coming up next on passion struck deluded Focus equals diluted results so what we want to do is be very intentional and Hyper focused on the messaging on the intent on the the way that we are going to go about getting the results that we want for people to just hyper Focus that reputation to be able to break through otherwise it's like throwing spaghetti at a wall and someone's hoping that at some point that it'll stick welcome to Passion struck hi I'm your host John R miles and on the show we de
cipher the secrets tips and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turned their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself if you're new to the show I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays we have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors CEOs create innovators scientists military leaders Visiona
ries and athletes now let's go out there and become passionstractor [Music] foreign love doing episodes but I absolutely love it when I get to bring a personal friend on the show and today I have an amazing guest for you Hillary Billings welcome Hillary oh my gosh thank you so much for having me I'm so excited to be here that's what's so great to see your smile again and for those of you who are listening you can catch it on our YouTube channel I'd love to ask this question we all have moments t
hat define us how did a firework accident eventually lead you to becoming Miss Nevada talk about a defining moment in my life I at the time was an international travel blogger and I had just gotten back to the States from living with the firewalker tribe in Fiji who claims to be The Originators of the practice of walking on hot coals and it was right around the 4th of July I had a friend that was having a Fourth of July party and they were lighting off fireworks like any normal person would on t
he 4th of July and it just happened to be a freak moment where one of them the fuse lit up the fuse went down and nothing happened and everybody went quiet because you know that something is wrong when the firework didn't explode and then it exploded in all the wrong ways and the fuse ended up traveling 30 feet on fire in the air curved around it hit my sunglasses and went down my shirt and I ended up suffering second and third degree burns to my chest and my stomach and at the time I was doing
some modeling I was traveling a lot I had all these travel plans for the summer and for the fall and everything in my life was put on pause while I was trying to heal doctors didn't know my healing time would look like they didn't know if I looked normal fun fact but chest is the slowest healing part of the body being in my mid-20s at the time it was a really interesting time I was having to redefine what it meant to feel feminine and beautiful and to accept my body and all of the healing that w
as happening to Grapple with the fact that I was defining Myself by my career and I always had by my success and being a travel writer and a travel blogger I just went underground and I didn't tell anybody that I had this major life change I was just continuing to blog about what had happened to me in the past some places I traveled before I felt so embarrassed by the situation even though there was no reason to and it was the New Year's going into 2013 that I was hired for some modeling gig and
I was feeling really good about myself and then I just happened to look in the mirror as I was leaving for the event and I saw my scars and I just had a breakdown and I was so tired of throwing myself as pity party so I decided to put myself in the most uncomfortable situation that I could think of nothing sounded more terrifying than being on stage in a bikini and having someone Judge Me based upon my appearance never done a pageant before never had any interest before still didn't really have
any interest but I wanted to overcome my confidence issues and then lo and behold I would go on to win the pageant and become Miss Nevada work with the burn Institute the burn Foundation Southern Nevada firefighters and it was a really life-changing experience specifically because I made the decision to take action in a time where everything felt so dismal you hear these horror stories of accidents people have with fireworks and I remember as a youngster when I was in Middle School myself and a
group of my friends all would go in together and we'd buy these box of fireworks not even sure my parents know but we would end up having like bottle rocket fights and Roman Candle fights up and down the neighborhood streets and I look back and I'm like we could have so injured ourselves but man it was fun yeah yes I was definitely a casualty of that thinking but I think again it was such a formative experience for me and really allowed me to push beyond my thinking as to what my life could loo
k like and how my impact could be seen and felt in the world at the end of the day I'm glad that it happened because otherwise I wouldn't have had the opportunity to connect with so many people and to make the impact on my community that I did because of my involvement with pageantry and it's still an organization that I'm still very closely tied to and being able to help Empower and Foster the next generation of beauty queens who are just women that want a platform who are super smart and have
an agenda to making the world a better place and so I think it's a pretty interesting and cool organization to be a part of that prioritizes community service that prioritizes scholarship in that way and it's been a lot of fun to have this interesting feather in my cap over the years yes this question just came into my head and that is once you win a pageant like that are you kind of part of that Organization for life at that point or do you after a time period move away from it it really depend
s upon the woman I would say that there is opportunity to create a strong system actually just went to a wedding of a former Miss Nevada friend of mine there was a number of us there and so it was fun to see the beauty queens from over the years and how we continue to support each other I think the great thing about the organization is that it gives you an opportunity to connect with other women who want to make an impact who are looking for ways to get involved in their community and who have a
ll gone through something in one way or another that has led them to be more ambitious and one of my best friends was my first runner-up from the year that I won and we're still incredibly close today so I have had the opportunity to judge for many missusa pageants coach a lot of girls to the Miss USA and Miss America stages and I think now as I get more into focusing on business and different opportunities I'm not as heavily involved as I was closer to my reign but yeah it's one of those system
s and organizations where you can be involved for life and I think a lot of women are because of the community that it can Foster well you left that and we all see these people at the Oscars or Golden Globes or major events interviewing these a-listers and you often wonder how in the heck did they find their way doing that and you yourself were one of them interviewing a-listing celebrities on the red carpet how did doing that make you passionate about helping people overcome imposter syndrome a
nd developing confidence where we feel authentic in ourselves gosh it was such a privilege to be asked to be a part of that world it all started actually when I was still miss Nevada so I had just gone to compete at Nationals it was actually a year to the day that I was burned with the firewalk that I was competing in the swimsuit preliminaries for my title shortly thereafter I had won a local blogging award for a Las Vegas magazine that was a highly reputable and revered and I think it was abou
t two weeks after I got back from the national pageant where I got a phone call from USA Today and they were interested in having me come on as a journalist and I remember the phone call with it was the president of the travel editor in their division and I was so nervous and he's talking to me about what they wanted to do and what they were thinking about and how we could do the six with trials because I had this blogging experience but I didn't have formal journalism experience and I remember
being so serious like yes okay of course we can happily do this and he said this is supposed to be fun exciting and I was like yes I am excited I'm also just so nervous I want to show you that I'm taking this seriously and I think we got a week or two into that trial and there was an opportunity that came up for me to be on the carpet for the I Heart Radio Music Festival that was going to be here in Vegas and so they called and asked if I'd be willing to do hosting for them I said yes and then I
hung up the phone and started freaking out about it you say yes to the opportunity then you have the freak out then you go do it that's my philosophy and they sent their top music journalist from Nashville essentially to babysit me he was so wonderful and he and I joke about this now because he's still a fantastic mentor and friend but they didn't know if I would be good at it or how it would go so they wanted to make sure they had a professional there as well that was able to help guide the pr
ocess and my first interview out of the gate was with Ryan Seacrest so just the interviewer of all interviewers no pressure whatsoever but between Ryan and having Brian Mansfield who have been with USA Today as their top music editor for so many years it was such an incredible opportunity and just very fast down and dirty trial by fire of how to do this well and both Brian and Ryan were very great at making you feel like you were the only person in the room prioritizing the relationship and that
was something that even with USA Today in general at the time they were very well known for which was they would prioritize their relationships over being the first ones to break a scandalous story because at the end of the day it mattered to them to be able to have access long term that really shaped the career for me and provided an opportunity for me to continue to do these red carpets and even though I would get super nervous going into these interviews the thing that I realized the more th
at I did these interviews with people that I idolized and all of these incredible celebrities was that they're just like us right they have the same self-confidence issues they have the same imposter syndrome issues they're dealing with the same things and you can even see that reflected in their interviews sometimes which was really fascinating but at the time it was something that we weren't talking about and it really made me passionate about wanting to bring that to light to Showcase and see
how we can help especially women when we have all these impossible standards that are being put on us at all times to look a certain way to act a certain way to have all the energy in the world and do it effortlessly and also run the UN and cure cancer and and look great doing it that's just not the reality of the people that we look up to either and how do we start having more realistic conversations so it was through that experience that really motivated me and brought my passion out about he
lping people overcome their feelings of insecurity and build authentic confidence yeah I've recently had on Dr hallerman Who now is a psychologist but at one time she was one of the top agents in Hollywood she represented Ben Stiller Vince Vaughn Jamie Lee Curtis the list goes on and on and she said the same thing that you just brought up that when it comes down to it they are just normal people just like you and me they have the resources that we don't necessarily have to make them look amazing
every single day and to help pull some of the pressure off of them that they're dealing with on The Daily and I just saw a photo of Tom Cruise when he was in Jerry Maguire compared to now and it looks like he's younger now than he was then I'm like wow I need his health program gosh he has some great genetics doesn't he oh my gosh I wish we all had that same ability and money to do what he's able to do oh well you end up jumping from that and alongside it you become a personal brand strategist
yeah and I wanted to ask you why is it so hard to build a personal brand and what are some of the reasons that you have found working with people why most personal Brands don't survive so I think for start everybody other or not they are in their business you are known you have a reputation for your results you have a reputation for the amount of people you impact and how you do that so we all have a personal brand so for starters there's a lot of saturation on the market in my experience and wh
at I've learned with working with clients is the biggest reason that people are not breaking through to the next level to where they want to go is they are trying to do too much they are trying to break through on every possible front so whether that's they've got a million different social media profiles they're trying to break through on YouTube on LinkedIn on Instagram on tick tock on clubhouse on Pinterest they're trying to build their email list the same time they're trying to build a podca
st at the same time they're trying to write the book at the same time they're trying to write the show and they're have so many course offerings or different types of business models their messaging isn't clear at the end of the day my mentor and Coach Rave Aiden says all the time that diluted Focus equals diluted results so what we want to do is be very intentional and Hyper focused on the messaging on the intent on the the way that we are going to go about getting the results that we want for
people to just hyper Focus that reputation to be able to break through otherwise it's like throwing spaghetti at a wall and someone's hoping that at some point that it'll stick and now in my career helping people with short form content it's a very similar challenge that people are running into it's the haphazardness of it all you and I were talking before we started recording about how a lot of people will see what some of these huge personal brands are doing right now like garyvee like Mark Cu
ban and they will be copying what they're doing because they see it working for them but the challenge is they've already had at least 10 years in the marketplace to build their reputation so they can do things that people that are less well-known necessarily can't or won't work for them because of the reputation that they have going back to Tom Cruise he has I think 2 million followers on Tick Tock he hasn't made a single Tick Tock post right so it isn't about content it's about his reputation
people are already following him just waiting hoping for some sort of fun top gun clips that are potentially going to come out on that platform so we have to think about it differently and not necessarily apply what the current leaders in the industry are doing to what you're doing so first and foremost we have to get hyper-specific hyper clearing your messaging hyper clear on the goals so that a proper strategy can be put into place as to where and how people are going to find you yeah so I jus
t had Rory on the show as well his episode if someone wants to hear it is 248 and one of the biggest things I learned from him is that a lot of people go into their personal brand in service of self and I think one of the key messages he has is personal Brands really flourish when you're in service of others and you're typically most inclined to serve the person that you once were and I think that's where a lot of people go wrong I know I did when I first started this because a lot of times you
don't want to see the person that you once were oh yeah because doesn't that just remind you of all the inadequacies and insecurities that you felt and that's a hard place to have to Grapple with and to sit with that but I think once we are able to look at our previous selves with compassion and embrace that they had so much to give and so much heart and forgive ourselves for the transgressions or whatever our ego at the time wanted us to do I went through the same thing even when I was on red c
arpets and there was a lot of validation that I needed in that time and being in that role that now I don't and I think that it's such a beautiful place when you can finally look at your prior self and say gosh I feel for them and embrace them and recognize that there are so many other people out there in your sphere and in the world that need the knowledge that you now have and how can you help them to gain that I think that's so powerful when I went from trying to Define what I was trying to d
o with the podcast to really doing it through a unique lens the hockey stick effect was almost overnight and has just increased because what I found is once you find that lens you tend to do everything through it like who you bring on the show who you bring into your life how you're talking about things the questions you're asking and it makes such a profound difference and what a powerful thing because it also I remember when you and I first started working together and talking there's so much
overwhelm in feeling like you have to do it all and that you have to take every opportunity and you have to bring everybody on the podcast and you have to create all of these relationships all the time but once you find that uniqueness and you live in that uniqueness and you also know what your long-term and short-term business goals are it really allows you and gives you permission to release all of these things that aren't for you so you can focus on that hyper specific hyper focus of your dif
ferentian to get through the wall and it provides some peace I'd say and feeling like you don't have to do it all the time yeah I would agree with that and as you're well aware this podcast is focused on how you create an intentional life and that is really mentally physically emotionally and spiritually and I have come to firmly believe that it's the culmination of our daily choices that determines our long-term tsunami of greatness and I'm going to ask you a philosophical question along these
lines that is what is the key for translating our highest Ambitions into what you want your life to look like in the future oh I think it's providing space to sit with yourself to understand what those are and how you want your life to look like we were talking about this before as someone who is a content creator who helps people with their short form video and social media strategy and personal brand strategy it's so easy to see what others are doing and to be consuming and to get lost in I've
got to do that too instead of looking at what works for the end goal that I want to be achieving and I think in order to do that you have to take a step back at some point and probably pretty regularly to do an audit and see if the life that you're creating and the actions that you're taking if those align with your self-worth and your deservingness and where you want to go in your life so I would say that's a big piece of it that we don't do enough because we are so plugged in all the time I'm
not sure if you know who Juliette font is but she has a great book called a minute to think and it's all about this topic and she gives this great metaphor that people want to start a fire in their lives or their career but if you think about actually starting a fire nothing happens without air and the one thing that we are missing so much in this digital world that we're going to start talking about is white space I recently interviewed Robin Sharma about the power of focus and the impact of d
istraction and during our interview he told me that we have a choice we can go about changing the world where we can play on our phones we can't do both and I wanted to lead in with that because how do you think the digital world we find ourselves immersed in is impacting Our Lives in every way it's impacting our attention span it's impacting how we process information it's impacting how we connect with others it's impacting the types of content that's getting made it's also impacting the celebr
ities that are now arising in our world and the people that we consider influential even down to actors and actresses that are getting booked in movies and people that are getting book deals there is so much that is being dictated by what's online and I think it's a really powerful place to be because there's fewer Gatekeepers than there used to be so there's obviously positive negatives when it comes to what's happening in the online world and I do think that we can often get stuck not intentio
nally thinking about our time online I believe I went to it was Elizabeth Gilbert's book launch of city of girls and she was talking about how you can either be a Creator or you can be a consumer but you can't be both at the same time and I remember at the time I was just getting into content creation when I went to see her and it was a very powerful statement because we spend so much time consuming it and that was a lot of how I learned my process for how to make good videos when we were first
given this opportunity to have this Facebook watch channel I was coming off of doing hundreds of videos for USA Today my co-founder and partner he was a former billboard charting artist and musician and had this huge background and TV and film and so we thought we got this we could make content all day long and we were terrible at it and we couldn't figure out we were so frustrated that we couldn't get our videos to work and there was this turning point of we either had to go all in and figure i
t out or we had to abandon ship and try something else so we sat down and watched hundreds and hundreds of viral videos and mapped them out we put them in a spreadsheet what's happening at second three what's happening at second five what's happening at second 15. how many people are in the video what's the framing what are the colors what's the captions is there music how long is it what's the themes and through that we started to see patterns emerge so we took the learning and applied it to ou
r next video which did five million views and then we took those learnings and applied it to the following video which did 10 million views and not to say that every video that we did since then was a hit certainly not but through this process of initially consuming and then translating to intentional action from that learning we have been able to do over a billion organic views I grew my Tick Tock following from zero to four hundred thousand followers in 40 days and we realized that we had crea
ted a system for how to help people authentically especially Brands and entrepreneurs to make and authentically connect with the people online that they want to find but it really comes down to that piece of intentionality 20 million new videos are uploaded to social media every single day and that's a lot of noise that everyone's up against and frankly a lot of it is bad noise it's haphazard people are just trying to keep up with the Joneses they see someone doing something They're copying it h
oping it'll work for them they don't have a strategy they don't have a voice they don't have a uniqueness they're not pushing towards a goal as to where they want to drive that traffic if something does go viral they don't know why it does they're not able to replicate it it's a lot of haphazard work which is creating a lot of noise and also creating a lot of consumables that aren't incredibly helpful so going back to what we were talking about earlier of creating that space within your own busi
ness and your own brand to sit and think about what are we actually trying to achieve here and then going forth with intentional actions with that content I think is so powerful but yeah I think the playing on the phone analogy is so powerful we can either be a consumer or we can be a Creator we can be making impact or we can be consuming and getting impacted and it's really our decision as to when we want to do that in our lives because we have to have both but making sure that both are intenti
onal and neither one is by accident well I loved that you brought up the words attention span because yesterday I interviewed Dr Gloria mark who's an award-winning psychologist she teaches at the University of California Irvine and she has studied the science of attention and multitasking for two decades and she released a new book in January called attention span and she has found through her pioneering field work that we spend an average of 47 seconds on any screen before altering our attentio
n 47 seconds and it just makes me want to ask because you were well immersed in this digital economy where do you see the future of attention going short form content has certainly changed the game across the board even the way that we consume content on socials is now even affecting and impacting how major film and TV studios are making decisions about shows they're all about optimizing for watch time which is exactly what we're trying to do through short form content I don't think short form c
ontent is going away Adobe recently released a study 80 of the time that you're on your cell phone not making phone calls or texting you are watching short form video and I think that number that 80 percent of the time is only going to increase over the next five years and regardless of what platform that's on everyone's playing catch up with Tick Tock right now but whether that's Instagram reels or YouTube shorts or Facebook reels or whatever the next thing is it is going to be based in short f
orm content which is affecting our attention spans overall even with how they're now making movies and TV shows Things Are so much quicker if you go back and watch shows even from the 90s or from the 80s there is a major difference between how quickly we are dropping into a storyline and how quickly we're getting to learn about characters and action is happening because of the consumables and the way that we want to see content happening you see it in music you see it in podcast episodes you see
it in books and how we write everything changes as the Zeitgeist of how we consume changes so I would say short form is definitely continuing to lead the charge of how we consume and our attention as much as there is out there I would say that there isn't a ton of great content that's cutting through the noise and that's part of our mission is we want to help people to really make an impact and be able to cut through those 20 million videos so yours is the one that people stop the scroll on and
helping people intentionally set those up so that they can be seen and heard and get their message out there Hillary that was a great lead into where I want to take this but before I go there I just have to say that we all wanted to go see Avatar until we saw that it was three and a half hours long yeah it's a long movie and I'm like how in the world can you sit there through three and a half hours it went the opposite of this short form content yeah but it did impact your decision to go you de
cided not to and I remember this is going to date me but I remember when the Titanic came out and everyone was like oh my gosh this is the first three hour movie to ever be made and none of us could wait to go to the theaters to see it and there was an intermission it was the first time I'd ever experienced an intermission in a movie because it was so long and it came out it had those three VHS tapes all next to each other because they couldn't fit it all on one yeah it's fascinating to see how
the pendulum has swung and it might go the other way I think that we all need to be very aware that we have to be better about saying what we want to say in a much clearer concise and intentional way because there is no haphazard attention being given anymore there's just too much out there and that's a really important thing is we have to earn attention this is all about making your content as compelling as possible so it's really removing the ego and that's a lot of what we do if you're lookin
g at your content the lens of a stranger who doesn't know you who doesn't care how do we get them to care how do we get them to give you another two and a half seconds on a video and this is where we really start to craft intentionally and make your content so compelling it can't be denied I think it was Steve Martin who said be so good they can't deny you and it's the same thing that we're dealing with now in short form content it used to be a lot easier it's not anymore so now we have to earn
the attention but that's okay because it can be earned and especially by the right people yes you're absolutely right and I think you just answered the next question I was going to ask you which was how can a listener Leverage a psychology of attention to share their passions with the world everyone has a personal brand sometimes it's easier to create one in certain career paths for instance when I was at Lowe's Home Improvement the last thing that they wanted anything employees to do was to hav
e a brand outside the company they wanted everything to come through that lens and I know a lot of people probably are in professions like that but what I learned looking back is that there are many things I could have done even by publishing articles or expanding my presence that would have benefited Lowe's but it would have benefited me on a personal basis as well and I had a cure at Dell Victor Fetter who did an amazing job with balancing both so it doesn't matter if you're in a healthcare pr
ofession or corporate profession an attorney whatever anyone can cultivate a personal brand and I think it makes you that much more alluring to other career prospects to have your name out there absolutely and I would like to say My Hope Is that a lot of these bigger organizations and corporations that previously didn't want their employees to have those Brands I think they're starting to see the importance of it and recognizing that whether or not they're involved in the process and they're enc
ouraging that process personal brands are happening because again your personal brand is your reputation it is what people think of when they think of you Muhammad Ali has a personal brand Hitler has a personal brand they can be both positive and negative right and Mother Teresa has a personal brand I think the language that we use to describe it is a little bit different now especially in our social media age but it is cool to see that organizations are recognizing that they can't necessarily c
ontrol it but they can cultivate it and the more that they cultivate and encourage their employees to own their personal Brands they can leverage those for more sales and better reputation of the company so I'm 100 with you I think there's a lot that can be done that doesn't necessarily make you a threat to the organization and if the organization does feel threatened by that it might give me pause to look at if this is the right fit for me moving forward knowing that the end goal is to just bri
ng in more Revenue more bottom line and a better reputation for the organization that I'm a part of there's something we share in common is that when tick tock was first out there it's a platform that neither of us really cared for and in fact now I have people coming to me all the time why aren't you doing more Tick Tock do Tech talk do this do that and you were adamant you wouldn't get on it what changed I was exhausted I think like a lot of business owners and a lot of personal brands there's
already so much that's required of us outside of our day-to-day job outside of the thing that brings us in money we have to fill that type of funnel and having that personal brand out there in a lot of different ways through Linkedin through Facebook through Instagram through doing newsletters having blogs updating the websites doing speaking opportunities it's exhausting being a person in this age and to add one more platform that I didn't know I didn't want to learn how to use that wasn't for
my generation that seemed to be all about dancing it was too much and I was not interested whatsoever and I was very adamant to Rory many a time that I put my foot down I would not go I would not eat green eggs and ham and it wasn't until I had a major issue on my Facebook page and we had just posted a video it was going viral things were going well and there was a glitch on the back end of my page which demonetized the page and Facebook was working on it with some sort of tech issue but I'm ju
st watching this video I think it ended up getting about 15 million views bringing in zero dollars and my heart is just breaking and I just couldn't look at it anymore and I had to give myself something else to do so I said okay I guess I'm gonna go through this whole Tick Tock thing is about and I spent some time and we did a very similar methodology to when we started working on Facebook where I spent a lot of time studying different videos and then from there made some guesses of my content t
hat had done well other places what might work if I reworked it and edited it accordingly and almost right away we started to see great results and it was really fascinating to see the growth happen so quickly there is also something called the new account Advantage which happens on every platform regardless of whether it's YouTube or Tick Tock where the platform will artificially lift your first couple of posts because it's trying to help you find your audience it's trying to figure out what ty
pes of content you fall into which categories as well as it's trying to keep you on the platform so we were able to really leverage that to my advantage Without Really recognizing that was a piece of what was happening at the time but it it quickly turned into a huh okay something's happening here there's a shift that's occurring and and really starting to delve into the opportunities that Tick Tock has presented and now again over the course of the past few years it is the leader in the space i
t is the number one search engine for Millennials and gen Z it is the way that people are getting their information it's the way that media is getting its news headlines have you noticed how many news articles are based around a viral video that's happening on Tick Tock we joke that people are getting their news on Instagram the tick tocks on Instagram a week later as to what's really cool and happening in the space so there's a incredible opportunity it's still very possible to grow organically
I think the thing that people struggle with the most is having the bandwidth to do it all and what we found with attention here is and with our clients is that now if we take a tick tock first approach even if the content doesn't go on Tick Tock but we think about intentionally curating the content for that platform it's a one-way street so that content will work on Instagram reels it will work on YouTube shorts it will work on Facebook reels it doesn't go the other way so a lot of the exhausti
on that people feel a lot of the exhaustion that I was feeling of having to put together these photo posts and these stories and these highlight reels and all these different pieces for these different platforms all that goes away again eighty percent of the content that people are consuming now online a short form video and when you start with Tick Tock first in mind you can really make a bigger impact in Splash so it's from that random fluke that I ended up on the platform and I'm very happy t
o say that I am and how much I guess I would say importance goes into how you describe a video on tick tock so this is interesting because I think that I get this question more than anything else so hey what are the hashtags that I should be using I have this 5 10 5 strategy or what time of day should I be posting and what does my caption need to look like and I found that all those pieces are important and they can help to lift a video especially now that Tick Tock is cataloging videos on Googl
e especially now that people are searching for videos in Tick Tock so there is more lift that can come to that but at the end of the day none of it matters if your content isn't compelling so we take a creative first approach we've seen videos do exceptionally well that didn't have a single hashtag or even a caption attached to them because the creative is so strong and we've also seen our videos unfortunately do very well on other people's accounts when they steal your videos and post it up to
their thousand followers and then it gets them 50 000 followers because the creative is so strong there is a component of yes it is important and we want to think about it but I don't want that to replace focusing on creating compelling content it's the creative that is going to maximize your watch time which is what you want to optimize for and it's all about substance before strategy and then the strategy can help move you further down the path but if we don't have the substance the strategy i
s going to give you little to no lift well and Hillary I think the last thing I wanted to ask so that you could give the audience an example is you've had clients gain millions of Impressions and even win shorty impact awards for their videos that you helped create can you give us an example of a client you've worked with and how you have leveraged the psychology of attention we keep talking about and their authentic voice to create compelling content yeah again another one of the resistance pie
ces I think we come across a lot is I don't want to dance I don't want to participate in Trends and we totally get that and in fact our strategy when we work with clients is to not Embrace Trends because if you are following a trend You Are by definition a follower and we want to help Brands stand out and put their own stamp on the platform and communicate and connect we have a client they're based out of Canada they're called Lighthouse immersive you're probably familiar with them they run the
immersive Van Gogh experiences and they're about to launch the immersive Disney experiences across the country and when we were initially talking with them they've got a beautiful very visual product they mentioned that they have a lot of proposals that happen at their exhibits and we're like wow what a really cool moment that we could try to capture how do we showcase that this beautiful opportunity can happen here so we staged a proposal video and again thinking about the psychology of attenti
on there's three things we want to do we want to grab attention we want to spark an emotion and we want to create a curiosity Gap so in this video we're grabbing attention we're starting with the action God's already on his knee on the ground we see the woman we know who our Target is and we're sparking an emotion right oh my gosh there's excitement there's a surprise there's anticipation and then as far as the Gap what is she gonna say is he gonna get caught while he's setting up this proposal
and this video created such a beautiful opportunity for viewers to to comment on the proposal and comment on the experience and share in that moment of how special something like this would be to them so it really did all those things I think before we started working with them they were averaging let's say 150 views a post and that video did 350 000 views my Math's not great but it's a giant increase again just thinking about what we have on hand what's unique and special about what they do and
how to leverage the ability to spark the emotion to grab the attention and create a curiosity Gap so I think that's a great example as to how a client can do that with their content without having to dance or put on a show they don't want to put on yeah and Hillary I'll end with this if a listener wants to learn more about attentioneers or about you where can they find all things Hillary the best place to go is attentioneers.com it's attention ears ers.com you can also book a free call with us
at attentioneers.com backslash free call we're always looking and excited to hear what people are working on and what their goals are with short form video content and if we can help so that is the best place to find me and to connect well Hillary I so enjoyed having you on today and love having my friends on the podcast so thank you for being here it is such a pleasure John it's always great to see you and I hope this conversation is valuable I love that interview with Hillary Billings I wanted
to thank Hillary for joining us today on the show you're about to hear a preview of The Passion struck podcast with renowned experts Christina maslak and Michael P lighter co-authors of the burnout challenge who share their invaluable insights on tackling burnout improving workplace Civility and fostering engagement don't miss this enlightening conversation that could transform your perspective on work and well-being we want to feel like we belong to the unit the team we want to feel that we're
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