Morgul Marketing

    Washington, DC

    Filming roofs in a city with no side yards and three sets of rules

    There is no yard behind a Capitol Hill rowhouse. The roof is flat, it sits between two party walls, and the way up is a hatch, a third floor window, or a ladder set in an alley that somebody parked in at seven this morning. Access alone decides most of what a roofing company here can put on a feed. The housing stock decides the rest, running from slate near the historic districts to twenty year old shingles in Fairfax County, and so does a customer base that answers to three separate governments and, in a lot of cases, to a federal employer with opinions about being quoted.

    There is no side yard on Capitol Hill, so the camera goes up the alley

    Access decides who films, at what hour, and what ends up in the frame beside your work.

    The crew reaches a rowhouse roof through a hatch, out a third floor window, or off a ladder set in the alley, and the alley is often blocked by a car belonging to somebody who is at work until six.

    So the arrival shot is the ladder going up between two buildings, because arrival is the part an owner is actually nervous about. Film it once, film it properly, and stop reshooting the same twelve feet on every job.

    The frame is the harder problem. Standing on a flat roof between party walls you are looking straight into a neighbor's deck, their windows and their kids, and none of those people hired you. Watch the footage back before any of it goes out.

    Parapets help. Shooting low along the membrane keeps the neighbor's roof deck out of the shot and puts the camera where the work is, which is the seam, the drain and the water standing in a low spot.

    None of this applies in Rockville or Fairfax County. There is a yard to stand in and a slope to walk, so a clip shot out there tells you nothing about whether your crew can film in the District.

    Slate and standing seam are the two jobs Georgetown owners pass around

    Few jobs, large tickets, and an audience of owners who compare notes with each other long before they compare quotes.

    A slate repair is the most watchable thing a roofer in this region can film. Sorting salvaged pieces, cutting a new one, setting a hook, matching a surface older than anybody standing on it so the repair disappears.

    Almost nobody here posts it. Most roofing work anywhere is a suburban tear-off, so that is what fills most roofing feeds, including the ones belonging to companies that do sell slate.

    The audience is small and connected. Owners of older houses near a historic district talk to each other, sit on the same block lists, and forward a video of careful work on a house that looks like theirs.

    Show where the material came from. Salvaged slate, a matched profile, standing seam formed on site: those are the details an owner of a hundred year old house is trying to judge and cannot judge from a price.

    The same footage travels out to Old Town and the older blocks of Silver Spring, where the houses are different but the worry is identical. Somebody there is trying to work out whether the roofer they call will treat an old roof as an old roof.

    The license question arrives in the comments, and it has three answers

    One labor market, three governments, and an audience that has learned to check before letting anyone onto a roof.

    An owner in the District, one in Montgomery County and one in Alexandria answer to three different administrations, and they know it. The question turns up in comments, in messages, and in the first minute of a phone call.

    Answer it in public, plainly, every time. Name where you hold licenses and insurance, name where you do not, and put the same sentence in the profile so people stop having to ask for it.

    Turning down an address you cannot serve, politely and in the open, reads better than silence. People remember who was straight with them, and some of them own a second property on a street you do cover.

    Insurance follows the same line. A certificate that satisfies a homeowner in Silver Spring is not always what a District condominium association wants from a vendor before it will let a crew onto the roof, and saying which you carry before anybody asks takes a whole exchange out of the first call.

    Naming the jurisdiction does quiet work for you. A Petworth job and a Falls Church job read as two different companies to a stranger unless the caption says which is which.

    The customer who works at an agency will not put her name on your page

    A workforce built on federal employment and contracts limits who will appear, who will be quoted, and how long any of them stay.

    Federal employees are limited in how they may endorse a business, and people who hold a security clearance keep their address and their family off public feeds out of habit. Plenty of your best customers in Arlington and Bethesda will say no to a testimonial and mean it kindly.

    Build the account so it does not need them. The roof carries the story on its own: the failed seam, the tear-off, the finished membrane, and not one person in any of it.

    Ask for a written review rather than a face. A sentence on a review page is something a federal worker is usually comfortable leaving, and it does not put her on camera in a video her office might see.

    Expect the audience to turn over. Appropriations and contract cycles move people through this region constantly, so a following here is something you keep re-earning rather than a balance that only grows.

    Everything that does not change at the Potomac, from who on the crew ends up holding the phone to what can safely be said about an insurance claim, is set out on our roofing social media page at /industries/roofing/social-media.

    Questions we actually get

    Can we use drone footage in the District?
    No, and it is not worth testing. The airspace over the District and a wide ring around it is closed to drone flight, with no version of that a roofing company gets to opt into. Suburban addresses are a separate question and worth confirming with the FAA before anybody launches. In practice you build the habit around the ladder and the hatch anyway, and a phone held over an open seam shows a homeowner more than an aerial of a flat gray rectangle ever did.
    Our customer works at a federal agency and will not appear on camera. What can we still use?
    The roof, which is the part worth showing. Film the tear-off, the rot under the old membrane and the finished surface, and ask whether she would leave a written review instead. A lot of people in this region are careful about appearing in anything public that touches their employer, and pushing on it once you get a no is how you lose the job you already did well.
    We hold a license in Virginia but not in the District. Do we say that in public?
    Say it plainly and put it where people find it without asking. Owners here have learned that a company covering the whole DMV is often covering one part of it, so a profile that names Northern Virginia and stops there reads as honest rather than limited. You will turn down some addresses in the comments, and the people watching that happen are the ones who call you about a house in Falls Church next spring.
    How do we film on a rowhouse roof without publishing the neighbors?
    Shoot low and shoot tight. From a flat roof between party walls the camera is level with somebody's deck furniture, their windows and whatever their kids are doing, so keep the parapet as your backdrop and stay on the work. Review anything before it goes out, because the person who complains about a rowhouse video is usually not your customer at all.
    Is slate work worth filming when we only do a few of those a year?
    It is the highest value footage you will shoot. The audience is small, concentrated on a handful of blocks near the historic districts, and unusually willing to pass a video to a neighbor with the same roof. The clips also age well, because a slate repair in Georgetown looks the same in three years and nobody else in this metro is bothering to publish one.

    What is different here

    Florida has tightened what a roofing contractor may say to a homeowner about an insurance claim, and the rules around soliciting claim work carry real consequences for the client rather than the agency. Design wind speed and product approval also vary by county, so a re-roof specification is a local document. Marketing built around storm claims needs legal review before it runs.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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