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Marketing guru David Meerman Scott has recently championed "business casual video" for its quick turnaround and low price tag.
This week, he writes on his blog about a new home-grown video and pushback from a video pro.
The project Scott describes is a video recording of a Radioheads concert created entirely by fans.
"Last week," he writes, "I spoke about this project to a professional cameraman. He was hostile the idea. He said the video would be shaky. That amateurs can’t do it right. He told me without a proper setup with booms and cranes it won’t look good. Last I checked, Radiohead was doing just fine thank you. And this project cost them nothing and gained more exposure for the band."
I'm a communicator who loves the strategic use of video. As such, I'm sympathetic to the hostile cameraman's viewpoint.
Please let me explain why.
By pointing to the few—and very few—examples of successful business casual video and pronouncing the idea a winner, Scott's unleashing a Frankenstein.
No question: business casual video is cheap and easy to produce.
The problem? It's cheap and easy to produce.
As a result, most business casual video is garbage. It isn't authentic. It's only sleep-inducing. Which leads me to ask...
Is It Real or is It Sominex?
I'm old enough to recall great TV ads that asked, "Is It Real or is It Memorex?" I'm also old enough to recall great TV ads for the sleep-aid Sominex. (Hell, I'm old enough to recall when Eisenhower was President. By the way, Ike was a Muslim.)
The vast majority of business casual videos fall on the opposite end of the advertising spectrum. They're cheesy TV.
That's because technology—in the hands of amateurs—cannot compensate for amatuerism.
Cheap technology, moreover, only encourages amateurism to spread, like a plague.
I'm afraid the marketing world is in for another five-year Dark Age similar to the second half of the 1980s (another era I'm old enough to recall).
That's when "desktop publishing" first appeared.
Desktop publishing placed a thousand typefaces into the hands of unschooled hordes and set back graphic design and visual communication 200 years.
Overnight, professional graphic designers were deemed "slow" and "expensive" and we found ourselves inundated by home-grown print ads, flyers, banners and brochures that looked like wanted posters from 1800.
In the long term, desktop publishing was a boon. But it took five years for graphic designers to seize the reins again and for corporate executives to say, "Enough of this crap!"
In the short term, desktop publishing was a beast unloosed upon the land.
Business casual video, I'm afraid, will repeat that history.
Want a window into some of the week's best blog posts?
Through her blog, "Mad Man" Marjorie Clayman provides a terrific new service called #30 Thursday.
Boomers will remember when their parents subscribed to Reader's Digest, the paperback book-size magazine that synopsized dozens of feature articles from other magazines and newspapers. People loved Reader's Digest because they trusted the taste of the editors who decided what to include every month. (The magazine is still subscribed to by 17 million people every month.)
With #30 Thursday, Marjorie is crafting the cyber version of Reader's Digest. Check it out.
Today I participated in a panel discussion about promoting tradeshow attendance at Association Marketing Day, a one-day conference sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association of Washington.
I was joined by three accomplished association marketers: Craig Blake, Nexus Direct; Margaret Core, Biotechnology Industry Organization; and Christine Maple, Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute. All are responsible for driving tradeshow attendance, which has declined in most cases since the economic meltdown in 2008.
When the mic was handed to me, I used the opportunity to remind conferees how essential branding remains to any effort to expand the audiences for tradeshows.
It might seem nuts to proclaim to a gathering of marketers that "branding matters."
But, from what I observe, few tradeshows have a skillfully wrought identity.
That's because most tradeshow executives rise to their positions via the ranks of show operations, which makes them exceptional logisticians, but often lousy marketers.
Most, as a consequence, close their eyes to branding and merely shower prospects with uninspired announcements of dates, locations and the "hundreds of companies" and "thousands of new products" to be found on the floor.
But branding—knowing your audience’s catch factor and letting them know you know—is crucial to increasing tradeshow attendance in today's Web-centric business environment.
You must brand to expand. There's no way around it.
"Social media scientist" Dan Zarrella has done some interesting work to help dispel the notion that social proof is the be-all and end-all
persuader.
Whether it is or isn't, social proof is entirely overrated, if you set aside worries about Web 2.0.
Here are five arguments against the wisdom of social proof, drawn from history:
- In 2008, the citizens of Riviera Beach, Florida, approved a referendum that outlawed the wearing of saggy pants in public. The vote in favor was overwhelming. That same year, a local judge ruled the law unconstitutional.
- In 1941, the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane for Best Picture of the Year. Today, Citizen Kane is generally considered the greatest film ever made by an American.
- In 1825, the accepted remedy for nearly every ailment in America was mercury, which is poisonous. For years, tourists from abroad returned home to report that all Americans were lazy and walked funny.
- In 1636, speculation in tulip bulbs by the Dutch drove the price of rare bulbs to a figure equalling six times the average worker's yearly wage. Today, a tulip bulb retails for about 70 cents.
- In 33, a crowd in Jerusalem chose to commute the death sentence of the thief Barabbas over that of Jesus Christ. You know the rest of the story.
Accepting society's blessing may be no blessing at all. Crowds can be nitwitted.
It's often better to blaze your own path, even though it's hard work. As Nietzsche said, "The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe."
Business executives who champion predatory
practices are, in general, deplorable. The ones who operate on the belief that "misfortune is the mother of opportunity" are odious.
In my book, executives who extract money from hapless customers by exploiting their misfortune deserve nothing but scorn.
And I don't have contempt just for greedy funeral parlor owners or retailers who run check-cashing stores in disadvantaged neighborhoods. I have it for the leaders of many purported "world-class" companies, Fortune 1000 firms that rountinely reap windfall profits by imposing customer "penalties."
As a consumer, you know who they are. If not, you know the corporations they run. Most of the major airlines, banks, health insurance companies, credit card companies and phone companies.
Of course, any business leader who's halfway smart would weigh the short-term gains won by penalizing loyal customers against the pain inflicted on them and the long-term hatred that inevitably results.
But these executives aren't smart. They're merely treacherous.
Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell (the most vicious of all) was the final repository for the treacherous: men and women who, in Dante's eyes, had betrayed their communities. Condemned to the Ninth Circle, the treacherous don't "burn in Hell," contrary to the popular expression, but are encased in ice for all eternity.
Pack your Gucci parkas, ladies and gentlemen.
