[Mark Suszko]

One quibble I have with the definition, It is: Offer, Acceptance, and Consideration, the last being defined as actual money has changed hands, even if just a token amount. Without that part, the other two don’t add up to a contract. This is why you see those deals where people trade the title to a car for a dollar, the dollar is the consideration that proves both parties are going thru the exchange, and have agreed to terms. If you tell a guy you want him to edit for you, but never pay a dime up front and never sign anything, nor give him material to work on, you have a hard time proving you had anything like a meeting of the minds.

I had this proven to me in small claims court against a crooked client who’s main argument was that we didn’t actually have a contract, so whatever nefarious things he did (like pirating a ton of dubs without paying me my agreed cut) were none of my business. I was able to show there was consideration thru a cancelled check of his and receipt signed by him for a deposit fee as part of the first dub run. Judge looked at that and said I had an open and shut case and ruled for me and my biz partner. Closest I ever came to mom’s dream of me being a lawyer

Just the week before, I had been watching an episode of “The Paper Chase” that was all about consideration as part of a contract. So I had this argument all prepared and ready, but was lucky I didn’t have to cite John Houseman as my source:-)

And they say Tv doesn’t teach you anything:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Where can I see some of this work?

[Mark Suszko]

Bill, I truly am not trying to bait you or anything, but after reading your COW bio I am very curious to see what kind of stuff you’re actually selling and how you sell it. It would help me to understand your assertions on this topic a little better. Clearly, you are moving some product in profitable quantity. But how you are computing the costs and values is not clear to me. Can you point to some actual cases or online examples of the stuff you’re doing?

[Mark Suszko]

See, this is one area where universities and colleges should be doing a better job, they teach media as some kind of hybrid between a trade school and n academic lab, and everybody is interested in playing with the camera and throwing terms around… but do they teach stuff like insurance, business practices and and legal clearances?

Mostly, no.

It should be a full-on course in the second year curriculum. If I was a student shopping for a com arts program today, this is something that would be a deal maker or deal breaker, because it separate the working practitioners from the dilettantes.

[Mark Suszko]

If there is one thing I will NOT abide, it’s absolutists:-)

I don’t know what to make of this new argument, however, I have seen plenty of “call this 800 number” spots on my local cable, all of the 30-second nature, scattered through all the channels and playing only once or twice in an hour on any one in particular. 30-second spots, with response needed to order. Yes, many of them are cheesy, others have a bit more production value. Same cable co. runs 30-minute informercials on a couple dedicated channels that I NEVER watch, in fact have deleted many of those channels from my remote.

How does this figure into your assertion?

[Mark Suszko]

This is just my opinion, working only from what you’ve said so far. Take it for what it’s worth. It is way easier to armchair quarterback what someone else has done than to look at a blank sheet of paper and start being a genius with the first pen stroke…. so like I said, this is constructive criticism FWIW…

“The video has to attract clients with diverse needs”.

I’m looking at that statement and I’m going to ask you: ….why?

Is that the best strategy? This gets back to my point about trying to make one product do too many things or reach too many audiences. Does BMW market in one monolithic approach to both doctors AND ditch-diggers? Or do they narrow their focus and let the users self-select? Two well-targeted videos are a better deal than one which can’t decide where to put the emphasis. And that says something about how your company thinks too: targeted and singularly purposeful… or diffuse, contrary, and over-generalized?

“One of the sections of the video as it was originally planned was to answer the typical questions that are asked in an initial contact. (How long have you been in business? etc.) We were going to animated text and perhaps combine it with images. Narration by voice over. This could certainly be one of the sections.Obviously we do not want this to look cartoony….like the 60s Batman tv show. “

I would say there are perhaps ways you can weave this thru the other material more subtly. If you put it away in it’s own section, fewer people will navigate to it to look at it. And why should they want to? I think you have an opportunity here to try and incorporate that data within the other narratives, and each narrative can approach some of the same ideas from a different perspective, a perspective that comes out of that unique dimension of the company and what it does and how it does it. One unified message or theme, and each sub-section addresses one dimension of it, reinforcing the overall theme and tying to all the other sections.

Perhaps an example you could point to when discussing this with the bosses is Warren Buffet and the history of Berkshire Hathaway.

You really get a fast and accurate picture of the man and his philosophy from several short anecdotes like how long he resisted getting his own corporate jet, flying coach instead, what he named his plane, and why he thought that was important. About contrasting his home size and his annual pay with other CEO’s. About where he puts his money and WHY that makes Berkshire so distinctive. That’s SHOWING instead of TELLING. So much of the dull facts or claims you could make for B.H. could instead be woven into that kind of a narrative, instead of a list. Your graphics guy/gal could be a brilliant animator of that data, and make it do all kinds of clever gyrations, but at the end of the day it is just laundry list: it tells you what, but not WHY.

“Another section would be demonstration of expertise and shows a portfolio. The client calls this the trust building section. ”

The whole video is (or should be) an exercise in trust building, not just one section. I think your guys should pick one, single-phrase goal, and put everything into that. If the decision is “trust-building”, by God, make the whole thing revolve around that message, visually, in visual subtext (SHOW, more than TELL) and in overt spoken copy. “You can trust us because the feds say THIS about us…” “You can trust us because our customers say…” “You can trust us because even our competitors say this about us…” Or look at what I said before about these other sections being like facets of the one big jewel, each one refracting a little different color, a different perspective, on the whole…

Videos are really about a big picture and generating an emotional framework, I don’t think they are as good for presenting dry tabular data, so I would not want to dive as deeply into the prospectus stuff in a video but have the video refer to printed or online ancillary materials. An additional benefit of that is the ancillary materials can be updated much more simply and even dynamically: you can add an online calculator to the site that actually runs a prediction of your portfolio based on previous performance if you invest x amount on A and B and C funds… get the picture? Leverage each kind of media for what it does best.

“Finally, the business for whom we are doing this has some very big name clients. We were thinking of listing the clients in a credit roll. “

This I think will mostly appeal to the vain members of that list, see above. You need a better way to tie that sort of endorsement into the story you’re trying to tell. Did your writer ( was there one?) do a creative treatment and discuss the overall creative approach first, or is this script something that was more or less handed down from above, and you are trying to find the way to make it work? That is setting yourself up for a lot of trouble, I think.

I think I would stall and try to re-conceptualize the whole thing from basic principles. But maybe I’m assuming too much.

[Mark Suszko]

Dude, it is JUNE, and everybody in the wedding biz is likely busting their humps doing the bulk of a year’s worth of business this month. 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Well, you don’t really say enough detail to be absolute, but in general, yes, shorter is better, and user-navigable content is better than sitting thru a passive linear presentation. Make a linear presentation too long, and the viewer will make it navigable by just fast forwarding thru all your hard work anyhow. What good does that serve you?

If you are thinking about breaking the material up, is it because the bits are too long and boring, or that the segments don’t really relate to each other or reinforce the overall message? Clients are always trying to “gold-plate” a single project with additional features and requirements. If it’s a training tool they often want to add motivational or sales components to it. Or it is considered too much work to customize the content for the various audience education and experience levels, and so they make you add introductory materials and exposition for the “least common denominator” that the more advanced people know by heart already and want to skip past. We live in a time where hyperlinking and DVD chapterization and video games make us all very used to self-navigated non-linear content.

That should really be a separate program and a separate conversation. Really boil it down and define each piece and how or why it should be in the overall presentation. Think of it as buying a car, and the salesman wants to talk you into adding options and accessories you didn’t want when you came in.

[Mark Suszko]

Does Carpel still take them?

[Mark Suszko]

Yes, go bigger than 12 if you can.

12 limits your maximum working distance and forces you to use bigger fonts.

Bigger fonts force you to scroll faster because you can’t show as many words on the screen at the same time. Which makes reading choppier and harder for the talent, particularly the more inexperienced person or one who’s doing this for the first time… like a non-actor, perhaps an office person in a corporate setting… just the worst kind of person to be put into that position.

Prompters are not just for text: we use them a lot to show things like powerpoints so the presenter can keep eye contact with the TV audience but still see their slides. It can make a big difference.

You may be limited to 12 by circumstances not covered in your first post. If not, seriously consider going bigger.