[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “…there’s spam pills for that sort of thing?
“

You’d be amazed. The only thing ima add is that there are apparently a lot of lonely grandmas out there.

[Michael Gissing] “I am sure Tim has more important things to worry about…..”

Hey, NOTHING is more important than this. I was just focused on other stuff for a bit that was…okay, other stuff is important too. 🙂

But to summarize again where I’m at right now:

No “Or Not” in the Cloud Debate forum because there’s no real discussions about alternatives to Adobe products. Obviously way oversimplifying here, but the largest single topic, maybe the only major one, is about the way that the products are being paid for / owned / not owned, etc. “Soapbox” has negative connotations that I wouldn’t want to convey, but that’s more of how I see that forum, with no disrespect intended. The forum is doing what it needs to do.

The debate here was never just between FCP 7 and X, but about every NLE (time to reconsider Avid again, I’ve already got Premiere because I own AE, Smoke has a crazy crossgrade deal, etc etc), and every combination of NLEs that may or may not include X at all. Past holdouts are finding reasons to make the switch, with good and bad things to report, new people are entering the discussion for the first time, a new computer is bringing up angles that haven’t been talked about at all for a year or more — things change here, often, and often by a whole lot.

In all, the topics here are doing more to reflect what’s happening in the real world, with people’s actual money on the line, than anywhere else on the web.

I’m nowhere near done with that. I am done with “pundit” wannabes saying “Time may tell” and other claptrap that exposes how little they use it, and how little real thought they’ve given it. It’s straight-up clickbait. I recommend avoiding every article with a similar title unless it’s at the COW, where I would never consider publishing such a cowardly article. I demand more of our authors because I respect your time. It’s been 2 years. Have a fkkking opinion, or don’t waste my time.

Which is why I love this forum so much. LOL

And I’m generally less interested in someone’s opinion than in what they’re DOING, and I love that threads like that are also in such abundance.

Of course, I don’t do anything at all, and am wall-to-wall opinions, so what the hell do I know? I know that the conversations between some of the smartest people online (and the rest of you LOL) make this the best forum on the web.

As always, I’m up for any changes that reflect the forum better than this name does. We had no idea that the forum would last this long and be so popular. If we had, we might have taken more time with the name LOL….but it felt reflective of the posts we were actually seeing, rather than some idea about what the forum “ought” to be.

And yes, drop me a line any time about this or anything else. How ’bout them Red Sox, y’all!

Yr pal,

Timmy

Vice President, Editor-in-Chief,
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

I still think you’re mixing “wanting to people to contact them” with HOW the client wants people to contact them. Maybe the client is trying to tell you, “We don’t like the web, we don’t understand it, and we’re not going to properly service anyone who reaches us there,” but are too embarrassed to admit it to you.

I think you’re also still mixing what you think they should want people to DO with what they want people to UNDERSTAND about them.

Seriously, do they have a yellow pages ad? THEN USE THE PHONE NUMBER.

Additionally, ask them what they want from their website. I guarantee that the answer is “We want them to call us or come by.” And if their website DOESN’T feature their phone number prominently, then it’s a bad design for a local business. The phone number is EVERYTHING.

They’re the client, and you have to yield no matter what….but if you’re more than a couple of years younger than they are, I rest my case. LOL This has nothing to do with “reality” and everything to do with their feelings about “this is our image, this is how we want people to contact us…”

…and everything to do with creating a second step between the ad and personal contact.

There’s no upside for you in this, and potential downside.

For research, you can look at some other local spots, but this shouldn’t be an argument between you and me. I don’t think you or my dear friend Todd are even a little bit right about how absolutely critical a phone number is to a local business, but really, your goal is to make the client feel you understand them and their wishes.

If they come back to you and say, “We didn’t get the response we wanted,” THEN you can try the website…but I guarantee that the response that they want is for more phone calls than more hits on their website.

Otherwise, why would they come back to you? “He wouldn’t do it our way, he kept trying to talk us into doing something we knew wasn’t a good fit for us, so we’re going to go with someone who’s really listening to us.”

What’s the win for you? Making the customer feel good about THEMSELVES. Their feelings about the product and the results are numbers two and three, in that order.

I won’t repeat myself, but the more I’m thinking about it, the stronger I’m feeling about it. LOL And fwiw, I did a ton of local spots when I was still in production (“Advertising” was part of my company’s name), and I lived by my own advice. 🙂

But you know your client and your market better than I do, so I’ll leave it at that.

[Tim Wilson]

[Neal Petrosky] “I’m hired to do professional work, but my advice is thrown out the window.”

Asked and answered. 🙂

Speaking more broadly, NO WAY would I put in a web address.

You have to match the medium and the message. Local spots are lo-fi and intimate. “I’m in your house at 2am to tell you that I’m just like you. I share the values that YOU share, not your hipster son with his soul patch and fedora, not your daughter and her nude selfies. You can trust us, because we’re just like YOU.”

This is true regardless of whether your client does FB, which they may well in their everyday lives. Even if they do for their business it’s because their hipster son or nude selfie daughter talked them in to it. They want to do business with phone numbers because they want to business IN PERSON.

If they’re the kind of company with a Yellow Pages ad, this is a rock solid truth that cannot be messed with. They are ALL about the phone number.

I’ll go further and say that the phone number is the second most important part of the ad — right behind the name, just ahead of the address. It supports the key message: “You can reach us. You can touch us. You can shake hands with the owner.” That’s the kind of intimacy that people WANT from a local spot. Local spots should touch them where they LIVE.

This is quadruply true if they have a legacy area code or exchange in their phone number, which says they’ve been here for a long time.

It’s not hard to get a vanity number though, which I’d at least talk about with them — but even that may send the wrong message. Their message with an awkward number is, “We’ve had this number since before the days you could make up your own. The PHONE COMPANY gave us this one, just like they gave you yours.”

In other words, it DOES NOT MATTER if people CALL the phone number. The phone number is the MESSAGE, not the call to action. The call to action is the address. Your client wants the customer in the DOOR….and one reason why they’ll go in MY door rather than my competitor’s door is that I’M LOCAL.

The website actually GETS IN THE WAY of the action. It creates a barrier between the LOCAL spot by putting the potential customer on the WORLD wide web. No no nononono. The message is find us HERE. If you have any questions, you can CALL and talk to a real PERSON.

Now, if their message is NOT “we’re local, we’re intimate, we’re your friend and neighbor,” then maybe I’m wrong. MAYBE. But I’m not. In fact, if they TRIED to get a web or FB address in the spot, I’d demand they take it out.

What does the website do? It says we’re not necessarily local, we don’t need you to visit us, we’re hipper and more modern than you, we have soul patches and fedoras, and we send nude selfies. AND you need a computer and the skills to use it if you want to get the most information about us.

Or you could CALL.

I love you man LOL but I think that anything webby or next gen is a bad move that risks creating the opposite response you want.

[Tim Wilson]

[Ned Miller] “Wish we had a separate sub-board on Marketing Success Stories.”

Welcome to the Marketing Success Stories forum!

The name of the forum is “Business & Marketing,” not, “How Much Should I Charge,” “My Client Won’t Pay Me,” “I Want To Use Media That I Know I Shouldn’t But Don’t Want To Pay For,” or “I Hate This Industry Because This Industry Hates Me.”

Just plain old “Business & Marketing.”

Actually, the origin of this forum was an interest in talking about business practice in general. It’s not at all surprising to us that it developed into a problems/solutions forum though, since that’s why the COW as a whole was founded (in its original form) 18 years ago.

The fact is that very nearly all of you are having mostly good days. And yes, some specific plans outside day-to-day tasks that actually succeed. I’d love nothing more than a forum dominated by the dominant dynamic of the regular posters here: success stories.

No need to pile all the success stories in this one thread, either. Plenty of success to go around on a bunch of different topic….like this one about Good Old Snail Mail. My own mailbox gets more of this than anything, so I assume it’s working for a lot of people. Ned, I’m thrilled that you’re one of them! Great story!

The rest of you — keep ’em coming!

Yr pal,
Timmy

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

And as Abraham’s URL reminds us, it started life as a Film History forum, but morphed pretty early on. It was recently renamed to reflect the actual content of the conversations. Quite a concept. LOL

Dude, POST more! I love the posts in that forum, but there are only like a dozen of us regularly chiming in. I’ve always felt like COWs are some of the world’s most sophisticated VIEWERS of media, as well as most sophisticated producers of it, so I’d love to see more chatter. I feel especially strongly about this forum, because it’s one of the ones that I started for the sole reason that I wanted to have these kinds of talks.

Anyway, thanks for asking, and thanks for dropping by.

Best.

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “Believe me – we compete with each other all day long, and “bad mouth” each other, saying how we are better than the next guy for “this and that” reason – but ALL OF US can accomplish the goal – and NONE OF THEM can “

Just wanted to make sure that everybody sees this sentence. We’re thinking about making some variation of it the new motto of Creative COW.

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Bob,

I just wrote you with an alternate address. Always looking forward to hearing from you. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Kylee Wall] “So possible solution: have friends with expensive toys or access to them.”

This is especially good advice for this particular project.

It’s one thing to be offlining and not need proper monitoring — but unless you want to be stuck doing ONLY that, you need to give people the impression that you can do anything they want.

The great thing about color grading is that you can build a pretty dramatic reel on even the simplest footage. Even stock footage, because it’s all about LOOKS.

Some of the magic also comes in the presentation. I love this example, because it’s not Hollywood VFX stuff. It’s from an indie producer, doing quite a bit of local work and lower-budget documentaries, and his before/after presentation is basically a wipe.

Color Grading Reel

(That’s from Stephen Smith, btw, a great guy who you’ll find in the COW’s Movie & TV Appreciation forum in particular. It happens that his motion graphics skills are highly advanced — but my point is that for your REEL as a COLORIST is that they don’t HAVE to be.)

You’ll find many more dramatic reels, including quite a few in the COW’s reels library that ARE from famous movies…but keeping in mind the options actually within your reach, using presentation skills that are within the reach of somebody who focuses on offline editing rather than motion graphics. See what I mean?

I’m obviously veering a little off course, but I want to underscore the importance of Kylee’s point — this gig is worth taking the extra effort to avail yourself of well-equipped friends, and use their stuff to get the jobs that will allow you to buy the gear you need to get your career to the next level.

[Tim Wilson]

[Billy debu] “because I am the french champion of magic”

So, I had to go look for some video.

Okay everybody, meet Billy. 🙂

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[Tim Wilson]

He’s on the thread, you can talk to him. LOL Also, anybody who works in Florida is used to dealing with people whose first language isn’t English. That’s the easy part.

Billy, I agree that a school like Full Sail in Orlando Florida is exactly what you want. Strong training, excellent internships, 13-month programs, no wasted time.

I am certain that there are other programs like Full Sail that are worth considering. This is just the only one that I have personal experience with. I have huge respect for them, and encourage every student to consider them if this is the kind of education you want.