I’m sometimes baffled at the mentality of organizations towards marketing. Internal marketing departments seem to face intense scrutiny for their marketing activities, tying every penny of spend to ROI, but as soon as the decision to work with an agency is made, all sense of value goes out the window. I once watched an agency pitch my company a short animated explainer video with crazy elements like ninjas jumping out of bushes. Keep in mind that I was working for a tech company at the time. At the end of the pitch, the agency quoted us $25,000. Surprisingly, my company was about to greenlight the spend when the vendor we were creating the video for decided to go in a different direction. What I don’t understand is why organizations don’t give their internal marketing teams a chance to get creative with existing resources before paying inflated agency fees.
Picking Up Skills of Necessity
Before working at Ingram Micro, I had zero video production or video editing skills. One day, leading up to a big annual tradeshow, my manager at Ingram Micro offhandedly remarked that a video would go a long way to making our department stand out. I told her that I had a friend who had video production skills and who owed me a favor. I storyboarded my idea and purchased a few stock footage clips and music and gave my friend the assets. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the finished product back until essentially the day of the tradeshow. So, I didn’t realize until it was too late that the clips all ran too quickly in the final edit, and viewers wouldn’t be able to read the text because those clips played too fast.
As someone with zero video editing skills and no professional video editing software, I was in a bind because my manager was counting on presenting this asset. Luckily for me, I had Camtasia installed on my laptop, which is a relatively light video editing software that seems geared for capturing PowerPoint presentations. Nevertheless, if it edited video, I thought, then it may just be the savior to get me out of this jam.
I plugged the final edit my friend made for me into Camtasia and began teaching myself how to use it. After poking around for a few minutes, adjusting this and tweaking that, I finally had the video that could be presented without issue. It became a hit. Not only that, but the director for my department used it as the opening for all of his presentations and recommended it as an ice breaker for all sales associates when speaking with business partners.
And that’s how I became the video guy.
Take Advantage of Internal Skills
Now that my department had video production abilities, such as they were, requests for more videos started coming in. As I became more comfortable with what Camtasia offered, and since people above me were just glad to have videos, I had relative autonomy with how the videos were created. I began incorporating my own voiceover abilities into the videos.
Text will always have a place in a visual medium, but viewers will always appreciate a complete multimedia experience. And that means people want someone to talk to them. Fortunately for me – and the company by extension – I had live performance experience. Not only had I performed on stage for many years, but I also participated in speech competitions throughout my school years. I developed diction and projection, which supported how I wrote voiceovers. Now that I work with other writers who submit voiceover scripts, I can see how their lack of voiceover performance experience informs their writing. As I try to read their scripts aloud, I can tell that their lines were all crafted silently, because their word choice and sentence length both strain the human mouth and lungs.
All of that aside, I had become a one-man agency, at least as far as videos were concerned. As long as I could source appropriate clips, creating compelling videos was no longer a question of if, but how long it would take. Once again, this only worked if I had appropriate footage. Without camera equipment, lighting, locations, crew, or actors, I was limited with what I could actually produce.
Experimentation Within Limitation Can Yield Amazing Results
As another big tradeshow approached, I was tasked with creating another video. This time the subject was a little more esoteric: Deployment Services. Not only that, but the case study within the subject was relatively specific. Try as I might, I couldn’t find any clips that made sense. Once again, I was at an impasse. That’s when I thought the unthinkable: I would do a whiteboard video! I mean, why not? I had drawing ability and my limited video editing experience would allow me to speed up the footage. I could make this work!
After researching how to do a whiteboard video, I realized I couldn’t do one. The best ones out there require specific conditions to look good, like proper lighting. Still, I was determined. How could I bring my vision to life? I decided that instead of creating a whiteboard video I would create a whitepaper video. I would mount my cell phone on a tripod and aim it downward. For lighting, I could just use my torchiere lamps from my apartment living room. The rest of the video production would rely on my natural abilities. You can check out my setup here.
I think the video turned out great. Yes, it was a big risk. I had never done anything like this before, and it was a learning experience every step of the way. But this is exactly the kind of investment that organizations need to make internally. Give creative thinkers opportunity to fail small now so that they can succeed in big ways later.
During my movie review days, I’ve often remarked how some films and/or directors would have benefitted from more limitations. In some situations, having no boundaries leads to places people don’t expect (or want) to go. Furthermore, limitations force people to become their most creative. None of this is to say that creativity always equals something good or desirable. What creativity offers is experimentation. And experimentation necessarily means risking failure. But failure is just the elimination of an undesirable outcome.
And each eliminated undesirable outcome is one step closer to more consistent desirable outcomes in the future.