3 Tips For Working With A Video Company

Posted on November 9, 2010 by Nikc Miller

Recently I received an email from a previous client whose organization was planing for a video they needed to produce. The question he asked was timeless in our line of work:

About how much does it cost to produce a 60 second animation?

I ended up writing him a response that addressed a lot of problems with that question. I decided that it might be useful to post an informal primer to help businesses communicate more effectively with a prospective video producer.

Have a specific goal in mind for your video
This is the cornerstone of all video production. Having a clear goal guides every other decision you will make in the production process.

Instead of,

“My business wants something we can put on our YouTube channel.”

try,

“I want a YouTube video that has a humorous edge and can promote my top-selling product. A video that will be shared amongst 17-30 year old males, and will gain 10,000+ views within the first 3 months.”

Immediately the picture is clearer. A talented producer will be able to tell you immediately if her company is right for the job. She will also be able to start piecing together specific details about the scope of the project. A writer and talent will have to be brought on board. A distribution strategy will have to be developed.

Name Your Price
Many people feel that if they name how much they want to spend, they will get taken advantage of. However, when you name your price, you name the level of production that you wish to achieve. A commercial can be made for $30 or $3000, it really depends on the level of production. Knowing the goals for your video will be the key to figuring out how much money to invest.

WARNING: Measuring your budget against a proposed hourly rate is not a good strategy. Just imagine you had to hire someone to type a long document for you. One applicant is the best in her field, has worked as a stenographer for 10+ years. Her rate is $100 an hour. The other applicant was just introduced to a computer three months ago. His rate is $30 an hour. Who would you hire? In one situation you pay a higher hourly price, but get your job completed quickly and with few mistakes. In the other situation, you have to wait longer for your project to be completed, it’s probably riddled with mistakes, and you actually end up paying about the same total amount because it takes up to 4 times as long for the typist to complete.

If naming a price is still over your head or you just have a clue where to begin, try this approach: View past work by the video company. Find a video that you feel might be similar to what you want, then ask how much that particular video cost to produce.

Have A Deadline
Nothing gets more convoluted than a project in limbo. Goals expand, mindsets change, and suddenly the scope of your video can become much broader. Have a deadline for when you want to launch and remember: video has the option of being re-purposed. Release your video, analyze effectiveness, and tweak to maximize. It is very rare for a message to be totally successful right out of the gate. But the only way to see what works, is to get your video out of the boardroom and into the hearts and minds of your viewers.

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Want to see more posts like this? Ask us for advice on proceeding with your project. Seriously, it gives ideas for some great posts!

Flyers Are Never Marked As SPAM

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Nikc Miller

…but they still have the ability to piss off random people, and people still (mentally) mark it as junk.

Some fun facts about SPAM:

SPAM is not just digital.
SPAM was around before the Internet.
SPAM will be around after the Internet.
Probably the most frustrating thing about SPAM is that people usually know when they are SPAMMING someone.
They also know that it will be fairly ineffective. SPAM artists rely on sending out en masse and hope for a (usually tiny) percentage of people to buy

Is your marketing goal to avoid the SPAM folder or is it to actually engage, enlighten, and perhaps sell something?

Thanks to FedEx/Kinkos for this poster that inspired me to think about SPAM. It makes me wonder why they sent this message on a poster and not on a flyer. Probably because I would have marked it as SPAM.

Facebook > The Internet?

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Nikc Miller

While perusing Twitter the other day, I found an “alarming” fact that I’ll paraphrase here:

“One of the world’s largest brands publicly announced that it would rather drive traffic to their Facebook page than their web page.”

Gasp!

I followed up with the Tweeter to no avail, so who knows if it’s true or not. Regardless, let me talk about why this isn’t (or wouldn’t be) so shocking after all.

Why would you, as a brand, want to get more hits on your Facebook page rather than your website?

1. Facebook Gives You A Captive Audience

Having an active Facebook page is your opportunity to have a captive audience tuned into your “channel.” Sure there are comparable solutions in the web world; you can gauge your analytics; you can see how many unique visitors are on your website everyday; you can even create a Feedburner account to see how many subscribers you have. Unfortunately all of this data provides faceless numbers and zero opportunity to really know who your fans are.

The benefit of having Facebook “fans” is knowing that at any given moment you can broadcast a message that you know will reach your audience. The results are near-instantaneous: If your message fails, you know immediately.

2. Facebook Gives You An Open Forum (if you want it)

The key to reaching your audience on Facebook is message portability. Not only are you reaching a captive audience, but they have the power easily share your message throughout their base. This is a bit more difficult to achieve from your website.

Furthermore, having “likes” on your Facebook page gives your fans an opportunity to communicate with each other. You might notice a bigger opportunity: the forum is your opportunity to communicate directly to your fan-base.

I mean this in the most personal sense. Websites are generally used for sweeping statements and basic info. With a Facebook page you can respond directly to your fans’ needs.

3. Facebook Gives You The Ability To Show Your Fans That Your Message Is Worthwhile

Perhaps you gained a fan because they like your product, restaurant, or store. On a whim they tuned into your channel. That doesn’t mean that they will stay. This is your chance to prove that your messages are worth hearing. You can do this by offering a great deal once a week or maybe just by being genuinely engaging.(Actually, both is a nice approach!)

The great thing is that actively maintaining your Facebook page puts you in a more active role in front of your audience. Instead of relying on updating your website once a quarter and updating your blog once a month, you end up on the frontlines with your fans. Before you say “Well my webmaster said he can make all of that happen on my website with a couple of simple design changes and a few widgets!” Think about it. Websites are great and they remain a very needed tool in your brand marketing. But to deny the fact that web audiences are spending a humongous amount of time staying on Facebook is to deny yourself an opportunity to really reach those people.

Join Render Perfect on Facebook!

SPAM Lives In Social Media Too

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Nikc Miller

“Please just delete the message if you do not want it”
-actual message from a Facebook spammer

The words Social Media tend to conjure up images of birds chirping, tweet-ups, keeping up with grandma, and perhaps happily drumming up more customers for your business. But let’s not forget the golden rule of communication on a mass-level: your message has to be wanted. It’s a bit confusing that while a ton of people are up in arms about the ever-changing Facebook privacy policy, I hear few people complaining about the easily-abused message system within Facebook.

Let’s say, I am a SPAMMER (most people will picture a brooding ominous figure ala Dr. Claw, but in this case let’s picture the SPAMMER as a well-meaning yet tasteless event marketer.) I create an event that I think is really cool and I want everyone to know about. I invite all of my friends, and perhaps encourage a few close friends to invite all of their friends as well. I then, very quickly, have 1000 or more people invited to my event. Here’s where the fun starts. I can now send ALL invitees a message, over and over again.

Is there a way to stop getting these messages? Sure, but its not as simple as just hitting UNSUBSCRIBE. You have to navigate to the event and remove yourself from the event manually. That doesn’t mean I can’t throw you back on the list whenever I want to.

What’s the lesson here? Well, nothing really. As long as there are popular forums for mass communication, there will always be those folks who choose to ignore permission-based marketing and abuse the system. But my prediction is that it is not the privacy policy, or the ever-present rumor that Facebook will someday charge a fee that will kill the popular sharing site. Rather it’s these tiny loopholes that allow marketers to easily abuse the system that will have people leaving in droves. People navigated away from Myspace because it was way too easy for bands and everyone else to SPAM them. It’s only a matter of time before Myspace’s spammers move aggressively to where the audience is.

The Pa-Pa-Pa-Power of Advertising Laterally

Posted on May 11, 2010 by Nikc Miller

Here’s a Zen question that keeps me up at night: Has subversive gone mainstream, or is the new mainstream just more subversive? Since I tend to talk alot about video advertising on this blog you might already see where I’m heading.

Film buffs in the Baltimore-Washington area might remember a small film festival called MicroCineFest. MicroCineFest was a small 5-day fest located in Baltimore’s Hampden neighborhood and it featured some of the craziest, most extreme, and subversive videos on Earth. Remember, these were the days before YouTube (BYT), so people would come from far and wide to check out some insanely creative videos.

I was very into the programming at MicroCineFest. It was challenging. As a videomaker it made me wonder: If this is the film subgenre I am into, how could I ever be able to put this to work? In other words, this seemingly unmarketable subgenre of film was fine for the arthouse, but could it ever break out?

Well here we are roughly 10 years later. YouTube dominates the web (and television for that matter). Film festivals of any kind seem somewhat passe. And commercials like this can be found running during primetime on national channels:

What happened? It’s like all the filmmakers who made those crazy MicroCineFest films got real jobs and convinced huge companies to try something boldly different. Not only that, but it’s working. I personally heard a huge buzz about these commercials from friends before actually seeing them. And just recently, I was alarmed to find my friend proudly displaying his collection of various Old Spice products.

The video is doing quite well online too. With nearly 4 million views, the majority of comments read like this:

“that was @#$%ingepic sweet vid”

“Second commercial to convince me to buy a product. First was the last Old Spice one, man on a horse.”

and the comment that really hits the nail on the head:

“It’s as if they wanted the commercials to become viral videos that we would love and give millions of hits. Good job!”

So I guess the answer to my question is the latter. With a variety of equally popular media outlets available for distribution, there is no longer a mainstream for media consumption. In turn, the mainstream messages must get more subversive to accomodate each. Successful campaigns are not created by pushing a variety of mediocre messages through one premium outlet but rather spreading one highly-contagious message over a variety of outlets.

Keep it Short, Cut Your Ego

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Nikc Miller

Imagine you see an ad on Craigslist:

Two free tickets to the soldout show tonight. First come, first served. Contact Glenn.

You email Glenn the poster, and it turns out YOU’RE FIRST: You win the tickets!

But instead of recieving instructions on how to get the tickets you recieve this:

Hi,
Thanks for responding. I’m glad that you are interested in the tickets. For 45 years, I have been giving away tickets to people just like yourself. I pride myself in being the premiere ticket giveawayer in the whole Mid Atlantic region. But don’t take it from me, here is a list of satisfied people who have received free tickets:

“I’ve been getting tickets from this guy for years! It’s great!”

-Mary from Boston, MA

“Amazing! I don’t know how this guy does it!”

-Bob from Washington DC

….The email goes on and on.

You didn’t ask for this. In fact you could care less about how many years this guy’s been giving away tickets, who he’s given away tickets to, or any of that. You entered a promotion and you just want the free tickets!!!

For Glenn, it is super important that he gets his name out there. He is proud of his history of giving away tickets and making people happy. But as important as this all is to him, and maybe even to the people he’s done business with in the past, it is information that is useless and down right annoying to you: the guy who just wants some tickets.

In an alternate situation, you recieve an email from Glenn that gives you clear instructions on how to receive your tickets. You recieve them, have a good time, then you tell your friends about Glenn and his awesome ticket giveaways. Everyone wins.

When starting an incentive-based promotion or a giveaway, keep the message simple and direct. If you have to cut anything from the message, cut your ego, your history, and your case studies. Accept the fact that you are running a promotion. There’s a big chance that the majority of the people entering your promotion will not care at all about your product, they just want to win a sweet prize.

These are the people you win over with class.

Using Rich Media To Drive Home A Point

Posted on March 23, 2010 by Nikc Miller

In my spare time, one of my interests is music and band marketing. Specifically, how to use video to increase exposure throughout the music industry. When it comes to music marketing, there is almost no one more knowledgable on the topic than Derek Sivers.

A week ago, Sivers gave a talk at South by Southwest. The point of this talk was to give advice to attending musicians about how they should spend their time at the conference.. The key takeaway: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU! That’s right; all the networking and marketing that you do as a person, band, or business is successful only when you can turn the conversation in the interest of the person you are speaking with. Asking people about their lives is the only true way to figure out what they need, and how you can help them.

In a very key use of rich media, Sivers himself turned the tables and asked his fans to give their advice to fellow musicians. It was a very “meta” way to show how powerful his key point could be by putting it into practice on the spot. This made for a very interesting content-call on his blog where 60 or so participants filmed themselves dishing out their very own practical advice. Some, not all, of the blurbs were shown at the conference but a little bit of promotion was given to each participant afterward on his blog.

His presentation was a clear and powerful use of rich media. Sivers certainly has enough knowledge and experience to give the talk all by himself. But relying on his base to drive his point showed humility, wisdom and faith that the followers of his own advice were worthy to chime in with their own tips and tricks.

Super Bowl BADvertising Round Up 2010

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Nikc Miller

Last year we discussed the merits and rewards of putting MC Hammer and Ed McMahon in your ad. So we’ll take the plunge again and talk about the ads that really rocked people’s worlds during Super Bowl XLIV.

Unfortunately, there was a surprising lack of awesome to be found. This year was kind of revolutionary for Super Bowl ads. Top Super Bowl advertiser, Pepsi, decided that it wasn’t worth the investment. Google ran a single ad that was pretty cool and surprising for Google.

The Air Force ripped off The White Stripes in a really worthless kind of way. And the rest just seemed to be a fairly lame sketch comedy show run by Doritos and Bud Light.

One of the reasons that these ads fell so short is pointed out here by Gary Vaynerchuk. Put briefly, advertisers are beginning to miss the mark with their audience. The number of viewers who watch TV while attached to a laptop, or browsing an iPhone are at an all-time high. Granted this attachment to devices isn’t necessarily true for the Super Bowl viewing experience (people watching in groups of 8-10 or more), advertisers should still concern themselves less with creating the immediately gratifying ad, but rather the ad that gets people to a website, a Facebook page, or signing up to a list.

Google, of course gets the best of both worlds. Their ad has gotten huge in just a few days thanks to a bit of a pre-air leak and simply because they OWN the web-viewing experience. It turns out that their ad was not as much about competing with Bing as it was about launching their own web-based ad campaign called Search Stories. If successful, Search Stories could be the first and most pure cross-over ad campaign in history.

Breaking Up A Company’s Twitter Presence Is Hard To Do

Posted on January 8, 2010 by Nikc Miller

Neil Sedaka was right: Breaking up is hard to do.

Since we started our company Twitter account about a year ago we’ve had the same discussion in the board room about once every month.

The conversation is one I like to call the Person vs Entity debate. It involves questions like:

• What’s the most successful way to represent corporate culture on Twitter?

• What remains off-message and personal to the employees of the company?

and classics like:

• What crosses over? (or more importantly: What absolutely does not?)

Starting today we’re changing how we do things on Twitter. The @RenderPerfect account which has been maintained by Nikc Miller of Render Perfect will now become a bulletin board of things that are important to the company as a whole:

•Innovative video news

•Amazing stories about the success of our clients

•Updates of new blog posts

•New product updates

Our additional employee Twitter accounts will feature more personal interactions, introspection and promotion of the things that we think are cool about video, marketing or anything (music, film, news etc.)

To use the once laughable but now uber-cool Venn Diagram approach:

Obviously, we think about this stuff alot. So tell us, what ways has your company found success in using Twitter?

By the way, we’d like to express a HUGE THANK YOU to all the people who have checked out this blog, our YouTube e-book, and our Twitter profile. We’ve had a great time sharing info back and forth with you. It only gets better from here!

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