So what are my thoughts now that I’ve used it extensively? Well…you can get great results using these cameras, but when it comes to ergonomics and workflow in the field, the 60D (and DSLR cameras in general) just doesn’t compare to a dedicated professional video camera. The 60D certainly has its share of good qualities, especially its excellent video quality. It’s also generally easy to operate. But in my opinion, using DSLR cameras as your “A” camera for professional projects simply requires too many peripheral devices and convoluted cabling setups.

The two biggest issues are with sound recording and monitoring and external video monitoring. Even though the 60D has manual audio controls, unless you’re willing to load third party firmware (called Magic Lantern) every time you turn the camera on, controlling audio levels and monitoring is a convoluted process, requiring microphone preamps, a separate digital sound recorder (mainly for backup) and crazy cabling setups. You also cannot see your VU meters while shooting. The only way to check those is by way of a menu setting during your sound check. You can monitor sound through a separate field mixer or mic preamp while shooting, but it’s a bit disconcerting to not have a meter to check as well.

We’ve also experienced an odd, high-pitched noise on the auido of some of the 60D’s digital files. Oddly, the corresponding audio on our Zoom H2 recorder sounds perfect. This is significant because both signals are coming from the same mixer! We’ve ruled out the microphones, the cabling setup and the cabling itself through extensive testing. Unfortunately, we have not been able to rule out or duplicate the problem in our mixer/preamp (an ART Dual PreUSB). So it’s either an intermittent problem in this small mixer, or it’s a problem somewhere in the 60D’s audio circuitry.

Since I haven’t officially been able to rule it out, I can’t say with certainty the 60D has a problem. I will say that when I put the uncompressed .wav files recorded by the Zoom next to good audio files recorded with the 60D, they’re indistinguishable, both on the waveform and to my ears. So the perception that Canon DSLR cameras record “dirty” sound doesn’t hold water….unless of course our 60D is what’s generating that occasional high-pitched noise. My guess is it’s in the mixer, but until I can prove it I really can’t say where it’s coming from. Having the Zoom files available solved any post-production problems, but it’s still a pain to have to record separate sound. 

Video monitoring is yet another pain. You can send an HDMI signal to an HDMI capable monitor, but you can’t get rid of many of Canon’s on-screen menus, such as exposure readings and center frame markings (unless you use Magic Lantern). Same goes for SD monitoring, which can be utilized with a Canon supplied cable. But the down-converted composite signal is positively awful and is only good for framing and very general exposure checks.

And sending a signal to a second monitor for client viewing is a nightmare via HDMI. You either need an LCD monitor with HDMI loop-through (I’m only aware of 2 that are available, one from Marshall and one from Lilliput); or an HDMI splitter. We already owned a $1000 LCD monitor with HDMI input, so I bought an HDMI splitter. Then I bought another one, then another one….well…you get the picture. They DON’T work. I’ve yet to figure out why, but with all three units, one from Sewell Direct, one from Monoprice, and one from B&H Photo, getting a signal on both monitors required a crazy sequence of first plugging in one monitor, then plugging in power to the splitter, then waiting 10-20 seconds and plugging in the second monitor. Occasionally this silly procedure worked, but more often than not it didn’t. Or it would send pink video to one of the two monitors.

I don’t know if there is a problem with the HDMI signal that the 60D sends, if our camera has an issue, or if the splitters are just flaky devices. But I plugged all the splitters into two other consumer HDMI monitors and experienced similarly odd and inconsistent results, so I think it’s just a case of a still emerging protocol that isn’t designed for the fast-paced and demanding environment of professional video shoots. I even received a detailed if comical tutorial from the folks at Sewel Direct (who have great customer service) on the cabling and power-on procedure.

I have recently read that the Magic Lantern firmware (which is free) is now working fairly well with the 60D, but back in the summer when I tried it, it barely worked at all. The latest version is supposed to add on-screen VU meters, headphone monitoring capability (through the A/V jack’s audio out), and an HDMI video output signal without all the standard Canon menus and markings. Why is this important? Because it would allow you to output the uncompressed HDMI signal to a separate digital video recorder and record your video to whatever format, codec and compression desired. This could save a tremendous amount of time in post since you wouldn’t have to convert the complex H.264 files that the 60D records natively. Don’t misunderstand me here, there is nothing wrong with the video quality of Canon’s native files. When shots are properly focused, lit and exposed, they look great. And according to my tests, the files are captured at 44Mb/sec, which compares very favorably to other production quality high definition formats.

But overall, if you’re used to using $30,000 plus cameras designed for professional video, you’ll hate shooting with a DSLR. And if you’re a skilled shooter, you can achieve many if not all of the same shallow depth of field results with clever use of lighting and a long lens setting. About the only time you can’t get the same look is in small rooms or tight quarters. But for my money (and the clients’) I’d rather shoot with a professional video camera any day.

We’ll still use our 60D, but we’ll be getting a new HD camera before the end of the year, most likely the Panasonic AG AF-100, primarily because we’ve shot with Panasonic professional cameras since 2004 and know and understand the menu systems, scene files etc. The AF-100 seems to achieve a nice middle-ground between the conventional DSLR cameras and pro video cameras. Once we’re up to speed with it, we’ll likely use the 60D as a “B” camera on shoots.

I should also point out that we use the 60D for still photography, and for the money, it’s a FABULOUS still camera. In the hands of skilled photographer, the camera can produce truly stunning images. I’m not sure why anyone would pay more for a 5D or 7D when you could get two 60Ds and a couple of additional lenses and in my view sacrifice almost nothing in the way of professional features.

Obviously this technology has had many positive effects when it comes to marketing and advertising, but in my opinion that same technology has had some negative effects as well. Most prominent is a tendency for people to think that digital workflows are inherently faster and more efficient.

When used properly, digital tools can certainly speed workflow and productivity.  But two things that are still key to selling people anything is developing great ideas and producing compelling stories. Getting these right STILL requires the two things the best digital tools can’t deliver – time and experience. It’s no secret many projects have tighter deadlines and smaller budgets, and while a modest budget and quick turnaround doesn’t automatically doom a project, it certainly hampers the ability to make it stand out. That’s exactly where the value of experience comes in.

Experienced marketing professionals have typically worked on hundreds or even thousands of projects. That vast experience does two things. It gives the marketing professional great depth of knowledge about how to get projects done. And it provides a tapestry of work and ideas from which to draw upon.

Over the last 15 years here at Magnetic Image we’ve produced literally thousands of projects; from videos and print pieces to websites and social media pages. There is no substitute for that experience. When a client comes to us with a project, even if it’s something we’ve never done before, it’s a good bet that some element of that project is similar to past work. That experience does two things. It allows us draw upon our archives for ideas and workflow estimates, and because we’ve almost always done something similar, it speeds workflow.

These two things are at the heart of being a true professional, which in my opinion is any company or individual that is both fast and good. Give a group of designers a week to create something and you’ll usually get some great looking stuff. But how many designers can crank out great designs in a day? Probably not too many. The advantage these designers typically have over their less talented counterparts is experience. Certainly talent and creativity are important too, but I’ll almost always take the designer that is consistently fast and good over the designer that does great work but takes a week to do it. And rarely does the technology they’re using make any difference in the work or how fast they do it.

I see so many companies that opt to hire small, inexperienced firms to design websites or produce videos or manage their social media, and their hiring decision usually came down to being sold on the vendor’s “technology” or their “digital processes.” In this day and age, any marketing company still breathing is using advanced technology and dozens of digital processes…so I’m still amazed that smart executives are swayed by this. But darned if they aren’t. It amounts to snake-oil most of the time. But one thing is still true. The best technology simply cannot hide bad ideas, bad writing and bad storytelling.

If you don’t know what story your company needs to tell; or can’t tell that story in a compelling way; the design and execution of that story is irrelevant, and the digital tools used to produce are equally irrelevant. It’s a cliche, but experience matters. Oh does it matter!

“The most important thing to me, was to tell stories.”

Ebersol said it was a lesson he learned from his first boss, the legendary sports producer Roone Arledge. Ebersol told Posnanski that television seems to be turning away from storytelling, with everything  becoming fragmented and announcers making radio calls shouting about every play.

I had to chuckle and agree. I turned 50 this year, and while I can probably pass for 10 years younger (on a good hair day), I can’t help but feel a little old sometimes when discussing content for marketing and promotional projects with many clients. The idea of storytelling seems unimportant to most. Yet I still believe that a good story trumps style and glitzy design every-time. Great production values certainly never hurt a project, but a non-existent or poorly written story can kill one.

Stories engage people. They help people identify with characters, places and events. They can take viewers to a faraway time and place. They inspire, teach, make us laugh or comfort us, sometimes all at the same time. Yet many people have lost the ability to tell stories.

Over the years I’ve met with countless executives who have no idea what their corporate story is. They have no corporate identity, no focus on what they sell or what problem they solve for their customers. Most believe they sell a product or service. But people don’t buy stuff or lists of services. They buy a promise. They buy a feeling. They buy a solution. They want stuff to make their life better…to make them look and feel better or to confirm their status. They want products to make their kids smarter or their dog healthier. The best way to frame those promises is through stories.

Dick Ebersol is without a doubt a polarizing figure in sports programming. Some consider him one of the most influential executives in sports television history. Others believe he simply copied the techniques of his first boss, Roone Arledge. From helping create Saturday Night Live and producing dozens of Olympics telecasts, to choosing not to renew NFL rights in 1998 and creating the ill-conceived XFL, Ebersol certainly had his share of wins and losses in his 22-year NBC programming career. 

But I’m not looking to judge Ebersol or his place in programming history. I simply think that what he said, “the most important thing…was to tell stories…” is something worth repeating in this blog post.

In lamenting the absence of storytelling in most major sports programming today, Ebersol asked Posnanski, “How are we supposed to know what’s important?” Posnanski didn’t answer him. Neither can I. Stories help us understand the world we live in. They help us identify and empathize with people across the street and across the globe. They help us understand where we’ve been, and give us the inspiration to see what’s possible.

Nobody ever taught me that stories are an important tool in marketing, advertising or television production. It’s just something I’ve believed since I was in my 20s. But I’m glad Mr. Posnanski’s article reminded me that there are still executives out there who believe it too. I just hope the next generation of executives don’t forget it.

I just completed our first broadcast project using the Canon 60D and I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the results. Since the 60D is primarily designed as a still camera,  I was initially skeptical about both the camera’s reliability and quality in a broadcast environment. But once I got used to the controls and became comfortable with the capabilities (and limitations) of the camera, I came away impressed.

Getting up to speed with the camera is really no different than adding any new piece of gear to your arsenal. Before our first shoot with the camera, we spent several hours experimenting with various cabling setups, mounting configurations and menu settings. Despite this, the first shoot was nonetheless nerve-racking. You just can’t reliably judge quality until you use a camera on a real project under real location pressure.

If you want proof that you can do broadcast work with the Canon 60D? Here are two spots recently shot with the camera for HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital.

Although there are definitely drawbacks to using the Canon 60D in the field, most notably monitoring audio and using multiple monitors for client viewing, the image quality is much better than I expected and there are affordable workarounds that overcome these limitations.

It also took a few shoots to develop a reliable post-shoot work-flow, but even that turned out to be less of a hassle than expected. Based on these experiences,  I would cautiously recommend it to other professionals as a solid tool for professional work.  Why the cautious recommendation? Mainly because I’ll have to use the camera over an extended period of time to judge it’s reliability and image quality to recommend it fully.

In addition, like any camera, the quality you get from the 60D is directly tied to the experience and knowledge of the camera operator. You can’t put it in the hands of an inexperienced or mediocre shooter and expect it to instantly improve their work. You still have to understand composition, ISO, aperture, shutter speed, depth of field, focal lengths and how to work with various lenses.

The most surprising thing about the camera is that the choice of lens is probably more important than the camera itself. It reminds me of wireless microphones. Wireless transmitters are nothing more than two-way radios and the quality of audio from a wireless system is often more reliant on the quality of the microphone than the quality of the electronics. Another surprising thing is the dynamic range the camera has. You can easily shoot at 800 or 1600 ISO with little or no noticeable grain in your image. Of course, the lower you can keep the ISO, the better your images look, with no discernible grain at all.

And while I was extremely nervous about the audio limitations of the camera, we’ve recorded long interviews with it with absolutely no issues in quality or work-flow. It helps that the 60D has manual audio capability built in, but the camera’s biggest drawback is still the lack of a headphone jack. We’ve overcome that by using an ART 2-channel microphone pre-amp with left/right mono out to a Zoom H2 recorder. The H2 has a headphone jack and we then feed the 60D via the 1/8″ line out of the H2. It’s not exactly an elegant solution, but it works. Another solution we’re looking into is some of the new HDMI capable LCD field monitors that have headphone jacks built in. Sony came out with one recently, and Marshall is supposed to be coming out with one as well.

Only problem is I can’t seem to get anyone to confirm with any certainty whether the HDMI output from the 60D carries the audio signal. If it meets HDMI specs it certainly should, but I’ve been on forum after forum and seen conflicting answers to this question.

Speaking of LCD monitors, Marshall recently introduced a 7″ field monitor that has built in HDMI loop-through, which solves the problem of only being able to feed one monitor in the field. Up to this point, you had to use small HDMI splitters, which require power and add yet another intermediate device to your setup.

The biggest difference in using a DSLR compared to even a high-end EFP video camera is focusing. And I’m not talking about keeping a shot focused when the camera and subject are stationary, but keeping a shot in focus where either the camera or the subject is moving (or both). It takes practice and a steady hand. Having a follow focus mechanism is also a big help. We currently don’t have one but that’s the next item on my list of accessories.

I’ll post more later about the 60D since we’ll be using it this week to shoot a series of new TV spots for a regional healthcare company. These spots all involve actors and dialogue so we’ll be putting the 60D’s audio to the test yet again. We’re also renting a Manhattan 8.9″ LCD monitor and battery powered 1×2 HDMI splitter so we can use two monitors, one for camera monitoring (our 7″ ToteVision HD monitor) and one for client monitoring (the Manhattan LCD).

I recently created a client website that needed an easy to use e-commerce solution for selling books, CDs and digital downloads of documents and audio files. On the client’s old website, she was just selling her book and CDs using a very simple PayPal link for processing and payment. It worked, but wasn’t very attractive and offered little more than credit card processing.

I use Wordpress to build client sites so I spent a couple of hours researching and testing various e-commerce plug-ins. There are several out there that are extremely popular but they all seemed unnecessarily complicated to setup and convoluted to use…not to mention buggy.

Then I found Ecwid. It’s not only a Wordpress plug-in, but also a complete e-commerce solution that can be used with literally any web authoring platform. The plugin is simple to install, and it’s hands-down the best Wordpress plugin (of any sort) I’ve ever used. What makes it so good? For starters, it just plain works, which is a nice change from the bulk of Wordpress plug-ins out there, which are typically buggy and offer little or no instructions for use. Ecwid is rock-solid, full-featured and has just about the best documentation, tutorials, and knowledge base of any product I’ve ever used. That’s a tall statement considering I bought my first computer in 1984 and have worked on all the major OS platforms at one time or another. It’s also FREE for store-fronts up to 100 products, with incredibly affordable pricing plans for stores with up to 20,000 products. Other than the product limit, the free version offers virtually the same functionality as the paid versions, minus some security and SEO features. This software is so good, my guess is that many people try the free version and gladly upgrade to the paid one.

Ecwid is powerful enough to be used for some serious e-commerce needs, but also easy enough for a part-time web  programmer like me to figure out with little to no time spent reading the online manual. Interestingly, I almost didn’t even try the software after I first registered to use it.  All the other e-commerce plugins I tried used the Wordpress admin back-end for entering data. Ecwid uses it’s own back-end and is tied to your site through their Wordpress API. I’m not exactly sure if that even correctly explains how it connects to your site, but that’s how I understood it.

So after I installed the plug-in, I had to log into my account from Ecwid’s website to start using it. My first reaction was, “how am I going to maintain the look and feel of my website if I’m setting up my store on a third party interface.” Well…I’m here to tell you, it integrates beautifully with your Wordpress theme. All you do is create one simple page in Wordpress and call it “Online Store,” or any other name for that matter. Then you tell Ecwid to use that page for your storefront. Next you start adding categories and products, complete with mulitple product images, comprehensive descriptions etc. Ecwid is incredibly full-featured, with options for adding tax, scores of payment processing choices and a dizzying array of shipping options that will calculate shipping costs for your clients. The features are too numerous to mention but my sense is this software will work for just about any e-commerce need, including large companies with thousands of products.

The best things about Ecwid are:

• The back-end admin interface is intuitive and extremely easy to use.
• The vast, search-able knowledge-base of information available to help when you get stuck.
• Video tutorials to help you get started.
• The fact that it just plain works!
• Its huge feature set.
• It’s FREE for stores with up to 100 products.
• Affordable pricing plans for larger stores.

The Ecwid website is also extremely well-written, easy to navigate and explains the technical mumbo-jumbo of how it works in language that I could understand. This fact is amazing considering the company that created Ecwid is based in Russia! Their site is better written that the majority of U.S. based technology websites!

Last, I love the look and feel of their storefronts and category/product layouts. They’re big and bold and cleanly designed, making the end-user’s experience a good one. There is also a tremendous amount of customization available for both the look and function of the store.

For instance, the default layout asks the end-user to sign-in to their account before proceeding to checkout. Like most online stores, Ecwid will keep a database of users’ information to speed their checkout on subsequent visits. Since this particular website only has about 25 products, and it’s unlikely visitors will return over and over, I wanted to turn this feature off completely and remove the sign-in boxes and requests. Plus, the layout and sign-in box confused me when I was doing a test purchase.

Fortunately, none of this is a problem, because with a simple code change, copied and pasted from the great Ecwid knowledge base, I turned off the user sign-in box and then completely turned off all options for client accounts. If at a later date my client wants to allow clients to sign-up, I just remove the code snippets. The Ecwid website walked me through every stage of making these changes. There are also options for changing the look and feel of the store. If you want to make major layout changes, you need to know a little something about CSS and PHP to make that happen. But for an experienced programmer, it would be pretty easy to change how the store looks and behaves.

If you need a great e-commerce solution, you owe it to yourself to give Ecwid a try. It’s truly an impressive system.

Don’t you just love the New Year? We all have a clean slate with no broken resolutions or abandoned plans. It’s that magical time of year where we all do our marketing plans and set our objectives and everything is still on track. If you’re like most of us, your resolutions are somewhat off track by spring and seriously off the rails by summer.  There are some things we can all do to avoid that.

Once you get buy in on the plans, it’s time to get to work. Don’t put your plans in a drawer and file them away. Keep the objectives and the plan where they can be seen, re-read them often and make sure others do the same. You can review them in your weekly status meeting to check your progress. Try to identify one or two things that can be done each week to get you closer to your goals, and then hold everyone accountable to get them done. Breaking the larger things down into pieces will make them easier to achieve and repeatedly reviewing progress will make it easier to get done.

The first of the year is also a great time to review your processes. Is it easy to get things done in your organization? Take time to go through each process step by step to see what steps can be eliminated or what forms or processes can be done away with altogether to make things less cumbersome. The simpler and cleaner you make things, the easier it will be to keep your team moving forward. 

Finally, realize that you may need to adjust objectives or plans based on market conditions.  What seemed perfect in January may no longer be the right thing for your company in June.  A marketing plan is a working document that should grow and flex with your company.  Recognizing that will save you a lot of headaches and keep you from forcing a direction that may no longer be right for your company. Identifying the pieces that need to be revised and making those changes will help you stay on the right track.

But remember, while planning is important, actions will determine success. The best workout plan in the world won’t help you get in shape all by itself. So let us help you plan for marketing success, then actually put that marketing plan into motion. We regularly spend time reviewing clients’ plans and processes, which helps chart their progress. So take advantage of the momentum a new year brings and get your plans rolling for 2011. If you’re not sure where to begin, give us a call. Helping clients with advertising planning and execution is what we do.

I’ve read with great interest and some skepticism all the hype surrounding digital single lens reflex cameras, commonly called either HDSLRs or DSLRs. I’ve also watched quite a lot of video shot with a variety of these cameras and the results are impressive to say the least. Since our digital still camera is almost a decade old, I thought now was a good time to upgrade to a DSLR for still photography and at the same time test out the HD video capabilities.

After reading a lot of reviews, I settled on ordering a Panasonic GH2, but unfortunately I couldn’t find anyone in the U.S. who would actually sell one. Amazon was taking orders and said they were “back-ordered,” but I read recently that because Panasonic keeps missing release dates, Amazon canceled all orders dating back to September.

B&H Photo published a January availability date, but wouldn’t take orders for them because they have no idea when they’ll actually have any for shipment. This obviously doesn’t bode well for the GH2 despite all the great pre-release reviews from people like Phillip Bloom and others. So I settled on my second choice, the Canon 60D, which is a nice compromise between Canon’s more expensive professional models and it’s much cheaper consumer ones. Why the 60D? Well, for starters it has manual audio capability right out of the box, without the need to install quirky third party firmware, which several other models need to disable the automatic gain control (AGC) during audio recording. The 60D also allows for external monitoring during record, albeit in down-converted SD resolution, which some cameras still don’t provide. Last, it has an articulating LCD screen much like mid-range HD camcorders from Sony and Panasonic, which allows for a lot more freedom when shooting from unusual angles.

The thing that ultimately convinced me was Phillip Bloom’s positive review of the 60D, which can be read here along with a comparison of most of the other major DSLR models. I decided to get the standard EOS 60D DSLR Camera Kit with Canon EF-S 18-135mm Lens, and also added an EF 50mm f/1.4  lens, a Letus Hawk viewfinder, 4 Sandisk 16GB SDHC cards and 4 batteries. I’m also going to eventually add a shoulder mount rig,  a follow-focus system and a matte-box, but I wanted to use the camera before deciding on what additional equipment is really necessary before spending another grand or more on support gear.

So what about my first impressions? For starters, I’m struck by all the looming workarounds when compared to both SD and HD camcorders. There is no headphone jack so there is no way to directly monitor audio that’s being recorded. Additionally, the audio input jack is a 1/8″ phone jack that uses consumer impedance levels. So you have to find a way to monitor sound and convert your professional microphones from professional levels to consumer levels.

The workaround is to utilize either a small mixer/microphone pre-amp with a headphone jack, or record separate sound on a digital recorder, monitor from the digital recorder, then sync up the audio later. There’s absolutely no way our projects would allow for recording separate sound and syncing later, nor would I want to add this potentially time-consuming and confusing step to our post-production work flow. For now I’ll be using a small portable Samson Mixer for monitoring critical audio as well converting microphone levels going into the camera — an annoying process but likely not too painful.

Next is external video monitoring. On virtually any professional shoot, clients want the ability to see shots on a 7-9″ external monitor. If you’re doing dolly moves or any sort of creative lighting, external monitoring is also important. The Canon 60D (and other brands and models) have limited monitoring capability. When shooting HD video, the eyepiece you normally use for shooting stills is disabled and you have to monitor on the 3″ LCD screen. If you connect an external monitor via HDMI or the A/V output cable, the camera’s LCD screen shuts off and sends the signal to the external monitor only. When in preview mode, you can monitor the external HDMI signal in full HD, but as soon as you hit record, the signal down-converts to standard definition from the HDMI.  The A/V output is always SD, so if you don’t have an HDMI capable field monitor, you can’t monitor anything in HD. Again, this isn’t a huge issue since even with professional cameras, we typically monitor using a crummy old composite signal coming out of the camera. External monitoring on most shoots is rarely seen as critical monitoring, and on 99% of shoots it’s used for framing and general lighting checks. The biggest drawback is not being able to monitor from the camera’s LCD while connected to an external monitor, so having two external monitors on-set is recommended. One for the client and one for the camera operator. You simply loop the signal from one to the other to accommodate this setup.

What about camera ergonomics? Well…if you’re primarily a video shooter who uses professional cameras, all I can say is it’s different. Shooting off a tripod isn’t bad, and with a decent camera rod system you can mount just about any accessory needed to improve functionality. But if you plan to shoot hand held, it’s darn near impossible without a separate shoulder rig. The camera just isn’t designed to be held in one position for more than a few seconds at a time. My shoulders and arms got tired after holding it for about a minute.

You also must have an LCD viewfinder adapter to shoot hand-held, especially if you’re farsighted like I am. I occasionally use reading glasses but I see objects far away just fine. The diopter adjustments on professional cameras easily adjust to accommodate this, but with a DSLR, unless the LCD screen is about 3 feet away, I simply cannot focus on it. Even with perfect eyesight, it’s difficult to shoot hand held just using an LCD screen, especially if you’ve spent 25 years shooting using a traditional viewfinder.

This is where the Letus Hawk viewfinder adapter comes in. While it’s extremely well-made, I’ve had trouble getting it to mount snugly on the Canon 60D and since it came with NO instructions, I’m still struggling to get it to sit flush to the LCD screen. It’s optics are also not quite pro-grade, as the image it produces is slightly distorted, which initially gave me a headache while using it. I got used to it after a few uses, but it’s still an adjustment from using professional viewfinders. The Letus device also isn’t cheap, costing nearly $400. Overall I’m a little disappointed with it, especially the inability to get it to fit snugly to the LCD screen. Hopefully the folks at Letus can provide some insight but I haven’t had time to contact them as of yet. I’ll report back on this after some additional use.

Along with the  issues noted above, herein lies the big “gotcha” with the current crop of DSLR video cameras.They all require numerous third-party adapters, gadgets, mounts, cables and quick releases to come close to the functionality and speed of using a professional video camera. The big question is, “will the resulting image quality be worth all the workarounds and additional equipment?”

I plan to find out soon as I’m going to use the camera on an upcoming marketing video. Am I nervous? That’s a big yes. But the only way to truly test a piece of gear is to use it in a professional environment, and I’ve read enough positive reviews of the unit to feel pretty good about it.

I’ll report back on my experiences with the camera as the project unfolds in the next two months.

But for most things, figuring out the cost is much more difficult. From buying a car to getting a fence installed, the price can vary wildly based on factors too numerous to even think about.

So what does advertising cost? How about getting a video produced? What about having a website designed…or an interactive kiosk created…or…well you get the idea. There are no quick and easy answers, but there are some guidelines you can use for many types of projects.

Let’s look at websites. If you’ve ever gotten estimates for having one designed, the differences in price can be cavernous. I’ve seen website estimates vary by tens of thousands of dollars based on the same specs. How can this be possible? Some of the disparity can be attributed to differences in turnaround time, differences in how the site is programmed and built, the experience level of the designer etc. But more often than not, if there’s a huge difference between the lowest bid and the highest bid, it’s a good bet you’re looking at one severely underbid estimate and another severely overbid one.

Certainly there are many types of websites with varying levels of complexity, not to mention the growing need to build separate mobile versions. But for most sites, you could use the following guidelines to figure a range of what it should cost.

Good designers have hard drives filled with previous design templates along with pre-built code that doesn’t have to be programmed from scratch for every project.  So they can typically create several spec layouts in a couple of days, create a web template or develop style sheets in a few more, then build each page in about an hour or two each. 

So if you have a 50 page website you can estimate that most designers will spend two days creating spec layouts, four or five more building the web template or style sheet, then no more than two hours per page after that. Of course there would be pre-production time added in the form of meetings, along with some revision time, but it should take no more than 150-175 hours to build a fairly typical 50 page website. 

Most designers and programmers are going to charge you anywhere from $100 to $125 an hour, so using those figures, you could expect to pay in the $15,000 to $20,000 range for a 50 page website. Can you get a website that size done for less? Certainly, but if somebody tells you they can do a 50 page website for $1000, run away…..fast. Likewise, if you get a bid of $50,000 or more for a fairly standard 50 page website, that’s $1000 for each page! That would mean the designer is spending 8-10 hours per page, which in most cases is ridiculous.

Of course if a site has a lot of video on it or uses a lot forms or interactive elements, then certainly the cost can be higher, but just breaking down the amount of time that someone might reasonably spend on a project can help determine what something should cost.

A similar formula can be used for video. Based on the type and length of video, you can often use broad estimates to determine cost. For television commercials, we can typically get a good quality spot shot and edited in about 2-3 days of actual production. But there are always pre-production costs, including concepting, scripting, client meetings, talent searches, location searches and scouts, and prop or wardrobe shopping to name a few.

So add about 2 days of work for pre-production, and a good-quality television commercial comes in at about 5 days, or 40 hours of work. Using an average hourly cost of about $150, you could expect to pay $6000 for production, plus any talent fees, location costs (like renting space, feeding crew etc.), make-up artists, props and supplies etc. Add another $1500-$3000 for that and a nice-looking television spot comes in at $7500-$9000. Of course there are all kinds of things that can raise or lower the cost, such as needing lots of extras in scenes, needing experienced on-camera talent etc. The cost can go to $20,000 or higher very quickly when well-credited talent is needed. And network quality commercials can cost 10-20 times that, especially if you use union crews and talent.

Can you do commercials for less? Certainly! We’ve produced very nice commerials for around $3500 using volunteer talent, donated locations etc. But when you get below $3000, it becomes difficult to produce a television commercial that rises above the clutter of screaming pitchmen.

So how does that cost compare to a network quality commercial? A McDonald’s commercial was shot in our area a few years ago for a test launch. This particular spot aired in just three markets, yet they closed a local restaurant for three days, spent a full day lighting and  gelling windows, hired over 50 extras for two full days of production, and had a star of a CBS sitcom as the spokesperson. The extras alone cost over $50,000, and just feeding the cast and crew (probably more than 100 people) cost thousands more. They had to have spent over $250,000, likely more, for one test commercial!

Want further evidence of what network quality commercials cost? The Directors Guild of America considers a low-budget commercial to be: ”commercials whose total costs do not exceed $75,000 for a one-day shoot, or $150,000 for a two-day shoot or $225,000 for a three-day shoot.  No single day’s costs may exceed $75,000.”

So when people think spending even $20,000 for a television commercial is a lot of money, comparatively, it’s peanuts.

Of course commercials aren’ t the only video projects companies use. What about a corporate marketing video? You can typically get about 2-3 minutes of finished video shot in one day of well-planned shooting, and you can typically edit 2-3 minutes per day. So if you have an 8 minute video, you can reasonably plan on a total of 6-8 days of shooting and editing. Add in pre-production time, propping, location fees, talent costs, travel etc. and you could figure 80-100 hours of production time plus expenses and fees.

So using those numbers, a good starting point for a corporate video is about $2500 per finished minute. That rate can usually produce a simple but well-shot and edited piece. So a simple 8 minute video would likely cost between $20,000 and $25,000. Start adding in other things like big camera moves or animated graphics and naturally the cost goes up. Add in extensive travel or multiple locations and it can go much higher. Want experienced on-camera talent? Open up that wallet! Want custom or copyrighted music, get out that checkbook. The total cost all depends on what you think it takes to communicate your message. But bottom line, an 8 minute corporate video could cost anywhere from $20,000 to $200,000 depending on the factors above. But by knowing a starting point for what it takes to produce one, you’ll at least have a way to start figuring your budget.

On the flip-side of this issue is media buying. A common misconception in advertising is that it costs money to hire an agency to buy and place your media for you. I’m amazed at how many marketing directors and directors of communications are unaware that when we buy ad time, be it on television, radio, in the newspaper and often online, we get paid a commission discount from the media outlet. So if we place a $1000 radio buy, we get a percentage of that $1000 placement as our agency fee. The buy costs the client exactly $1000 and we don’t charge the client a penny for the work done in placing that media. Of course if an agency is handling a large ad budget, they’ll typically charge a monthly agency fee to cover research, client meetings etc. But it’s usually a small percentage of the total ad buy. The bulk of revenue comes from the agency discount, which costs the client absolutely nothing. What is it worth to a busy marketing manager or advertising director to take all that work off their plate when it costs them virtually nothing? Yet many small to medium sized companies continue to buy and place their own media because they’re either unaware of this, or unwilling to give up control over placement.

We have media buyers with years of experience placing media in all types of outlets, yet we’ve worked with companies who have recent college graduates making their ad buys! Does this make sense?

You can use basic forumlas like the ones above for just about any type of advertising related production work. It’s also easy to search union and trade group websites to find standard advertising industry rates for various work. I found the Directors Guild of America rates quoted above in about 5 seconds. Of course most companies aren’t willing to spend that kind of money producing their television ads, and for many that kind of cost doesn’t make financial sense.

But once you sit down and reasonably consider the time a project will take, coupled with project related costs for materials, talent etc. Figuring out what advertising costs becomes more manageable. But if you want your advertising to look and sound like McDonald’s, you obviously can’t expect to spend a tenth of what they spend on production and get the same quality product.

I ran across an interesting article this morning about the status of 3D in movie theaters and on television. You can read it here.

The gist of the article is that director Christopher Nolan won’t be shooting the next Batman movie (The Dark Knight Rises) in 3D, and that ESPN is questioning it’s foray into 3D with it’s ESPN3D network.

ESPN’s Senior Director of Technology, Johnathan Pannaman, recently told a European business conference that ESPN is “still not sure what makes sense for 3DTV, and we don’t yet see a proven ROI [return on investment].”

All this before Discovery Network has even decided on a name for it’s proposed 3D network, and still hasn’t announced a launch date, only offering “early 2011″ as the proposed launch.

My prediction is if ESPN3d folds, Discovery 3D will follow, all before it ever airs a second of 3D content.

We often get calls from clients who think they need a particular type of promotional product or service, be it a new website, an instructional video, a print brochure, a television campaign, or a new logo. But many times after meeting and discussing their needs, it becomes clear the client needs something entirely different.

We’ve even occasionally recommended services that we don’t provide because they better serve the client’s advertising needs. After all, our job is to help clients communicate to their customers…not just take their money for something they think they need.

Unfortunately, not all advertising and marketing companies are that honest with their clients. I’ve seen it time and again during the 25 years I’ve worked in this business. Advertising agencies, TV and radio stations, newspapers and internet companies selling products and services that have little chance of helping their clients promote themselves.

I’ve never understood this mentality. It’s like convincing someone to buy an overpriced, overhyped product that doesn’t actually work as advertised. When the customer gets home and realizes they’ve bought a crappy product, they’re not only angry it doesn’t work right, they also feel like they were duped by the hype! This type of selling virtually guarantees clients won’t come back. 

I remember my very first experience with something like this. I was 8 years old and along with my 3 brothers, I was a sports fanatic. I read every sporting publication I could get my hands on, from Sports Illustrated to the Sporting News. It was the latter publication where I first saw “the ad.”It was a half-page spread promoting Strat-O-Matic baseball. The advertisement glowed about the game being the most “realistic simulation of major league baseball” you could buy. It must’ve used the word “realistic 25 times!

It also heavily promoted its revolutionary “automatic umpire,” which conjured images of a small toy waving his arms and barking “safe” when a player slid into a base. Now never mind that the 1969 era advertisement DID say exactly once that Strat-O-Matic was a “board game.” To an 8 year old, all that talk of “realistic” translated into some sort of magical, animated electronic game similar to electronic football, except with figures that could move their arms and legs!

My brothers and I were all over that. We scraped and saved and finally pooled enough money to order this wonder of gameplay. I don’t have to tell you how supremely disappointed we all were when it arrived. It was a board game with dice and cards and reams of statistics that to us was about as interesting as reading the dictionary. It made Monopoly look revolutionary. To four boys ages 8 to 12, it SUCKED! Of course we were probably idiots for conjuring such a fantastic vision from “the ad.” But that vision came directly from how it was written. We all interpreted what it said literally! Now either that’s some good writing or it’s deceptive. Thinking back, I think it was a little of both.

Amazingly, Strat-O-Matic continues to be a thriving enterprise today, and their website STILL uses the word “realistic” about a hundred times to describe their games, which now include baseball and football and come in traditional board and computer versions. I’m sure it’s a wonderful game that thousands enjoy and think is worth every penny. But you will never catch me buying or promoting it because even now, 42 years later, I STILL hold a grudge against Strat-O-Matic and their advertising copywriters. I think their descriptions were and still are deceptive. How can a game that basically takes statistics and packages them into a board game be “realistic?” Realistic to me is sitting in a flight simulator cockpit and feeling like you’re actually flying, or going to Epcot and riding “Soarin,” an attraction that simulates hang gliding. Rolling dice and turning over cards with statistics on them is NOT realistic.

Fast-forward to today. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve worked on projects and objected to how a client wanted something written or photographed. It’s a huge dilemma. Just like with Strat-O-Matic baseball, there’s a fine line between truth and hype. So what do we do in those situations? We try to politely point out that the writing or photography might be confusing to a consumer. Sometimes we win the argument, more often we lose. I can’t help but feel like I’m sometimes playing on the same team as the Strat-O-Matic guys. Considering how they made me feel as an 8 year old boy, I’m not sure how I feel about that today!

So the moral to the story is simple. Try to do what’s right! When creating advertising for clients, consider how it portrays the clients’ products and services. Integrity in advertising is important, so advise them when you think the writing or imagery crosses the line. Ultimately you won’t always have the final say and you won’t always win, but it’s your duty to try. Now…”play ball.”

There’s no denying that Facebook and Twitter are both hot topics right now. We get a half-dozen emails each week advertising seminars, podcasts or webinars proclaiming they can teach us to turn tweets into dollars or status updates into customers.

Is social media really that powerful? Is it really a ground-breaking way to reach potential customers? The answer is…”sort of.” In the opinion of many advertising experts, social media is like any other marketing tool. It only works if it reaches people who want your products and engages them in a positive way. There’s nothing ground-breaking there. The greatest advertising in the world won’t work if nobody sees it.

But social media pundits point out that what makes social media unique is that it’s…well…social. People enjoy sharing things they like, and if they like a product, service or brand, they’ll share that experience with others, sometimes in droves. That can certainly benefit a company. But the trouble is, if people DON’T like something, they’ll share that too…often with venomous delight.

So you cannot simply be “on” Facebook or Twitter. You must give potential customers something of value, be it tips and techniques, coupons or discounts, promotional giveaways or perhaps just a good laugh with a funny story! You also have to be responsive. If you DON’T interact on your social media site, it’s like NOT returning phone calls or answering emails. Yet many companies jump into social media without making a commitment to maintaining an account and interacting with customers. So before entering the social media arena, ask yourself a few questions:

• Are your customers actually using social media?
• Do you understand the terminology and technology?
• Are you committed to providing resources to handle the extra work by assigning people internally or allocating money to pay an outside company?
• Do you have time to do it yourself or manage it with an outside agency?
• Are your other online marketing tools in order? It won’t help to get people interested on Facebook if your website is poorly designed, written or outdated.
• Have you identified ways to get people interested in your product or service without “hard selling” them?

Some answers are no-brainers. For instance, it seems virtually everyone uses social media to some extent, so any company or organization can use it to their advantage. But maintaining a social media account can be incredibly time-consuming and even technologically challenging. So if you can’t answer “yes” to the other questions, chances are you’re better off NOT being on Facebook or Twitter.

Plus some types of companies will obviously have a harder time reaching people. A law firm or a company that makes engine parts or toilet paper may struggle to find ways to engage people about their products. But darn if there isn’t a great toilet paper story (in the first link below) about how Charmin built a large fan base for its toilet paper via an iPhone app.

Remember, people have to believe they’re getting something of value in exchange for their interaction with you or your company, and in turn the company has to provide timely information or feedback when it’s needed.

Magnetic Image handles social media management for several clients and we’d be glad to see if we can help you. Here are links to other articles with great insight about social media’s potential value to businesses.

http://www.twistimage.com/blog/archives/is-social-media-right-for-every-business/

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/199210

http://redcubemarketing-blog.com/2010/07/21/the-social-media-strategy-series-is-social-media-right-for-your-business/

Have you ever noticed that graphics in low-budget television commercials and videos seem to almost scream at you? Much of that is from poor design, but another less conspicuous reason is how they’re created and superimposed on-screen. Poor graphic preparation can cause pixelated edges, dingy looking borders, over-saturated colors and color banding that can produce annoying noise on-screen.

In contrast, the graphics and text supers in well-produced videos seem to blend perfectly with the background video, displaying clean edges, soft contours and smooth color gradients.

Ever wondered why? The answer is twofold.

First, almost every video ends up being compressed for final playback. Compression works by throwing away information, which can play havoc with text and graphics. Second, creating clean graphics for television requires an understanding of how color and contrast works on-screen, as well as how keying and alpha channels work.

So let’s look at what compression does. Many compression schemes throw out 50% of the color information right off the bat! That’s right, 50% of the color is eliminated! Additionally, if your video is for broadcast, it’s up-linked and down linked and passed through and relayed and…well you get the idea. The bottom line is this can degrade quality. Of course television engineers will tell you that if it’s digital, the signal remains unchanged. But few delivery routes keep a video signal in it’s original form throughout the journey. So a video will likely be recompressed or converted to an analogue signal (and then back to digital) somewhere along its path. The result is a drop quality.

So how do you combat that loss? First, it helps to have good design and layout skills. Great design, coupled with good typestyle choices can make a huge difference in the look and feel of television graphics. But even well-designed graphics can suffer if the creator doesn’t follow a few guidelines to help fight the effects of compression.

First, pay attention to color. Televisions, even high definition units, have trouble properly displaying overly bright or heavily saturated colors. Reds and greens are particularly difficult to render correctly. It’s a good practice to keep the saturation level of graphics and text to no more than 80%. This helps colors look cleaner, bleed less around the edges and exhibit less noise when broadcast. It’s also absolutely required when using reds and greens. So NEVER use colors at 100% saturation.

Next is luminance or brightness. Keep your whites, yellows and other bright color values at 90% and under. You can get away with using 100% white if you’re using it as a pure background color, but if you’re superimposing white text against a dark background, using 100% white will make the edges appear harsh. In fact, we often keep white text closer to 80%. It still looks white on screen and the darker shade reduces contrast.

Of course you WANT contrast in most graphics, but the key is to reduce it just slightly. Reducing the contrast between background and foreground elements can soften their overall look and help the graphic appear cleaner. A good rule of thumb is to keep dark colors at 5-15% and bright colors at 80-90% of brightness values.

Also avoid using thin borders on text or foreground elements. If you have to use them, try to either soften them, thicken them slightly, or reduce the contrast between them and the main image. Remember, your video is almost certainly going to be compressed and resized, which is going to affect how your graphics render on-screen, and thin, contrasty lines suffer more than anything else during compression.

Another trick to getting cleaner, softer looking graphics is to not key them at 100%. We often key graphics at 90% or 95%, which also helps soften their look. The downside is that a little of the background image will show through, which can sometimes be distracting. But most of the time it’s imperceptible to viewers.

Next are color gradients, especially in large images or backgrounds. Televisions have a hard time rendering smooth gradients, especially when the video is compressed for delivery and playback. What that means is your smooth gradient is likely to end up looking like a series of bands. The solution? Don’t use symmetrical gradients, meaning a straight gradient from top to bottom or an oval one. Instead, use wavy curved lines for the gradient path, or better yet, take an image, make it black and white, add heavy blur, then overlay it with your background color in Photoshop. Play around with the blending mode until the gradient looks the way you want it. 

Another trick is to add a slight amount of noise or grain. Usually a value of 1 in Photoshop is enough to eliminate the banding in your video. You can do the same thing to gradients in text or logos.

Lastly, there’s an art to creating clean key or alpha channels. If you aren’t familiar with key or alpha channels, they’re just an extra channel in a graphic or video that assigns transparency to certain areas based on grayscale value. White is usually opaque, and black is usually completely transparent, with all shades of gray in between having varying levels of transparency. The alpha channel determines which part of a graphic superimposes over the background.

Some file types are saved with completely transparent backgrounds, which makes keying them very easy. PNG and Photoshop files are two examples. Unfortunately, not all video editing applications play nice with those file types, and many animation programs prefer other file types, such as targa files (.tga). Targa files save the image with a color background, then use the alpha channel to determine what’s opaque or transparent when the graphic is keyed or overlayed. So with these types of files, the background color of your graphic influences how your keyed graphic looks on screen.

If you leave the background transparent in Photoshop, it will be white in your saved targa file. But if your text or graphic has black edges and your background is white, your edges will appear pixelated and jagged when the graphic is keyed. Why? Because creating smooth edges on graphics is really a hack. Graphics programs use decreasing levels of transparency along the edges to fool the eye into thinking the square, stair-step pixels that make up your graphic are curved and smooth. If the transparency along the edges of your black graphic let the white background show through, it ruins the effect, also ruining your clean key.

So what’s the solution? Making sure your background matches the color of the edges of your graphic. So if your graphic has dark edges, make your background color a similar color. If it has light edges, make it brighter. Of course, this can get dicey if you have graphics that have both dark and light edges. But don’t fret, there’s a solution for that too. Simply take your graphic layer, duplicate it, blur it slightly and then put it behind your original graphic. Create your alpha channel from the top graphic and voila! The slightly blurred graphic below the original helps to make the background edges the same color as the edges of the keyed graphic. If the key still isn’t clean enough, duplicate the background again and put two layers behind the main graphic. Do this until your key is clean.

This same principal works for motion graphics too. A perfect example is an organic element like fire. If you want to overlay animated fire over video in your timeline, you’ll have to save it with an alpha channel. Fire is mostly orange and yellow and to look realistic it needs varying levels of transparency around it’s edges. Plus, unlike a static graphic, it’s edges are constantly moving and changing. If you render your fire effect over a black background, then place that video (with alpha channel) in your timeline, the edges of your fire appear dingy and dark, which produces a wholly unconvincing effect. The black background is showing through where the alpha channel is only partially opaque.

The solution? Make the background of the fire animation orange or yellow. Now…the fire video will key cleanly because the edge transparency matches the color of the background. This principal can be applied to static graphics, web graphics, video, and even print graphics when using file formats that don’t support true background transparency.

The last tip to creating clean graphics and text is adding a slight amount of blur. We usually add a .2 gaussian blur to almost all graphics and motion graphic compositions. It smooths the edges just enough to make them look clean and soft, but doesn’t blur so much that the elements look out of focus.

So let’s review. If you want cleaner looking graphics:

• Reduce contrast and keep brightness values at 90% or under, and dark values at 10% or greater.
• Keep color saturation at 80% and under
• Make gradients asymmetrical and add a slight amount of noise
• Avoid thin borders, or try to soften them and reduce their contrast
• Set key levels at 90-95% instead of 100%
• Pay attention to background colors when creating alpha channels with certain graphic formats and video with alpha.
• Add a slight amount of blur to your final graphics and animation to soften their computer generated look.

I’ve long been aware of WordPress, but had typically viewed it as a tool for creating and managing blogs. In the past year, I’ve found that it’s a powerful tool for building rich, dynamic websites.

If you’ve ever looked into WordPress, the whole enterprise is a little confusing. There is wordpress.com, which is basically a hosting service that provides free and paid WordPress hosting to users. You create an account, they install and set-up everything for you, then you build your blog or site using the WordPress web user interface.

Then there is wordpress.org, which is the free, open-source software group that writes and develops the WordPress software. You download the software, install it on your server, set it up yourself, and build your site or blog using the same basic web GUI.

The difference between the two is that on WordPress.com, there are quite a few restrictions on what you can and cannot use on your site. You’re limited to choosing from roughly 100 layouts…or themes as they call them, you can’t edit the PHP code behind your blog, and you can’t upload any of the great plugins written for WordPress. Of course WordPress.com has paid accounts that lift those restrictions, but they require that you promote their VIP service on your site as well.

With wordpress.org, you can choose from thousands of pre-built themes, many which are free, you can edit the PHP code and css stylesheets as much as you want, and you can use any of the plugins available on the WordPress plugin site. Plus, you don’t have to put links or tags on your site pointing back to WordPress.com!

The downside is if you’re using WordPress on a web host that doesn’t directly support it, you have to install the software on the web server and setup your own database, which can be a little daunting the first time you do it. But many hosting services offer WordPress based hosting packages where they install the software and setup the database for you. I’ve done it both ways and can say that it’s much easier to use a host that offers WordPress based hosting. Your site is ready to edit as soon as you’ve setup the hosting. Setting up a WordPress site without built-in support can take an hour or two and can get pretty technical. But there are tutorials online that walk you through the entire process.

Probably the best thing about WordPress is that it’s a CMS based system. If you haven’t guessed, CMS stands for Content Management System, and it basically offers a “back-end” or graphical administration panel where you build and edit your site. If you’ve ever worked in web authoring programs, using a built-in CMS system is a breath of fresh air. The focus is on entering content, which is controlled by a database that “talks” to other files in the system to determine layout.

Using a CMS based system also allows your client to edit and update their own site. Of course, they also have to learn a little about how WordPress works to undertake the task, but with many companies wanting more control over their site, it’s another reason to use it. If a person can use word processing software, they can edit and add content using WordPress.

The second best thing about WordPress is its layouts are entirely theme based. These are a stroke of genius. You just find a basic layout you like, upload it to a folder on your site, and it’s instantly available in the admin panel. You can even switch the look of your site from one theme to another as long as the themes use the same or similar plugins. But themes are infinitely customizable. The more you know about web coding, the more you can do with them.

That’s the beauty of WordPress. You find a theme you like, select it in the admin panel, and away you go. You can customize just about anything in a theme, from image files and the size and colors of fonts, to the line spacing and margins used throughout the layout. Of course editing all that requires knowledge of HTML, PHP and style sheets, but in my opinion it’s still far easier than building custom sites in web authoring programs, since the tedious part of the layout is already done for you!

Of course WordPress is far from perfect. Much of it’s functionality comes from freely available plugins that offer all kinds of shortcuts to adding video, audio, sliders, menus etc. Many of the plugins are poorly written and conflict with each other, causing either the plugin or some other critical part of your site to stop working. The other frustrating part of using WordPress is very confusing documentation, both about the software and various plugins. Many plugins have NO documentation, which often makes them unusable. And documentation on the WordPress.com site and Wordpress.org sites is inconsistent at best.

But…WordPress is also free, open-source software, so it’s difficult to complain about these deficiencies, and there are some incredible plugins that save hours of time and work beautifully.

Like any software, WordPress requires a commitment on the part of the designer to take the time to figure out how it works. But it’s truly an amazing system that’s well worth the effort.

For our first 11 years in business, we used direct attached storage for reading and writing files on our computer systems. But in early 2008, we switched to an enterprise level, network attached system (NAS) for project and media files. The reasons for the switch were varied, but the biggest was to improve productivity and efficiency.

With direct storage, we often worked on multiple client projects simultaneously where employees needed access to the same media. So if two people were working on projects for the same client using the same media, all that data had to be on both computer systems. Multiply that across four workstations and we spent a tremendous amount of time copying, transferring and backing up files. That workflow translated into wasted drive space, slow transfers and lost productivity from the time it took to move all that data.

You might ask, “why didn’t we already use shared storage in our workflow”; The answer, like most things in life… money. Before about 2007, it was just too darn expensive. Up until then, direct storage was the fastest and most affordable way to move large files…and in our business, speed is critical. Plus, our entire office was wired with a 10/100 ethernet system that was inadequate for the speeds we needed.

Here’s where it got interesting. I must’ve spent 2 months researching shared storage options with an eye on systems designed for real-time capture and playback of broadcast quality video and audio. The system had to have easy administration (since I’m not an IT person) and had to handle many file types. But before I could evaluate systems, I had to first learn the difference between the various shared storage options (and there are many). The two most widely used are Storage Area Network or SAN, and the previously mentioned Network Attached Storage or NAS. Others gaining popularity include iSCSI, SATA over Ethernet (called AoE), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), HyperSCSI…well you get the idea! It was more than just a little confusing.

For this post, I’ll just stick to NAS and SAN systems since they’re the most common. Just understanding how they worked was a daunting and confusing journey.

SAN

 SAN systems typically use fibre channel to move data. That means you cannot use existing ethernet cabling in your building. So before you spend a dime on storage, you have to run new cabling, buy new fibre channel data switches (similar to an ethernet switch), and buy and install new fibre channel network cards in your computer workstations. Sound expensive? It is. Then you need a SAN computer server with 12-24 striped SATA drives. Sound more expensive? Yup…it is. A decent SAN system typically costs $50,000 and up and it’s not unusual for them to cost over $100,000. Worse, they’re difficult to set-up and administer and require third-party software to facilitate the type of file-sharing we all take for granted using typical office networks.

NAS

NAS systems can use existing ethernet cabling (Category 5e and up), usually require a multi-port, managed gigabit ethernet switch (ours has 48 ports), gigabit ethernet network cards in workstations and a multi-port gigabit ethernet card in the storage server. All of which are way cheaper than fibre channel hardware.  However, a fast, reliable NAS system (especially for video editing) is still not cheap by today’s storage standards. Our NAS system cost a little over $15,000, including a new ethernet switch, new ethernet cards, a 4TB media storage server, a 2TB project server, a 4TB backup drive and a sturdy metal rack to hold all the rack-mountable hardware.

The truly frustrating part of making a purchase decision was all the misinformation that exists about high-speed, broadcast capable shared storage systems. There are many companies that claim they design and sell these type of systems, but in reality, there are probably less than 10 that actually know what they’re doing. Some were just way out of our league when it came to cost, often dealing only in SAN based systems with prices starting at $50,000. So the options dwindled to less than a handful when it came to companies making NAS based systems that could truly deliver real-time streams of broadcast quality video across multiple workstations. The fact that we’re a Windows based company in a decidedly Mac-centric industry made it even more difficult. In my opinion, the company we chose, Apace Systems is the best of the bunch by a long shot!

Our system uses the specialized vStor 4TB network media server from Apace Systems for all video and audio files, a 2TB (LaCie) network drive for project storage (video timelines, photoshop files, InDesign layouts etc.), and a 4TB (LaCie) network backup drive.

The vStor system is specifically designed for the rigors of video production, providing as many as 12 streams of broadcast quality standard definition video across our 4 connected edit systems. It can also deliver multiple streams (4-6) of DVCPro100, Cineform or Apple ProRes HD. It’s truly an amazing product that delivers on ALL its company’s performance claims. We haven’t experienced ANY down-time since it was installed in February 2008. That’s 30 months of 24/7 operation without a single corrupt file, system lock-up or hiccup of ANY kind. In fact, it has only been turned off twice in that time, both after storm related power failures. We just power it back up and we’re back to working in minutes.

Apace also spent hours on the phone via Go To Meeting setting up the software portion of the system, which controls how your various workstations connect. We had to install the hardware ourselves, but it was pretty straightforward.

First, we placed the unit in a rack and connected cables from our 4 main workstations to our new switch. From the switch, the workstations were routed to the four-port gigabit ethernet card on the vStor. That’s it! The only drawback is the vStor is big, heavy and loud, so it had to be put in a large, well-ventilated closet (where our phone system was already installed), and we added sound adsorption foam to dampen the noise. You CANNOT place the vStor anywhere near your editing suites because of the noise it generates.

Other unique features of the vStor are automated defragmenting routines on the drives (which occurs when the system is idle); RAID 5 formatting, which means if one drive fails, all your data can be rebuilt once a replacement drive is installed. They even included an extra drive in the purchase price, so if we have a failure, we have an identical replacement ready to install.

I cannot say enough good things about Apace. Their product and customer support are outstanding. Plus, their reseller (IEEE in California) provided great pre-sales support and was by far the most knowledgeable of all the various sales representatives I talked to from shared video storage companies.

The LaCie drives have been almost as reliable as the vStor, with just a few quirky sharing and permission issues when rebooting from power failures. Of course the LaCie drives aren’t nearly as fast or robust as the vStor, but they cost about 80% less than it did. They are fast-enough, but if I had to design a system again, I’d look for a faster array for the main project drive. I’d keep the LaCie network drives for backup purposes, since they are definitely workhorses and are plenty fast for backup.

Speaking of speed…the LaCie’s average about 25MB/sec both read and write, while the vStor delivers about 95MB/sec read and 65MB/sec write when the unit is 25% full or less. As the drive fills up, speeds slow down, with read speeds coming in at about 75-85MB/sec and writes at about 45-50MB/sec. But that’s still fast enough to capture uncompressed standard definition video across two workstations simultaneously, and deliver 10-12 streams of DVCPro50 video across all our workstations, which means we can get multiple streams in real-time across all 4 edit systems. We typically use 3 of the systems for traditional digital editing and the fourth for compositing, so we actually can edit with up to 4 real-time streams in the 3 main suites even if all three are in use at the same time.

Apace systems are also capable of delivering multiple streams of compressed HD, including Apple ProRes, Cineform, DVCPro100 and AVID DNxHD.

But we rarely need that level of performance since most of our projects are SD and typically use just a couple of video channels in the majority of the timeline. But even under heavy use, we virtually never see a hiccup in the playback of video streams, or have a need to render since our trusty Harris VelocityQ editing systems can deliver 4 compressed streams of SD video in real-time. We also easily edit HD video projects using this system, but naturally, there is less real-time performance.

All in all, investing in high-speed, enterprise class shared storage was one of the best things we’ve ever done from a technology standpoint. It speeds work-flow, makes backing up files easier, and requires far less administration or maintenance than it took to keep half a dozen separate SCSI arrays running smoothly.

By Chris Blair

I must admit, I’m not much of a fan of 3D in movies and television. About the only time I’ve ever enjoyed it is at amusement park rides and shows, such as Mickey’s Philharmagic at Disney’s Magic Kingdom or Muppet Vision 3D at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. I’ve also read that shows like Terminator 2: 3D at Universal Studios are great fun. But even then, most of the enjoyment comes from the completely over the top 3D effects. 

At the movie theater the much ballyhooed Real3D seems to be more hype than substance, typically dimming the image to the point that it looks muted and muddy. Even worse, the process often distracts from the story rather than enhancing it. That’s not just my opinion either. Film critics like Roger Ebert and renowned filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola have been outspoken critics of 3D. And consider that Coppola made a 3D movie for Disney theme parks starring Michael Jackson back in 1986. The film, called Captain EO, was recently put back into several of Disney’s parks following Jackson’s death last year!

So now here we are almost 2 months into the launch of the first 3D TV Network, ESPN3D. Coupled with the craze surrounding 3D movies, I figured it would be a good time to see how 3D television is doing. But after spending nearly an hour searching online, there’s surprisingly very little in the way of news or reviews about any of the networks or programming.

Discovery Channel’s 3D network doesn’t have a name and hasn’t even announced an official launch date, only saying it will be sometime in “early 2011.” ESPN3D debuted in early June with 3D broadcasts of the World Cup. I can’t help but notice the lack of fanfare about it both then and now. How many people watched a World Cup match in 3D? According to industry reports, not many. Official estimates were under a million. And remember, soccer is hands down the most popular spectator sport in the world and the World Cup the most popular sporting event. ESPN even brought technology journalists to their Bristol, Conn. headquarters to watch one of the matches in 3D, and even those reviews are lukewarm at best. Note that ESPN likely had the room setup for the absolute best possible viewing experience too!

Another popular sporting event that was broadcast in 3D even before the launch of ESPN3D was The Masters. Comcast produced it and while golf doesn’t seem like a prime candidate for 3D, reviews for it were actually better than those of the World Cup. The most common positive comment was that the 3D images showed the topography of the course, which is undulating and hilly, something that’s completely lost in 2D. Many reviewers also said it made distances of shots seem more accurate, meaning if Phil Michelsen was standing 150 yards from the green, when the camera was behind him, the 3D image made that more realistic looking than in 2D, which tends to compress distances.

But the negative comments were plentiful too, with reports of weird double-vision like effects when objects close to the camera (but in soft focus) came into view. Or the same double-vision issues with background elements, like people in the galleries. Perhaps these are technical issues that can be ironed out, but it’s surprising that a notoriously slow-moving sport like golf received better reviews than a fast-moving sport like soccer.

Before it starts to sound like I’m a fan of sports programming in 3D, I’ll go on record as saying a 3D sports channel is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. Just go back to the dismal reviews of the 3D imagery in virtually every 3D motion picture released since Avatar. It’s preposterous to think consumers are going to buy new, 3D televisions and those expensive, silly-looking glasses for live sporting events when the process brings nothing but novelty to the experience. And what about advertisers? Will they continue to pay a premium to advertise in 3D events when they see the dismal audience numbers?

I do believe 3D has a place in some types of programming and films, especially animation, children’s movies and computer generated films that allow for virtually limitless possibilities in terms of visual effects. But sports in 3D? Traditional television dramas? I just don’t see how the cost of entry (a new TV, expensive glasses) is worth the novelty effect it provides.

Roger Ebert even argues (quite effectively I might add) that 3D imagery is less realistic to viewers than traditional 2D motion pictures, saying: “Our minds use the principle of perspective to provide the third dimension. Adding one artificially can make the illusion less convincing.” Plus, virtually all 3D that I’ve seen definitely does NOT mimic how human vision works. Hence, I’m often distracted by the different planes of imagery

Here are some other links to interesting articles about 3D, including a review from the Time/CNN blog about the World Cup matches, a list of 3D movies in theaters and theme parks that dates back to the early 1990’s, and a PC Magazine review of the World Cup matches and an earlier 3D sports TV test of an NFL football game.

I’ve been aware of Netflix for years, but always viewed their service as more trouble than it was worth. When it comes to watching movies, I’m the spontaneous type, rarely planning a viewing in advance, so ordering a movie or movies, then waiting for them to be delivered in the mail didn’t seem very attractive.

When Netlix added the ability to stream movies instantly, I was more intrigued, but since I couldn’t imagine watching a full-length feature on my laptop or desktop computer and didn’t have a way to output a computer signal to my TV, it didn’t make sense to try it then either.

Then in the Spring of this year Netflix added the ability to stream movies wirelessly to the Wii (which we got the kids for Christmas).  I hate to admit it, but I didn’t even know the Wii had wireless capability! But now it seemed like a good time to give Netflix a try.

Streaming to wireless devices was nothing new for Netflix. For some time it had offered instant streaming to a host of other devices, including Xbox 360, Tivo, the Roku set-top box and a variety of wireless enabled blu-ray players and TVs. One of our employees, Cole Perkins had often talked about his Netflix setup, especially the quality of the digitally delivered movies, but I had always assumed they were delivered over a wired Internet connection. I found it hard to believe that SD and even HD movies could stream reliably over wireless, and if they could, further questioned the visual quality considering the amount of compression required to maintain the data stream.

Well, I’m here to tell you the quality, reliability and ease of use is superb. Not to mention the ability to pick and choose from thousands of titles at the touch of a button, including not only movies, but also thousands of television shows. The ability to watch an entire season of a TV series is a great option, and my 6-year old daughter watched all three seasons of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender during her summer break! There are also stand-up comedy specials, documentaries, and hundreds of children’s programming choices.

Surprisingly I’ve also found Netflix’s mail delivery option enjoyable as well. Place a title in your queue by early afternoon and it’s typically delivered the next day. Better still, there’s no limit to how long you keep it and the DVD is returned in the same mailer it came in.

The streaming service is impressive. You load movies into an instant queue on your computer or directly from the Wii interface on the TV. Once loaded, you just click them and hit play. It takes about 15-20 seconds for the title to buffer before starting. In 2 months of use, we’ve watched literally hundreds of movies and television shows and I’ve only seen one title pause during playback. The image and sound froze for about 10 seconds, but as soon as the data stream caught up, the movie continued uninterrupted. Another plus to the streaming option is you can move backwards, forward and pause playback, and if you stop it, you can pick it up right where you left off.

And the technical quality is nothing short of amazing. The only time you see compression artifacts is in extremely dark scenes, which is a non-issue because the scenes are so dark there’s almost nothing visable anyway. The compression shows up as large, off-color blocks, but it doesn’t impact the viewing experience at all.

And what about the price? Well, for $9 a month, we can stream an unlimited number of movies and order a limited number of DVDs. At that price, you can only have one DVD in your possession at a time. So if you order 2 DVDs, the first one is delivered, you keep it as long as you want and as soon as Netflix gets it back, your second DVD is sent (again, usually the same day the other is received). Pay a few dollars more a month and you can get more DVDs delivered at the same time. But with the $9 package, you can place up to 6 DVDs in your queue at one time and as fast as you can watch and return, you’ll continue getting the other movies in your queue.

Plus, the entire first month is FREE. That’s right, you can sign-up and try the service with NO limitations for an entire month before committing to it. There are NO catches either. You just cancel if you don’t want to commit to it. Even better, there are NO contracts or penalties after you do decide to pay for the service. So if you pay for a few months, then decide to cancel, just cancel online and your membership will stop at the end of that month, no questions asked. Even more refreshing, it’s easy to find the cancellation link on their website and they clearly spell out how your membership works.

The only drawback to the service is that the instant streaming selection is limited. But from what I’ve read, Netflix isn’t the one limiting the number. It’s the major movie studios, who are all wary of what online streaming might do to their aftermarket DVD and premium movie channel revenue. Despite this, I’ve found plenty of attractive viewing choices available via instant play, and as I said before, the mail delivery option is actually pretty nice once you get used to it.

And what about ease of use? The only complex part of configuring the service was setting up the Wii console to connect with our wireless router. And that wasn’t really all that difficult since Nintendo had a detailed “how to” right on their website. But I could envision non-technical folks having trouble with that part of the setup.

Of course, that’s not Netflix’s fault. It’s just one of the requirements for being able to use the streaming option. You could always fore-go that and just use the mail delivery option. They also offer a limited number of Blu-ray DVD titles…and the streaming service will examine the settings on your wireless device along with your connection speed and deliver the highest quality stream possible. So you can even stream HD content to a fast enough wireless device hooked to an HDTV.

All in all, in my opinion Netflix is the best value on the planet. We’ve watched hundreds of programs and movies in the last two months, all for $18! You could spend that for a handful of traditional movie rentals!

Oddly enough, one thing I don’t like about Netflix is their advertising, especially their mind-numbing radio ads. Especially the ones that sound like a game show, with the host asking nonsensical questions to contestants (who somehow answer them with even more nonsensical responses).  They’re beyond stupid and they run incessantly. With a service this good, there’s really no need to be so quirky with their ads. I’ve recently seen new TV ads that use nicely shot testimonials from actual users along with a big push for people to try the service through the free trial. Now that’s the way to sell this service. Because once you try it, it sells itself.

I’ve long been on the fence concerning the value of using social media to promote a business or non-profit. I certainly think if an organization can keep relevant information flowing, it can add value. But even when a social media site is well-maintained, using it for marketing is at best a shot in the dark since it’s difficult if not impossible to control who your message is reaching.

The biggest issue I have with a business or non-profit using social media is that it exploits the original intent of the sites, which in Facebook’s case, was as a means for students to stay connected and easily communicate. Unless a group is providing useful information or uses a site as a way to provide customer support, I think most consumers see the practice for what it is: a veiled attempt at selling something.

Of course most people are used to being bombarded with advertising and they realize that few truly non-commercial entertainment or communication venues exist. But there just seems to be something smarmy about an organization that tries to capitalize on what is mostly a social phenomena. In my opinion, the only way a company or non-profit can successfully use Facebook or Twitter is by providing timely, useful and relevant content. If they’re doing that, then social media can certainly be a useful part of a an overall marketing plan.

Here’s a nice article from Business Week’s website listing some of the myths of social media marketing: 

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/tc20090522_078978.htm

Ok, you’re probably wondering, “what the heck does Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s crazy comments about Lebron James spurning the Cavs have to do with marketing and advertising?” Well, not that much on the surface, except for the fact the whole affair has brought more attention to the NBA during the second week of July than it’s ever had in an entire summer.

July typically brings us Major League Baseball, Wimbledon, the British Open, the Tour de France and this year the World Cup. But the Lebron James free agency circus changed all that. And oh what a circus it was! Leave it to ESPN, creator of the dubious sports award show “The Espys” to bring us a live TV special with Lebron announcing his decision. Of course we have to remember the “E” in ESPN does stand for “entertainment!” But I digress. The real fun didn’t start until after the show, when Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert published an “open letter” to Cleveland fans on the Cavaliers official website. If you haven’t read the letter, you can do so here:

(Editor’s note: the original letter was removed from the Cavs official website Tuesday morning July 13th, but you can read a transcript of it at the link below):

http://www.cleveland.com/cavs/index.ssf/2010/07/gilberts_letter_to_fans_james.html

And here’s a screen capture of part of the original page…a MUST see I might add: http://www.videomi.com/blog/gilbertletter.htm

First off, what’s with the font Dan? In the original posting on the website, Gilbert wrote using a superhero looking font I later learned was called (appropriately enough) comic sans. That’s a bad choice for a letter from a billionaire CEO. The internet is awash with nearly as much commentary about Gilbert’s font choice as it is about his jaw-dropping comments.

In his letter, Gilbert talked of James’ ”selfishness and betrayal” and called the decision a “heartless and callous action.” Yeah right! I’m sure Mr Gilbert never made a selfish or heartless decision while amassing billions in profits over the last 25 years. I’m also sure he never once fulfilled a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract with a client or vendor (as Lebron did), only to move his business elsewhere. Don’t get me wrong, James’ silly TV special and even sillier, third-person comments during the show were bad enough, but he’s a 25 year-old basketball player! Gilbert is a forty-something executive with an impressive entrepreneurial track record. Gilbert is obviously the one with the experience and business savvy needed to handle the disappointment of losing a contract to a competitor. Yet Gilbert used phrases like “cowardly betrayal,” and “shocking act of disloyalty” in his decidedly grade schoolish letter to Cleveland fans.

What if we here at Magnetic Image reacted the way Mr. Gilbert did every time we lost a project bid to a competitor? Gilbert complained that James wouldn’t return his texts or phone calls and didn’t inform him of his decision prior to the announcement on television. I say…”so what!” When we bid on a project, clients often don’t answer inquiries and we are almost never informed we weren’t chosen. We don’t write open letters on our blog or website attacking the company or people because they chose someone else!

Gilbert is another example of a businessman who believes by virtue of his success in one industry, it guarantees success in another, which seems a common malady for professional sports owners! What businessman in his right mind buys a sports franchise anyway? Less than half of major professional sports franchises turn a profit each year. Some, like Mark Cuban’s Dallas Mavericks, lose hundreds of millions year after year. According to Forbes.com, with Lebron James under contract, Cleveland made money. Without him they likely won’t. Forbes.com estimated the Cavaliers team value was $476 million with James, and will fall to somewhere around $250 million without him. Attendance and licensing revenue is projected to plummet, and when their $25 million television contract expires, it will likely be renewed for far less.

Here’s an article that sums up the psyche of billionaires who buy major sports franchises:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-06/billionaire-bosses-become-beggars-in-sports-scott-soshnick.html

Cleveland fans have generally lauded Gilbert for his comments and have blogged and tweeted and facebooked about how refreshing it was to see an executive not worry about being politically correct. Unfortunately they’re jaded by fan loyalty! From a marketing perspective, Gilbert’s comments are about the worst thing a CEO could do. Here is the top executive of a half billion dollar enterprise crying about and deriding an employee who fulfilled his contract but decided to take his talents to a competitor. And Gilbert does this to an employee who likely made him tens of millions of dollars during his seven-year stay (five with Gilbert as owner). Sure James could’ve handled the whole thing better, but again, out of what obligation? He fulfilled virtually every expectation (and then some) given the hype surrounding his talents. I can’t think of another athlete except for Tiger Woods that has lived up to the expectations placed on him at such a young age. Even Kobe Bryant was allowed to grow into his marquee role. He wasn’t even a starter for the Lakers until his third year!

Why do people expect pro athletes to have more loyalty than the rest of us? James spent seven years playing with a mediocre supporting cast and yet still at the age of 22, got to the NBA finals. He single-handedly made the Cavaliers relevant again. He brought excitement to their city. He played out his contract, never complaining about it and never holding out for a re-negotiation. He even publicly hinted of his intentions to move on more than 2 years ago! If Gilbert is such a great businessman, he should’ve done more to build a team that gave James a legitimate shot at winning an NBA title.

The last 15 years show that to win an NBA championship, you need at least 2, if not 3 Hall of Fame caliber players on your team. The only exception was the 2003-2004 Detroit Pistons. Every other champion since 1995 had at least 2 perennial all-stars and likely Hall of Famers. Think Alajuwon and Drexler, Jordan and Pippen; O’Neal and Bryant; Duncan and Robinson; Duncan, Parker, Ginobili and Robinson (yes they were all on one team); Wade and O’Neal, Pierce, Garnett and Allen; Bryant and Gasol. Who did Lebron have? Mo Williams? Donyell Marshall? Drew Gooden? Larry Hughes? Zydrunas Ilgauskas? All fine players and probably finer human beings, but….puh-lease! The only chance these guys have of getting into the Naismith Hall of Fame is if they buy a ticket.

Dan Gilbert may have won fans in and around Cleveland, Akron and the rest of Ohio, but I doubt many outside the Cavs faithful think he did much to help his team or franchise. What NBA player in his right mind now wants to go play for a guy like that? It certainly says a lot about how he does business. As long as you’re making him buckets of money, you’re his buddy. Decide to take your talent to a competitor, and you’re a “traitor” (his words, not mine).

I feel sorry for the director of marketing for the Cavaliers! How do you “spin” comments like that from your CEO? Where do you go with your marketing after that? Imagine one minute having arguably the most talented and popular athlete on the planet at the center of your marketing campaign, then the next having a collection of 2nd tier NBA players and a coach who’s twice been fired in the mid-season after mini-revolts by his players.

Glad I’m not THAT marketing guy!

Of course, if Cleveland can land a talented player or two, and coach Byron Scott can brew the same winning formula he cooked up in New Jersey and New Orleans (albeit during short stints each time), marketing an underdog team will sure get a whole lot easier. Hey…it’s basketball….and everybody likes a winner! Until he leaves and takes his skills to another city!

Here’s another well-researched (and funny) post about our buddy Dan Gilbert:

http://childmurderingrobot.blogspot.com/2010/07/owner-of-cleveland-cavaliers-is.html

If you’ve ever worked with websites, you’ve probably heard the term “keywords.” If you’re not familiar with it, the term refers to the words and phrases used to describe your organization on your site. Keywords are important because search engines like Google use them to determine search rankings. Theoretically the more accurate the keywords, the better your ranking. Keyword frequency on a site (often called keyword density) can also help with rankings. Of course website rankings involve other things, but using the right words, terminology and phrasing is important to getting found on the internet.

You might be saying, “Ok…easy enough,” but where do I put those keywords? That’s where the confusion begins. We occasionally work with companies that offer SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services. They’re supposed to help clients optimize their search rankings…but I’ll admit up front that I’m not a fan of the some of these companies.

Why you ask? Simply put, many of them don’t understand how to properly use keywords on websites. The most common myth these companies promote is recommending use of the keywords meta tag, which is a type of HTML tag placed in the source code of a webpage. It generally looks something like this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”your keywords here”>

The problem with this advice is that it has NO effect on your search rankings and is so outdated that its relevance pre-dates the creation of Google! That’s right, search engines haven’t used the keywords meta tag in determining a page’s rankings since 1997! The keywords metatag issue is a prime indicator of whether an SEO company knows what they’re talking about. If they tell you the keywords meta tag is important to your site’s rankings, run away….fast.

Don’t believe me when it comes to the irrelevance of the keywords meta tag? Read here:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/sitepromotion/keyword-meta-tag.shtml

So let’s look at where keywords DO work. The first place is in the body copy on your site! That’s right…the best way to improve your site’s rankings is with good writing.

But before you start writing, you need to make a comprehensive list of keywords that define your business, including words that describe the company, where it’s located, the services and products it offers and the skills your people possess. Use those words and phrases religiously on your site. Use them for page headings, in body copy, in photo captions and video descriptions. Use them often (within reason).

It’s actually pretty simple stuff. The more times you use relevant keywords and phrases on your pages the better your search ranking will be. Of course, you have to use common sense. You can’t just load your page with keywords without writing something of value. I personally believe good writing on a website is more important than high keyword density. It doesn’t matter if 1000 people find your site, only to be turned off by the obvious loading of keywords in your copy.

There are also a couple of relevant code based ways to improve rankings, like putting accurate and properly worded HTML title tags on each page. These tags appear in the header of your HTML code and describe what the page is about. This text isn’t visible on the page itself, but appears in a web browser’s title bar or tab. Search engines use this tag as part of its algorithm to determine what your page is about, so it’s important to use relevant keywords and descriptions about each page in the title tags.

Another helpful code based method is to use the meta description tag. Search engines use this tag to describe your page in their summaries. If your page doesn’t have a meta description tag, the search engine simply grabs the first bit of page text and uses it for the description. So you can see how using this tag can improve the quality of the information displayed in search results. A good page description improves the probability that someone will click on your link when reviewing their search results.

Remember, most search engines read only text. So a well-written site that uses relevant keywords and good descriptions in the HTML title and description tags will typically get high rankings. So developing that list should be one of the first things you do when you’re creating or changing a site. Create a list of every service you offer and every possible phrase that might help a potential customer find you. Use the old journalistic method of asking ”who, what, where, when and how” about your organization. Think about your wording from a customer’s point of view. Ask yourself what problem customers are trying to solve and use terminology that fits the problem and the solution. Once you’ve got the list, use it to develop menus, page headings and company descriptions.

I should point out that there are excellent SEO companies out there. But it’s the bad ones that give the industry a black eye. They spread more misinformation than fact and make performance claims that cannot be trusted, such as guaranteeing a certain number of first page Google rankings without telling you how they plan to do it. Noboby can guarantee that without a plan of action and a substantial web advertising budget. SEO companies are most beneficial when companies need to target specific geographic areas or want to purchase adwords to insure high rankings.

Website development and administration is still mystifying to most people. Heck, it’s mystifying to me and I spend a lot of time doing it. So it really bugs me when companies try to take advantage of people by using the complexity of the web as a disguise. That’s the root of my dislike for the SEO industry. It’s like the unscrupulous auto mechanic who replaces unnecessary stuff on your car because he knows you’re clueless about automobiles. It sucks.

Just remember that many of the things that lead to high search rankings can be done by web developers with modest web administration skills. And good writing is king when it comes to improving rankings without spending a dime.

The best do-it-yourself information I’ve found on SEO (and website creation in general) is on Christopher Heng’s blog here:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/

And here are his excellent tips for improving your search rankings:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/sitepromotion/search-engine-friendly.shtml

If you’re going to pay for search engine optimization, probably the best thing to buy is Google Adwords. It’s complex enough that it helps to use an SEO company knowledgeable about how it works. In simple terms, you select keywords, write a search engine listing, and when people search on Google using one of your keywords, your ad appears next to the search results. So you’re in essence buying a high ranking. But it can become extremely complicated when it comes to buying in certain regions, tracking the ads etc. So a good SEO company can really help when clients want this type of search engine help.

But I have to admit that when I’m looking for unbiased information online, I typically ignore the Google ads returned in my searches. Maybe it’s because when I visit those sites, the keywords always seem only vaguely related to the services the company offers. I always feel like they’re using the keywords in a blatant attempt to drive as many people to their site as possible. It just pisses me off, so I tend to not even click on them. I prefer the unpaid search listings and find they almost always better match what I’m looking for.

It’s probably heresy for me to admit that, but I’ve talked with a lot of people who feel the same way. But obviously using adwords works since Google’s main source of revenue comes from this service and in 2008 that revenue topped $20 billion.

But if you’re a small to medium sized business, just putting a little thought into what you say on your site, and making sure you put good descriptions in a few places in your HTML code can put you on the first page of most search engine results.

Here’s another link to some common SEO scams:

http://unstuckdigital.com/8-seo-scams/

If you’re not sure what a storyboard is, just look at a comic book. A storyboard is basically the same thing, using a sequence of still images to help visualize a story. In advertising, storyboards provide a visual snapshot of key scenes in a commercial, and can be used to help sell a concept or as a blueprint for staging, lighting and photographing a project.

But useful storyboards can take many forms, from elaborate, full color illustrations, to crude stick figures scrawled directly on a script. Whatever their quality, all storyboards serve the same function; they make you think in pictures.

But storyboarding is one of those things that a lot of people misunderstand. For starters, storyboards are not necessary for every type of project, especially if the project has a limited budget, doesn’t involve narrative elements or if continuity isn’t important. Storyboarding also requires an understanding of filmmaking techniques, including composition, continuity and shot coverage, so the most effective storyboards are usually created or supervised by a talented director.

The scope of a project can also determine whether storyboards are needed or even practical. In advertising, long-form projects like half-hour infomercials are the most difficult to storyboard because of the sheer number of shots involved. While storyboarding scenes can be a huge time-saver during production, it likewise takes significant time, energy and money to create them beforehand. Hiring an illustrator to create simple black and white illustrations for a 30 minute program can take days and cost thousands of dollars. Even drawing simple stick-figure based boards can be time-consuming for a long-format project.

Storyboarding also requires detailed location scouts, something that can be difficult to undertake on a modest budget. Plus, many good directors can visualize scenes and shots without the aid of storyboards, so if a project has a skilled director and a limited budget, it’s probably best to skip storyboarding and use the time and money saved on the shoot or edit.

But short-format projects like commercials typically should be storyboarded. Simple drawings work fine for most projects, but basic film and video framing techniques need to be followed and storyboard images should lead viewers logically through the storyline. A good storyboard will include master shots that establish a location or place and time, along with cut-ins, cut-aways and other shots typically used in film and video production.

Here are a couple of detailed storyboard examples from projects we’ve produced. On the first, we created the storyboards. On the second, the client provided them. Each storyboard is followed by the finished video.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

Notice how the videos are almost shot for shot the same as the storyboards. Naturally there are differences, but that’s pretty common. Scripts are often revised after a shoot and shot sequences can change during the edit. That’s why we often shoot additional shots that aren’t storyboarded to make sure we have enough coverage during the edit and to offer choices to both the editor and the client.

This is where storyboards can dramatically improve your video. They make you think of different ways to tell your story with a camera. They help you think about creative camera placement, scene coverage and editing, forcing  you to think about how the images will cut together after the shoot. Using storyboards can also tell you exactly how many setups and shots you’ll need to complete your shoot, so they can save time that’s usually spent compiling shots lists and creating elaborate shooting schedules.

Storyboarding can also be useful for all-graphic, animated projects. Here’s an example from a recent project we created for the Ten Adams Ad Agency. Creative Director Kris Laufer and Art Director Madison Strobel concepted and created the boards.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

Notice how the finished video closely matches the boards. By providing the layout and sequencing, the client saved at least two full days of design, compositing and production costs. They also gave their client a great snapshot of what the finished commercial would look like before spending a dime on production.

Designing full screen graphics prior to edit sessions allows you to think about font styles and layout before you start animating or compositing. You don’t have to waste time trying to create keyframes or fitting text and graphics onto the screen. You can focus on finding clever ways to animate elements and refine those movements. Better yet, if you’re a designer for an ad agency, your designs and layouts will stay consistent when you hand them off to an animator.

The most frequent excuse for not storyboarding is the time it takes. But it’s a classic catch-22. You can either spend time thinking about visuals before the shoot and edit, or spend time thinking about them (at $200 an hour or more) during the shoot or edit. However, creating useful storyboards can also be expensive, especially if clients want professional sketches or full-color illustrations, which can cost from $20 to $50 per sketch depending on their detail and use of color.

In my experience it’s not uncommon to spend 30-60 minutes on each panel in a professionally sketched or illustrated storyboard, sometimes more. That includes the time to think about the shots, create the layouts or sketches, and compile them into storyboard form. That’s anywhere from 6 to 18 hours for a standard 12 or 18 panel board. Naturally stick-figure boards take much less time but can often be just as useful in the hands of a good director.

I’ve also found that storyboards can actually make it MORE difficult for some people to visualize a project or storyline. I call these people “literal thinkers” and they typically have to read or hear a description before a concept clicks. It’s always amazed me that people like this work in a visual industry like advertising, but it’s surprisingly common. Showing these folks storyboards typically elicits blank stares and retorts of “I don’t get it.” Or worse yet, they focus on irrelevant details in the sketches. Some favorite responses include: “Why does the actor have a mustache? Will he have a mustache in the commercial?” Or…”Is that what the actors will be wearing?” There are dozens more, but you get the idea.

This phenomenon is especially true if the storyboard is used as a tool to sell a concept prior to getting the green light to produce it. These types of boards usually don’t have finished graphic layouts and often use royalty-free stock images to represent people or locations along with simple text and design for full-screen graphics. Literal thinkers just cannot look at a sequence of images like this and translate it into any sort of storyline without getting bogged down on unimportant details.

But more often than not, a storyboard will improve a video project by forcing those involved to think about how the story will be told visually. So if budget allows, it’s definitely worth it to have a skilled director sketch or supervise the creation of a storyboard.

Here are some simple, stick-figure based storyboards that I created for other commercial projects. As you can see, I’m certainly no sketch artitist, but storyboards don’t have to be works of art to be useful.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

Magnetic Image buys and places a lot of media and we have two highly experienced media buyers on staff. I’ll admit that I’m not one of them. But in over 25 years in this business, I’ve certainly learned a thing or two about media buying.

One trend I see (and don’t agree with) is to produce an ad, run it in heavy rotation for 3 or 4 days, then assess it’s effectiveness based on sales figures during that period. Sorry to be harsh but this is lunacy! I’m pretty sure we here at Magnetic Image aren’t the ones recommending this sort of ad schedule (at least I hope we’re not). There’s no way you can run an ad for just 3 or 4 days and expect it to consistently deliver results. Of course there are times when a particular event or sale could potentially benefit from this type of buy, but I’m talking about companies using this technique week in and week out for ALL of their television ad buys.

The scenario usually goes like this. A company spends a few days producing a commercial then they buy ad time on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The spot gets placed and the client tracks sales several times a day at multiple store locations. If after the second day, sales aren’t up over last year, it’s decided the ad “isn’t working.” That means either pulling the ad and replacing it with something else (that previously did well), or revising the ad with a new ”sell” message of one kind or the other.

When you consider the average person has hundreds of channels available on their TV, dozens of media and entertainment options on their computer, smartphone, netbook or iPad, it’s asking a lot to expect people to see an ad and respond to it in a two or three day window. Especially if the product or service isn’t something that demands immediacy.

In my opinion, you simply cannot run a new television ad every week or two using different messaging, different visual looks and disparate brand promises and expect it to have a significant long term impact on sales or brand awareness. I believe you have to hammer your message into the minds of consumers!

Ever notice how advertisers like Target, Wal-Mart, Budweiser, and dozens of others place an ad, then run it for what seems like FOREVER? My favorite example is Enterprise Rent-a-Car. They have an ad that shows a woman standing in front of a “repair shop.” How do I know it’s a “repair shop?” Because there’s a big, lame-ass sign that says “REPAIR SHOP” hanging right behind her. She’s on her cell-phone and she says, “Enterprise, I need to rent a car.” The ad segues into a voice over that says Enterprise will pick you up and get you on your way. That darn ad ran for probably 6 or 7 years straight during NCAA basketball games in the early part of this decade. Then, when the ad started looking dated, Enterprise produced a new ad. Guess what? It has virtually the same copy, but uses a new, more hip looking actress standing in front of the same lame “REPAIR SHOP” sign. Yes…the ad is almost word for word and shot for shot the same as the original!

Why does this ad work? Because it’s simple, has only a couple of messages, and Enterprise runs the holy crap out of it! Enterprise went from being something like the 5th largest rental car company in the 1980s to the largest rental car company in North America. Naturally they didn’t do it solely because of their advertising, but it certainly helped.

Of course, if you’ve ever rented a car from Enterprise, you also know their primary sales message of “we’ll pick you up” is a crock. I think I’ve personally rented from them a half dozen times and for one reason or another they’ve never been able to come pick me up to get my rental. If you read blogs about Enterprise, just about every post says the exact same thing. However, they must be doing something right to grow so large.

Another example I like to use is the Budweiser “Wassup” campaign from a few years ago. The ads became so popular the actors scored guest appearances on late-night talk shows like Jay Leno and David Letterman. But what most people don’t realize is the ads ran incessantly for at least 6 months (mainly during sporting events) before they gained pop culture status. What if Budweiser had run the ad for a weekend and said, “awww…this isn’t working!” Do you think the “Wassup” saying still would’ve become a catch-phrase?

All this begs the question, why do people create so many different ads and run them for such short periods of time? As my dad used to say, “hell…I don’t know!” One media buyer at a large agency explained it to me this way. “We don’t want a client’s ad to get stale and we want customers to think the client has something new going on.” Another ad executive opined: “We’re just responding to market conditions. As consumers tastes change we’re changing with them.” To both of these responses I say, HUH?!?

If you don’t develop a consistent story about your company and stick with that story, customers will see your ads for what they are, a hard-sell attempt at getting their business. Television viewers are way too savvy for that. They can see right through that stuff. So if you’re going to produce television ads, run them! Even low-budget ads cost thousands to produce. RUN THEM! Run the crap out of them. Run them until you’re sick of seeing and hearing them. When you get to that point, that’s about the time they’ll start being effective.

Bad audio can ruin an otherwise well produced video. Whether it’s poorly recorded voice tracks, mismatched ambient sound in scenes with dialogue, or poorly timed cuts in a testimonial interview, bad audio can disrupt the flow of individual scenes and sometimes the entire video.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest changes in video production over the last 20 years is that many people don’t budget for audio on projects. Whether it’s having a sound engineer on a shoot, producing custom music, or even spending time sweetening an audio mix, audio is often the first thing that gets cut when planning a shoot or edit. In fact, on most of our shoots, the camera crew ends up being responsible for audio. And while our shooters are adept at setting microphones and monitoring levels, it certainly isn’t the best way to guarantee quality audio on a shoot, especially when it calls for actor dialogue or extensive interviews.

Audio is just too important to be treated as an afterthought. It’s arguably half your product. It can drive the pacing of a project and can create the appropriate mood, add emphasis, and subliminally influence how images are perceived. People have gotten so used to the impact of sound that studies have shown that when test subjects are shown silent video of events or machines that make loud or distinct sounds, a huge percentage report hearing the sound while watching the video.

Of course you could claim those findings prove you don’t need audio, since viewers filled in the missing sounds themselves, but if you’ve ever watched deleted scenes on a DVD where the audio hasn’t been mixed and enhanced, the FIRST thing you notice is the uneven levels, the missing ambient sound and the improper mix of dialogue and effects.

The most important task when it comes to sound is to get good tracks during the shoot. Doing this requires conducting location scouts before the shoot to discover possible sound problems, assess microphone choices and determine correct placement. During the shoot, it’s equally important to set levels correctly and critically monitor takes. Plus, microphone choice and placement can differ depending on whether you’re recording an interview or actor dialogue. Interviews typically require putting the microphone as close to the subject as possible, while with dialogue, the microphone doesn’t always have to be right next to the subject. The reason is that motion picture and television sound editors often vary levels based on the subject’s distance from the camera.

But even if the recorded audio is clean, sound editing can also make or break a project. Editing interview comments can be especially tricky, since you often have to combine comments shot at different times. A person’s inflection, tone and enthusiasm can vary wildly, and keeping background sound levels consistent can be extremely difficult. Editing dialogue can just as tricky because conversations can often overlap and as noted, viewers expect levels to vary. The trick is to make all those edits sounds as if they’re one seamless track.

There’s also a real art to knowing where to cut so that shots mesh seamlessly. Whether it’s an interview, narration or dialogue, a good sound editor listens to the cadence of voice tracks, and identifies cut points based on emphasis, inflection or pauses in delivery. The key is understanding where to cut, then knowing how to adjust levels and transitions so they become transparent to the audience. Then there’s ambient sound. Even if voice tracks and music are perfectly mixed, when ambient sound fluctuates or changes too dramatically, it can ruin the mix.

Editing music also requires experience, patience and a good ear for instrumentation. Just selecting the music can be an art form in itself. Some people have a knack for finding music that matches the tone of a video, but most do not. I worked with a producer who once chose a snappy jazz number for a commercial he was working on. It was a great piece of music. Only problem was the commercial was for a funeral home!

The majority of videos we produce use either royalty free or needle-drop music, which is existing music provided on-demand. The typical process involves searching through a music library, finding a dozen or so cuts that seem to fit the tone of the video, then auditioning those cuts to see which ones work best with interview comments, voice overs or dialogue. It can take hours to search for and find music that works with a particular concept, and then hours more to test and decide which of those meshes with the video’s existing audio. That’s before any mixing is done.

Of course once you’ve picked music, you need to mix it loud enough to complement voice tracks, but not so loud that it’s distracting. That’s one of the biggest problems I see in local and regional production. Many clients are afraid to use what I call a “hot mix,” which is basically a mix that gives nearly equal weight to the voice tracks and music. Local television and radio commercials often air with music levels so low that they might as well be non-existent. In my opinion, that’s as distracting as having the music too loud. Spend a night listening to the music levels in nationally produced commercials and you’ll be surprised at how loud the music is mixed in those spots.

The key to a “hot mix” is to make sure voice tracks are dynamically compressed, which is a process that increases soft sounds to match louder ones in the same track. Equalization is another process that can allow for a hotter mix between the two. Equalization at the most basic level is the process of enhancing or reducing the frequencies of sound. So if a music track has high tonal frequencies that fight with a voice over, reducing those frequencies can help it work better with the voice tracks.

Notice I didn’t mention scoring music. The reason is that in this economy, very few clients are willing to pay to create custom music. But a well produced and written custom musical score can certainly make a video come alive. A good composer knows how to arrange a score so that instruments mesh with the visuals, and a well-written jingle can forever brand a company in the minds of viewers. As an example, who can ever forget the “I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Weiner” jingle?

If creating great visuals is important in video, capturing and mixing great sound isn’t far behind. Sound can enhance video when it’s well done or ruin it when it’s not. So pay attention to sound and budget for it on your next video. Your projects will stand out because of it.

While I’m on the subject of media players. I was recently reintroduced to RealPlayer’s basic media player and I was blown away by how much it’s improved since the last time I used it. RealPlayer was initially a leader in online video streaming and it’s player was pretty much standard fare on Windows computers in the early part of this decade.

Problem was, the player itself was a resource hog, it started up every time Windows started, and seemed to make itself the default media player for every single media file on your system (whether it could play it or not). It became such an annoyance in our office that we removed it from every computer and banned it from being installed.

Well I’m happy to say the folks at RealPlayer must have listened to customer complaints, because the latest version is superb. From being able to play virtually any file type, to providing an extremely easy-to-use encoding tool that opens from within the player, they’ve created a tool that greatly simplifies media playback. It also gives you the ability to download videos directly from the web, organizes them for you, and makes it easy to find them when you want to go back and watch them later.

The encoder has many presets for popular mobile devices, making it easy to move media files to your smart phone or mobile media player. Plus, the interface is much improved, with a sleek look and intuitive controls.

Best of all, it no longer takes over your computer or commandeers every media file on your system! It’s definitely worth trying, and there are versions for Windows, Mac and Linux. The Mac version appears to offer similar functionality to its Windows counterpart, but the Linux version doesn’t appear as full-featured. I haven’t tested it on those platforms so I can’t speak to it’s performance or GUI on either. But if the Windows version is any indication, it’s a player that’s well worth having.

But like any free software, it’s not perfect. The biggest complaint I’ve read from users is that the free version will continually ask you to upgrade to the Pro version, especially when you try to do things that only the Pro version can do. Other users have complained it constantly tries to update itself and invokes too many pop-up windows asking you to do so. There are also user reports that it doesn’t work in all browsers, but I can’t refute or verify that. Another complaint is that the web download function doesn’t always work, but that could be because many sites block downloading of media files, so it’s hard to fault RealPlayer for that.

Personally I haven’t seen these issues, and even if I did, it wouldn’t be any more annoying than the free version of Quicktime, which also constantly asks you to upgrade to the Pro version and asks for you to buy plugins to add functionality for playing MPEG2 and other file types.

Update -July 13, 2010:

As the above date, RealPlayer doesn’t seem to be able to play MPEG2 files. Much like Quicktime, it will warn that you need MPEG2 codecs to play the files (even if they’re already installed). It then searches for and finds them (again, even if you already have them), installs them, then continuously repeats this process, telling you over and over that you need the codecs. 

Unfortunately, it still can’t play the MPEG2 files after this maddening process. RealPlayer’s website reports the problem is supposed to be fixed in the next version. We shall see. This isn’t a deal-breaker for me, since Quicktime is very similar and actually requires you purchase an MPEG2 codec to make it work. But RealPlayer would be equal to competitors like VLC and KMPlayer if it could fix this issue.

The default media player in Windows Vista and Windows XP cannot play a lot of popular file types, such as Quicktime and the now ubiquitous H.264/mp4 format. But now there’s a simple, safe plugin that gives Windows Media Player the ability to play both. The plugin is from a company called Medialooks and best of all it’s free.

It only takes a few seconds to download and about a minute to install. The only drawback is you need Quicktime 7.0 or higher installed for it to work. You may say, well if I have Quicktime, why do I need this? Well you don’t. It just makes it easier to use one media player instead of 2 or 3 different ones to play your video files.

From a technical standpoint, you don’t really need the Quicktime player itself, but you do need the Quicktime codecs that are installed along with the player. After installing the Medialooks plugin from the link above, you’ll be able to play virtually any Quicktime file, along with just about any H.264 based file directly in Windows Media Player.

While there are several free, third-party media players available that can do the same thing, many people (including me) actually like Windows Media Player. Plus, some corporate IT departments may not allow installation of free, open-source media players, fearing viruses or malware. Even if they do, they can sometimes be difficult to setup. This plugin simplifies things and greatly expands the abilities of Windows native media player. And since Quicktime comes from a trusted source, it’s much more likely an IT department would allow it to be installed along with this plugin.

The term branding is thrown around a lot in marketing and advertising, yet many companies struggle to consistently brand themselves.

One reason is that many advertising and marketing professionals make it so darn complicated. They use terms like: value propositions, brand equity, B2B, shelf shout, push marketing, ROI, and sonic branding. There are dozens more but you get the idea. I’ve worked in marketing for 26 years and I still get confused hearing jargon like that.

It doesn’t have to be that complicated. Branding on the most basic level is writing a concise story that defines an organization, company or product. That story should be the basis for all of a company’s marketing and should be relentlessly promoted to both employees and customers. It should be communicated across every point of contact, including all advertising, public relations, websites, blogs, even email signatures and telephone on-hold messages. The goal is a consistent, repeatable message that is unique and relevant to target audiences.

That story or brand could also be reflected in logos, packaging and design styles, but that can be difficult if a company has a longstanding logo or visual style. And while it may seem obvious, the message has to be truthful and people inside the company must buy into it. If you can’t convince your own employees that your branding message is genuine, how are you going to convince a skeptical and wary public?

The development of every ad, every layout and every message should start with this story and it should position the company as a unique supplier of whatever it delivers, be it products, services or a combination.

Of course developing the message and repeatedly delivering it is the hard part, especially in large, diverse companies. Marketing managers often want to put their own stamp on products or services, believing that differentiating them sets them apart. This is usually a bad idea. It’s almost always better to build on one brand than to try to create new ones. Why? Because people’s connections with brands often transcend products or services.

Apple Computer is an example of a company that does a great job of placing its brand before products. Wired Magazine wrote, “The secret of Apple’s success may have less to do with innovative products than with the image the company has created through skillful marketing.” Some argue that Apple’s brand is as powerful to its supporters as religion. Don’t believe me? Visit any Apple online discussion forum and post something negative about an Apple product and watch the reaction. Apple customers protect the Apple brand like animals protect their young. This loyalty persists even if a product is flawed, like the initial release of the iPhone, which had many technical and service issues, and Apple’s Quicktime media platform, which has a history of technical issues on both Apple and Windows operating systems.

The common belief is a product or service has to live up to its claims. But that’s not always the case. The product only has to live up to its claims in the mind of the buyer. So when people spend $4000 on a new computer and it doesn’t work right, they’ll still often defend the product to justify their purchase and hence protect the brand. That’s not to say Apple doesn’t make great products. It does. But its marketing helps elevate the brand. Its customers buy into the story Apple sells them in a big way.

Of course most companies don’t have a $100 million advertising budget like Apple does, but the lesson is it’s better to build a simple, clear, consistent message and use it on everything than to build separate stories for every product or service. Good brands also don’t simply tout features. That’s not what they’re selling. They’re selling a promise to solve a problem. If it’s Apple, the promise is that your Mac won’t break down and will be easy as pie to use.

Where people go wrong is thinking consumers get tired of seeing the same message over and over. Repeating a message does NOT mean telling a story the same way every time. Look at Geico’s advertising. They have the caveman, the gecko, and the creepy “money with eyeballs” for goodness sakes. But those diverse ads say the same thing. Fifteen minutes could save you 15% or more. There’s almost no talk about disaster response or being in “good hands” when a tree falls on your car. Yet, it works!

Geico’s promise is they can save you money without compromising your protection. Certainly some ads from Apple and Geico tout features, but every ad, every promotion and every press release consistently reflects their core messages.

Another important part of building a brand is developing a consistent look and sound across all marketing. It’s not enough to develop a strong story about your company. You have to commit to integrating it into every marketing tool you use, including the way it’s written, the use of the logo, the design, color scheme, typeface and layout. From TV ads and billboards to in-store signage and print ads, the look and feel should be consistent.

But even if you do everything right, you can’t entirely control a brand. You can only guide and influence it. I once read that brands are like sponges. They absorb perceptions like a sponge soaks up water. Every nuance about a product, service or company affects how it’s perceived and influences how people view it. Brands are defined by a company’s best product as well as its worst. They are shaped by good advertising as well as bad. They are influenced by the performance of your best employee and perhaps even more so by the deeds of poor ones.

But developing a strong, compelling and accurate story and using it as the basis for every marketing endeavor can help position a company ahead of its competitors.