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By Chris Blair

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.  Read more »

Filed under: Marketing, Thoughts & Musings on October 29th, 2010 | 16 Comments »

By Chris Blair

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.

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Filed under: Computers, Marketing, Online Marketing, Thoughts & Musings on October 16th, 2010 | No Comments »

By Chris Blair

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. Read more »

Filed under: Graphic Design, Video Production on September 16th, 2010 | No Comments »

By Chris Blair

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.

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Filed under: Graphic Design, Online Marketing, Web Video on August 30th, 2010 | No Comments »

By Chris Blair

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.

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Filed under: Computers, Production Techniques on August 22nd, 2010 | No Comments »