Two products, directly competing with each other. iPhone 4 and Droid X. How are they advertised?
Both have ads with no voice over, simple scripts, and no extensive feature lists. But they couldn't be more different.
The iPhone 4 has one :60 ad that focuses on one feature of the phone, the new FaceTime feature. It shows three or four different scenes of people interacting via video-calling. The ad is clearly meant to strike right at your heart - you see a girl on graduation day talking to her grandparents, a woman showing her military spouse their baby via an ultrasound, and a couple who are speaking sign language to each other.
The ad is less about the phone and more about how the phone connects people in a revolutionary way.
Then you have the Droid X ad. The ad is a static, extreme close-up shot of an eye that is blinking as screens are reflected in the pupil. Then the pupil turns into a machine eye of some sort. Then we are told that Droid Does.
Well, Droid, based on your ad, the Droid turns you into a machine. It sounds like a great phone for the Terminator. However, if you aren't the terminator, well, I guess it's just a fancy phone aimed at people who want to be machines. Or wait, there's not even anything in the ad to suggest that the product is a phone. Nor is there any answer to what exactly it is that the Droid does.
Obviously someone somewhere thought this is a great ad to sell Droids, but I can't imagine that many people who are buying phones are finding an extreme close up of a machine eye a compelling reason to get a Droid. Yet the Apple ad, which cuts straight to your emotions, doesn't claim to "Do" anything, it just shows us how the device connects us and lets us draw the conclusion that the iPhone does.
I love using Apple Compressor. It is my go to compression tool of choice. I've found that I have better success with it than Adobe Media Encoder or MPEG Streamclip, and once I've found something that works, I stick with it. One compressors strengths and weaknesses is its ability to batch encode. I love that I can drag a folder of files into Compressor and then with one more click, apply a preset to all of the files. If I'm ok with the files compressing to their source folder, I click Submit, choose my cluster, and I'm ready to go. Very fast.
But a problem I run into a lot is that I want the files to be compressed to a different folder. Compressor makes it easy to drag a compression preset to a bunch of files at once, but new compression destinations must be individually dragged to each file. This can be a pain in the butt.
There's a very easy work around though. Say I have a batch of raw files I want to transcode.
I could drag a preset straight to all the files and then individually drag the destinations. Or, I can create a custom preset and make it very easy on myself. Here's how.
First, select the preset that you intend to use for this batch and click the duplicate button (shown below). You can keep the default name or rename it to suit your purposes.
Second, create a new local Destination that points to wherever you wish for your compressed files to end up.
Make sure to save the destination after you've named it.
Now, go back to the duplicated Preset and go to the last tab where you'll see a drop down for Default Destination. Change that to select the Destination you just created.
Save your new preset, and apply it to all your files. Bingo - from now on you have a Preset that automatically points to a specific folder, meaning you can set up new batches really quickly.
Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 12:01PM | Winston Hearn
We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. The table each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, yet Apple’s revenue last year was $40 billion. I think any other company that could say that is an oil company.
Every time I start a project, I chase down dozens of ideas that turn out to be crap. I'm willing to let those go. But I love when I've started projects with a great idea, only to have to scratch it half way through because I've found a better way to approach it. That's fulfilling.
But it's most fulfilling when a client or boss agrees that the new direction is better, and gives me the time to develop it. They've helped me stay focused on improvement, and I'm appreciative of that.
Perhaps you've seen this video. Four guys, eight treadmills, and a choreographed dance, filmed in one take on an unprofessional set and camera. The video - OK Go's music video for their song "Here it Goes Again," went viral when it came out a few years ago and millions of people around the world saw it. Millions still see it, as you can go to YouTube right now, type in "Here it Goes Again" and play the video, adding one more view to the millions that it already has. That video went viral because people liked it and shared it. Back then, a video spread virally, or alternately, it went "viral."
Now, four years later, there are companies and services dedicated to producing viral videos. The idea has changed - "viral" is not something that happens but something that is engineered. Companies do not want a video produced, they want a "viral" video produced.
As a video producer, there is a part of me that understands this desire, but there is a larger part of me that hopes this is simply a phase of the internet. When OK Go crafted their "Here it Goes Again" video, they wanted as many people as possible to see it, sure, but the video also clearly reveals a desire to make a fun and unique video because they can. A music video is a marketing tool but it also is a natural extension of their vision of what they do as musicians. If you doubt this, look up some of their other videos. They have a style: quirky, one-take videos that prominently feature the four members of the band. Within that signature style, they take great freedom in remixing and varying the content with every single video.
There is nothing innately wrong with intending for a video you create to be seen by as many people as possible. In fact, no matter who you are - a large corporation creating a video for a big product you sell or a local company trying to raise awareness in your town or just a person with a passion about a topic - having people watch your video is a good thing. But having a video spread virally means that people find it worth watching and then worth sharing, and you have a lot more control in the making it worth watching than you do whether or not they share it.
If you start with the goal of creating a "viral" video, immediately you will be drawn towards quirky and goofy ideas. They are what we remember of all the viral videos that we've seen - a wedding party dancing down the aisle to a rap song, a kid who is high after the dentist, people catching sunglasses on their face, a blender that blends up iPhones. There is no doubt a place for these, but the videos that catch and take off are very rare. For every multi-million view video on YouTube there are dozens of others with only a few thousand views that have a funny concept but no actual content to speak of.
But for every one of those non-viral videos, there is a corollary somewhere of a company that took the time to value their message and craft a video that is worth watching. Those videos might not rack up millions of views on the internet, but they don't need to. Once released online, videos have a life of their own, and if people find that something is helpful or interesting or thought-provoking, they will begin to spread to just the people that need or want to see them. The video that is worth watching always has the potential to go viral, but because the end goal is not mass views but being compelling, success hangs not on the anonymous masses but on the effort you put into your video and the skill with which you craft the content, then getting the video into the hands of those people who are already listening to you. That's where social media comes in very handy, but that's a different topic for a different day.
OK Go gets this. They put a lot of work into making fun and cool videos, and if people watch them and share them, that's great. It's one measure of success. But the pride that they take in their videos as standalone projects is evident, which leads me to believe they would be ok if only their die-hard fans watched it. Having videos go viral starts with a willingness to make a video that is worth watching - and this means ignoring what the masses want and finding a way to say something new. A video that goes viral can be a great boon to you or your business. But a video that is found worth watching by your target audience can be worth just as much in the long run.
In coming posts, I'll share my observations on what makes a video worth watching.
This past week I started doing some research for a video I'm making specifically for this site. I started looking around into all the statistics available about online video watching and how much video effects your site rankings in Google. I found two things that were even more interesting than the facts and figures I was finding all over the place.
In June of 2009, half of the population of the US watched on average 7.6 hours of video online In the video I'm producing I'll break those numbers down even more to explain where I got them, but it's worth noting that most people do not watch long form videos online, they are watching YouTube length videos that are less than 4 minutes long - and lots of them. And more often than not, when people see something that interests them, they find a way to share it - via email, Facebook, Twitter, or a multitude of other methods.
A recent Study found that for the top 40 keywords online, a site without video has a 1 in 500,000 chance of being on the first page of Google results, while a site WITH video has a 1 in 11,000 chance That's because Google has started returning "blended" results of text, images, and video on certain searches. And what that same study found is that if you add tags and keywords to the text describing your video, you have even higher chances. As Bing and Yahoo incorporate blended results on their searches, staying ahead of the curve will only help you stay on top of the search engine game.
I found a lot of interesting statistics and I'll hopefully have a video with everything compiled online to be viewed soon. But if these statistics are making you think that video is something you need for your site, use the contact form to email me today. We'll get together soon and start dialoguing.
(EDIT: I wrote the numbers wrong in the second point, transposing the full amount of results returned for the actual chances of being on the front page. This is now rectified.)
Monday, June 28, 2010 at 3:01PM | 
