Strategy·June 2026

Post Like a Director, Not a Marketer

There's a specific kind of founder video I've now watched, without exaggeration, more than a thousand times. Good lighting. Clean framing. A person who clearly knows their field, saying something genuinely useful. And I can feel my thumb getting ready to move before they've finished their second sentence.

The information is good. The person is credible. The video is dead on arrival.

For a long time I couldn't explain why. I run a studio that has produced well over a thousand videos, so this bothered me more than it probably should have. I'd catch myself watching these things late at night — competitor reels, our clients' competitors, random founders the algorithm decided I needed to see — replaying the first three seconds over and over, trying to isolate what exactly was killing them. Because it wasn't the content. The content was usually fine. Sometimes the content was excellent.

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to land on an answer I could say out loud, and it fits in one sentence: the video was marketed into existence, not directed into existence.

Everything about it — the hook that sounds like a headline, the pacing that unloads information like a slide deck, the call-to-action arriving right on schedule at second twenty-eight — quietly tells your brain, "this is a message someone wants you to receive." And your brain has a very efficient response to messages people want it to receive.

It scrolls.

Two questions that produce two completely different videos

Here is the cleanest way I know to put the difference.

same footage, two questions, two different objects.

A marketer starts with: what's the message, and how do I get it across?

A director starts with: what's the feeling, and how do I make someone unable to look away?

On paper that looks like a cosmetic difference — two phrasings of the same job. It isn't. It changes every single decision that comes after it, because the two questions optimise for different things. The marketer's question optimises the message. The director's question optimises the experience of receiving the message.

Start with the marketer's question and you make a post: a unit of information with a hook bolted onto the front and a call-to-action stapled onto the end. Start with the director's question and you make a piece: something with a hook, a build, a payoff, a deliberate look and a designed sound. The information inside both can be word-for-word identical. The retention graphs will not be anywhere near each other.

A marketer optimises the message. A director optimises the experience of receiving it.

I want to be careful early, because "post like a director" can sound like I'm about to tell you to buy a cinema camera and hire a colourist. I'm not. I'll deal with budget properly later — short version, this mostly isn't about budget. The difference lives in the question you ask before anyone presses record, and most founders have never once asked the second question.

Not because they're lazy. Because nobody ever told them it was theirs to ask. Directing sounds like a job title, something that belongs to people with clapperboards. It's actually just a posture toward the viewer. And it's available to anyone with a phone.

We posted like marketers too

I should say this part before I say anything else, because otherwise this whole essay is a guy with a studio pointing at other people.

With Media's own early content was made exactly like a marketer made it. All of it. Mine included.

In the early days I undercharged, said yes to everything, and treated our own pages like a brochure with a feed. What we offer. How our process works. Why editing quality matters. Tips, carousels, the occasional talking-head explainer. Perfectly reasonable posts, perfectly informative — and I could not describe a single one of them to you from memory today. Neither could anyone who followed us at the time. We were a studio selling cinematic work through content that contained no cinema whatsoever, and when I finally noticed that, it was a genuinely uncomfortable thing to sit with.

What changed it wasn't a strategy deck. It was making one piece the other way and watching what happened.

We made "6 Months of My Life Behind Lens" — a video about, honestly, just the work. Six months of shoots, edits, travel, exhaustion, condensed into something we built like a short film instead of a post. An opening that raised a question instead of announcing a topic. A middle that earned its length. An ending that meant something rather than asking for something. No offer anywhere in it. We made it the way we'd make something for a client we were scared of disappointing.

And people didn't respond to it like a post. They responded to it like a thing. They shared it the way you send someone a film you liked, not the way you tag a friend under a tip carousel. Same team, same cameras, same faces on screen. Different question at the start, completely different object at the end.

So no, I'm not writing this from a mountain. I'm writing it as someone who made the marketer version for years and can tell you precisely what that period feels like from the inside: busy, productive, consistent — and invisible.

The hook is an audition, not a greeting

Let me get concrete, because "post like a director" is useless as a vibe. Whatever the format — feature film, documentary, thirty-second vertical clip — a director controls five things. The hook. The build. The payoff. The look. The sound. Every creator already controls all five. Most just never exercise the control.

the five things a director actually controls.

The hook first, because it's where marketer thinking does the most visible damage.

A marketer treats the first two seconds as a greeting. A setup. "In this video I'm going to show you three ways to..." A director treats the first two seconds as the entire audition, because that's what they are. Nobody has agreed to watch anything yet. The only job of second one is to make second two non-optional.

Look at what a title like "3 Dinners in a Day for Weight Loss" is doing before a single frame plays. Three dinners. For weight loss. That's a contradiction, and your brain does not like walking away from an open contradiction. The hook isn't a promise of information — it's an itch. Same with "Average Indian Learns the World's Hardest Pushup in 73 Days." Average. Hardest. Seventy-three days. Every word in that line is load-bearing, and none of it reads like a headline written by a marketing department. It reads like the start of a story you'd want the end of.

Inside the edit, the same logic applies at a smaller scale. We've recut single hooks eight, nine different ways before a piece goes out, and the difference between the version that holds and the versions that leak is almost never the idea. It's whether the first shot creates tension or explains context. Explanation is death in second one. If your opening frame is you sitting down, adjusting your mic and saying "so," you have already answered the audition, and the answer was no.

The uncomfortable part: most founders spend hours on what they'll say and roughly zero minutes on the two seconds that decide whether anyone hears it.

The build — every second has to buy the next one

Here's where the marketer's instinct quietly sabotages good material. A marketer, trained to "deliver value," front-loads. Give them the tips fast, respect their time, get to the point. Which sounds virtuous, and produces videos that deflate like a balloon from second five onward, because once the information is delivered there is no reason left to stay.

A director paces. Information gets released, not dumped, so that tension rises across the piece instead of leaking out of the front of it.

The pushup film is the clearest example we've made. The entire piece is a build — the structure is literally a countdown through seventy-three days, and the honest failures along the way are not trimmed out for efficiency. They're the point. Watching the attempt collapse at day forty is exactly what makes day seventy-three worth staying for. A marketer would have cut the failures and gotten to the achievement faster, and the video would have been shorter, tidier and completely forgettable. The failure is the build.

You don't need a 73-day arc to use this. In a sixty-second clip, the build might just mean withholding the best sentence until second forty instead of second five. It might mean structuring the piece so a question opens early and closes late. The discipline is the same at every length: every second has to buy the next one. The moment a second stops paying, the viewer leaves, and no amount of "value" behind that point will ever be seen.

And then the payoff — the reason the piece exists, actually landing. A director makes sure the viewer ends the video feeling resolved, not just informed. "40g Pure Veg Protein in 20 Mins" works because the promise is kept precisely and visibly: you see the thing exist, in the time claimed. The itch that the title opened gets scratched on screen. Compare that with the standard founder video, which just... stops when the information runs out. No landing, no resolution, nothing to feel. People don't share information. They share the feeling of something completing.

The look and the sound

These two get dismissed as polish. They're not polish. They're the layers that work on a viewer before and beneath the words.

The look — colour, framing, rhythm — is processed pre-verbally. A viewer decides "this was made with care" or "this is content" in about half a second, before a single word has registered, and that verdict colours everything the words then try to do. This is also where consistency compounds in a way founders underestimate. When we built the Ghee Series with Dr. Shilpa Arora, the individual videos mattered, but the visual language mattered more: the same warmth, the same framing instincts, the same rhythm, piece after piece. After enough repetitions, people knew it was her before her face or name appeared. That's not decoration. Recognition is the first step of trust, and a consistent look is how recognition gets built in a feed where nobody reads usernames.

Something like "Rangeela" runs on this layer almost entirely — the look isn't supporting the piece, the look substantially is the piece. You can feel what it's going for before you could summarise it. That's direction.

Sound is the layer almost everyone ignores, which is strange, because it's the one that turns watching into feeling. Most founder content treats sound as a menu choice — pick a trending audio, set it under the voice, done. A director designs it. When to let the music start late. When to drop everything out and let a line sit in room tone. When the cut should land on the beat and when landing on the beat would be the obvious, forgettable choice. We made "Kalabhairav Ashtakam" as a piece where the sound isn't accompanying the visuals — the visuals are serving the sound — and I'd struggle to think of a project that taught the team more about how much of "cinematic" lives in the ears.

You will never get a comment that says "great sound design." You'll just get watched longer and trusted more, and you won't be able to prove why.

Why founders get more out of this than anyone else

Everything so far applies to any creator. Here's why I think it applies to founders with extra force.

When a brand account posts, it's selling a product, and everyone processes it as selling. When a founder posts, something different is on the table: authority. And authority has one brutal property that most personal-brand advice tiptoes around.

Authority can't be claimed. It can only be demonstrated.

Saying "I'm the leading expert in X" does nothing — worse than nothing, usually. But looking like someone who takes their craft seriously does almost everything. The care is the credential. A viewer who watches a founder's content and senses genuine intention behind it walks away with a conclusion the founder never had to state: this person probably brings that same intention to their actual work.

Is that logical? Not entirely. Production quality is a proxy for competence, and proxies can lie in both directions — I've met brilliant operators with terrible videos and mediocre ones with beautiful feeds. But fair or not, it is how humans judge, and pretending otherwise doesn't exempt you from it. If your content is careless, some part of your audience quietly assumes the work might be too. You never hear the assumption. You just lose the people who made it.

I watched this compound from very close range. When we started with Dr. Shilpa Arora, the Instagram account had around three thousand followers, and most of those, honestly, were bots. Today it's past a million there, with 700K+ subscribers on YouTube and a best video north of sixteen million views. And the thing I keep pointing out when people ask about it: her credentials never changed. She was exactly as qualified at three thousand followers as at a million. What changed was that the content started demonstrating the care that the credentials could only claim. Morning Routine, What I Eat In A Day, the Banana Smoothie video — these are formats every health creator on earth has done. Done with a director's intention, they stopped being formats and became recognisable series. Recognition became trust. Trust became an audience that argues on your behalf in the comments.

That's the founder-specific loop: demonstrated care builds authority, authority makes everything downstream easier — sales, hiring, partnerships, press — and none of it required saying a single self-promotional word. The work says it, which is the only version of saying it that people believe.

The objection I hear every week: "I can't afford to make films"

Fair. Also, mostly beside the point.

Posting like a director does not mean making films. It means bringing a director's intention to whatever you're already making — including a thirty-second vertical clip shot on a phone. A directed clip and a marketed clip can come out of the same phone on the same afternoon. The difference is that one of them was made by someone asking: is there a reason to start this, a reason to stay in it, and a reason to remember it?

What does that cost, concretely? Watching your own cut back before posting and being honest about the exact second your attention dipped — because that's where everyone else's will too. Killing the first six seconds of throat-clearing that you're attached to because filming them felt like effort. Choosing one look and holding it for twenty videos instead of reinventing your frame every week. Recording your audio close to your face instead of across the room. Ending on a landing instead of a fade-out shrug.

None of that is money. All of it is standards.

Now, the honest caveat: budget does buy real things. Mostly it buys time — time to recut a hook nine ways, time to design sound instead of selecting it, time to fail at an idea and reshoot it. I run a studio, so yes, obviously biased — at full production, this is literally what we sell, a few cinematic pieces a month per client. But the pattern I'd point to is the opposite of a pitch: the founders we work with who improve the most improve on the videos we never touch. Their quick phone clips get better, because the questions in their head changed. That part costs nothing and nobody can do it for you anyway.

Two more objections worth answering straight.

"Isn't this style over substance?" No — direction is how substance travels. If you have nothing to say, no amount of directing will save you; a beautiful empty video is just a perfume ad. This entire essay assumes the substance exists. Most founders' problem is not that they lack substance. It's that their substance arrives packaged as something the brain has learned to skip.

"My audience is serious. B2B. They don't care about this stuff." Attention doesn't have a B2B setting. Nobody watches worse content at work out of professionalism. The one place I'll genuinely concede: pure utility content — a tutorial someone searched for, documentation, "how to export the report" — doesn't need direction, because the viewer arrived with their own motivation. Direction matters when you're in the feed, competing against everything else on earth for a stranger's next three seconds. Which, for a founder building authority, is exactly where you are.

What it looks like at full expression

Below this essay there's a short film we made called "BOI BOI."

I want to be clear about what it is, because it's not a case study in the usual sense. There's no message strategy in it. No CTA, no offer, no "value." We made it as a film, full stop — the director's question at one hundred percent and the marketer's question at zero.

You don't need to go that far. Almost nobody posting to build a business should go that far, most of the time. But I'd ask you to watch it and pay attention to one thing only: what it does to your attention in the first ten seconds, compared to what the last founder video you scrolled past did. That gap — between something directed and something posted — is the entire argument of this essay, compressed.

Every piece you put out sits somewhere on the line between those two points. The useful realisation is that the position isn't assigned to you by budget or team size. It's chosen, quietly, by the question you start with.

Where I've landed

Most founders will keep posting like marketers. The defaults all point that way — every template, every hook formula, every "content system" is marketer thinking with better packaging, because marketer thinking scales and director thinking doesn't. That's not a complaint. Honestly, it's convenient for the few who go the other way.

I'd love to tell you I've fully crossed over myself. I haven't. I still catch the marketer instinct in my own head — the urge to bolt a CTA onto something that was better without one, to open with the summary because the summary feels safe. The director's question isn't a switch you flip once. It's a discipline you re-choose per piece, and some weeks I choose it less than I'd like.

But I've been on both sides of this long enough — as the guy making the marketer content, and now as the studio watching directed pieces quietly outlive everything around them — to trust the pattern. The feed is a pile of messages people are trying to get across. The rare directed piece doesn't compete with that pile for attention.

It just takes it.

BOI BOI — a short film by With Media.