Cris: What do you think that a lot of marketing people are missing right now? Michael Hourigan of Shoeboxed: In terms of being a good marketer, especially for a tech company like Shoeboxed, the most important thing you can do is be a data-driven marketer. You'll get a lot of marketers who understand the theory and understand building brands, which is exactly what you need to be doing. But at the end of the day, you have to have quantifiable results of the ad campaigns you're running or the social media campaigns you're running. You have to have numbers to back it up. And even before you start them, you have to have projections and hypotheses of what you are looking to accomplish. I was visiting with a friend from college who I had not seen in 30 years. And the person said, “You're a lot more head strong and sassy than you used to be.” I said, “Well, raising two strong, independent girls and running a business will do that to you I guess.” - Marcia Cubitt of clients Essential Bodywear Cris: What's one of the more memorable projects you've worked on? Will Hardison of FanBase: We redesigned RCA Television's website. That was fun because that was a huge learning experience. RCA is located in America, but they have branches all over the world. So not only were we working with the American division, we were working with the French division, etc. I remember we were on a phone call and each representative from each brand around the world was on it looking at the home page we had designed. It was our first time working with a global brand that had brand standards, like how much white space had to be around the logo. With, say, Bill's electrician shop or Sally's bakery, they don't have that type of stuff. So you're kind of free to do whatever. But when you're working with RCA Televisions, they are like “No, it has to be an inch around every single time you use our logo." “What are some of the things you've learned in your years at Shoeboxed that was maybe not taught in school?”
Michael Hourigan of Shoeboxed: Almost everything. I studied marketing and advertising in college. The thing about school is it teaches you the higher level concepts of business but not the intricacies of everything – that is stuff you learn as you go. It's actually funny. One of the start-up terms is “fake it till you make it.” Work at it. Figure it out on your own. And then you finally get comfortable doing things and you learn things. And that's pretty universal across all things marketing, which is what I do. Whether that has been paid advertising, copywriting, blog posts, social media, customer outreach – just talking to customers about the product itself and how we can improve and add to it – that's all stuff you really just learn as you go. And it is quite a fun experience. "Event video is a big animal to tackle. Because you can't re-create that event. So if you are promising your client at a concert or a corporate function, “I'm going to film this, that, and the other,” and you don't get the best footage or you don't capture audio, you can't go back and recreate that concert. You can't go back and recreate that keynote presentation. That is why event video costs more. It is stressful and you can't go back and re-do it." - Will Hardison of Fanbase, LLC
Cris: You guys do a lot of video work. What are the mistakes most people make when it comes to video?
Will Hardison of Fanbase, LLC: First is lighting. You can have the nicest camera in the world, but if you don't have the lighting for the scene you want to shoot or for the interview you are taping, it's going to look terrible. Poor lighting becomes incredibly difficult when editing to produce a high quality final product. Second is sound. People buy a camera and think, “Cool. It's got a built in microphone.” And they just use that. Versus getting really nice lapel, wireless mics that are feeding into an audio recorder that sound really crisp and clean. The last thing you want for a video is to sound like you shot it in your bathroom, with that hollow, echoing sound. Because that just screams low budget, low quality. |
AuthorCris Cohen Archives
March 2021
Categories |