How One Agency Turns One Shoot Day Into 50-Plus Video Ads (With Connor Lewis of Studio Lewis)

Dave Gerhardt (0:00)

Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Look, I hear about AI agents every single day on the internet in the Exit Five community, but it's confusing. It's a little bit overwhelming. Which platform should I be using? Which agents are actually worth building? How do I even set this up? There's a lot of noise out there. It's kind of hard to tell what's actually going to make the job easier versus what's just going to be another thing to manage, or is this just a cool little thing some guy wrote about on LinkedIn? Well, Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. You can build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. This is really smart. They also just launch virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that can learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your whole website optimized. Humans, that's us, of course. We still get the final say over these robots, but this seems really useful. This is worth leaning into right now, right? Agents have so much potential and using AI in a platform like Optimizely for stuff that eats your week so you can get more time for the strategic thinking and actual fun parts of your job. I'm into that. Let's make marketing about the craft of marketing again. I think there's something there. So go and check out Optimizely right now. See how their AI agents can help you with your B2B marketing operations. They purposely built this for B2B marketing. This is really cool. optimizely.com/exitfive. That's optimizely.com/exitfive. Go and check out their agents. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Webflow. Webflow is a website platform for the Agendic Web, built for modern marketing teams to build fully custom sites that perform an AI search no developer needed. Your website isn't just your homepage anymore. It's actually the first thing an AI agent is going to read about your company and from there decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer before a demo, before a sales call, before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists, which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams use to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI search, govern your content and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them out at webflow.com/four/exitfive.

That's webflow.com/for/exitfive.

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Dasha (2:33)

Connor, welcome to the pod. Connor Lewis from Studio Lewis, very creative name. How are you?

Connor Lewis (2:39)

I'm good. I'm good. It's busy here right now. Video seems to be popping off, which is great.

Dasha (2:43)

Video is popping off. Do you think it's tied to AI in any way?

Connor Lewis (2:47)

I don't know. We've had a lot of people who have tried AI ads and then come to us and been like, can you fix this?

But I'll talk a little bit about how we use AI in our process. It's certainly not out of it.

Dasha (2:56)

Let's do it. I've jumped way ahead. Let's introduce you to our listeners, to our viewers.

Connor Lewis (3:01)

Cool.

Dasha (3:01)

Connor, who are you?

Connor Lewis (3:02)

Who am I? My name is Connor Lewis. I've been doing video since I was 16 But more importantly, I've been doing SaaS videos since I was 20 I worked at an HR tech company called The Predictive Index, led a video team there, figured out what worked in video and then I branched off on my own when I was 26

Now I'm 30 and I know way too much about software video. It seems to be the niche I've fallen into or my main quest, as I like to call it.

Dasha (3:28)

What was happening when you were a 16-year-old? Were you the kid in high school that always had their camera on them?

Connor Lewis (3:34)

I love that you asked that. I wanted to be a YouTuber when I was 16 Now I don't, it's too much work.

Also, I was editing video game montages. People would pay me 20 bucks to take their clips and make it into like this dopamine-fueled video game montage. So I started as an editor actually.

Dasha (3:50)

Oh, that's hilarious. Are they still live?