Thoughts on What’s Under New Media’s Hood

I’m about to deliver a presentation in two hours or so. Every Tuesday morning, a group of local business people gather for something called a “BNI” meeting– Business Network International. BNI is a structured networking referral group.

We have about 20 members in our group, which means that each individual gets to make a ten minute “pitch” three times a year on what kinds of referrals would be good for their own business. It’s hyperlocal, which is good in general, but probably not perfect for me since my goods (custom meetings, videos, DVDs, Web Video and Web Sites) tend to be somewhat higher ticket.

We meet at Cafe Verde in Phillipsburg, NJ, which is a very nice place, and also happens to be a client. We started working on a video / web marketing package for them about a month ago. And this is NOT a high ticket relationship, but it is an important one. It is a proof of concept relationship. The web+video marketing combo relies on a lot of things, all of which are defined by the fact that the web is somewhat measurable, search rankings are somewhat controllable, and video is turning out to be a key component to succeeding in defining success in measurement and ranking.

I’ve been through a lot of media in my career: slide-shows, multi-image extravaganzas, filmstrips, industrial theater, video for meetings, multi-screen video, electronic presentations, visual databases, “Instant” a-v’s for meetings with early electronic recordable still cameras, panoramic video through anamorphic shooting and playback, PowerPoint, interactive cd-roms and DVDs, and even custom video-on-demand,  e-learning and content management systems.

Always about a year too early. So we’ve got some arrows in our back, but we broke a lot of ground and can claim we were among the first in many of these areas.

My company has done web sites before– plenty. But my company was bigger back then. It was a different time. The bandwidth wasn’t there for video, there was no such thing as WordPress, FrontPage was the “mature” web development software, and Dreamweaver was on V1.0.

That meant that web sites were expensive, and not very creative. They took a lot of programming, and if you weren’t careful you could lose your shirt. The emphasis was on the back end, and it’s endless pursuit of perfection, and I was a front end kind of guy. Content, Creative, Design… then execute.

It seemed we sold  something, then almost immediately started to program. The programming applications had some flowcharting visualization built in, but all of it was in the hands of one person– approvals were therefore difficult, changes were plenty, and projects seemed endless. It was all in one person;s head.

Doing a DVD was a bit different for me. Being, in fact mostly video, and being a pretty straightforward (IF GRUELING) programming process, we were better able to visualize how the DVD (or cd-rom) would work. We used flowcharts, and those flowcharts were created by our writers, who had to build the sales and persuasion logic that drove the whole process to begin with.

Besides, we had been down this road before, so we knew what to do.

Writer always made us different. That we didn’t realize the important role writers could play in the architecture of the web was understandable. The web was links, clicks, pictures, some copy blocks, or a lot of fill in the blanks surveys or grabbing data from here and showing it there. I know. We even built our own e-commerce system.

Years have passed, the web has matured, there’s tools for everything, and advertising and Google’s role in the web have brought standards and measurements to the field very reminiscent of magazine and newspaper readership studies. There has also emerged a standard language for building websites, and the bandwidth is now such that, thanks to YouTube and other video hosting sites, video is the big gorilla carrying viewership and search optimization on its back.

Welcome home.

The video web combo offers bang for the buck unlike we’ve seen in the past 20 or so years. One way of controlling costs of course is to plan. That we have always done, and it’s not surprising that our tool-set for this is very familiar:

• Strategize
• Outline
• Propose
• Quote
• Wireframe
• Site-map
• Copy Blocks
• Art Direction
• (APPROVAL)
• Refine art & copy
• Create graphics and videos
• Webisize.

Okay, “webisize” gives the work done by the web designers and programmers short shrift.

But what good local sight needs today is efficiency, gravity, personality, and constant change. And all the Flash in the world can’t provide the juice to pump up the search engines.

Content can. Video Can. Change can.

That’s the Video Trojan horse. Used to be, to sell big videos we had to sell big meetings. Now, to sell video, we sell web sites. A well produced video on the web is gold. it is sticky, has personality, gets the communications job dome quickly in site and sound, and can be parceled out at the right place on the site at the right time.

We have a very well developed “wireframing” process for our web sites and interactive projects. But, being around for a while, we didn’t just learned the logic of interactivity yesterday.

Many years ago, we produced some of the first interactive laserdiscs in the world in conjunction with AT&T and Bell Labs. They provided the hardware and the operating system for their hardware, we provided the finished laserdiscs, all carefully branched out interactively, just like one of today’s DVD’s or websites.

Here is the end result:

One of the First Interactive Video Projects, by Brien Lee & Company for AT&T

We didn’t have flowcharting software; heck Microsoft Word didn’t even exist and we were just a year or two beyond typewriters. So, here is what it took to get it there:

Tim Dodge and Brien Lee review their "living" flowchart

A flowchart. made of masking tape and a large empty room.

And it worked.

Proving once again, content is king.

There were something like 150 videos produce for those laserdiscs– all small segments like you might see today on YouTube. It was the beginning of short attention spans.

Without a detailed written guidepost plan, I don ‘t see how we could have done it. We used three different facilities in New York City, two writers, two producers, and dozens of support personnel. That’s what video was like in those days, plus laserdisc production was a very tightly controlled process– high quality, clean rooms, test pressings, on and on.

Once the laserdiscs were done, the AT&T engineers had to program their secret code into their secret computers to make the discs work with their secret playback systems. We didn’t have much contact with them, because they were protecting their proprietary code,  but they had our flowcharts, and they told us that the flowcharts and script segments were detailed enough that they could handle it on their own. Saving, I’m sure, hundreds of hours of miscommunication had we not had all the documentation.

Lesson learned. And not the hard way.

Today, outside of some of the more sophisticated shooting or 3d animations, the whole job could be done by two people and a couple of powerful enough laptops. Naturally, we’d use DVD, or hard disc, or even solid state drive. The intelligence could be programmed into the DVD, or the whole thing could be put on the web with a combination of flash, video, html and perhaps php. And the code is no longer proprietary, or at least a secret. You just have to buy off-the-shelf software.

But you have to be proud of the fact that our people– Linda Duczman, Lora Keller, Tim Dodge– went into the project with a plan we all developed. (And came out of it alive!)

It guaranteed success, and we do like to guarantee success.

Guest Post: Best Ways to Use Presentation Technology, by Jimmy Sturo

Audio Visual Presentations
By Jimmy Sturo

Even the best messages can be ruined by a bad presentation. To get your information across effectively and to generate the right response from your audience, you need to know how to use audiovisual technology to your advantage.

Interested in how to improve your presentation? Read on for some audiovisual presentation dos and don’ts.

Organization is the key. Forget about fancy graphics and sounds; instead, focus on making the flow of your presentation seamless and clear. It’s a good idea to first outline the points you intend to make before you even begin working on the presentation. Identify major themes and ideas so you know what to visually highlight.

Avoid clutter. Fancy animation and sounds are usually unnecessary; oftentimes, these elements only distract from the message instead of contributing to it. Brevity and simplicity work best – the shorter and simpler your messages and manners of delivery are, the more likely they are to be recalled by your audience. Too much clutter diminishes the impact of a good message. Highlight your message and not your graphics, and you will never go wrong.

Consider the physical requirements of the space where you will deliver your presentation. Are you going to use a small and private conference room with just four to five people or a big theater with hundreds in the audience? Are the room’s acoustics decent, or do you need to bring additional speakers to be heard? Is it well lighted? Can you control the lighting to enhance your presentation? You need to answer all these and many other questions in order to design an audiovisual presentation that makes the most out of what the venue has to offer.

Finally, complement your audiovisual presentation with handouts. No matter how effective your presentation, remember that your audience can only remember so much; you need to provide them with follow-through materials like a systematically outlined handout in order for them to truly retain your message. Keep your handouts short and sweet. This way, the reader only sees the most important messages.

Audio Visual provides detailed information on Audio Visual, Audio Visual Equipment, Audio Visual Rentals, Audio Visual Presentations and more. Audio Visual is affiliated with Alpha Numeric Pagers.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jimmy_Sturo
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How Long Should a Video Be?

Depends.

So, What Do You Do for a Living?

When we started in business just out of Marquette Journalism School, our medium of choice was slides. Not that we wanted to "make slides"– it was just the most affordable way for us to tell stories. But if, when asked what we did for a living, we answered, "I’m in the slide business", we knew the misconceptions would begin. "You make charts and graphs. You give slide talks. You process slides. You copy slides. You shoot slides. Must be easy– I’ve got a camera!"

No, actually. We did more than that. We examined communications problems, designed solutions, wrote scripts, , shot slides, conducted voice interviews, recorded narration, edited the slides in two or more slide trays, selected music, directed announcers, created a soundtrack, and used  a microprocessor-controlled dissolve unit tied to an audio tape deck to create the illusion of a complete communications  solution– which viewers then mistook for movies.

Movies were expensive, slides were inexpensive, and we went through all of that rigmarole so we could afford the overhead to be in the business, so that our clients could afford what we did, and so that we could be creative– and not just be "in the slide business."

But try explaining that in an elevator– or cocktail party– pitch. We found the best offense was to show our stuff and wait for people to experience the difference.

With an office in New Jersey now, I find myself answering the question once more. And in a market where we’re not all that well known, save for a few pre-existing clients, I feel like I’m just out of school again (although I don’t look it.)

What do we do for a living? We do video. "Oh, you shoot video? Do commercials? Use Final Cut? Yeah, that’s easy…I’ve got a camera and Final Cut…."

These days, everyone does video, just as years ago, everyone typed. But that didn’t mean they could write. Everyone had word processing and PageMaker– that didn’t make them designers. And now, everyone has a camera, iMovie, or Premiere Elements, and that’s all you need….. right?

Well… we don’t sell video. We sell ideas. Concepts. Content. Crafted in the art of video, and distributed via DVD, web, YouTube, videoconference, sales meeting, whatever.

We know words, pictures, sounds, music, and the way to mix them to elicit a response. We have success stories, track records, awards, and a modicum of financial success.  We have no secrets, and we will gladly train you or your staff in what we do and how we do it.

But the process is not simple– not as simple as "doing video."

It’s just that it’s so easy to say…..

A Must Read: Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario 2.0

For those of us who use, produce, or work within the fringes of marketing messaging, Bob Garfield’s Advertising Age essay, Chaos Scenario 2.0, is must reading. In it he details the changing economics of advertising, the shift to direct, web, and social media, and the response– or lack thereof–from traditional ad media and agencies.

To quote one agency maven about a recent six Flags assignment: "They had a promotion for their 45th anniversary. They wanted to give
away 45,000 tickets for opening day to drive traffic. So we got a brief
to do whatever: ads, microsite, whatever. But our interactive creative
director just went off and posted it on Craigslist. Five hours later,
45,000 tickets were spoken for.

"No photo shoot. No after-shoot drinks at Shutters," he adds, with faux
regret. Then, with somewhat less irony: "Now, the trick is, how do you
get paid?"

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The Corporate Storyteller, Redux

I had a nice discussion with one of our clients yesterday, in which we discussed various executives we had worked with over the past thirty years. We agreed that those that were most effective could impact an audience by telling a story– and if they couldn’t, at least they were smart enough to create a vehicle that told the story for them.

The nature of the corporate story is that it ties current operations into past keystone events (real, apocryphal, or parable.)

The Wall Street Journal recently has been running a series of articles detailing the same thing. According to WSJ, “Corporate Storytellers” are folks who work with companies to unearth their past, particularly after years of conglomeration, buyouts, downsizing, and more. The story emphasizes the use of live narratives, even original songs, to help reinstate a sense of heritage, purpose and belonging.

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