*
Transcript:
Tom Farrell: [00:00:00] And I always use that question. Why not right now? Why not do it right now? You can talk about it and kick it down the road for years. What you have to do is roll up your sleeves, decide that you're going to plow forward, commit to it, and stay with that commitment.
Adam Stoker: [00:00:20] Hello, everyone and welcome to another episode of the Destination Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Adam Stoker. We've got a great show for you today. I've got a guest that I met recently. It's somebody I wanted to meet for a long time and finally was facilitated to meet him in February. His name is Tom Farrell, and Tom is the founder of The Workshop. And we're going to talk a little bit about The Workshop today and what it does. But first of all, Tom, thanks for joining me today.
Tom Farrell: [00:00:48] You're more than welcome, Adam. Pleasure to be here.
Adam Stoker: [00:00:51] Yeah. I’m really excited to chat with you. As soon as we met, we knew we had to do an episode together. Before we dive too far into the subject matter of today, I'd like to have the audience get to know you a little bit. So maybe if you could start by telling us your dream destination, Tom, if you could go anywhere in the world that you haven't been, because that would be cheating. Where would you go?
Tom Farrell: [00:01:11] I'm glad you threw in there haven't been, because, you know, I would have said Myrtle Beach right out of the gates. But, I guess a dream destination that I would have, I would say somewhere in Italy there's a there's a town that I've heard a lot about called San Gimignano. I don't know if you've ever heard of San Gimignano.
Adam Stoker: [00:01:33] I haven't. No.
Tom Farrell: [00:01:34] Small little town in Italy that I have had on my bucket list for many, many years. And I would say that's the one place that I really want to get to and hopefully in the not-too-distant future, I'm going to get there.
Adam Stoker: [00:01:48] Now, why is it on your bucket list? What is it that you learned about that destination that made it stand out to you?
Tom Farrell: [00:01:53] So, my older brother Joe is a Roman Catholic priest and he lives in Rome. He's stationed in Rome and they have a monastery in San Gimignano, and he often visits there. And the pictures that he sends me and the stories that he shares with me about this place, it just seems like a location out of Central Hollywood casting. It's a small little village that to me with the pictures that I've seen just feels like a step back in time. And so for myself, I think about often going there and just kind of decompressing for a little while. And it just, it's one of those ones that's been on my radar forever. So glad you asked that.
Adam Stoker: [00:02:38] Yeah, you've got the inside track. It sounds like your brother over there doing the recon for you. You probably have a pretty good guide to show you around.
Tom Farrell: [00:02:46] And he's fluent in Italian now. So more than a perfect guide.
Adam Stoker: [00:02:51] A guide and a translator. That sounds like a pretty good deal, Tom. I think a lot of us would like to have that in our dream destination.
Tom Farrell: [00:02:58] Well, we can connect you to him, Adam.
Adam Stoker: [00:03:00] Let's do it. Let's talk a little bit about one of your favorite travel memories that stands out in your life. Maybe somewhere that you went, that was an important part of your kind of journey.
Tom Farrell: [00:03:08] Yeah, there's a couple, but the one that really sticks out is a town in the northernmost part of Canada called Churchill Canada. It is known as the polar bear capital of the world.
Adam Stoker: [00:03:24] Okay.
Tom Farrell: [00:03:26] And I was fortunate enough to go up there. Not once but twice. And it's one of those places that has just stuck with me over the years. I think it was the experience more than anything. We were out on the frozen tundra in the middle of winter, tracking polar bears.
Adam Stoker: [00:03:42] Wow.
Tom Farrell: [00:03:44] So it was flat-out awesome. But that destination certainly is a really, really good memory for me.
Adam Stoker: [00:03:51] Now, you didn't do the thing where you get in the glass cage and put meat around you where the polar bear comes in and tries to get through the cage, right? That wasn't you.
Tom Farrell: [00:04:00] We did not go to that extreme. We did airlift a polar bear away from the town into a remote location and watched that process, which was really fascinating.
Adam Stoker: [00:04:13] Oh, no way. That sounds awesome. Well, holy cow one more to my bucket list. Now that I have to check out because that sounds like an incredible trip.
Tom Farrell: [00:04:22] It is. It's definitely worth the experience.
Adam Stoker: [00:04:24] Awesome. Well, Tom, like I said, I appreciate you coming on. I want to maybe start with you giving your background and maybe how you got to where you are today because you've had kind of a story journey. And I'll give a little spoiler that video production has been a major part of your life. And you know, the fact that we're all in the tourism industry, those of us that, you know, listen to the show for the most part, video and quality video content is one of the most critical things that we can create.
And so I felt like this would be a really important conversation for us to have for somebody that's got the experience that you do the background that you do. Because I think your experience has led you to have maybe a different perspective on content than a lot of the production firms that are relatively new, or you know, have come around in the last several years. You've had a progression. And so I'd love to have you talk about that progression and how it led you to where you are today.
Tom Farrell: [00:05:26] No problem at all. Our mission statement here at The Workshop is creating premium content with a purpose. And we really try to live by that, whether we're developing a new TV show or we're working for a piece of social content for a corporate client. It always has to have a purpose and that's what drives us.
And so I have been working in the content creation space for a long, long time even before it was referred to as content creation, that I originally started with an independent production company and we made TV shows, that was our specialty. And that's where I got my start in the unscripted world. I worked for a company that was fortunate enough to land the client TLC, and TLC at the time, had a show called Trading Spaces. This is in the early 2000s. And I got the opportunity of a lifetime when I was given the job to run Trading Spaces.
So I ran that cable TV show for many, many years. And we were creating content with a purpose. It was an hour-long Saturday night, 9:00 must-view type TV show, where we were doing an interior design show basically at its core, that's what it was. But it was the granddaddy of all these shows that we see today on HGTV and all those other platforms that do interior design shows. Trading Spaces was the granddaddy of those shows.
And so I ran that show and then in 2008, started my own company called The Workshop, which I still have today. And we specialize in all unscripted content. That's all we've done over the years and it has evolved as every business does from creating TV shows that air on Saturday nights to social media campaigns that we create for a corporate client that will run 24/7 on whatever platform they choose to put that piece of content.
Adam Stoker: [00:07:28] Awesome. So interesting journey. You worked on that show, Trading Spaces for a long time. What was it that made you decide? I'm going to go from where I've been and working in this organization, producing this content to, I'm going to be an entrepreneur and I'm going to do this on my own. What triggered that transformation?
Tom Farrell: [00:07:49] I think it was exactly that it was the entrepreneurial itch that I had. I saw what could be done and I wanted to give it a shot myself and see if I could do it. And so like all entrepreneurs at the beginning, ignorance was bliss.
And so I just jumped right into it with both feet. You know, it was touch and go as all start-ups are. And I think at the core, it was me wanting to run my own business and seeing if I could do it myself and create my own team. And since 2008, we've had a pretty good run at it.
Adam Stoker: [00:08:25] What were some of the biggest challenges that you ran into? And let me preface this with, I went from employee to owner of the company that I was working for at the time and was always kind of looking at the owner saying, oh, I could do this better, I could do that better. And then of course, once you actually get in the driver's seat, I realized that I was pretty naive and ignorant in some of my views that I had had beforehand, and had to learn a lot of the things the hard way. So I'm wondering what as you got into that driver's seat, what did you have to learn the hard way?
Tom Farrell: [00:08:56] I had to learn how to say no. And sometimes that's hard because at heart, I like to be a pleaser. I'm a pleaser type of person. But when you're trying to establish a company, I learn quickly that you can't please everybody all the time. And so that was really difficult for me and I had a lot of learning experiences there that helped me grow as an individual, but also helped the company go grow and the culture grow of the company.
And so I found out real fast that saying yes, all the time wasn't the best thing for the company. I was trying to please a particular employee at the time. And that wasn't always for the betterment of the company. So that was a really good hard business lesson that I learned out of the gates. And it has served me really well over the years.
Adam Stoker: [00:09:50] I like that. Okay. So now that you're with The Workshop, you know, you got through some of those challenges that, that you're mentioning there, you learned how to say no, what are some of the projects that, that you've worked on over the last, you know, 15 years that you've been doing this? Now that that really stand out to you, you mentioned unscripted TV. And actually, so before you go into those projects, I'd like to understand why unscripted is important to you because that sounds like a big part of what you do. And then let's talk about some of those unscripted shows that you've been a part of.
Tom Farrell: [00:10:20] So I'll answer the first question about why it's important to me. And that's, I love at the heart of what I love most storytelling and to be able to have the opportunity to tell somebody's story, whether we're renovating their home, we get to tell their story or if it's revolving around their golf swing. We get to dig in and tell the story of that individual through whatever outlet it is or whatever show it is that we choose.
So I think that's what drives me is the storytelling aspect of it. I love being able to dig in and find out about people and then turn their stories into entertaining content.
To answer the second part of your question, Adam, we've produced thousands of TV shows here, but the one that really sticks out as special to me is our first one that we did. It was called the Haney Project for the golf channel. And the premise behind that show was Tiger Woods’ coach, was a gentleman by the name of Hank Haney. And Hank Haney paired up with a celebrity and our first season was Charles Barkley. He tried to teach Charles how to get better at the game of golf. And we made an eight-episode series out of that, so eight half hours of a Haney project.
And that show just kept getting renewed. So we did Charles Barkley the first year. We did Ray Romano the second year. We did Michael Phelps the third year. We did Adam Levine, and so, and so and so. And so that show really launched The Workshop as a company and we just haven't looked back since that first series.
Adam Stoker: [00:11:55] Oh, that's awesome. And I know that a lot of our listeners here are remembering some of that, those shows. I mean, the Charles Barkley Golf transformation process was iconic, right? And garnered a lot of attention. And so, yeah, I thought it was a great show and really what a fun first project to be involved in once you start your own thing. What are some other ones that stand out to you over the years? Tom Farrell: [00:12:21] Yeah, we have had another show called Basketball or Nothing on Netflix, which we went to a location in Arizona called Chinle Arizona and it sits on the Navajo reservation. We followed a high school basketball team as they made a run for the state championship. And what they lacked in height they made up for at heart. And they were short in stature, but man, they would run team after team after team out of the gym, and made it all the way to the finals of the state basketball championship. And so we made a whole series for Netflix out of this high school, Chinle High School basketball team. So, that one really sticks out.
Adam Stoker: [00:13:04] It seems like sports has been a significant part of what you've done.
Tom Farrell: [00:13:08] Sports has been really, really a good genre for us. I think a lot of it stems from the fact of how much everybody here is into sports. And so you lean towards stuff that you like. And we were fortunate enough to find one project after another in the sports world. But I wouldn't say we're focused entirely on sports. I'll go back to what I said at the beginning about creating premium content with a purpose and it just so happens that it's had some sports themes and fell under the sports umbrella. But there's also other genres that we love to tackle and take on a daily basis here.
Adam Stoker: [00:13:48] Well, I think that's a good time to segue, you know, from your journey, how did you end up with tourism being an important part of what you do? And you know, that's probably a good time to talk about that Stuart introduced us and you had the opportunity to work with Stuart to Visit Myrtle Beach. So walk me through when tourism became part of the picture and why it's an important part of your future.
Tom Farrell: [00:14:10] And it was sports that initially got us into business with Myrtle Beach. We were doing a golf show, and through that golf show, I was able to meet Stuart Butler. And Stuart and I brainstormed about different ideas that we could bring to the beach and that was really my entree into the tourism world and haven't looked back. And just see it growing more and more and more by the day. And I have to credit Stuart because he had a big idea and he took a chance and did something a little different than a lot of the other DMOs were doing at the time. And we created full-length TV series down there around Myrtle Beach, and that's been terrific for us.
So while we entered in on the golf side of things, we've kind of now pivoted over to many different genres down there, including the culinary world. We're really big in that space down there. And then now our most recent show, which I really am the most proud of is a show called Traveling The Spectrum that hasn't found a home yet. But when it does, it's going to make a difference.
Adam Stoker: [00:15:25] Yeah, so let's talk about a couple of those shows. There's Chef Swap at the Beach. There's Traveling the Spectrum. What I'd like to understand from you, and of course, I've been able to see a little bit under the hood on some of these things. But I think for our audience to understand is how did you decide to create these ideas? Did you go audience first and say, okay, who are we trying to reach and then let's create content that reaches the audience, or did you decide we want to create a certain genre of content? And that's how we'll start or tell me a little bit about the way these projects came about. And then how did they go from idea to, it's non-scripted so you can't go to script, so from idea to maybe outline, to concept, to actual production and publication.
Tom Farrell: [00:16:17] So I think the incubation stage for these ideas began with the location itself getting to know what Myrtle Beach was about, what was important to Myrtle Beach was a really key first point of entry into what we wanted to do.
And so one of the things we put up there on the whiteboard was how do we elevate the culinary scene in Myrtle Beach? And we began with just that simple concept or log line. And from that, we just started to riff about ideas and that is where Chef Swap at the Beach was born.
Adam Stoker: [00:16:56] So I wanted to jump in here Tom, because that, I think that's really important for our audience to hear that you started with the challenge that needed to be overcome, whatever that was. We need to get more exposure on the culinary scene in Myrtle Beach. That's the challenge, right?
And from there, you guys started creating concepts. And so I just want to make sure for our audience that it wasn't, hey, you know, we'd like to, you know, find a new audience to attract or something like that. It was a business challenge, business objective that needed to be overcome. And that's where this started. And I really like that, because I think starting with the challenge or objective before you get too far down the process on ideation, can make sure that you're still solving the relevant problems that a destination has before you go rogue and create something that may not have, may not solve the problem that you originally started the project to solve.
Adam Stoker: [00:17:56] Very well said. And in Myrtle Beach's particular case, they had 2000 restaurants down there that we wanted to somehow shine a light on. And so, while it's impossible to shine a light on all 2000, we kind of broke that down into, okay, how do we elevate as many restaurants as we can of that 2000. And that's how we came up with this unscripted series called Chef Swap at the Beach where each show we incorporated two chefs and two restaurants and highlighted them in an entertaining, fun type of way.
And at the same time brought the viewers' attention to, wow, that I didn't know that restaurant, I didn't know that Mexican restaurant existed in Myrtle Beach or I didn't know that Italian restaurant existed in Myrtle Beach. So it was an organic way for us to make a TV show. And at the same time, go after the challenge that was in front of Myrtle at the time was how do we get more attention on our restaurants.
Adam Stoker: [00:18:57] Great. So tell me some of, because, you know, it’s one thing to have a business objective, but the audience doesn't necessarily care about your business objective, right?
Tom Farrell: [00:19:05] Totally.
Adam Stoker: [00:19:07] So what was the process like of saying, okay, we do have this problem we need to solve. But how do we make this entertaining enough to where people will want to watch? What, how did you feel, figure out what the hooks were going to be?
Tom Farrell: [00:19:17] So I think that was just years of experience of us going into our tool bag and knowing what television audiences like to watch and what people might lean into more than others. And so we didn't want this to be a traditional travelogue type of feel show that this is winner's kitchen in Myrtle Beach and just there's a script there that you just read about everything on their menu and this is the chef. So what we decided to do was put a little bit of television magic into the concept itself.
And so that's where we came up with a competition series where we were going to pit two chefs against each other. We know competition plays really well these days. And so, but we did it in a friendly type of manner so that both businesses came out winners at the end. There was a winner that we chose, but the experience and we've done multiple, multiple episodes down there, the experience is always a positive one for both chefs.
Adam Stoker: [00:20:20] Yeah, there's a fine line between competition and conflict, right? And I think in Chef Swap specifically, you guys have done a good job of keeping it in the vein of competition and not foraying into conflict, which could definitely hurt one or both of the restaurants involved.
Tom Farrell: [00:20:38] Yeah, you're exactly right there. And we've been cognizant of that since the beginning.
Adam Stoker: [00:20:41] Interesting. Okay. So that's one thing, and again, I'm looking for nuggets that our audience can take away here as they're wanting to create content. So one of the things that you found that really engage the audience is competition. It's the reason sports content works as well, right? Is it because competition has been proven to be interesting to, for the most part of the American public, right?
So, we, we can start there, the competition is a nugget that could probably be valuable to most audiences if you can manufacture it in the correct way. What are some other key, you know, storytelling aspects like competition that really engage the audience?
Tom Farrell: [00:21:24] Back story. 1000% back-story of our guests is a tent pole in each of our shows. So in order to care about the show, we have to care about the chefs themselves. And so we spend the first four or five minutes of every program taking a deep dive into how they got to where they are today. And I think once a viewer cares about who they're watching, then they're going to hang on longer and stay with the program more. So that's another extremely important factor in any project that we do. And so we carefully cast it the first season. We're now in production, post-production on the second season, and we're beginning a third season of shooting this month. So, this formula has certainly worked in Myrtle Beach and hopefully it's worked for the culinary community as well down there.
Adam Stoker: [00:22:19] Great. Let's now talk a little bit about Traveling the Spectrum. This is a project that might be one of the more meaningful destination projects that I've ever come in contact with. And I'm pretty proud to have some level of involvement in it more on the distribution side.
But what I was really interested in picking your brain on is you've got a subject here with Traveling the Spectrum where we're taking families that have members of the family that are neurodiverse and we're demonstrating their experience in Myrtle Beach. And part of this came to fruition because Myrtle Beach is the first autism-certified destination marketing organization through the Champion Autism Network. So, you know, Stuart and his team saw the stat, the 87% of families that have someone on the spectrum don't travel and embarked on a journey to attempt to change that. And that's what led to the show Traveling the Spectrum being created.
I'd love to have you talk a little bit about the brainstorming sessions that led into the creation of that show. But then also we talked about the fine line between competition and conflict. There's also a fine line between storytelling and exploitation as well, when you are showcasing a family that does have someone that's neurodiverse, and it could very easily go the wrong way, and you guys did a great job of portraying the characters correctly and not making it portray them negatively in any way.
And so I'd love to learn about all the debate and process that went into that because I think you somehow manage to not only walk a fine line but create a really, a piece of content that's actually going to affect change, maybe even in the world.
Tom Farrell: [00:24:08] You know, Adam, I think we could spend an entire show just on this topic alone, and you hit on so many points there that we could go down a road and talk about forever. But what I'll try to do is just pick off a few of those that you threw out there and tell you a little bit about how the process went and where we are today.
And that the process began with Stuart Butler. The guy is a visionary down there and he saw what he wanted, even before we shot a frame of video. He knew that he wanted to have a show where we brought people to a community that is light years ahead as far as sensory awareness goes. And the way that we did it was, again, we developed like we would any other television show, and we talked about what would work from a pacing perspective. Should we have one family? Should we have two families? Should we have three families? Eventually, we did land at that three-family formula. And it really, really worked, because, from a pacing perspective of the show, we were able to bounce from family to family to family as they were taking their vacation in Myrtle Beach and experiencing different parts of the beach.
So, while one family may have been at a restaurant making pancakes, another family was out for a dolphin watch. So it really from a pacing perspective, it turned out to be the correct formula for us. But the biggest takeaway that I could give your audience on this one was this was meant to serve a particular purpose, the show. And man did they hit it square. They being Myrtle Beach square on the bull's eye, because all three families experienced something that they'll never forget for the rest of their lives.
And we did it in a really organic fly-on-the-wall type of way. We weren't camera and faces the whole time. We let the experience unfold in front of us. And when you watch the show, it's told through their voices. And so the entire program is told through their experience and it's not manipulated in any way whatsoever. So that I'm very, very proud of.
Adam Stoker: [00:26:40] Awesome.
Tom Farrell: [00:26:41] And the final episode is one of the most impactful pieces of program that I've ever been associated with.
Adam Stoker: [00:26:51] Yeah. I actually haven't seen the last episode so I just can't wait to see that. I got to tell you, this is the reason I think that I really like creating owned media assets as opposed to running paid media, because when you look at the business objective, the idea was that 87% of families that have someone on the spectrum can't travel or don't travel.
If you ran ads saying, hey, family with somebody with autism, you can travel, book a trip today. How effective would that campaign be? But if you can actually demonstrate how these families can travel and how a destination can receive them effectively through the storytelling, you can actually change their belief on whether or not it's something they're capable of doing. And I just feel like that is so much more effective and impactful than we ever could have reached with, with a paid media campaign saying, hey, families that fit in this category, you can do it, you're wrong, you can do it. And it just never would have worked the same way.
Tom Farrell: [00:27:59] Never in a million years. And to your point about owned media now, Myrtle Beach now has an unlimited resource of assets that they have captured. Yeah, we have that six-episode series, but they can slice and dice that up into little snippets that could live in social content, media world forever, in different capacities and directly to your point of. Rather than creating a 30-second commercial that says what you said there about coming to Myrtle Beach. Here, we can actually illustrate that in particular ways through these three families and more that we'll be doing in the future.
Adam Stoker: [00:28:40] Yeah, it takes so much more work, so much more planning, so much more coordination, and a lot more upfront budget to create this type of content. But the thing that I value about it is that if you go through all the hard things on the front end, the impact of going through this can be so much more than what we're seeing now in the destination marketing industry, where every problem is attempted to be solved with the same style of marketing and it just doesn't work.
And so, you know, if you're willing to go through, and I wouldn't even call it pain because it's really fun to create. But the pain meaning it's a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of coordination. If you're willing to get past that and go through it, the payoff is incredible. And I think that's what we're experiencing right now with both Chef Swap at the Beach and Traveling the Spectrum. Any parting thoughts here, Tom as far as you know, advice to other destinations that may be trying to create this type of content, or maybe any final piece of advice from what we've discussed today.
Tom Farrell: [00:29:46] My advice to any DMO that's listening to this is what you said we're doing it right now in Myrtle Beach. And I always use that question. Why not right now? Why not do it right now? You can talk about it and kick it down the road for years. Myrtle Beach has done it right now and it's certainly attainable for other places to do it right now. What you have to do is roll up your sleeves, decide that you're going to plow forward, commit to it, and stay with that commitment. The moment that you start to deviate and think, uh-oh, this might not be the road we want to go down, that's where the wheels start to shake. So, why not right now, would be my piece of advice for people.
Adam Stoker: [00:30:33] I love it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that the idea that maybe we'll get to this next year, maybe we'll get to this next year, always results in doing the same thing over and over and over again. So, let's get started right now. Great advice. Tom, if people want to learn more about you or The Workshop, what's the best way for them to dig in?
Tom Farrell: [00:30:52] Yeah. Go to our website. It's theworkshop.tv, is the best way to find us and you can see all the different shows that we work on. And there's an info page in there if you want to reach out to us. We'd be more than happy to talk.
Adam Stoker: [00:31:06] Great. Tom, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.
Tom Farrell: [00:31:09] My pleasure, Adam. Have a good day.
Adam Stoker: [00:31:11] And thanks everybody for listening. If you enjoyed today's episode, please don't forget to leave us a rating or a review. It helps us continue to bring you amazing guests like Tom. Thanks, everybody. Have a great week.
[End of transcript]
We recommend upgrading to the latest Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.
Please check your internet connection and refresh the page. You might also try disabling any ad blockers.
You can visit our support center if you're having problems.