Schreiner's Media Landscape

“My bags are packed, I’m ready to go” goes the old John Denver song “Leavin’ On a Jet Plane”. Spring has traditionally been my busiest time since I started ProBusiness Video ten years ago this summer. But it’s in the the past five I’ve had the extraordinary opportunity to witness and document the transformation and resurgence of manufacturing by working for the world’s third largest maker of computer-aided-design computer-aided manufacturing (CADCAM) software, Delcam based in Birmingham UK. The changes have been incredible: for them, for me, and for the thousands of companies and workers who’ve joined this revolution and prospered for their foresight and hard work.

Every spring, I begin taking my gear all over the U.S. and Canada (last year I also went to England) making videos about the people and companies who use Delcam’s software to design and make stuff. I also make instructional, promotional and other videos for the company year-round. Today, I leave for Colorado where I’ll spend a few days in Colorado Springs and Denver. I love working with smart, dedicated folks who are part-artist, part-mechanic, and all business: mostly small businesses of fewer than 25 employees but some with several hundred.

These are the folks who make our cars, tools, gadgets, just about anything you can think of, and lot of stuff you’d never believe if you didn’t see it. They make our lives better and safer through their creativity, determination, and good, old-fashioned know-how. I particularly consider our customer testimonials not just marketing tools but tributes those leading the American and Canadian economies into a new era of prosperity. You don’t know who they are and may not care. But I hope you check out this video and any of the others on my YouTube channel to see not only how fascinating and important what they and Delcam do is, but how we can do that for you and your company too.

The movie trailer is a Hollywood genre that is, for lack of a better term, a tease on steroids. They are fun, almost irresistable, to watch (usually more fun than the actual film) and lots of fun to make (this video above is for a documentary I made). But while they’re good for promoting entertainment, they’re not looked upon favorably by viewers of TV or online news who are often hooked by tease and let down by the result: what we used to call in TV news “anticipointment”.

The word “tease” is commonly associated with TV, and online its derogatory equivalent is “clickbait”. But the controversy over clickbait is basically the same argument over teases and trailers: they take lines and scenes out of context, hype them with often inflammatory words, images, music, and sound effects, and promise something they don’t deliver. Often, the program they promote doesn’t look like the one that actually exists.

Like TV commercials, trailers are good at catching a wandering viewer’s eye or a web surfer’s attention. But if you’re a business promoting yourself online, chances are someone’s found you through search and the video they’ve come to see on your site should tell your story as completely and accurately as possible, reward their patience, and satisfy their curiosity. Remember, they’re already on your site- you don’t need to grab their attention with a commercial or trailer. If you do, they will be “anticipointed”.

If you have any more questions about the style of video that suits your business best, contact ProBusiness Video now!

One controversy among professional video makers is over user-generated content (above). You might know it better as that stuff people put up on YouTube showing themselves jumping off roofs, dressing the cat up as a martian, or various, other, sometimes funny, sometimes stupid efforts. But despite its failures, user-generated content has its place. And like the video here, it’s memorable even if for the “wrong” reasons.

Like still pictures, animation, painting, or anything really, user-generated content is a way to reach your audience if you know how to use it and, maybe more important, how much of it not to use. I have decades of experience teaching young TV news people how to shoot, edit, write, even perform in front of and behind a camera. Many of them have become very successful, not just in TV but in associated industries- like marketing- that they’ve since moved on to.

The most useful lesson is to give them the education and tools to operate the equipment correctly allowing them to let their imaginations run free without worrying about which button to push. If you’re looking for help to develop not just a user-generated content campaign, but even develop the users to generate it, contact me so we can talk about what ProBusiness Video can do for you!

There’s a new word for all the posting, uploading, emailing, and recording of every thing we

Saga, free of charge, figures out when you're traveling, on what roads, and how fast, and when you're at your destination.

do every day: Lifelogging (the app pictured here is Saga). The reasons why we do it are as varied now as they have been since since a human first picked up a rock and scratched it on a cave wall. But now, even with all the smartphones, the cloud, and other methods of cheap and massive storage for our mementos, there’s an app for that. In fact, there are lots of apps being made just for that.

Mike Elgan of Computerworld has put together a list of the major lifelogging apps with excellent analyses of how each one works. While they seem redundant with Facebook, Google+ and all the social networks doing an excellent job of not only encouraging us to lifelog but accomodating it, these new apps organize it in a way where you can choose to share it or keep it private:

The end product of Saga is a diary, or what the company calls a “beautiful log” — a record of everywhere you went and everything you did. It shows your past in a scrolling series of summaries (with tiny thumbnails of your pictures), so you can easily go back in time for total recall — literally photographic memory — about your life.

The major question is “do I really want to remember all those things?” For me, it might only be a sad reminder of how uneventful my life actually is and the most exciting thing I did all day was download an app to record it.

When TV controlled the cameras, tape, and other technological tools, they decided what was interesting to all of us. And it was interesting because that’s all there was. Digitization made cameras and everything else affordable and easy to operate for everyone. In a short time, people decided what was interesting and made it ourselves. No one in TV suffered more in this twist of fate than news departments. The proof of this is the continually deteriorating quality of their product, layoffs, and evaporating budgets.

But at the same time, many news organizations have found that the pervasiveness and popularity of video presents opportunities. Newspapers like the New York Times have been making videos for their websites for years. And now, their new head of production is supervising an expansion of their video services. Rebecca Howard says in this Nieman Journalism Lab story:

We also think that when people can experience our excellent video, it actually has the opportunity to serve as a beacon and get people to come back to the site — even potentially become a subscriber. We have a lot of inventory demand right now from advertisers and we’re trying to find ways to satisfy that demand, and increasing our streams is really important. So that was also a part of that decision.

Is more competition for viewers, stories, and advertising dollars, going to help TV news or push more newsrooms into extinction? Is this affirmation for aspiring video makers that TV news can be the helpful, informative, and viable community service it once was? If nothing else, it’s confirmation that one of the most powerful and respected news organizations in the world considers video a crucial element of their media portfolio. And this should serve as excellent reference for any business or organization trying to get their message out.

A customer of mine just released a major news software that designs products and programs robots to make them. Several major magazines run stories about wearable robotics that are helping developmentally-disabled humans become Iron Man. The video here is just one of many robotic animals now demonstrating how a robot can be made to do just about anything, whether it’s useful or not.

I’m all for robotics. I hate to see them replace humans on jobs but nearly all the jobs robots are called upon to do are ones that are dangerous for humans and can result in injury, disability, and death. It should be a wake-up reminder to all of us that education is the key to getting or even creating a good job and that, without it, we can all be replaced by someone smarter, younger, or increasingly likely, one that never pays taxes or takes a lunch break.

This is not mine. But I can see myself on it.

It takes more than a camera, a computer, and an idea or two to make a successful video business. It takes energy, flexibility, and durability. In other words, good physical condition. I’m about to enter one of the busiest times in the ten-year history of my business. I’ll amble around airports, rally in rental cars, breeze through buildings, hauling the same weight as a family of four’s luggage (often feeling like an actual family of four), and moving from Paris to San Diego faster than me thirty years younger (ask my former co-workers in TV news- I was born on the road).

Like any good story, business has antagonists, protagonists, enemies, friends, spies, and similar aggressor and victim-sounding characters. The difference with the online video phenomenon is that after almost 15 years of legitimacy, we’re finally seeing who the major combatants are, at least on a corporate level: advocates of “user-generated content” vs. big advertisers and production companies. In short, a philosophical struggle between bottom-up and top-down theories.

On the user side, the Google army, their video battalion YouTube, other social networks and mostly web-based companies. For the top-down, Disney, Sony, and other gigantic Hollywood content makers. Their struggle is reported by New York Times following a major annual conference called the Digital Content New Upfronts (you need a new name, folks). Essentially, the Googlites advocate, as Robert Kyncl, global head of content at YouTube, says “engaged fan communities” galvanized by fan-made LOL cat videos, other home-grown content, and social networks encouraging and accommodating video exchange including stuff made by their “enemies”, the Hollywood types. The video I posted above is an example.

Naturally, the big brands and corporate producers are protecting their domain. Jimmy Pitaro, co-president of the Disney Interactive division of the Walt Disney Company, said “consumers are inundated with low-quality experiences, unfulfilling for them and for brands trying to reach them.” Certainly, people are still going to movies, watching TV, and playing video games but in shrinking numbers. Meanwhile, YouTube’s views continue to explode and they’re reportedly starting a subscription service. The numbers and the revenue flow support the user-generated theory, not the corporate producers’.

As usual, the truth seems to be somewhere in the middle. User-generated content direct but rife with quality, legal, and other inconsistencies, while corporate products are unimaginative, slow-to-market, and often carry larger, subtle political or philosophical messages instead of just getting to the point or the product. My answer is that any small marketing campaign with a limited budget needs to concentrate first on its target audience which is best done online. Any large campaign with deep resources still needs to make online or user-generated content part of a balanced strategy with TV, digital signage, video games, or other traditional and still-popular corporate-based outlets.

Sadly, from the article in NYT, both sides are not negotiating peace but girding for war. Whose side am I on, you ask? Yours. Want to know how I can help you avoid getting caught in the crossfire? Contact me anytime.

I.B.M. claims to have made the “world’s smallest stop-motion film”: “A Boy and His Atom” (above). While this appears to be a huge albeit microscopic development, other efforts to do the same thing have been going on for years. I made a video for the University of Utah’s department of research back in 2011 about a group of staff and students making similar microscopic videos: what they call “MEM art” (below). While all this seems like a whimsical pursuit, the applications of this kind of research are many and significant. Paraphrasing one I.B.M. researcher: “Right now you can store a (Hollywood) film on your phone. Imagine it storing every movie ever made.”

Nothing makes me happier than seeing one of my clients succeed. That’s particularly true of Josh Hanagarne. Struggling his whole life with depression and Tourette’s Syndrome among other physical and mental challenges, his life’s story, “The World’s Strongest Librarian” has just been released by Penguin USA and is available everywhere. I shot the promotional video for the publisher last year (above).

We shot it last fall at his home and Salt Lake Public Library where he works. Josh is one of the biggest, strongest, imposing, yet most gentle, humble, and funny people you’ll ever meet. It was a pleasure working with him and he did a fantastic job for someone who’d never spent much time in front of a camera. The only difficulty was I had to be careful how I set up my lights because bright light can trigger the tics and seizures characterizing Tourette’s.

Josh’s book has gotten good reviews including this one by The New Yorker magazine. Here’s an excerpt where Josh describes what living with Tourette’s is like:

While it was true that I could no longer scream, and being in public was easier, I finally had verification of something I had long suspected—there was a daily intensity quota that had to be met. I had to expend a certain amount of energy on tics each day. It could be meted out over many small tics, or a few dozen huge ones. So even though I wasn’t screaming, my body was still trying: it just couldn’t make the noise. If I couldn’t be noisy, I could still be an abomination of motor skills gone amok.

You can follow his experiences as a soon-to-be-famous writer on his blog. I haven’t read the book yet but I’m sure it will be a hit here in his home state of Utah and among others who appreciate inspiring true stories and Josh’s style of self-deprecating humor. It inspires me knowing I was able to help someone achieve a big dream. Thanks, Josh. You deserve it.