RONOH MEDIA / BLOG
Thoughts, process notes, and insights from the studio.
There’s a hair salon near where I grew up that’s been open for over twenty years. Same owner. Same chair by the window. Generations of women in that neighbourhood have had their first relaxer, their first big-chop, their wedding-day style done in that exact room. If you asked around, everyone would tell you the place …
Almost every business owner I talk to about video says some version of the same thing: “I don’t want to be one of those TikTok people.” I get it. Nobody wants to feel like they’re performing for an algorithm, doing a trending dance in front of their own shopfront, forcing a personality that isn’t theirs. …
The first time I sat down to plan a shoot properly — shot list, interview questions, B-roll, the works — I remember thinking: this is a lot of effort for one video. I was wrong about the “one video” part. That single afternoon of filming didn’t produce one thing. It produced a website hero video, …
I was building out a website mockup recently and needed a placeholder image — something to show what a “team meeting” section might look like before I had real photos to drop in. I typed “African business meeting” into a stock photo site and scrolled. Row after row of the same handful of poses. Same …
Most of the business advice I come across online was written for a context that isn’t mine. Load shedding isn’t a variable in the framework. Neither is the specific math of pricing a service for a local market that isn’t the US or UK. Neither is the reality that “just post consistently on social media” …
There is a photograph of my mother as a child. She is sitting with her parents – my grandparents – and she is small, the way children are small, in a way that is hard to reconcile with the person you know now. The photo is old. The colours have shifted the way old photos …
I came across something recently that stopped me mid-scroll. Quinta Brunson – creator and star of Abbott Elementary – was speaking on Scott Evans’ House Guest series about the ecosystem of Black television and how her show came to exist. What she said was simple, but it landed like something I’d been trying to articulate …
I can tell within about thirty seconds of watching a brand video whether it’s going to land or not. Not because I have some special instinct, but because the signals are that obvious once you’ve been paying attention to them. There’s a particular quality that comes through when a business story is true – when …
Something I think about a lot when I’m talking to potential clients is the question they’re not asking out loud: what kind of video should we actually be making? Most business owners have figured out that they need video. What they haven’t figured out is which end of the spectrum they should be on – …
I know what it looks like when a business isn’t being taken seriously. I’ve seen it enough times to recognise it immediately. The rushed phone photos used to represent a decade of craft. The generic stock imagery standing in for a team of real, capable people. The video – if there is any – that …
I started paying attention to this before I had a name for it. I’d meet a business owner – someone running a real operation, with real clients, real expertise, years of hard-won knowledge – and they’d tell me about their work and it was genuinely compelling. Then I’d look at how they showed up online …