“I never wanted to own a company — I just saw something wrong with the industry and wanted to fix it,” says Moo TV’s owner Scott Scovill. He and his team have done a lot of fixing over the years, and more – today they are thriving in an increasingly competitive market. Part of it is in knowing who they are and sticking with what they do well.
“Scott and I don’t have any interest in doing anything other than video here at Moo TV,” says general manager Chuck Young. “We come from the old school, where being a specialist is an advantage. There are others with deep pockets and stocked warehouse with a lot of equipment and a Rolodex full of freelancers, but that’s not necessarily what the Nashville artist wants.” Moo TV has a long history in video, and today have a wide array of top tier clients including Band Perry, Brad Paisley, Garth Brooks, Chris Young and Dierks Bentley, among others.
U2 Can Be in the Crew
Scovill grew up far from the glow of anything video — he spent his youth on a farm in upstate New York. His next stop, college, didn’t end well: “I was a horrible student and flunked out.” He was waiting tables when U2’s road crew came in. They were touring in support of U2’s Joshua Tree album. A conversation ensued. “It blew my mind you could do that for a living,” he says. He followed them around for a couple of weeks and announced to his new friends that he wanted to work with them, and would do it for free. They informed the 19-year-old that it doesn’t work like that. They did look the other way when, for the next five weeks and four days, he would mysteriously appear at gigs doing an increasingly impressive imitation of a crewmember. “Whenever anybody asked, I just said I had a relationship with management,” he smiles.
The ruse was eventually discovered, but at that point he knew he wanted to do video because “that was new and I was new.” He took a weeklong technical course and got a job with a production house in D.C. called Performance A/V, run by Lee Griffin. In 1992, Green asked him to move to Nashville and work for Alan Jackson. At first he was less than enthused by the idea, but “by the end of the first year, I fell in love with everything Nashville and saw the potential.” And that potential was beyond the I-Mag/B-Roll/looking like an MTV video thing everyone else was doing. “I saw a creative need that no one else at the time seemed to understand,” he says. “Just seeing the artists face or some literal image of what was happening lyrically in the songs was expensive and/or distracting. Maybe there needs to be a simple abstract image, or even just a color.”
He would sharpen his skills with Jackson, and was on his way. Then Scovill actually turned down the chance to go out with U2’s Zoo TV tour not once, but three times because while he had a certain skill set they needed, they didn’t want to hire the company he was with. He felt it was unethical, but he was conflicted as it was his dream job. That day would end with him launching Moo TV. The name was a play off of “Zoo TV” and by the end of that day and a few drinks; he painted a white chair with black spots. (Griffin was his partner in that venture until he tragically died in 2002. Today Scovill is the sole owner.)
The Flood, and Further Growth
After 15 years of running Moo TV, Scovill decided to bring in Chuck Young to run the day-to-day so he could spend his time pretty much wherever his muse takes him. Today Scovill is involved in shooting a movie, and is half owner of CenterStaging in Los Angeles. He oversees Moo Creative, a content company that specializes in commercials, live events, and music videos. And Scovill still gets to indulge himself in one of his favorite roles, directing videos for the likes of Brad Paisley and others.
Young grew up in West Virginia and started his career as “the worst guitar player in the worst garage band.” Starting in the late 1970s, he would go out with bands as an audio engineer, and eventually a production manager working with artists like Blind Melon, Clint Black and Wynonna Judd, among others. A stint at Nashville’s Starwood Amphitheater grew into a gig with the Country Music Association. Meanwhile, he was good friends with Scovill, having spent some serious bus time with him over the years. “On a Jackson tour, I was a monitor engineer and he was a video director, and when I became an event producer, I was always hiring Scott.” In 2008, the tables turned and Scovill offered Young the chance to run Moo TV.
“The company has grown so much over the years,” Young says. Like many companies in the town, they were knocked down by the great flood of 2010, having lost millions of dollars of equipment, much of which they had just bought. “But on that second day, I knew that if we were going to survive, we would need to move quickly.”
And that meant a new location. They would settle in a former children’s bounce house in northeast Nashville. Today the company is thriving, and employs around 50 professionals. “You have to fit in here because it’s important that everyone gets along. It’s our way of staying above the competition — we’re blessed with so many great clients, and with our staff being like minded, it’s the basis of the whole company.”
He says clients like Paisley have been with them a long time, and while they sometimes lose a client because “someone else is offering them the moon for nothing,” it doesn’t stay that way. He cited two examples of a high profile artist using another video company, and then coming right back to Moo TV the next year.
But the other challenge is one that all the production houses face: Making shows better, year after year. “If you do magic on one tour, then you have to do magic-plus on the next one [for the client],” Young says. Today that involves new products: “All these hybrid products, lighting and video, that’s going to be the future.” He says the competition keeps them on the toes, particularly being fiscally responsible, as margins grow increasingly tighter. “I always say we never had the delusion that we would be wealthy, we’re just here to make a living and help others make a living. So it’s about quality work and staying viable in the marketplace. Sometimes this means walking away from a job if it’s not the right fit.”
Nashville Values
“I like the relationships,” Scovill says about Nashville. “We work in a very consuming business and you really need to surround yourself with the right people. You do that and you will have an interesting life. And I love our clients and am very proud of who we are and what we do.” Like many, he’s not always fond of the changes happening in the marketplace. “We are in a world full of mega corporations with fewer companies like ours, companies with different values than just the bottom line,” Scovill says. “We care about hiring the best people and working with the best artist. At the end of the day, the mega corporation wants what is best for them; at the end of the day, we want what is best for you. We’re not motivated to be a big company, but we organically grow, and by controlling the pace, we can make sure we take care of people the way they are used to being taken care of.”
Moo TV has prove itself all the time, of course, as in this business, you’re still really only as good as your last job. Even though they had worked with Garth Brooks on many tours, when he came back on the scene, Brooks did a survey of his other touring friends about what was the best video company to work with. Scovill smiles and says: “They said it was a landslide in our favor, and there wasn’t a better company to work with.”
For more information, please visit www.mootv.com
