Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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We’ve run into this situation twice with large clients. U.S. intellectual property law is clear and as many have pointed out, in the absence of a contract stating otherwise, the producer/shooter/production company owns the footage.
But as others have also pointed out, ethically it’s a sticky situation. In each of our cases, the clients wanted to take literally hundreds of tapes of footage AND graphic and AE comps… and use the material to revise, recreate or update a video we previously produced.
In our cases, we felt it was necessary to ask for something financially in return for all this. The graphics alone represented hundreds of hours of design work, much of it very-high end in style and quality, and we didn’t feel comfortable releasing that to the client to do with as they wish.
In each case we presented the clients a buyout fee for what they wanted, and each was very fair considering the amount of assets.
One understood the reasons behind us wanting compensation, mulled it over…then decided to keep using us and is still using us today and is quite happy with the work.The other client was behind on their bills (not with just us but with many vendors), and we asked for quite a bit more in compensation than the first client (but it was still very fair). They turned us down but also kept using us for another 2 months before laying off 85% of their staff and essentially folding up shop.
To my mind, if a client asks for ALL your footage, it’s usually not a good sign, and unless they’ve requested ownership of the footage (as many large companies do), it’s totally your call on whether to release it or not.
Very little good can come of releasing a large volume of your work…unless the client is up-front and forhcoming about it’s use, and also assures you they’re not trying to cut you out of the food-chain.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Over the past year we’ve had some experience with sales reps. In 2004 we decided to move from just being a production company to a full-blown communications company that does print, buys media etc.
The clients we bought media for were beginning to take up just about all of my partner’s time, and he found he didn’t have time to run the company. So we decided to hire an account rep. The first guy we tried was right out of college, very bright, nice looking, and personable. The agreement was he’d immediately get an existing car dealer group account (4 dealers) with a base salary plus a modest commission off the media placed for them; but, he had to bring in other work if he wanted to make more money and keep working for us.
We tried it for 9 months and it just didn’t work. He didn’t bring in a single piece of additional billable work, and while he did a decent job on the existing account, we couldn’t justify his salary vs. the revenue that was coming in on just that one account. He was a nice guy but just didn’t have enough initiative.
Problem was, we still needed someone to handle these accounts. So now we’re using a person who used to be a marketing director for a large retail company. We pay her commission only on what she handles. She has another part-time small business now and handles the dealer group account from home. She has brought in a couple of new jobs, but it’s not like there’s been a boon of new business. But…I believe this is the way to go if you’re going to add an account person. We’re not outlaying much for the services, and she gets paid for only for the work she does with the dealer or what she brings in.
I do believe an experienced, savvy salesperson could easily sell our services and make a very nice living. But finding that person and convincing them to come to work for you is a tough sell.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
We see ads for gun stores and gun shows all the time in southern Indiana and Kentucky.
Here’s one from a gun shop and shooting range in Indianapolis:
https://www.metacafe.com/watch/466097/dons_gun_commercial/
And another for a larger gun manufacturer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgmSw6c587A
I don’t know of any laws prohibiting advertising of any sort for firearms, and doing a quick google search turned up nothing for it. I’ve seen print ads selling Guns at Dick’s Sporting Goods, Gander Mountain, Bass Pro Shops, heck..even Wal-Mart…so I doubt there’s any law prohibiting TV commercials. And as Todd said, it’s doubtful you’d have any liability anyway. It would be like someone walking into the gun shop and slipping on water that spilled from the sink. I doubt the plumber who ran the pipes for that sink would be held liable.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
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John,
I probably didn’t say it well, but I was agreeing wholeheartedly with you on everything. Your point about companies wanting vendors to not only make recommendations but also do the work and basically take ownership of it is spot on.
We find the companies we work with want us to take very raw concepts and ideas and just run with them and get them done, making decisions to keep the project moving all along the way. BUT…they want to be kept involved in the process. When they were working with big ad agencies and consultants, the complaint was they were excluded from the process…and when they wanted to make changes, the agencies would argue with them and in some cases tell them they weren’t able to do that (either due to budget or time issues).
Jony Morley:
In this era of doing more with less, authority for decision making, and thinking strategically, is increasingly being pushed down to the folks doing the actual work. Prospering in this environment means demonstrating to your clients that by hiring you, they don’t need to hire anyone else to keep you–and them–out of troubleSo yes…you’re assessment of what it takes to prosper in this economy and business environment is exactly what we see in our part of the country.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
John Morley:
positioning yourself as a consultant, who understands your client’s business and takes initiative in adding value–or preventing mistakes–is one of your best strategies for building loyalty and increasing revenue.I agree with just about everything that’s been said in this thread. But some of the strategies to sell your work really depend on the part of the country you work in and the type of client you work with.
Our clients are mainly in the midwest and almost all have some sort of in-house marketing departments that range from a handful of employees to entire departments with dozens of workers. From our experience, most of them cringe at the notion of anyone acting as a consultant to them on projects.
Most of our clients formerly worked with either an ad agency, or a “one-man band” type consultant that directed their marketing and advertising efforts, but farmed literally everything out, from design to web to TV and radio production.
We were continually caught off-guard by the disdain they had for their former consultants and agencies. So we always tried to tactfully find out why.
Their aversion comes from years of working with companies that:
1. Didn’t listen to the client’s needs or any of their suggestions.
2. Would purposely deliver project previews and proofs so near deadlines that changes were essentially impossible.
3. Would place their media based on whether thay could get trips and incentives from newspapers, TV stations and radio stations.We heard this over and over from multiple companies. Some large, some mid-sized. They ranged from casinos, banks and health-care companies, to furniture companies and car dealer groups.
So we’ve learned to almost never refer to ourselves as consultants for fear we’ll get hog-tied and strung-up on a post somewhere!
I agree…that IS what we essentially are to a lot of our clients, but we prefer to frame the relationship being more of a partnership, since if our efforts help make them more successful, it helps ensure that we can likewise be successful. It may be a matter of semantics, but we’ve found that the language and phrasing you use in dealing with clients can make a HUGE difference in how they view you.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Those are all great reasons to do that many videos. But these folks hadn’t decided on any uses for the videos beyond in-store and hand-out DVDs. We had already produced half a dozen web videos for them, none of which ever got uploaded to the website, and they could barely spell powerpoint much less embed videos in it.
We really did try to understand why they wanted that many vidos and what the uses were. We just could never get the information out of them. As I mentioned, the entire project was eventually shelved…probably because it was just too unwieldy for anyone at the corporate level to coordinate, and when we gave them a rough estimate of the cost (based on their specs), they about had a stroke.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Bill,
I’m with you on everything you’re saying. I completely agree…but we’ve found that as the size of the client increases, so does the ability to consult or advise them of anything. They almost never listen or heed the advice. We’ve worked with a handful of good sized corporations (500 million to 1 billion in annual sales), and they were all dominated by their CEO. In each case, the CEO dictated what was done in every department, including marketing and advertising. So regardless of how much we tried to understand their business, every project and every pitch was derailed by the domineering personality of the CEO.
Now I’m not saying CEOs shouldn’t be involved in every aspect of the companies they run…I’m just saying they should allow their VP’s of marketing and advertising to do their jobs. And in the companies we worked with, they weren’t given that choice. The CEO’s in question had accounting and finance backgrounds and had no formal training or understanding of marketing and advertising. Their idea of market research was to bring in all the secretaries and have them watch the spot we produced. They’d ask them what they thought. If the secretaries liked it, it ran. If they didn’t, it was back to the drawing board…despite weeks of coordinating our TV spot so it meshed with the rest of the company’s internally produced in-store, outdoor, newspaper and magazine ads.
So while we still try very hard to understand our client’s problems and needs and recommend plans that can truly help them brand and distinguish themselves in the market, they rarely listen. In fact, what I find astonishing is that any broad, focused branding campaigns EVER get produced. We constantly show our clients examples of how companies like Best Buy, JC Penney, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowes and many others, create a distinct look and image, and hammer that image and message into consumers heads for years at a time.
But a month later, the CEO is complaining that we need to change the color of the graphics and find some new fonts because the advertising is looking stale. We’ve learned you don’t say “no” to CEO’s worth millions of dollars.
Anyway…we still hold out hope that there are clients out there that understand that branding and positioning a company is central to its success. We just haven’t found any yet!
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
They are the best keep secreat out there and understand Video Workflow better than most.
I can second Dan’s assessment as we have an entry level vStor and it works great, and their customer service is outstanding. Their engineers know what they’re talking about and they can actually explain stuff to you in terms that you can understand.
When we were researching products they debunked a lot of the “myths” out there about shared video storage. One example is that everyone else we talked to said we COULD NOT use a network switch and connect our client edit workstations and regular office PC’s to it and expect to get the needed throughput for video editing.
Apace actually recommends you use a managed GigE switch and tells you it’s fine to have regular office PC’s connected to the network on the very same switch. We have it setup that way and it works fine, with NO ill effect from office network traffic.
They also said there was no performance gain by connecting directly from the ethernet connection on the PC to the ethernet connection on the vStor…which other companies claim gives a performance boost by bypassing the switch. We actually confirmed this by connecting one of the edit stations directly to the GigE port on the vStor. It tests out at the exact same speeds and performs the same as when connected via the switch.
Apace also gives you recommendations on the brand of switch to buy, how to cable and configure etc. All based on their experience with many, many installations. I find it incredible that they still seem to be the company no-one knows about.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
How does vstor work exactly? I’m intrigued that there is no client software, and no SAN software. Is it just a high-performance NAS? Do you connect to it using “Command-K?”
Sean,
It’s a relatively simple device. It’s basically a Linux based server using an embedded OS (I suppose it’s on a chip but I don’t know enough about the hardware to say for sure). It has a relatively fast processor, several GB of RAM, a display card etc. All this controls the RAID, which is made up of 8 SATA II drives striped in a RAID 5 array. This allows for high speed read/writes and provides redundancy in case of 1 drive failure, meaning the data can be rebuilt if one drive fails.
Our unit has 4 Gig-E ports and each edit station is connected via dedicated ethernet card to 1 port through a 48 port managed GigE switch. The ports on the client PC’s are given unique static IP addresses so nothing else conflicts with the data that’s moving back and forth across that connection. Each workstation also has a second ethernet card that’s connected to the rest of our general network through the switch. The rest of the network doesn’t have access to the vStor, but you can set it up so 1 client PC allows sharing of vStor assets if you like. This will marginally slow the one client PC, so it needs to be a non-critical edit station, meaning you wouldn’t want to designate a capture station as the client that allows sharing.
You administer the vStor through a GUI that’s accessible via your internet browser from any of the client PC’s. You can also hook a monitor, keyboard and mouse to the vStor and do it direct if you prefer, but it’s not necessary.
In terms of formatting and actual use, it’s very easy. You just decide how many separate volumes you want on the vStor (we have two, one for video and one for audio), then set up each client PC to automatically connect to those volumes at boot up, and then you’re off and editing. It works identical to our direct attached setup, and is actually as fast or faster in terms of throughput.
You can keep project files on it as well as audio and video and you can set up your volumes and folders however you like. As it turns out, we should’ve just created one volume and kept both video and audio files in the same project folders as there’s no benefit to keeping them separate. We did it because our VelocityQ editing systems always kept video on one dedicated SCSI drive array, and audio on another to improve performance. But there’s no performance increase or decrease by setting up separate volumes on the same array…so we just did it out of habit.
The only thing that was complicated was setting up all the IP stuff, but Apace literally did it all for us via “go to meeting” sessions. If you’re not familiar with it, they set up a meeting, you call, then log into a website, then they take over your PC and set it all up for you. It’s very cool. You DO need to pay attention and write all the information down so you can access the vStor later, but if I can do it anybody can.
We also bought a NAS based backup drive (a LaCie 4TB rack-mount network drive) as well as a separate LaCie 2TB rack-mount that we keep project files on. But like I said, we should’ve just kept project files on the vStor too, as it doesn’t significantly impact throughput…and most people using it with Final Cut and Avid keep all their video, audio and project stuff on the vStor.
It’s amazing how much time we save using shared storage in terms of scheduling, file management, and especially backup. We used to constantly pull our hair out over all the duplication on our backups, which were individual drives attached to each workstation. Not to mention all the duplication of video and audio files on the direct attached SCSI arrays. Using the vStor eliminates all that.
The only drawback to the unit is that it’s huge and it’s loud. VERY loud. Ours is in our server closet where all our phone and other networking equipment is kept, and even with quite a bit of sound absorption and dampening material on the walls and doors, you can still hear the thing. It’s not objectionable, but if you’re into the whole “noise pollution” thing, it can be annoying. So you need to plan for where you’d put the thing and plan to sound proof some.
If you have more questions I haven’t answered, let me know.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Bill Davis
Essentially, to be allowed to uses your videos to help clients solve bigger problems. I think the rest of what’s being discussed here is relatively marginal.
Oh if it were only that simple! Bill..I agree with what you’re saying and we preach this exact same thing in both internal and client meetings. But the reasons corporations produce videos often defies logic. We recently had a client that had two promotional videos. One was a general “here’s what we do” that ran in their lobby, the other was a DVD that explained the company’s products.
They wanted to update them so we discussed what needed to change and what they wanted to improve from the old videos (produced by another company). They said they needed to meet internally to answer our questions. A week later, we re-convened and they decided they no longer needed 2 new videos, they NOW needed….drum roll please….26 separate and distinct promotional videos!
There were no new burning problems these additional 24 videos solved. We couldn’t get any explanation for the need except some executive decided they needed separate videos about virtually every product and service they offerred.
Conversely, we have huge companies in our city that proudly proclaim “we don’t use video.” Personally…I don’t see how you can be a modern company of any consequence in your industry and NOT use video. So I think a company’s culture and personality plays a HGUE role in thier view of corporate video and marketing materials.
I could tell dozens of stories about clients producing videos for all the wrong reasons, and half-a-dozen more about companies that refuse to use it in any circumstance.
We’ve produced countless videos and TV commercials for companies that are never seen or used! So the question on these is “what was the critical problem that needed solving here?” Well, obviously there wasn’t one. So while you may be astonished that we’re all missing the point, the corporate world is a strange place, where projects are often done because someone “THINKS” they need to be done…or in response to some vague request or initiative.
So while I wholeheartedly agree with you on every point, the truth is that in large ogranizations, sanity and logic are often ignored in people’s quest to “please the boss.” So if the boss doesn’t believe in video, there’s little chance the company will use it. Likewise, if he/she does beleive in it, there’s also a good chance video will be misused.
So I think in reality, corporate video often IS a complicated animal.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com