03Case study 01
Two and a half years inside one oilfield company.
What the content actually did, what it didn’t, and the one number I can defend in a room.
They were not short on work.
Noble Inc. is an oilfield services company. When I started, their social presence was close to nothing.
They were short on people. That's the problem nearly every company in this industry is dealing with, and probably the reason you're reading this page.
I came in as one person with a camera. No agency behind me, no crew, no media budget worth the name.
Shot the work as it actually happened.
Crews running casing. Equipment moving. Night shifts, weather, the ugly parts.
The job the way somebody doing it would recognise it, rather than the way a brochure would describe it.
Then I cut it for the people who might want that work — and just as often, for the people who'd watch it and realise they didn't.
Two and a half years of that, without stopping. Consistency is the part most companies can't hold onto, and looking back it mattered more than any single video did.
Two and a half years, one operator.
More than 3,000 applicants told Noble they heard about the company through social media.
That number is self-reported, collected inside Noble's own hiring process, and last verified in November 2025.
I'm telling you it's self-reported because that's what it is, and because you'd find out eventually.
It's still the most useful number I own. It's the reason I stopped selling video and started selling recruiting.
What it did not do.
It did not win Noble a single contract that I can point to.
Their work comes from reputation, from the bid process, and from a salesman who has known the customer for eleven years. No video has ever moved a procurement department.
I say that to every prospect before they ask. If you buy content expecting it to bring you work, you'll be disappointed in month six, and you'll be right to be.
It also didn't fix retention. Three thousand applications is the top of a pipe.
How many of those people were still there in thirty days is a different question, and it's the one I care about now.
I'd build the Real Work Preview first.
Every one of those applications went into a hiring process that never showed anybody what the job actually was.
Some of those people washed out in week one over things a video could have told them in four minutes.
That isn't hindsight for its own sake. It's the entire reason the Build now comes before the Cycle, and it's why I'd start you in the same place.
The first Real Work Preview.
Noble asked for casing training and safety videos. That request turned into the first full Real Work Preview.
It's being built right now. There's no retention number attached to it, and there won't be an honest one for at least a year.
When there is, it goes here. And if it turns out to be an inaccurate number based on too small a data set, I'll write that here too.
Nothing, by itself. Noble's numbers are Noble's.
What you can take from it is that one person, on site, over two and a half years, moved a company from invisible to three thousand applications.
And that the same person will tell you out loud which half of that result he can't repeat on demand.
Run your own hiring numbers against that. If it's worth twenty minutes, the call is twenty minutes.
20 minutes on the phone.
I'll ask five questions about your worst-churning role. If I don't think a Real Work Preview will move the needle, I'll tell you and we're done.