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.
The Art of Living Dangerously
April 24, 2008
Let’s assume you’re about about to make a film. (Maybe you are and that’s why you’re here, maybe you’re here because you were looking for advice on keeping chickens and you were momentarily distracted and took a wrong turning at google; whichever it is, now you’re here, stay and join in the hypothesising!)
So you’re about to make a film, how do you approach it? Some people come from the let’s get our CEO on screen telling us all how things are. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially if you have a really charismatic CEO, but should that be the limit of your boldness.
Often w
e think we come up with really creative, clever ideas, only for clients to get nervous, or think they won’t get the right message across in the right tone to their target audience. But often being bold can pay dividends. When Scottish Water agreed to our suggestion to get George Wylie, the elderly Glaswegian artist and a man of definite views, to present a documentary about the new Glasgow Water Treatment Works at Milngavie, they were taking a risk. But by doing so they brought a real sense of insight and passion to the finished film, and it gave the programme a certain something it would not have got with a ‘televison presenter’.
When the Ardbeg Distillery was brought by Glenmorangie a
nd re-opened in 1997, they wanted to create a film that celebrated the fact. Originally they wanted the film to focus on the distillery itself, and interviews with distillery workers and managers. But the distillery had been so important to the community, and it’s re-opening such a rebirth for that part of Islay, that we persuaded them that a film told from the point of view of the community would be more powerful. The finished film used a soundtrack recorded live in a pub during the actual shoot, and was based around the thoughts of those people who had lived through the years of the distillery’s closure.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There are lots of companies doing amazing things with film and video, animation and graphics, and often the more you open up to what is possible, the more you can get out of the film you are creating!
