How a Phone, a Rode Mic and a Pair of Good Shoes Built Our Biggest Content Niche
It’s hard to believe, that all I need to walk twenty thousand steps a day in Noosa, apart from a trusty pair of shoes or thongs is my phone and a mic to shoot the type of content I've become known for. In-real-life content has grown to be one of Brandid Media's biggest specialties. Here’s why!
I didn't set out to build a niche in social media festival content creation. It found me, on a hot ten-day stretch at the Noosa Festival of Surfing that has been part of the Sunshine Coast since 1992.
Where It All Started: The Scoop
We were handed a brief for a new segment called The Scoop, sponsored by Ben and Jerry's ice cream. I remember looking at it, thinking, “there’s so much more we can do with this segment than a few polished social media posts”. So we took the brief and ran with it….HARD!
I worked closely with Caelen Pitkeathley a New Zealand born surfer living on the Northern Beaches who had competed and commentated at the Noosa Festival of Surfing for many years. Despite Caelan’s natural abilities infront of the camera, coaching him and producing him through every interview, helped The Scoop become a viral content series that ran the full ten days of the festival. We were out there interviewing the people behind the scenes, the ones nobody else was pointing a camera at, and asking the question that ended up dividing Noosa: cone or cup? (do you prefer your ice cream in a cone or cup)
It sounds simple, but that's the whole point. Real questions, real people, real reactions. No script, no studio, just persistence and a mic in someone's face at exactly the right moment. By the end of the festival it was the most talked about content series of the whole event, and people were still bringing it up months later. That's when I realised this was more than a one off. Social media in Noosa had a new gear, and we'd found it.
Round Two: Backing It Up in 2026
Following up a viral moment is its own kind of pressure. New sponsor, new expectations, and everyone waiting to see if we could do it again. We went back to the Noosa Festival of Surfing in 2026 and delivered another standout series, proving it wasn't a fluke. Authentic content creation like this only works if you can repeat it under different conditions, with different partners, and still nail the brief.
What Makes This Work
People ask me what the secret is, and honestly it's not glamorous. It's persistence. It's creating opportunities out of nothing, hustling to get the right person on camera at the right moment, and a good dose of old fashioned persuasion to convince someone who's never been on camera in their life that they've got a story worth telling.
Being both the producer and the editor is the real advantage here. I know exactly what I need in the moment because I know exactly how it needs to cut together back at the desk that night. That means the early call times, the late nights editing, and every single angle, take and interview all serve one purpose: content that hits the sponsor deliverables and still feels completely authentic to the people watching it.
That's the balance every festival and event is chasing. The behind the scenes real people moment that sponsors love, delivered in a way that doesn't feel like an ad at all.
Where to From Here:
We're already planning to bring The Scoop back even bigger next time, and off the back of what we built in Noosa, festivals and events right across Australia have started reaching out wanting the same thing for their own line-up.
That tells me festival content creation is only getting more in demand, and the brands and organisers who get in early with authentic, real in the moment content are the ones whose sponsors keep coming back, not to mention the people paying for tickets to attend!
Planning Your Next Event or Festival?
If you're deep in the logistics of your next event or festival and the thing keeping you up at night is how and when you're actually going to create the content your sponsors are expecting, that's exactly where we come in.
Hit us up. You won't regret it.
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