Corey Peck

As co-founder and chief operating officer of Media One Creative (Media One), Corey Peck embodies a spirit of entrepreneurship. One of Corey’s goals as COO is to build a strong and talented team that is able to scale as the company continues it’s rapid growth. Media One is focused on having the right people in the right seats, and its strong culture is a result of ensuring that all team members share the company’s core values. We had the privilege of sitting down with Corey to discuss industry trends, how to determine your organization’s guiding principles, and the importance of hiring for fit.

On Industry Trends

“Many brands have spent the last few years building large audiences through flashy, six second videos. This audience is now sitting there and now wanting relevant and engaging content, demanding a more meaningful way to engage with the brand. This reality has led to popularity of long form digital video content (5-20min) with a focus on storytelling. Storytelling allows the brand to continue marketing themselves in a compelling way and appeal to their audience through common causes and shared ideas.”

“Video products and services are becoming increasingly commoditized due to technology advancements. Today, marketers can even create their own animated videos by simply filling in the blanks in a software that outputs the content in its final video form! This is a great way to empower internal marketing teams to create more ‘functional’ content, but we’ve found that brands are still working with agencies like Media One to conceive, manage, and execute content that is more ‘emotional’ than functional.”

On Finding your Core Values

“It is very hard to self-identify your own core values, but it is much easier to see the core values you value and respect in others. To find our Core Values, we started with an exercise asking ourselves, ‘If you could build a team by duplicating one person you’ve worked with before, who would it be?’ Once we picked 3-5 superstars, we then identified the qualities that make those individuals so great. We then combined the answers until we were left with 5 Core Values. In our case, it is “Media One-ness, Hardwork, Ownership, Passion, and Honesty’. These each have a definition and each have an example. We hire, praise, reward, and coach, discipline, and terminate all based on the Core Values. When your whole team is built this way, you and your team consistently get the behaviors and reactions they’d expect from their peers in any given situation.

On Hiring for Core Values

“M1’s hiring process prioritizes a candidate’s alignment with the firm’s values before anything else. During the interview process, interviewers share the firm’s core values, offering a description and example of each. The candidate is asked to share how they resonate with these values using examples of how they embody them in their previous actions and experiences. We don’t even get to asking about the skills about the candidate if they don’t align with M1’s core values. Hiring for fit is an important element to the success of an organization and we learned this the hard way. Experience can be gained and skills can be trained, but you either have our core values or you don’t.