25-year video production veteran lands enterprise brands with Hunter

Meet Jonathan Del Gatto

Jonathan Del Gatto has been running a video production studio for over 25 years, working in advertising for some of the world's most recognizable brands - Intuit, Freshpet, Amazon among them.

Their target audience is diverse. 

The studio's edge comes not from scale but from deep fluency with what enterprise brands actually need from video, built over decades of doing the work.

In Jonathan's world, the client list is intentionally short and the work is intentionally good.

Alongside the production company, Jonathan also runs The Director's Cut, a professional coaching community where he teaches video professionals how to grow their businesses.

Email outreach - and how to do it well - is central to what he teaches. He teaches the same approach he applies in his own business: fewer contacts, deeper research, more intentional messages.

The challenge

For most of his career, Jonathan built his client pipeline the hard way. There were no reliable platforms for finding contacts, no intent data, no shortcuts - just LinkedIn research, Google searches, and the discipline of tracking who moved between companies over time.

"In the old days there was just a lot of LinkedIn, a lot of just Google searches. There was no AI."

Jonathan Del Gatto

The challenge wasn't a lack of clarity about who to target. Jonathan has always known his ideal client: enterprise brands actively producing CTV and PPC advertising where someone just below the final decision-maker has both the need and the influence to bring in outside help. 

The problem was the time it took to find and research those people at scale. 

Every contact had to be discovered manually. Every list was built piece by piece.

The solution

Jonathan uses Hunter as a research tool - a way to compress the time it takes to surface the right companies and contacts, without sacrificing the quality of targeting that his strategy depends on. 

He is explicit about this: he doesn't believe in sending large volumes of poorly targeted email. He believes in sending small volumes of well-researched, highly personalized outreach.

• He uses Discover to find companies within target verticals - skincare brands, for example, where his studio has particular depth - and builds lists filtered to match his criteria.
• He then builds lead lists of people one level below the final decision-maker - where he can become a valued advocate before the pitch ever reaches the top. 
• Once a list of leads is generated, he goes deeper. He takes each name to LinkedIn to examine their career trajectory, the content they publish, how long they've been at their current company, and how many layers of management sit above them. "I would take a good list of 10 people over a bad list of 1,000 every day," he says.
• He tailors his outreach messages to what he calls the "feeling state" of each contact: junior staff looking to make their mark, mid-level managers trying to get things done efficiently, and senior leaders focused on higher-level outcomes.
• He keeps lists in Hunter and moves contacts to his CRM only when they show genuine intent - keeping his contact database clean and focused.

Email sequences in Hunter are stripped down to plain text. No design, no formatting. Jonathan writes personal emails that look like personal emails, because he believes people connect to people, not newsletters.

The results

Jonathan's send volumes are small by most standards - typically 30 to 60 contacts per month - but his conversion rate reflects the quality of his targeting. 

The rate of genuinely negative replies (unsubscribes, complaints, hostile responses) is marginal. 

And from that small, deliberate volume, his studio has consistently landed new client engagements with enterprise brands.

"Hunter doesn't do a different job for me. It just does the job really fast. And my success rate is better."

Jonathan Del Gatto

The philosophy Jonathan applies in his own business - and teaches to hundreds of video professionals through The Director's Cut - is that the return on email outreach is almost entirely a function of targeting quality, not volume. 

Hunter has accelerated the research that used to consume days, without changing the discipline required to use that research well.

The takeaway

After 25 years of building client relationships in a high-stakes, relationship-driven industry, Jonathan's view on outreach is clear: the work of finding and understanding the right people is irreplaceable. 

What Hunter has done is remove the friction from that work - compressing hours of manual research into a fraction of the time, and surfacing the raw material that his judgment then shapes into real outreach.

As Jonathan says himself:

"Hunter doesn't replace hard work. It just makes it happen much faster and more effectively."