Again it was a pleasure to roundtable the company’s goals last week. Andy & I are excited about what we’ve come up with here. We hope it will craft a winning partnership!
As we talked it through, we see us leading in two very different categories for you but with plenty of collaboration between our two units:
Andy—heading all things “online distribution,” meaning digital strategy & tactics, social media management, content optimization, and with AI involved along the way.
Troy—heading all things “content capture,” meaning producing/directing film & photo production. I’ll also be a great collaborative resource for strategically telling the Aero Asset story since I’ve been in the helicopter industry for my whole life it seems (grew up flying with my dad!).
Now let’s talk cost & deliverables. First up, Andy’s proposal.
Content Capture
Depending on the shoot, $8k — $40k per package is your range.
So my typical film/photo production packages range $15k to $25k for helicopter brands to come in for documentary style filming, Netflix style exec interviews, flight lines, hangars, cockpits, and so on. As I thought about you guys, I want to make it easy for you to calculate your photographer/filmmaker costs.
The two cost categories I’m thinking about:
Heli listings like these: https://www.aeroasset.com/en/aircraft/Leonardo_A119Kx_14916.html
Special projects like podcasts, town halls, etc and profiles like this one: https://youtu.be/LcGhADyvDJ4?si=aYw7lt-Riq-hG0Px
Heli Listing Cost Options
OPT 1
What I’m thinking here is we just land on a reasonable percentage to go get premium shots. Your own brokerage rates are probably a percentage of each sale price, so we can do the same for my rate. Bake me in per listing. Like this:
For every listing I shoot, my fee is either $7k flat fee or 0.25% of the advertised aircraft sale price. So, some shoots I make less, some I make more.
Just bake my percentage into your brokerage fee back to the seller.
But I get the higher number—aircraft selling for less than $3M would be $7k jobs for me, and those selling for higher, that’s when the 0.25% kicks in.
Either rate covers all gear AND travel (in the US/CAN) and makes room for the bigger/newer aircraft to get the premium multimedia treatment as needed.
Includes helicopter industry proven content strategy from me during pre-production and production.
If there's a big Aero Asset appetite for me leading film for EVERY media package, we can get creative with costs and how much I’m involved.
OPT 2
If you don’t like my 0.25% that scales my fee up or down, you can pay my usual rate: $15k per shoot, no matter the helicopter listing price. Still includes all expenses, and we can still can get creative if we’re talking about me solving most/all of your needs.
Special Project Cost Option
For the podcasts, or client/financier/operator profiles, etc, we’re back to $15k per shoot. No other options really. The 0.25% doesn’t make sense here either since nothing is being sold. We can scale this cost down if the shoot happens to be a small need for just a few shots. We can evaluate case by case but in the main, $25k is your cost for a shoot like these:
Watch VAI: rebrand launch video (lots of well-known heli industry personalities in this one!)
Watch VAI: rebrand announcement
Final thought
There is plenty of room for tweaks to my media capture approach! If the team has direction, I have ears. We’ll collaborate as we go, we’ll try new things, and we’ll use proven
