-
production values!?!?
-
You can throw some Jump Backs at it, some techno-thump music, and fancier bulleted graphics builds, but that’s a band-aid solution.
A very common problem I face with my clients is they want one video to do every kind of job: for an employee training video to also be a sales promo or motivational video and also a kind of annual report video for shareholders… when those are all distinct target audiences with conflicting, antithetical needs. They tend to do it from a lack of understanding of media, and from a false concept of economy: that the more “stuff” you cram into one production under a fixed budget, the more you somehow get for your production dollar. Where we would look at the above laundry list and suggest that’s at least three separate scripts and productions, they often want to lump dissimilar things into one job just to get it over with and because there is not enough money to make three good short videos. So we’ll make one cruddy extra-long one!:-P
I tell them the message is like an arrow, and the more topics you add onto it, the broader and flatter the point of the arrow goes until it can’t penetrate a target no matter how hard you pull back the bow(read as “spending money”).
Pare down the message to the essentials. Short is good. Leave them wanting more, not gnawing their leg off to escape. And of course, Know and understand your key audience, respect them, don’t try to tell them what they already know. Don’t lie to them. Involve them.
Something I do with my clients is ask them for five objective, measurable things a viewer should know or think or feel about the main point, after watching the program. Play the first-cut master video for some people in the target audience, with the same educational, social and cultural background as the target audience. Ask them the five questions before and after viewing. If they retain three or more, its a win. If they retain two or less, go back and try again with refinements. If they retain all five, submit the video to an awards contest!
And make sure they understand that if they are not themselves in the target audience, their perception of what is good or effective in a video may not be the best, and that they should lean more on survey data and polling to decide what to greenlight. Otherwise, what you get is, the project was conformed to impress “the Big Guy”, whoever that is, but has little effect onthe actual target audience. It’s much more important to risk the Big Guy not liking the show *personally*, as long as you can show him the objective numbers that the video is doing its proper job on the assigned target audience.
Steps like this kind of validation are not what non-pro’s know anything about when they throw some powerpoint speaker notes into MS word and call it a “script”.
-
>>I tell them the message is like an arrow, and the more topics you add onto it, the broader and flatter the point of the arrow goes until it can’t penetrate a target no matter how hard you pull back the bow(read as “spending money”).
That is a great way to explain it… I’m going to have to borrow that from you.
The trouble is tat during the discovery processes, I’ll try to convince my clients to focus on a target audience.
“Who are we designing this video for End user, Sales Reps, Recruitment, Training, Orientation.”
90 percent of the clients will say “YES!, all of them”! They interpret a diliniation of videos as an attempt to sell them more videos.
Often I try to convince them to break up the project into a few small 1.5 minute videos instead of one 6 minute videobut this is often the result:
‘All I want is a video”
“But Mr, customer, I’m trying explain that there are different videos for different purposes”
“My boss said he wants a video”
“Errr… OK”
-
Ah, yes, the dreaded: “General Audience” specification. Morley goes into great detail about this in his book. What you might try next time is to act stupid, and ask some leading questions:
“When you say General audience, do you have a lower and upper age limit?
“Would these people be assumed to have what level of education, at a minimum? And what maximum?”
“Are they predominately one particular ehnicity or gender?”
“And roughly what kind of income level are we talking about, in a broad sense?”
You keep whittling away at these “general” specs until you can define the target down to something manageable:
“So, what I hear from you is, we’re aiming for young, single, primarily English-speaking men of any race, living in cities of 50 thousand population and up, between ages 25 and 35, with at least a high school diploma and at least 2 years of college, making between 20 and 50 thousand a year, who like outdoor activities and who rent their current home or apartment, and have a bit of money saved they might want to invest in either a home purchase or another type of investment.”
You now know *something* about whom you want to reach, you now have some basis to start designing the message. That is not a “general” audience we just listed. You just saved a LOT of time and money for the client that might have been blown on creative approaches that would have been wasted on non-qualified target audiences.
-
Playing stupid is good advice. Especially when working with marketing managers as opposed to a non-marketing person or business owner.
Many marketing managers often feel threatened and like to call the shots.
Most videos I work on are in the 25,000 – 65,000 range but it’s amazing how many clients, even those with a decent budget, still want a video that is all things to all people.
Accessing the person you’re working with is key..
Are they a real decision maker?
Are they really interested in a quality product or are they covering the bases cause their boss told them told too?
Are they willing to “go to bat” for a good idea?
What is their background? Maybe they have more video experience than you!
Are they looking forward to the project? How can you make it fun for them?
How can you make them look good?
-
Great ideas, Mark. Stripping down everything that isn’t core would be my key goal… and you absolutely have to keep the audience in mind when you do that.
Even though the jumpbacks and graphics suggestion may not actually make it “better”, that may be what the client *thinks* he wants. If that’s the case, the first thing I would look at would be color grading. Some Magic Bullet film filters can do wonders for clients who are looking for cheap and quick ways to “improve” videos. I hope you can tell by my quotation marks that I see the magic bullet filters as band-aids that won’t save a bad script or bad acting, but color grading and a subtle (albeit emulated) film grain does at least show that there was some extra effort that went into the video.
At least it can help get you away from that “cheap soap opera video” look.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up