Laying an Egg - or, How we learned to love the Credit Crunch
October 7, 2008
If you are a follower of the stock market, it seems that every Monday at the moment is Gloomy Monday - they seem to have been getting progressively gloomier for sometime now. It’s not long before we’ll arrive at ‘It Can’t Get Much Worse Monday’, ’Edge of Despair Monday’, and finally ‘Totally Suicidal Monday’
It has been clear for some time now that the economy is suffering. Up to now people have been hoping it would remain in the financial sector, but it is rapidly making its way through to the real economy, and at the end of the day, that’s you and me, our companies and organisations. People are nervous of spending money, and when that happens one of the first things to be cut is spending on communications and advertising and marketing.
The thing is that often companies don’t want to cut back on their communications; they know that now is just when they need to speak to customers, clients, staff and stakeholders. But the budgets they have for those communications have got much smaller; they have to work more effectively and efficiently and achieve the same for less money.
So we in the chicken coop say bring it on. That’s what we love doing; finding new and innovative ways of communicating with an audience when budgets are tight. We have a host of ideas to get the most out of every single shilling you’ve squeezed out of your finance department, and would happily share those ideas with you. So call us.
Has HD hit a ‘Tipping Point’?
June 4, 2008
A ‘Tipping Point’ is reached when ”the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable” - or so said Malcolm Gladwell in his excellent book on the nature of tipping points. In his book he remarked on the shape taken by an epidemic, that it can reach a point when suddenly it spreads like wildfire, everyone catches it, and then just as quickly it can die out. He then took that shape and applied it to all sorts of situations in life. He used the ‘tipping point’ argument to explain how films with tiny budgets or books by unknown authors can suddenly can suddenly become world-wide hits based simply on a spreading word-of-mouth.
Although the dimming of the lights part of the analogy is probably not the case with HD TV, with the launch of freesat at the beginning of the month finally offering people the opportunity to realise the potential of those huge HD Ready TVs they all bought two Christmas’s ago, is this finally the tipping point for HD TV.
Certainly some large corporate have been producing films on HD for a while now, even though they have often only delivered it to staff and customers on Standard Definition, because the infrastructure to watch high definition pictures just hasn’t been widely available. That is certainly now changing. Blu-Ray DVDs are becoming more popular and it won’t be long before the internet can offer subscribers broadband that can deliver true HD pictures. Certainly within some companies their intranets are already working towards this.
This month we produced a number of short films shot on HD for a client who provides television and internet systems to hotels and who are about to launch a full HD TV delivery platform for hotel clients. Other clients want to shoot on HD to start building an HD library of footage for future projects. The momentum to HD is certainly growing and will accelerate.
The Democratic Primary and the Dark Arts
May 20, 2008
A bit of a break f
rom film this week. I have to say, I have developed an unnatural obsession with the US Presidential Elections, and have become an avid follower of every twist and turn in the race. It seems to me and everyone else - although not yet apparently Hillary Clinton herself - that the primary result is all but over, but the intricate manouverings taken by her campaign team over the past few weeks to subtly move the goalposts about what she needs to do to win have been masterful.
Boy can that lady fight. I honestly thought when she was at her victory rally in Indiana that she was going to jack it in, and the look on Bill’s face behind her only reinforced that feeling, but she hasn’t. Instead she has spent the intervening two weeks trying to persuade everyone, but especially the super delegates that she has really been the winner.
When she started this process and was favourite to wrap it up by Super Tuesday, she seemed to think the process was fine, but as it slowly dawned on her that she was losing on the pledged delegates c
ount, she started trying to play the electability card to get the super delegates behind her. She would be the only nominee to bring home the swing states, where she won big in the primaries. Finally she has tried to make it about winning the popular vote, including votes cast in a primary election where Obama wasn’t even on the ballot because it had been declared void by the Democratic Party. Hardly seems democratic does it?
I don’t know whether today’s primaries in Oregon and Kentucky will finally bring to an end this incredible contest, and it can surely only be a matter of time, but credit to her and her comms team for managing to get the media to engage with her changing ambitions for so long. That’s communication!
PS Is it just me, or am I really cynical? When Obama was in his hole over Jeremiah Wright, everyone expected the pastor to go on TV and make conciliatory remarks; well he didn’t. And don’t you think that made it easier for Obama. He could distance himself from this ‘radical’ pastor more easily and move on. It put the issue to bed for a lot of people. If Wright had actually apologised, the issue may have dragged on and on. Wright doesn’t seem like the sort of person that would bend his principles or position for anyone, but I just wonder if Wright spoke so forcefully on purpose, knowing that it might actually help out the presidential hopeful.
’The problem with communication … is the illusion that it has been accomplished.’
George Bernard Shaw said this, and what a wise old dude he was! We spend a fortune on communication. We print lovely glossy brochures, we make films, we host seminars, we cascade information through our organisations and then we assume that we have communicated, and more importantly we assume that our audience has heard us and understood what we wanted them to understand.
I had a friend who was organising a golf day for the local community charity. He carefull
y had lots of nice posters printed and then stuck them up in every single pub in his part of town. Result - not one person phoned up to take part. Why? Who knows? (Sorry there aren’t many answers this week, or even many opinions, just observations). Maybe being in a pub, people were too inebriated by the end of the night to remember they’d seen the poster. Maybe there wasn’t a single person in any of these establishments that liked golf, or maybe the poster (carefully drafted as it was) just didn’t convey the information he wanted it to in a way that made the people that saw it want to act.
Those of us who work in communication can sometimes get so wrapped up in the creative process that we forget to think fully about how those communications might be received. Communication is a two way process and if we forget our audience for even a minute then we aren’t doing our jobs properly. Film can help communication by presenting arguments simply and clearly, and engage with both sides of the argument, as Scottish Water did when building the Glasgow Water Treatment Works in Milngavie. Alternatively of course, as communicators we can all just be down-right bloody minded, and this is genius.
These days people communicate entirely differently with each other than they did even five years ago. Often we don’t even speak on the phone any more, we set up social engagements by text message and even then use a condensed form of langusge. People don’t want long-winded documents to read anymore. They don’t want long winding films, they want their communication short, to the point and entertaining, then they’ll listen.
I think however you decide to communicate, and clearly we believe that visual communications can play a hugely important part in any comms strategy, the most important thing is to communicate in a way that makes sure you are heard and more importantly understood and acted on.
