Some vendors don’t need an influencer.
They need proof.
That was the starting point with Grayscale.
When Ty Abernethy, CEO of Grayscale came to us, the ask was very specific.
They wanted to document real customer stories in a way that felt serious, credible, and respectful of the complexity of high-volume hiring.
Their buyers are practitioners running massive hiring operations. They don’t want to be sold to. They want to hear from people doing the work.
The brief looked like this:
Film real customers, not scripted testimonials
Use a true documentarian Q&A format
Studio-shot, professional, centered on the subject
No influencer energy, no talking heads selling software
Let the customer tell the story in their own words
My role was behind the camera, not on it. Asking the questions. Creating space. Letting the conversation unfold the way it would if two operators were talking shop without a marketing team in the room.
We filmed five customers. Each one became a five-minute standalone story.
One example is a conversation with Stephanie Berg, who supports hiring for a retail organization with more than 35,000 employees and over 50,000 hires a year.
Her story wasn’t about features. It was about scale, pressure, and constraints.
Lean teams. Massive hiring volume. Frontline, professional, and medical roles all moving through the same system. The reality that one or two people often coordinate hiring for hundreds of roles across locations.
In that context, Grayscale shows up as infrastructure.
Automation that helps candidates take the next step without being chased. Notifications that move people to interviews and onboarding faster. A system that lets a small team do the work of a much larger one.
But what stood out most wasn’t the technology.
It was the partnership.
Stephanie talked about how Grayscale listened when the product didn’t yet match high-volume reality. How feedback turned into roadmap changes. How the team invested resources to make the platform work for organizations hiring at real scale. That willingness to adapt mattered as much as the automation itself.
By the end of the conversation, the outcome spoke for itself. Tens of thousands of hires completed across more than a thousand locations in a single year.
Why work with Building the Talent Machine for custom content?
Our job was not to polish that story.
It was to stay out of the way.
This is why we took a documentary approach. No voiceover. No on-screen persuasion. No forced soundbites. Just a professional environment where practitioners could explain what changed, why it mattered, and how it actually worked in their world.
That’s the lane we keep coming back to with HR tech vendors who sell to serious operators.
How we approached this campaign:
High production quality that signals respect for the buyer
A format that centers the customer, not the brand
A distribution channel that reaches real practitioners
A story that sounds like the hallway conversations buyers already trust
Grayscale didn’t need to manufacture credibility. They already had it in their customers.
They just needed a way to document it properly.
That’s what we built together.
Why work with Building the Talent Machine for custom content?
I’ve been on the vendor side. I’ve run marketing campaigns to recruiting buyers with small budgets, produced webinars, hosted events, identified partnerships, launched gifting campaigns, and operated more brand pages on social than I’d care to admit. I’ve helped build an agency and a community from zero. And I know how hard it is to cut through when every recruiter’s feed is flooded with tools promising to fix everything.
That’s why I only work with partners I know, like, and trust.
This is the model we keep coming back to for HR tech vendors who want to reach buyers without burning trust.
Our model explained:
High quality production
Credible on-air talent
Distribution to the right audience
As a partnership. And we move quickly.
Because the vendors that win long-term are the ones that respect recruiters enough to meet them where they are, tell the truth about the problem, and show their work.
That’s what we built with Grayscale. And that’s why we’re Building the Talent Machine.
What you need is a hype man. That’s where I come in.
