marketing – Professional Survivalist

Give Marketers the Opportunity to Experiment and Succeed

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.

Open Work Environments Are Bad for Marketers

I understand the impulse that businesses have for open work environments. When workers know that they can be seen, it makes sense that they are less likely to screw around on the internet or their phones. Synergy is also easier when employees can simply turn around and get answers from coworkers rather than type to them via the internal chat system. However, when it comes to marketing departments in general and my work experience specifically, I can’t see that these benefits outweigh the cost in productivity and quality.

Almost every job I’ve worked after college has been in some kind of cubicle. Some cubicles wrapped around me with high walls while others were little more than desks with low barriers to separate the stations. During almost all of that time, I was performing some aspect of content creation for marketing purposes, like copywriting, blogging, video editing, designing, coding, etc. Looking back, I know that I was most productive when my environment was mostly closed off and I could work in relative peace. Open work environments always made marketing unnecessarily more difficult.

No matter how collaborative a project is, the various parts are always built individually. That means the copywriter, designer, editor, photographer, whomever all work by themselves to produce the deliverable that assembles into the final product. The worst thing a company can do is give these people visual or aural distractions. I know that when I’m trying to find the perfect combination of words that fit the limited space I’m trying to fill in an ad while still being persuasive and on-brand, the last thing I want is to hear other words. In fact, I want to make it as hard as possible for other people to disturb me in any way.

Designers and production artists probably feel the same way about open work environments. I see them struggle to block out light by building makeshift shades around their monitors to get accurate color reproduction. The best creative rooms I’ve seen have always been dimly lit and quiet so that artistic people can concentrate.

That’s not to say that I can’t be productive in an open work environment. My first exposure to it was at a mid-size manufacturing company where Marketing was situated right next to Sales. So, you had one department that needed quiet next to a department that was necessarily loud. To make matters worse, my specific station was directly beneath a loudspeaker, which the owner of the company used very frequently to summon people to his location around the property. When I think about those times, I’m impressed that I got any work done at all. My manager was always impressed with my work, so I certainly wasn’t turning in substandard copy, but I can only imagine how much more I could have accomplished with a better work environment.

There’s also something to be said about illnesses and privacy. I have watched flus and colds run rampant through offices one sneeze or cough at a time. One shrewd boss even sent me home when I was deathly ill so that I could work remotely, because she was worried that I would infect the office. I had just started with the company, and I didn’t think it would look good to call off on the first week. And while I don’t think that high-wall cubicles are a foolproof answer to stopping the spread of disease in the office, they certainly help.

In terms of privacy, not every call is personal. Sometimes conversations about office political maneuvers or other work-related delicate topics need to be had, and forcing workers to leave their desk to find private spaces just seems like wasted productivity. I sit next to the director for my business unit, and I often see him get up and walk for a phone conversation that is several paygrades above me. And this forces him to use his personal cell phone for business matters. Perhaps a high barrier wouldn’t prevent me from hearing his conversation, but at least it would prevent me from seeing his monitor or paperwork or anything else that would give me the context of the conversation.

I’m straying a little bit from the marketing topic, so allow me to wrap up with a relevant anecdote. In one company I worked for, the workspace was broken up into large rooms, so corner workstations – while still rare – weren’t impossible to get. As soon as one opened up, I put in a request to move there. In that space, where no one was walking around me and I could block out the faces of coworkers and their conversations, I was able to innovate for the company, creating a new marketing content process that would lift sales by 4% for every product that used my process. I created this process while making sure my regular duties were fulfilled, of course. It’s doubtful that I could have done the same in a more distracting environment.

After I left the company, I visited them a few months later to discover that large windows had been cut out of every internal wall, destroying the privacy that corner stations offered. I was told that it was a decision by the owner who reportedly said, “When people can hide, they don’t work.” I admit that there is some truth to that, but a low-value employee will always find ways to not work regardless of visibility. Conversely, a high-value employee may be prevented from going above and beyond their salaried duties in the same environment.

So, companies need to decide what goal they want to achieve: encourage workers who are actively working against the company’s interest or encourage workers who are creating new opportunities for the company’s success. Once that’s decided, then the choice of office environment should be a no-brainer.