t realize those lights, they will make you sweat, or just the oil of your skin will reflect the light, and you will come across so shiny. And those are just the little things. It’s why yes, we do have a makeup room.
Derek DeWitt: And that’s all anybody will talk about.
Craig Lucie: Yeah, that’s right. Like, God, that guy was so sweaty on air, he didn’t look good. He must have been out last night partying.
Derek DeWitt: Right. It might actually go viral, but for the wrong reasons. Instead of what you’re saying, instead, you know, you find out later, ’cause you’re older and you’re not on it, you know, there’s a TikTok video going around out there that’s getting tons and tons of views about, like, check out shiny dude.
Craig Lucie: Yeah, very true. Well, that’s why we keep a makeup bag, and we have our makeup room. Just because when we have clients come in and they’re in front of the camera, like, look, you have to have some or you’re not gonna like the way you look. Trust us.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, that’s for sure.
As the Lucie Content website says, “Content is king and will always be king” (or queen). And using the concept of Create Your News™, which is using these sort of modern, fast-paced newsroom ideas and techniques and attitudes and approaches to creating comprehensive, interlocking content pieces that engage your audience, give you real actionable ROI, and help you create something that hopefully will then have a better chance of getting picked up by the local or even wider media out there. It’s kind of a win-win-win all the way around.
And it’s very interesting because I had never really thought about using a news background for something like this, but once you’re done talking about it, it totally makes sense.
Craig Lucie: Well, good, good! Yeah, it’s a proven strategy. It’s working. It’s working. We’re five years running.
Derek DeWitt: Right, exactly. Yeah. So, of course if you happen to be in the Atlanta area, or even if not, I’m assuming you do things outside of the Atlanta area as well.
Craig Lucie: We do. We have clients all over. So, it doesn’t matter where you are. Remote work is the way to go.
Derek DeWitt: There you go. Hey, it’s an interconnected world. And of course, you can connect with Lucie Content. Of course there will be links to their website and some of their stuff as well, in the transcript of this on our own website.
I have been talking to the CEO of Lucie Content, Craig Lucie, who has a background in news and journalism. He was a TV anchor. He’s won multiple awards. And now he’s applying all the things he and his team have learned in that world and applying it to navigating through the modern content-hungry world that we all find ourselves in. Whether it’s for external communications or internal communications, I think the advice is exactly the same because you’re trying to accomplish the same things, essentially.
Absolutely fascinating stuff, sir. A very, very stimulating conversation.
Craig Lucie: Derek, thank you so much. This was a lot of fun having this conversation and going back to my news days and then relating it today, and then your knowledge in this space. Hopefully to your listeners, they walk away, you know, knowing they learned something. That’s the point is just giving them something valuable.
Derek DeWitt: I’d like to thank Mr. Lucie for talking to me today, and of course, as I said at the top, everybody out there for listening. And again, I remind you there will be links to Lucie Content and other things on the Visix website, and there will be a video version of this as well with some images that are apropos to the conversation we’ve just had.