Inside the ICE House x Las Vegas: Desert Rose Films Founder Nancy Paton

**SPEAKER_1** (0:12)
From Lake Las Vegas here in Nevada, welcome into another episode of the Inside the ICE House podcast. Today's guest is Nancy Paton. She is a global filmmaker and award winning director. Nancy, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.

**Nancy Paton** (0:24)
Thank you so much for having me.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:25)
So I want to start with something that feels truer now than it really has in a pretty long time. And it's something you actually spoke about at this conference too. And it's the idea that everybody needs to be a media company. It was the panel that you were on just a little while ago.
From your perspective, what does just that sentence mean today that everybody needs to be a media company?

**Nancy Paton** (0:46)
I think when you talk about media company, it's about getting your message across and your messaging, but really your purpose and your vision out. I think if media companies are great at marketing, I guess, or if my media company is a production company, so it's great at giving out stories, authentic stories about people and human, like about our stories.
So I think when you're talking about companies becoming a media company, it's not enough just to make a product or to have a company. You actually have to make people know about it. They need to know and they need to connect to it. Otherwise you will not survive in today's world because you might have the best product, but if no one knows about it and also no one connects to it, it's not gonna go further than that.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:28)
How hard is that to do because the market nowadays is just so saturated, it's so noisy, there's so many people with the access to be able to create media of all kinds so fast, so very cheaply as well. So how hard is it to really stand out?

**Nancy Paton** (1:47)
So this is, I think, another interesting thing that's changed is that, yes, it's so easy to create content in a sense, and like it was so easy to create ads, ads for companies, but you'd spend so much on ads, and then you didn't get the customer coming from it because it didn't connect to the audience. So yes, you could spend millions on an ad or millions on a campaign or social media influencer. It's not really thinking like that anymore. I think it's now thinking about, okay, what is real about your company or your product or who you are? What is and who are you real? Thinking about the audience, which is what, it's not just to give the message out, push, push, push, push, push. People are going to see it. The more they see it, they'll come. People might see a lot and be like, you know what, they're bombarding me. I don't want to be part of this company. Because it's, and actually it's got nothing to do. It's just fake news or fake media.
It's now thinking about how do we utilize our marketing spend or our, into a way that maybe we don't, maybe we only get 100 people looking at it, but those 100 people turn out to be your true audience and your true followers and your true testimonies. It doesn't matter if a thousand people watched it, if only one person bought it, it doesn't boost the point.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:57)
You'd rather 100 people watch it, 100 people buy it than a thousand people watch it and only one person buys it.

**Nancy Paton** (3:01)
So it's now that, and I think audiences are so much smarter now. Then they can smell it when it's just pure money being thrown at something, just to advertise. That's why we see this rise in podcasts, we see this rise in real people talking about real things. Because people are looking, I really want to understand and I want to know and I want to support.
I want to be your audience, I want to be your customer. But I need to feel that you want me as well, that you understand me. So I think that's the big shift we've seen the last year or so.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:32)
And so one of the things, Desert Rose Films, I want to get into that, that's obviously your production company. One of the things it's known for is this commitment to authenticity. And I think that's been portrayed within the answers you've given over these first couple of questions. When you look at just the current ecosystem that we have, which we obviously just spoke to as well, where everyone and everything is competing for this attention, how do you protect the authentic standard? Because there are so many things now working against that authentic standard.