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.

Video Viewing for a Happy July 4th (Part 2)

Video Viewing for a Happy July 4th (Part 1)

Which Comes First, The Video or the Website?

I don’t know, but I do know you need both. There are good marketing reasons for this, and good search engine visibility reasons as well.

Search engines love video. And search engines love links. If your video is on YouTube or another free video hosting site, and you embed the video in your website or blog, Google likes that.

The web loves video. There is video everywhere. Most of it I wouldn’t dream of watching on a large flat panel display; but one out of ten is very good indeed and works to sell the concept or product the website is selling.

So a great video gets you a lot of mileage– on the web, on the flat panel display, on the big screen in a big meeting, or on your iPhone for a quick sales pitch on the 8:15 from New Haven.

So which comes first? Well, they both take time to do right. (Exception: webcam updates are allowed, but NOT as your main video.)

In fact, consider how they will work together. Where will video do a better job than words? Where will words and art prevail?

It’s a planning phase you can’t ignore– we call it Strategic Digital Marketing.

OnLine Video should be Professional, Story-based, and Not always Bite-size, Says Eisner

In an interview with C-Net, former Disney Chairman Michael Eisner talks about his new video production company targeted at broadband delivery, and the types of projects he feels should be delivered ultimately on the web.

Surprise! They’re not user-created, low-budget, or even short.

Read more here.

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“An American Anthem” and YouTube

Ten year ago– in a simpler time– we produced a three-screen meeting opener for Walgreens called "An American Anthem." It was a celebration of Americana, which– after 3 minutes of history, pageantry, and patriotism– lead into a live singing of the National Anthem, followed by a rousing on-screen finale featuring the Blue Angels, fireworks and flag-waving, while on-stage, a nice pyrotechnic "kaboom" buttoned the whole thing up and lead to rousing applause.

It was produced fairly generically– without real branding other than a pairing of the United States and Walgreens flags in the final moments. Given that, we thought it might be worth making it available to other companies and groups who needed a nice, affordable, ready-to-go opener. So we converted it to single screen, took out the minute and a half orchestral accompaniment used by the live singer, and put it on a website and uploaded it to what was then the fairly new YouTube.

It got a fair number of viewings, but because viewers can leave comments, it also sparked a spirited discussion about politics, war, and the post-911 world.

Well, at least it got a response. If you’d like, go to this page at YouTube, have a look-see, and let us know what you think. Is this kind of statement appropriate for the post-911 world, or does it need to be tempered or modified to fly today? (It is video and is easily modified.)

And it still is available for rental…… (grin).