Schreiner's Media Landscape

LinkedIn has emerged as the way to not only look for a new job but, maybe more signficantly, allow employers to find you. Now, they’re making LinkedIn for job-finding even more attractive. The LinkedIn blog reports that today, they’ll start enabling English-speaking members to add video, images, PDFs, and other visual elements to their profiles. I’ve posted an example above.

I just checked and my profile hasn’t been enabled yet. But you can bet as soon as it is, I’ll be adding videos ASAP. This also means a great opportunity for musicians, voice-over artists, actors, and others to post audio and writing samples, and other visuals and audibles. If this is something you’d like to do with your LinkedIn site, contact me right now and we can start planning a strategy!

Lots of things are entertaining to watch but you wouldn’t want to actually do them. Skydiving, football, and being on a reality show, for examples. I’m not surprised that fewer and fewer people cook, given the convenience and quality of processed and prepared foods, and how little time people seem to have these days. However I am rather shocked that they enjoy watching it.

Cooking shows and now cooking videos continue to grow in popularity even as we go to the kitchen only when we need ice. This phenomenon is a small but significant portion of New York Times cooking writer Michael Pollan’s new book “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”. Full disclosure: I’m perfectly capable of cooking. But I now focus my limited skills to Sunday morning brunch. My wife is an excellent cook, probably due to her degree in chemical engineering.

I’m not a fan of cooking shows or videos as entertainment because they’re fairly predictable and present a rather short “menu” of available angles and things to shoot. Their true value are as demonstrations or recipe ideas: an area where video is far more useful and interesting to me, and apparently many others, than reading Betty Crocker, Fanny Farmer, or all those other fictitious cook/authors.

I am, however, a big fan of shooting video of food and watching food movies like “Big Night”, “Chocolat”, and probably the greatest food film of all time, “Babette’s Feast”. But that’s because the cinematography required to capture the nuances of food is so fine, close, and the lighting needs to be so exact, it makes them great movies for film, not just food, lovers. The stories are usually pretty good too but secondary to the imagery.

Either way, this all bodes well for the video industry. Whether you like cooking, eating, or just watching. Remember, watching food has zero calories.

I’m writing this post on my Samsung Galaxy S3 which is tough because my fingers are too big and clumsy for the tiny keyboards on any smartphone. But I’m doing it this way because I think the texting and other online writing revivals are ultimately good- as long as you’re not doing it behind the wheel.

Writing is also critically important to promoting video online. I take the headlines I write describing my videos in blog posts and elsewhere very seriously. They can make the difference between being viral or invisible. But I have to quit now because this miniature keyboard has given me hand cramps. Ouch.

My work this week on an audition video for NBC’s “The Biggest Loser” has me thinking about the causes and solutions of America’s obesity crisis. With more than 40% of the country’s adult population obese, it affects everything from the health care industry to jet, car, and building design. It’s easy to blame industry, parents, genetics, mass media, “the government”, “The Man”, and the usual suspects. Knowledge about how important nutrition and exercise appear to be the easy solution. Sadly, that’s not what’s happening. But thanks to shows like “The Biggest Loser”, and the book I write about here, at least we’re talking about it.

In “Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity”, author Emily Matchar attempts to debunk accusations that feminism is a major reason people are fatter. In this excerpt from a Salon article, she writes:

As should be obvious to anyone who’s peeked at a cookbook from the late 1940s or early 1950s that promotes ingredients like sliced hot dogs and canned tomato soup, we’ve been eating processed crap since long before feminism. Yet the idea of the feminist abandoning her children to TV dinners while she rushes off to a consciousness-raising group is unshakable.

The rise of convenience food has to do with market forces, not feminism. After World War II, food companies began unloading packaged food products developed for wartime use on the domestic market: frozen fish fillets, powdered coffee, tinned spinach. These foods were aggressively marketed as wholesome and modern, since housewives were initially suspicious of products like ham that came in a can. But lots of women, it turns out, were simply not so fond of cooking. The twentieth century’s two most popular pro-convenience-foods cookbooks, Peg Bracken’s cheeky 1960 “The I Hate to Cook Book,” with its recipes like Skid Road Stroganoff (“Add the flour, salt, paprika, and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink”), and Poppy Cannon’s 1951 “The Can-Opener Cookbook” were hits long before second-wave feminism was so much as a gleam in Betty Friedan’s eye. So why does Betty get blamed?

Matchar’s response is as simplistic as the accusation. Certainly, women being liberated from the kitchen has contributed to obesity. Eating habits are fostered when we are children and, given the exploding number of obese kids, parents- Mom and Dad (if he’s still around)- have to be held responsible (you’d think they’d want to be).

As my work with “Charise”, the name I’ve given my Biggest Loser applicant, has shown me, the causes of and contributors to eating disorders including obesity are many but well-identified. Like most problems, the major obstacle is not identification but taking action. Critics say “The Biggest Loser” is exploitative, manipulative, and even rigged. I consider it just one of the many possible solutions to a problem with many causes. At least NBC is doing something while others, and many obese people themselves, believe simply standing still will make the fat and the crisis go away.

Iconic imagery is one of the keys to viral video, advertising impact, propaganda, and great films. No one knows this more than Disney and no image is more iconic than the princess. Washington Post has a fascinating article today about what they dub the “princess-industrial complex” and how it dominates the dreams and wishes of little girls and boys regardless of economic or social status.

While the WP article focuses on actors performing at children’s birthday parties (picture by WP), it imparts valuable information about how Disney, more than anyone else, created the imagery that compels young and old to don tiaras and wield magic wands. There’s obviously a component in the fantasy that transcends the pure image- Cinderella leaping literally from rags to riches in one night is only one. This storyline permeates American culture in the form of reality shows and lottery frenzies.

But it’s the image that’s showing up a birthday parties, flying off toy store shelves, burning out DVD players, and inspiring millions of pilgrimages to Anaheim and Orlando each year. Disney Princesses is a 26,000 product line that earns $4 billion a year. If you want your image to be immortal, it’s a lesson for all of us. Hitch your dream to pumpkin coach and  hang on for the ride.

WSJ Illustration by Asaf Hanuka

Ask anyone working in TV who isn’t kidding themselves and they’ll tell you how terrible it is: the pay, working conditions, quality of programming, obsession with violence, sex, and “being cool”. The same stuff they complained about when I was in it. Where John Jurgensen of the Wall Street Journal got the impression that now is the “golden age of television”, as he writes in his WSJ column today, is perplexing and inaccurate. He never mentions why in his article and apparently just assumes, based on his observation that TV is all anyone wants to talk about these days:

Everywhere you go it seems as if all anyone wants to talk about is TV. Watching the boob tube used to be the couch potato’s hobby, hardly a subject to trot out over cocktails. Now, that stigma has vanished, and a few knowing remarks about “House of Cards” can confer gravitas. Ever since fictional mob boss Tony Soprano had an existential crisis over the ducks in his swimming pool in 1999, viewers have been feasting on a growing bounty of high-quality dramas.

Did Jurgensen just return to Earth after moving to Mars in the 19th century? Fact is, TV is becoming less popular and doing so for about twenty years. Ratings for all television shows except live sports are dramatically lower than thirty years ago and still seeking bottom. Revenues for TV are dropping commensurately as more advertisers spend more of their time and money on the Internet. Ironically, television executives are turning to the Internet as a new outlet for their products- to the point where video now takes up nearly 75% of the bandwidth the Internet has.

Jurgensen’s complaint about people talking unusually too much about TV is not only old, it’s a distortion. People have always liked TV since it started in the 1940s. Americans in particular have been talking about it for seventy years. He’s right that a lot of it is really good and a lot really bad. Kind of like- anything, huh? If the Wall Street Journal is really about business, Jurgensen would better spend his efforts writing about how wonderful it is that people are talking about TV at all. It sure could use the publicity.

(Note: I’ve changed the names and location to protect privacy)

When Charise called me after finding my website, I thought she’d want me to make a video of her wedding or kid’s recital or the usual kind of job people like her want. “I want to be on ‘The Biggest Loser’”, she said. That was very different. I’m familiar with NBC’s show where contestants try to win by losing the most weight. It’s my wife’s favorite show. While I’m not nearly as enthusiastic, I’ll admit I can’t think of too many TV shows that actually help people, garner decent ratings (it’s NBC’s top-rated show at #35 on Nielsen), and make the network a bunch of money at a time when they’re seriously hurting (worst viewership of the major networks). We talked money and I took the job.

Charise met me at the door. For someone who’s obese (5’2″, 215 lbs.), she’s energetic, outgoing, pretty, and seemingly happy. Her husband, Justin, was also there though “he works all the time while I stay home and home-school” her three kids, all under the age of seven. I sit them down on the couch for the interview that. That’s when it gets interesting.

I was trying to ease up to the ugly childhood, horrifying teenage years, and disappointing marriage stories that not only produce eating disorders but memorable reality show performances. But Charise wasted no time. In about thirty seconds, she had recounted her meth-addict mother who “shut her up with food” then abandoned Charise when she was eleven. She lived with her alcoholic uncle and dying grandmother then was befriended in junior high by another girl in a similarly awful home life. They were BFFs until Charise’s friend died of cancer shortly after they graduated from high school.

Charise met Justin, they married, and in no time had three kids. While it seems idyllic (it did to Charise), she soon found herself stressed-out, depressed, and as she did when she was young, eating to soothe herself. Justin, who’s actually a fit, healthy, construction contractor, said he didn’t want to tell Charise to change her situation because it would just “put more pressure on her”. The difference in their eating habits was as dramatic as that of a parakeet and a T-Rex.

“The Biggest Loser” audition instructions say to show the applicant’s self-destructive eating habits. This sounds akin to asking someone who’s suicidal to show us their gun. But Charise was happy to share her favorite and most “disgusting” eating habit: emptying an entire package of Double Stuff Oreo cookies into a big bowl, pouring milk on them, and eating them like cereal. She was right. I almost gagged. I may never eat another Oreo.

While that was heartbreaking enough, there was also the obligatory shot of Charise trying on her old high school dance and cheerleading outfits. It’s at this point I start thinking this is a terrible, exploitative sideshow with real victims dancing like trained chimps. But Charise wants to do it. She wants to be on the show. So she does it. We’ve just transitioned from disgusting to pathetic.

By the time it was over, I think I was more emotionally drained than Charise. I sure wasn’t hungry. I’m sitting down to edit the piece now so she can take it to the casting call here in Salt Lake next week. I really want her to get on the show. But I’m less afraid of her not making it than I am of what’s going to happen if she doesn’t (a very big likelihood). The promise of institutional intervention i.e. church, hospitals, schools is attractive. But if you don’t have the strength to change your own life, can a network TV show do it? I hope Charise finds out. Soon.

I visit my clients’ websites regularly to check the number of hits, views, pageviews, sessions, and other indications of customer interest. One thing I noticed on one customer’s site was that the first videos I did for them generated far less activity than the ones after that, and the ones after that, etc. Some became instantly popular, others were slow. I wasn’t sure why, but now we have at least an idea.

The online video marketing firm Unruly, from this article in ReelSEO,  releases statistics showing the life cycle of a viral video. While not all videos are designed to “go viral”, these numbers are an indication of how important immediate as well as enduring impact and relevance are to any video (maybe even TV commercials, signage, and other visual communication tools). Over the past seven years, Unruly tracked the most popular web videos and found, among other interesting tidbits:

• 10% of shares occur on day two
• 25% of shares occur in the first three days
• 50% of shares occur within the first three weeks
• 66% of shares occur in the first three months
• There are strong correlations between shares achieved in days one to three, days one through six and all-time shares.

To get an idea of the kind of videos we’re talking about, here’s a link to the Unruly Viral Video Chart which shows the rate of “social diffusion”: a fancy term for who’s hot and who’s not. Check it out then contact me to find out how to maximize not only your sudden impact but maintain it. To use the old Top 40 pop chart metaphor, we’ll make you a star, not just a one-hit wonder.

I have lots of my old documentaries and early videos on DVDs. Lots of people and businesses have tons of great material preserved the same way. While DVD video still looks great on a DVD player, you can’t just upload it to YouTube and share with the world. That’s because it’s in a file called “VOB” which has been a difficult, time-consuming, and often expensive process to convert to the .mp4, HTML5, and other new formats that are used by YouTube, Vimeo and other online services since streaming became the medium of choice over disc. That is, until now.

In Adobe CS6, the newest rendition, you can now just plop a DVD Video disc into your drive, open it, click and drag the VOB files onto your computer, import them into a timeline, and edit them like any other video. This is a massive change from recent years where you required a plug-in, and a lot of time and patience to update, dub, or otherwise use or change what was on the DVD.

The video here is one I shot on an old standard definition, DV tape camera ten years ago. It was an audition for the NBC show “The Apprentice” (hard to believe it’s been on that long). If your business wants to use DVD video in a new project, or update an existing DVD video with new material, contact ProBusiness Video now to find out how fast, easy, affordable the process is. FYI: I can’t get rid of the mullet but I might be able to give you sideburns.