Behind the Scenes

Out of our seven-person crew here at Storm Cloud Marketing, five are graduates of Missouri Southern State University. Naturally, when MSSU Athletics reached out to see if we could help out with a video project, we were filled with Lion pride.

Jon Koucky’s refurbished Volkswagen camper bus is a tubular time machine, a vibrant look backward into the halcyon days of the Haight-Ashbury 1960s, when free love and legal LSD dominated the cultural landscape and paved the way for bands like The Grateful Dead to stamp their names into the rock n’ roll lexicon.

Yup. You read that right. We do work for other agencies. When I first started with this agency in 2008, the agency world was a different beast. Competition was fierce. Collaboration was rare. The marketing world of 2019 has forced us all to either grow in-house capabilities or partner with third-party providers. If inviting a partner firm to the party means that you’re able to achieve more toward the client’s goals, do it.

Brand development is high on our list of favorite undertakings. There is just nothing quite like taking a whole lot of abstract ideas and mushing them together to create a tangible end product that tells an entire story all by itself. Indian Creek Outfitters asked for a brand that reflects their upscale outfitting services and experience focused mentality. Their number one request was that it display a professional look and feel while clearly portraying what they do.

If you’ve ever visited our website, our social media, or even our office, you’re probably familiar with at least a few of these pretty faces. These ladies spend more time in front of our cameras than almost anyone else. But what do we actually do with all these photos of them?

One continual challenge that an agency faces is being able to execute the vision of a client who already has a good idea of what they want, exactly the way they imagine it, and then take it to the next level.

You have to be a special flavor of crazy to work here at Storm Cloud Marketing. Not only does that require putting up with some really strange and random conversations in the studio on a daily basis, it also means having to be skilled in several areas, not just one. No one here is just a photographer; they’re either a photographer/graphic designer/creative coordinator, or a videographer/designer/strategist/photographer, or some other combination. This fluid skill set creates an opportunity for us to deploy three photographers on a single shoot – as both photographers AND models.

Evolution is a necessary part of growth for any business—ours included. We’ve experienced many transitions over the years. From its birth in 1998, this agency’s infancy was spent focused solely on local media placement. In 2008, it started to introduce creative services. In 2014, creative services began to grow to equal (and eventually surpass) media placement. Since 2014, we’ve experienced a thousand sub-transitions, pivoting to meet the needs of the fluid marketing landscape.

The end of the year means a lot of things to a lot of people. Here in our studio, it means producing another insane New Year’s Eve promotional video for Downstream Casino Resort.