Three times in two weeks, I had clients call with requests for the raw footage from earlier shoots I’d performed for them. In all three cases, they wanted me to send it to other production companies.
At the time, I felt compelled to say yes. Now, there’s a clause in our standard production contract that lets me tell them no. In the long run, it’s better to try and keep the rights to your footage.
(Photo by Rob_Rob2001.)
Way back when, the makers of Chivas Regal weren’t happy with their profit margin. In an act of desperation, they doubled the price of their whiskey without changing the formula in the slightest. Sales went up. Sales went up a whole lot.
I can’t even remember where I first heard this story, and it’s very likely apocryphal. But it’s possible to make clients happy by charging them more money — making them think they’re going to get charged an arm, a leg, and maybe a liver.
It should go without saying that whatever kind of publicity you’re putting out, it’s going to reflect back on your, your organization or your business.
But that’s what you want, right? The whole idea of advertising and PR is to make you look good. That door swings both ways, however. Putting out shoddy commercials, press releases or even malformed tweets makes you look bad.
And people remember the bad stuff a lot longer. They’re more likely to tell their friends about the bad stuff. People love sharing stories about bad stuff.
So take it personal. And invest a little bit of ego in it.
My son lulled me into a false sense of security. We got about four good months of his being the perfect two-year-old before the terrible twos started in earnest. And man, did they start. Every little routine daily activity was no longer routine — it was a battle of wills between us. He got mad. I got mad. His mother got mad.
Worst of all, it was affecting how we felt about our parenting. It’s hard to feel good about raising the youth of tomorrow when you feel overwhelmed, frustrated and utterly emotionally beaten.
Thanks to a little nugget of wisdom, though, things are better. Not perfect, mind you, but better. A lot better.
(Above: The original Rode VideoMic, with its problematic, but easily-replaceable rubber bands. Photo copyright Kei Izumi.)
I’ve used DSLRs to shoot video from the very beginning of my business, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that the built-in microphone on my Canon 5DII was awful. My solution came in the form of the original Rode VideoMic. It mounts directly on the hotshoe of the camera, gets perfectly usable directional sound, and came with a nifty shock mount that uses teeny-tiny little custom rubber bands to float the microphone in the air, away from any potential bangs and jostles.
But there was a problem. The little rubber bands break. They get old and squeak. I watched the supply that came with the camera dwindle smaller and smaller as they gradually broke, and this week at the very end of a shoot, disaster struck — four of ’em decided to break within about five minutes of each other.
My glorious little mic no longer floated on air. But I found a fast, easy fix that (so far at least) is working wonderfully.
Local commercials are a lot of things, but mostly they’re bad. Go to any small-to-medium TV market in America, and you’ll find wooden acting, awful scripts, grade Z production values and a complete lack of self-awareness in local TV spots.
But deep down, they’ve got heart. There’s an earnestness there that can’t be matched by the slickest of Madison Avenue agencies. Local commercials aren’t just people talking to you — they are you. They’re made by your friends, your neighbors, and other folks you run into every single day.
That’s one of the reasons that I fell in love with producing TV spots in a small Southeastern town, and why I continue to do it today. I’m helping connect businesses directly with their customers, with a level of personal contact that was strangely missing from the national spots I worked on.
Along the way, I’ve learned a few things about how to make an effective, cost-conscious commercial. Your local commercial doesn’t have to suck.
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