Media 1/Wrap This (Sanford, FL) has been producing a YouTube series since February 2020, racking up 180 videos, 4.28K subscribers and 490,244 views in total as of this post. Starring co-owners Dale Salamacha, the company president, and Rick Ream, vice president, the videos feature the pair exploring and having fun with every facet of their business, the many types of signs and wraps they do, their talented and interesting employees and more.
Dale has been the “Shop Operations” columnist for Signs of the Times for decades, and readers have enjoyed his insights, admissions and terrific sense of humor since he began. Rick, a member of the Signs of the Times Brain Squad, has been Dale’s business partner even longer, heading up fabrication and installation for Media 1 while Dale has focused on overall sales and the company’s Wrap This side.
Their YouTube series debuted just a month before the Covid pandemic began in the spring of 2020. Fortunately, those of us craving multimedia content have been able to rely on Dale and Rick entertaining and often introducing us to new aspects of the sign business, starting with this welcome video and their hilarious first episode, “Never Build a Sign Too Big to Fit Out the Door,” which was also one of our “8 Epic Sign Fails for the History Books.”
Every new episode is added to the bi-weekly Media 1/Wrap This newsletter after the video goes up.
“I talk to Dale about the different projects that are going on in the shop from week to week, and then try and figure out which episodes would make good content,” says Tom Breslin, executive producer, Gate Seven Creative Studios in nearby Orlando, FL. “Some episodes we can shoot in a day and other episodes take weeks to film. I’m constantly shooting footage around the shop to use as B roll for the episodes. It’s not scripted. I just let Dale know what I need for an intro and a close and he runs with it with Rick,” he says, adding, “Some episodes I can cut in two days. Other episodes take weeks.”
“Each video takes a lot of work,” says Eli Tobias, brand manager for Media 1. “Tom films with multiple cameras and edits for the final product.” After the video is published to YouTube, Eli enhances the description (sometimes the title), adds description tags and fills it with relevant keywords. Importantly, he matches keywords to verbal words they spoke in the video because YouTube’s system searches/recognizes spoken words, which can affect search result rankings in a positive, or negative way. Then “tags” are added, aligning with and adding to the keywords in the description, Eli says.
“The marketing then begins by posting on social media and adding every new episode to our bi-weekly email newsletter,” Eli says. A new newsletter goes out after every new video is published. The use of good SEO practices — which can boost views via YouTube “suggested videos” and search results — well-written titles and descriptions, are imperative for views/success, he adds. Good lessons for any shop using YouTube!
We usually include a QR code to a special or recent episode in Dale’s monthly Signs of the Times column, so whether you subscribe and follow the series on YouTube or check them out when you get your latest issue, you’ll laugh and learn a lot from Dale, Rick and everyone at Media 1/Wrap This.