We recently connected with Dustin Pagliughi and have shared our conversation below.

Dustin, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with a fun one – what’s something you believe that most people in your industry (or in general) disagree with?

I feel that a lot of people in our industry don’t want to believe in the success rate of using User-Generated and found content. Being in the UGC and found content space since 2004 (the birth year of youtube) I’ve seen many different trends come and go. At first, companies were afraid to use UGC and found content because of the risk. The internet was the wild west back then and people were stealing and using content to their monetary benefit at an alarming rate. This was a huge concern for companies because of building claims against using anything that wasn’t properly cleared. This really turned people off from using this type of content even though the analytics returned showed that content created by real humans, outperformed produced content across the board. While content is still being stolen, we have better ways of verifying each piece so it lowers the risk immensely. Also, the success analytics can no longer be ignored. For example, consumers find UGC 9.8x more impactful than influencer content when making a purchasing decision. The number of positive stats are endless…

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I started working with User-Generated and found content back in 2004. This was the year that youtube was launched. I took a television production job as an associate producer for a “clip” styled show and I was tasked with finding content to fit specific genres of episodes. Then to take it further, obtain permissions and have the creators send in hard tapes of the content we were interested in using. Sometimes this took weeks or even months to complete. We would fax an agreement to a pizza shop in the owner’s town, send a pizza to their home to sign, then have the pizza shop fax that agreement back to us. In addition to this taking so long, the type of content out there was extremely limited.

Today, the process is much different. We can find and clear almost any piece of content that fits any creative. If there is content out there that fits our partner’s creative, we’ll find it. We operate at a very high speed and can complete projects in real-time. We’re a boutique content agency so there’s not a lot of red tape for our partners to cut through to work with us. Project ramp-up, completion, and response times are much faster than other agencies like ours in the space.

Locomotive Content was created to connect marketers, advertising agencies, brands, and production companies with fully-licensed, brand-safe user-generated, and found content. We have a team of experts that have been working in the space for 20 years. Our team works tirelessly behind the scenes to find that special content to fit perfectly for every creative brief. We do the work so you can focus on your clients needs.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

I believe being authentic and transparent about what our business model is and what is deliverable has helped me build my reputation in the market. In the early days of starting the business, it was very hard to get through to potential partners and clients since no one knew who we were. Once we did get a response and started completing projects on time and within our client’s budgets, they started referring us to other peers and companies in the space. We would never sell through a project that we don’t be believe to be deliverable and we’re extremely transparent about that upfront. It’s been 6 years, and we have 100% delivered on every project we’ve taken on.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Initially, when I started Locomotive Content, I had very little capital. I had about $10,000 to my name and spent $8,000 of it to brand the company. I was a bit “backed into a corner” as one would say. I dedicated about 90 hours a week to reaching out to potential partners and trying to land some business. After racking up expenses on a credit card for a few months, we finally landed a small project for a company. From there, I just kept slowly building and adding pieces.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.locomotivecontent.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/locomotivecontent/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/locomotivecontent
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/locomotive-content/
• Other: https://vimeo.com/locomotivecontent