Boy is this ever a fun—if uncommon—topic. So many times, in these articles, we’ve addressed ways to deliver the most bang for the buck... and often, for the nickel. 
 
That’s not always the case. Every once in a while, we’ll work on an assignment for a client with incredibly deep pockets. Then the calculus changes. Not the creative. But the approach to the creative. 
 
Think of it this way. If you see some low-budget movie with no-name actors in it, everything is cheap. The sets. The music. Even the hair and makeup look bad. 
 
Now make that same movie, except with an A-lister. Would the music sound tinny? No way. Would the sets look cheap? Nope. Would one hair on that actor’s head be out of place, in even one shot? Never. 
 
But these two hypothetical movies are shot from the exact same script. 
 
Or are they? 
 
Playing Monopoly
 
More times than we can count, we’ve used the word “stock” in deliverables we create: References to stock photos. Stock music. Stock illustrations. Canned material. 
 
Granted, that does pose some very real creative problems. How do you, for example, make your stuff stand out when you’re using the same ingredients as countless others? (We wrote a cool article on that very topic; check it out here.)
 
But for a recent assignment, the sky was the limit. Of course we’re under NDA so we’ll need to cloak the details in anonymity, but the client was a major U.S. enterprise. You know their name, even if you haven’t used their service. And you likely have used their service. 
 
So. We were tasked (by this enterprise’s ad agency, to be clear) with developing concepts for a creative campaign that would span all media. Think network television spots. Bus sides in major cities. Blanketed social media. Everything. 
 
In the broad scheme of things—and this is pretty typical in situations like this—the client’s big budget item wasn’t the creative, but the media buy. (Yes, our rates are quite reasonable here at Copel Communications!) Think of, for example, a Super Bowl spot. There’s no way the production budget comes anywhere near the price-tag for the air time. 
 
But we still had what felt like Monopoly money to play with. Imagine an unlimited production budget. What do you do? 
 
How do you spend it? 
 
It’s all in the scale 
 
We’ll single out one of the campaign concepts we’d submitted here, because it illustrates our point nicely. 
 
We wanted to show (imagine that this is a “pride” campaign, showing the world how great this company is) that this company makes people’s lives better. So we’d start with, say, a guy on the street. A woman in a grocery store. A cop on the beat. (Remember, we’re fudging reality here a tad, to maintain confidentiality.) 
 
And we could then show how each of these people’s lives were improved by Big Company. 
 
That’s fine. In fact, it’s nice. It’s intimate. You, the viewer, can easily connect and identify with all these people. 
 
But what if it’s bigger than that? What if Big Company is helping entire neighborhoods? How do you show that? 
 
Know how? You show it. You go big. You go aerial. You broaden the perspective—try that with stock footage—and have all these people coming together harmoniously. 
 
But it gets even bigger. (Yes, Big Company has global ambitions.) Big Company, it turns out, is helping the entire planet. It’s all part of the “E” in what’s commonly known as ESG, for Environmental, Social, and Governance, i.e., corporate social responsibility. 
 
So we scripted time-lapse special effects which depict the world’s wounds, healing. Changes in the oceans. The weather. All orchestrated (what the heck, call in the orchestra) to this very human-level narrative which began, mere seconds ago, at the street-and-grocery-store level.
 
That’s how you use a big budget. 
 
Stress-test it
 
Note the progression here. We started small on purpose. The reason for this was twofold: 1) It established the intimate, human connection. 2) It effectively “showed off” the big budget: The spot grows bigger and bigger and more audacious as it goes. That’s intentional. 
 
Imagine if we didn’t work that way. What if the spot started with the planets and stars and special effects? Then it doesn’t have anywhere to go. There’s no exciting revelation, no expansion. In a strange way, it would be small.
 
Here’s another stress test: Does the whole thing resonate with the client’s intent and vision? Put bluntly: You can’t bring in space ships and aliens if there’s no need for space ships and aliens. Everything must be justified. 
 
Overall, we’d say that lower-budget projects force you to be more, not less, creative. You have to do more with less; you can’t simply buy your way out of a problem. 
 
But big budgets, as you’ve seen, have their own special challenges. We couldn’t turn in a script for just-the-grocery-store-level perspective for this assignment; we’d be laughed out of the room. You need to make it appropriate for the assignment. And yes, even the budget. 
 
Not everything we work on is a multimillion-dollar project. Not that yours isn’t—but even if it isn’t, we’d be delighted to help. A creative challenge is a creative challenge, and we love rising to the occasion. Contact us today to get started. 

​Okay. We’ll admit that the title of this blog—“ SME-based articles for non-SME audiences”—is a mouthful. But it’s also a good, important topic when it comes to business development for your consultancy or professional-services firm. And it speaks to assignments we work on a lot, to our clients’ benefit. 
 
This story starts with a story. We were tasked with writing a highly technical blog article for a high-tech client. So far, so logical. 
 
But the intended audience was non-technical.
 
Aha. 
 
Who’s pulling the purse-strings?
 
Let’s keep one thing clear here: Our mission, at Copel Communications, is to help our clients make more money. Period. All of the deliverables we produce, whether they’re websites or video scripts or blog articles like the one we’re describing here, are designed to soften the beachhead of prospects, and ease them further down the funnel into buyers. 
 
Taking a customer-back approach to the challenge of this article, we asked our client: “Who is this aimed at?” More specifically, “Who would be buying what we’re selling?”
 
This is where it gets interesting. Our client makes high-tech equipment for use in a variety of scientific applications. And there are lab technicians who use this equipment. For them, a highly technical article would be appropriate, with no need for dumbing down any of the nerdy details. 
 
But these lab technicians, although they are users of the equipment, are not the buyers of the equipment. 
 
Oooh. Let’s repeat that: 
 
These lab technicians, although they are users of the equipment, are not the buyers of the equipment. 
 
And this is where the lessons of this story apply to what is likely a ton of scenarios for your business. 
 
Two different audiences
 
The lab technicians’ bosses certainly have technical know-how, given their career path up the corporate ladder. But they don’t need to read an article on the nuts-and-bolts of this technical equipment. They’d rather know the business case for buying one (which often involves replacing an aging or lesser version of the exact same thing). 
 
More importantly, a big, albeit secondary, chunk of the intended audience was relative newbies in the field: People just starting their careers who, despite their schooling, need to quickly get up to speed in the real world to get ahead. 
 
For those people, they’d be Googling topics of interest to learn more. And thus this article was seeded with the types of keywords they’d be searching on; think of it as a “101”-type intro article on the broad applications of this piece of equipment. 
 
Now, why would you want to educate this latter audience, if they’re not doing the purchasing? 
 
Let’s make this easier by re-phrasing the above question: 
 
Why would you want to educate this latter audience, if they’re not doing the purchasing today?
 
Right. Given their ambition and hunger for information, they’ll likely be purchasers of this equipment tomorrow. Time moves fast in business. And they’ll be the ones who will thank this company (our client) for giving them the free knowledge they’d craved to get up to speed in their new careers. Not only that, but said company also proved to be a reliable source of expertise, which burnishes its brand and reputation. Why wouldn’t you go with that brand of equipment when the time comes? 
 
Un-SME-ing the SME
 
So we knew all of what we described above, about the target-audience landscape, when it came time for us to interview the subject matter expert (SME) assigned to us for the article.
 
Not only that, we explained this situation, upfront, to the SME. So she understood what our intention was, and what we needed to do. She was very generous with her expertise, but also helped us to explain the why’s and what-for’s of each nugget of information, so it would be more than just a litany of facts; it would be a basis for working knowledge in the lab.
 
And thus the article. In fact, we did a couple of these; they’re peppered in among the company’s more-technical offerings, which is a smart approach unto itself: Never assume your target audience is homogenous, especially when it comes to their level of experience or expertise. 
 
So the next time you feel inclined to push out technical promotional material to the world, (re)consider your audience. You certainly don’t want to swamp or intimidate the very people who might make formidable future allies—or customers. 
 
Need assistance with this kind of complex communication challenge? Contact us. We help our clients with assignments like this all the time, and would be delighted to help you, too.