19 Sep 08 Local Video is the Future of America

The massive quantity of passion behind WellcomeMat has always been rooted in our desire to make the real estate industry vastly more efficient and make stars out of local business owners: you know…locally owned coffee shops (not Starbucks), McGuckin’s Hardware (not Home Depot), Jax Fish House (not Red Lobster). You get the point right? Video was the be the property hunter’s best friend and the biggest secret weapon that the little guy/girl business owner could ever hope for. Local video is finally teetering on the brink of the inevitable explosion, yet I feel like many of us have the essence of local video entirely wrong.

Now that local video is happening and can no longer be denied/postponed, it sometimes becomes nothing more than the newest sales pitch in the local game, a means to extract money from one pocket and insert into another. We have video producers consistently asking us “how do I convince business owners to spend $______ on a video?” Here’s how: start the local video revolution! Capture the essence of your home town by celebrating the people and places that make it unique! Become known as the video pro, or company that celebrates your town better than any other. If you can’t think of ways to do this, then move! If you can’t find material as a local video producer, then from one creative person to another, you live in the wrong place.

Local video is more than just business: it is the future of our entire country and economy. Is that a big, risky, going-too-far-out-on-a-limb statement? Hell no it’s not. You want to see America go down in flames? Keep sending your money to China via Target and Walmart. You want to see our kids digging their way out of a national deficit inflicted on them by their parents and grandparents? Keep buying goods and services from companies that outsource manufacturing. Local video is 100%, entirely, whole-heartedly about helping locals to capture the majority of money being spent locally.

I am very apologetic for not being able to source the person behind the following quote. But, there has never been a more true statement about making a difference in the world than “think globally ACT locally!”