Creative Partners is our ongoing interview series where we talk to clients, past and present, about their views on the value of professional partnerships, creative growth, and developing a lasting relationship between a client and vendor that evolves with a brand.
Today’s creative partner is Jeff Reynolds from Okapi Publishing. For nearly a decade, our team has provided Okapi with live-action explainer videos, animated sales videos, in-classroom case studies, and recently, a brand film. Throughout it all, Jeff has been one of the leading creative voices behind all of our collaborations and continues to return to Blue Barn for projects every year. In our conversation, we discuss the importance of cultivating long-term partnerships and the benefits of developing a creative “short-hand” with your vendors.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Carlos Foster (Co-founder, Creative Manager, Blue Barn Creative): Hi Jeff! Please describe where you currently work and your role.
Jeff Reynolds (Director of Marketing, Okapi): I’m the Director of Marketing for Okapi Educational Publishing. We provide supplemental resources for K-5 Reading Language Arts Instruction, and we’re headquartered in Southern California. Most of what we produce is available in either English or Spanish, so a great portion of our marketing outreach is to dual-language educators. But our core business revolves around foundational skills development and small group reading instruction. My role covers a lot of bases in promotional literature, the company website, videos—which we’ll be talking about—product training, product positioning, product development, and a lot of administration.
CF: How long have you worked with Okapi?
JR: I have been with Okapi for a little over eleven years now. I come from the East Coast, where I had a 30-year career with various publishers that include Scholastic and National Geographic. I’m bringing a background in trade, library, and classroom promotion to my present position.
CF: Why do you like working in that field?
JR: Because it’s all education-based. I really enjoy the publishing process, and educators, and the cyclical nature of the school year. I think it’s a dynamic and always challenging field to work in.
CF: In what ways do video and photography support the marketing efforts for Okapi?
JR: We use video in a variety of ways. That includes short interstitials that introduce products and can be used on our website or attached to digital outreach. We produce longer-form positioning videos that go into greater detail about any given product for those that require a deeper dive into what it is, how it works, and why it’s a good fit for their educational needs or approach. In addition, we always find it valuable to produce video in collaboration with gifted educators using our products in real classrooms with real students. These videos highlight the efficacy of what we offer and the myriad ways it can be deployed in actual instructional settings.
When all of this gets channeled through our mechanisms, it brings potential customers to our doorstep to find out more. When you’re using video—a medium that has motion—I think your message becomes more compelling.
CF: In what ways have you brought video, as a medium, to Okapi?
JR: Instructional programs and learning platforms are complicated things, and they come with very high stakes. You have to be able to take what is valuable about what you’re offering and condense it down to the bare essentials. That’s all the time people can spare to give you. Video helps us do that.
CF: How is the relationship between Okapi and Blue Barn evolved and grown over the years, and what types of projects have we produced?
JR: Blue Barn has been an invaluable partner to Okapi, and mainly for this reason: we often come to projects with a firm grasp of what we want or need to accomplish. And I think we’re fairly good at ideation and conceptualizing, but we don’t always know the best means to the ends, and that’s where Blue Barn has often stepped in and provided us with the roadmap we need. We worked on a project recently—a company positioning project where we knew more about how we wanted viewers to feel than how we needed it to look. And we’re really pleased in our collaboration with Blue Barn and the entire process, from the script writing to the final video.
CF: How have the animated projects come together, and what purpose have they served?
JR: We’ve just gone through the process of re-engineering our website, to better brand our various programs under the Okapi umbrella. One component of that is providing our customers with very quick looks at all the things we offer. Because they’re instructional programs, they’re often difficult to break down into just the bare essentials, but using video helps us do that. We can give visitors 60 seconds or less of what it is, what it does, and where to go to find out more.
That’s been a really interesting process, and Blue Barn has been a great partner. As we worked our way through those short animations (you can think of them as sixty-second commercials for each of our product lines), we’ve had the added challenge of needing to be aware of the dual language market in addition to Spanish and English.
CF: I know you have an in-house team, so why use out-of-house vendors like ourselves?
JR: We are a small organization. We don’t have a lot of bandwidth in-house. The marketing staff we do have are adept at finding solutions for what we need, and a lot of that relies on the services of outside partners like Blue Barn.
CF: Why cultivate a years-long partnership with someone rather than just hiring new vendors whenever you have a new project?
JR: Well, it speaks to the shorthand and the trust that you have with people you know. Mainly it comes down to the fact that we’re too often challenged by time constraints to search out or establish new relationships. Having the comfort and the reliability of a trusted partner really makes a difference for us.
CF: What would you say to anyone who’s considering hiring Blue Barn for their next video production?
JR: I would say go for it. They are the right resource for whatever it is you’re doing, and you should know that you’re getting involved with people who care about what you need, who care about the work, and who will deliver more than you had imagined.
CF: We’ll take it. That’s the billboard quote right there. Thank you, Jeff.
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Carlos Foster
Carlos is the co-founder and creative manager at Blue Barn Creative.