Morgul Marketing

    New York, NY

    Making plumbing content when the job site belongs to somebody else

    Every rule about filming your own work assumes you have somewhere to stand. In most of the five boroughs you do not. There is no yard, no driveway and nowhere legal to leave the van, the hallway belongs to a board, the apartment belongs to a tenant, and the technician is carrying tools up five flights with both hands full. What a New York shop does own is the pipe it carried out, the sound a building makes when the boilers come up, and a stretch of housing old enough that the failures are unlike anything in a newer market. Those three are enough to build a feed on, and they happen to be material nobody else can shoot.

    The pipe you cut out is the only prop in this city you own outright

    There is no yard, no tailgate and nowhere legal to park, so the studio is your shop bench and the material is what came out of the building.

    Filming on site here is difficult and often not yours to authorize. Inside an occupied building the space belongs to a board, an owner or a tenant, and the hallway is not a set no matter who let you in the front door.

    The section of pipe in the back of the van is a different matter. Cut it in half, put it on the bench, and let people look at what actually closed the line: scale, corrosion, a joint that gave up decades ago.

    A prewar building supplies visuals nothing else does. A choked galvanized branch, a section of a waste line off a brownstone, a radiator valve worn past sealing. All of it films well under one light, at your own pace, with nobody's permission but yours.

    Bench footage also solves the practical problem. A tech carrying tools up five flights cannot also carry a camera, and a phone that comes out on a job is a phone somebody has to justify to a managing agent.

    A riser you can hear is the one prewar system a picture cannot show

    Steam heat runs through a large share of this housing stock, and its failures announce themselves as noise rather than as anything visible.

    When the boilers come up in the fall, the old buildings all start talking at once. Hammering in a riser, a valve hissing at three in the morning, a top floor radiator that stays cold while the one below it cooks.

    None of that photographs. A boiler room is dark and cramped, and a picture of a radiator tells a resident nothing they did not already know. The recording that helps is audio: the hammer, then the same line afterward.

    Publish the pair as sound with a still over it. Anybody who has been listening to that noise since October knows instantly what they are hearing, and almost nobody in the trade publishes it because it does not look like content.

    Record it in the first cold weeks or wait a year. Once a building has been heating for a while somebody has bled a line, shimmed a radiator or closed a valve that should have stayed open, and the noise you wanted is gone until the boilers come up again. There is one window for this material and it opens when the heat does.

    The story a board wants is who you kept dry, not how fast you cut

    In a stacked building the plumbing failure is never one apartment, and the thing decision makers fear is the disruption rather than the repair.

    A leak crosses ceilings, floors and at least two households who did not hire anyone. Everybody in that chain remembers how much of their life the work consumed.

    Make content about containment. How you isolate a line so the whole stack does not go dry, how you protect the apartment below, what you do about the ceiling you had to open, how the residents get told what is happening.

    Containment is the material a board member reads. A volunteer treasurer weighing two bids is choosing between two disruptions, and the shop that described the process in advance sounds like it has done this before.

    Show the protection rather than the repair. Floor covering down the hallway, a dust wall at the apartment door, the ceiling below closed the same week. Those are the pictures somebody remembers when the second bid arrives.

    A Bay Ridge house owns the pipe under the sidewalk and the owner has no idea

    The one and two family houses in the outer boroughs are a second public entirely, and they own more of the system than they think.

    In Riverdale, Forest Hills, Bay Ridge and across Staten Island, a homeowner is responsible for a lateral running under a public sidewalk and a street they cannot touch on their own.

    Almost nobody learns that before the day the line fails. A calm explainer on where a private line ends and why the job takes longer than the length of pipe suggests is the highest value post you can make for that audience.

    The street opening is the part worth filming. A trench cut in a public sidewalk, plates over it overnight, a crew working around parked cars on both sides, explains the timeline better than any line item on an estimate.

    Everything after the footage exists, from where to put it to what deserves money behind it, works the same in Queens as it does anywhere else in the country, and we have set that part out on our plumbing social media page at /industries/plumbing/social-media.

    Questions we actually get

    Can we film inside a building we are working in?
    Ask first, and ask the right party. A resident saying yes is not the building saying yes, and house rules or an alteration agreement can govern photography inside an occupied building regardless of what your customer thinks. When there is any doubt, shoot nothing on site and take the material back to the shop, which is where the better footage is anyway.
    Our only real footage is a cut length of galvanized on a bench. Is that enough to run an account on?
    It carries more than most shops manage on site. Rotate what goes on the bench, a waste line off a brownstone, a valve worn through, a fitting packed solid, and add the two things that happen outside the shop: the sound of a riser in heating season and a sidewalk opening at a house in the outer boroughs.
    What should we publish when the boilers come up in October?
    Sound. A hammering riser, a hissing vent, and the same line after it was corrected. Pair each one with a plain note about which of those are apartment problems and which belong to the building, because most residents have no idea which category their noise falls into and that question is the reason they will write to you.
    Most of the people watching us are renters who cannot hire anybody. Is that wasted?
    Not here. A renter is the person who reports the leak, the person whose ceiling gets opened and the person standing in the hallway while your crew works. A post that explains what a repair will do to their apartment for two days removes an argument your technician would otherwise have on site, and it gets forwarded upward more often than you would expect.
    Our shop is in Long Island City and most jobs are in Manhattan. What should the feed say about where we go?
    Name the boroughs plainly and say what you can physically do. Coverage in this city is decided by parking, freight access and how many flights of stairs, not by distance, so a shop that says it works walk-ups in Astoria and prewar co-ops on the Upper West Side is telling people something useful. A map with a radius on it tells them nothing.

    What is different here

    License numbers belong in advertising, as with the other trades. The more useful local variable is that water source, water chemistry and sewer versus septic service differ between neighboring municipalities, which changes which problems a plumber is actually called about and therefore what the page should be about.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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