1683: Paid Social Video Production for Brands with Maddi Clarke

Branded content has to fit the platforms where audiences actually watch, and social media demands a different approach than traditional television advertising. In this episode, Maddi Clarke, founder and executive producer of Los Angeles-based Yada Yada Studio, explains how her team creates commercials and creative assets for paid digital media. Working with brands and agencies across categories from American Express and Mastercard to Gap and Lululemon, Yada Yada helps turn marketing goals into social-first video and photo production. Clarke’s career began as a production assistant and truck driver in New York City before taking her through reality TV, commercial production, freelance producing, and agency producing. Her background in finance and marketing helped her connect creative ideas with audience strategy, budgets, and the work required to bring a campaign to life. After seeing media investment shift from broadcast toward mobile and paid social, she founded Yada Yada in April 2024 to meet the need for production built specifically for digital platforms.

Maddi explains why social campaigns call for platform-aware creativity including the right visual format, hook, and audience fit instead of simply repurposing a television spot. She describes how brand strategy, creative development, and production come together, from understanding where an audience spends time to shaping an idea around the available budget. The process can mean scaling back ambitious concepts while preserving the campaign’s central goal. Maddi also shares the entrepreneurial challenge of balancing client work with consistent sales activity amid the feast-or-famine cycle of production. After becoming deeply immersed in busy projects and letting business development slip, she learned to protect time for sales and build a dependable bench of freelance talent. These practices help the studio manage growth, adapt to changing workloads, and keep projects moving while serving clients.

https://youtu.be/IfTcSXIlw5s?si=vl48PY_Vyu0GgV2A

Team-building is another central theme, with Maddi drawing on trusted relationships and recommendations developed throughout her career. She looks for people who are hardworking, adaptable, collaborative, and open to constructive questions, while inviting them to improve the studio’s systems. Using freelance projects to assess fit gives both sides a chance to learn how they work together before making a longer-term commitment. Maddi defines Yada Yada’s promis