Every hear of a “paper edit”? Probably not. Let’s dive, quickly, into the topic you tuned in for: Making the easiest marketing videos you’ll likely ever make. It gets better. They’ll also be among the least expensive to produce. And they’ll also be among the most powerful. Salivating yet? Let’s get started. Recycling is good for the planet… and your business A client of ours recently recently pitched a new prospect via a Zoom call. Specifically, they “ran the demo” of the company’s offerings, which included both a PowerPoint slide deck and a demo of specific SaaS (software-as-a-service) offerings. The call went great. Our client closed the deal. What could be better than that? How about closing lots of deals? From the exact same call. You’re smart. You’re already way ahead of us here. Why do we even try to build any suspense? LOL! The key: Our client recorded the Zoom call. With the prospect’s permission, of course. Important point: the recording did not show the prospect on screen. Only our client, who was presenting. That recording is worth its weight in gold. It’s a verbatim capture of the best possible sales pitch, with our client hitting it out of the park. The entire video ran about 20 minutes. And in it, our client—the one who was running the demo—was making killer point after killer point, with each one nicely illustrated by either a powerful preso slide or quick SaaS demo. We watched this video, and realized that it was marketing gold, being served to us on a platter. The paper edit “Paper edit” is an old-school video editing term, which surprisingly isn’t so old-school or even outdated. It’s exactly what we created in this case. And it’s what you can do, too. (You know you’ve got some good recorded Zoom pitches by now. And if you don’t, you know you’re just itching to record your next one.) Here’s the task. Take that 20 minutes of raw footage, and convert it into as many little McNugget-sized videos as you can. They should run anywhere from about ten to 30 seconds each. So you just need to park the video in a window on one side of your screen, and a blank Word doc on the other. Watch the video and look for the organic “start” and “end” points of each little mini-video. Write down the time codes for each. Then come up with a title for that specific mini video. Lather, rinse, repeat, and you’ll have a “paper edit” which you can hand off, along with the big raw-footage file, to your favorite/least-expensive video editor. You will have done the heavy lifting; at this point, your editor simply needs to follow your instructions. They’ll need to create a master “set of bookends” first: This will be the opening title card, underlying music bed, and tail-end/call-to-action (CTA) title card. Once you approve those, you’re off to the races. Your editor will be able to crank these out like a machine. In our case, the 20 minutes of raw footage yielded more than 20 different short videos. They were so simple to create, that we didn’t even need our usual high-end editor for this assignment. Rather, we handed off the footage and the paper-edit doc to our client’s digital marketing firm; they were able to make these little vids for us—and put them to use, too, since they were able to easily fold them into the account’s digital marketing strategy. Sure, we continue to make slick, highly-produced videos for this same client. But they’re more expensive and less frequent. These little videos are awesome for keeping the world informed and teased, while easily building up your social presence on platforms like LinkedIn, simultaneously boosting the brand and impressions. Need help with an assignment like this, or others? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.
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RFPs—that is, Requests for Proposals—come in all shapes and sizes. Broadly, there are the ubiquitous ones that populate the world of government services contracting. There are plenty of private-sector RFPs out there, too. In this article, we’re going to address the tipping point that must inform all of your RFP pursuits: the notorious “go/no-go decision.” We’re looking out for your best interests here, trust us. All-American competition A little background first. Why would a company (or the government) issue an RFP? The bigger question could be: Why wouldn’t they? Think about it. If you’re an entity that needs to spend money on services (or products, but we’ll focus on the former here), it’s entirely safe to assume that 1) you want the best possible services at 2) the lowest possible price. And what’s fairer, what’s more American, than level-playing-field competition? So. You issue an RFP. And you let all these suitors compete against each other. You get exactly what you’d wanted. It’s a beautiful thing. Or is it? The race to the bottom Let’s get real jaded, real quick. How well does the government do things, compared to private industry? By and large, not nearly as well. There’s no profit motivation. There’s no “Government 2” that they’re competing against. There’s a baked-in complacency and a literal ability to print more money if they need it. This shows in their work. Think of all the shoddy government services you’ve had to suffer through—IRS, DMV, U.S. Postal Service, Amtrak, you name it. Think of how many times you’ve said, “If only Amazon were running this!” And the crazy thing is, tons of these shoddy government services are actually provided by private-sector contractors! Why? Because they came in with the lowest bid. We’re over-simplifying here—there are other ways that the government procures things, and even in the private sector, there are SLAs or “service-level agreements” which stipulate a minimum required level of performance—but, as we’d intimated, nice and jaded, RFPs often represent a race to the bottom. Cheapest possible—and just passable. Now pivot this scenario to your business. Would you want to willingly join in, in this death spiral? To RFP or not to RFP The upside, for you, of competing on an RFP, is that it’s typically a pretty big contract. And it’s all or nothing. You either win it, or you don’t. And either way, you’re putting in a ton of work. Hmmm. This gets to the very core of the go/no-go decision. We were told, years ago, about an NFL coach who had a plaque in his office. It read: “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing, Coming in second is un-American.” Yowch. Painful. Brutal. But refreshingly similar to your RFP go/no-go decision. It boils down to this: Only respond if you can, and will, crush it. Partial measures are a total waste of time; expend that energy on other biz-dev. Assess your capabilities and those of your likeliest competitors. Can you crush the competition? If you can almost crush them, what would it take to push you over the top? Here’s a little anecdote for you. We were recently invited to compete on an RFP for a slate of marketing services. We could see, right away, that it wasn’t a great fit. We knew we could crush a certain part of what this company was requesting, but there were other parts that weren’t our specialty. We were just about to pass on this one when--hmmm—we learned, through the grapevine, that a few other companies, which we know and have worked with before, were also invited to respond to this exact same RFP. Know where this is going? Imagine where it went? Of course. We reached out to those other entities, and said, “Let’s consolidate!” And that’s exactly what happened. Working with the others, we created a veritable Dream Team… and crushed the RFP. By the way, there are interesting and creative ways to craft the actual RFP response itself, to help you win it, which go beyond the scope of this article. We’d love to help you in this realm. Contact us and let’s talk. "Ghost Email Writer.” Kind of an odd role to put on your resume, no? It’s on ours. More importantly for you, however, is the answer to this question: Which business emails that you need to send are so important that they would warrant having a pro step in to pen them? That’s what we’ll explore in this article. Touchy subjects There is a common thread when it comes to emails that we ghost-write for our clients. It’s generally what we’d call “the big ask,” which kind of goes hand-in-hand with “the humble brag.” Both of these are hard to do. They put you, as the writer, in an uncomfortable situation. Err in one direction, you look like a jerk. Err in the other, you appear too meek. And in both of those situations, you don’t end up getting what you’d wanted. Talk about a fine line. First things first: You don’t really need to hire a professional writer, like us, to write an email like this. You can really work your tail off, and polish it, run it by colleagues, and even push it through ChatGPT if you want it to sound generically-correct enough. The question is: Is that worth your time? If you’re reading this article, chances are, it’s not. (Spoiler alert: We charge a mere pittance for things like these, for our clients, especially considering the upside ROI they deliver.) But so far we’ve been dealing with generalities. Let’s dive in and give you two real-life examples. Ghost-Written Email Example 1: To a former client We recently helped a client create a series of marketing videos for their B2B consultancy. On their website, they’d had an ancient, but great, testimonial from an old client of theirs. They hadn’t spoken to this client in ages. Can you guess where this is going? Of course. A written testimonial, on a website, doesn’t do you much good when you’re creating marketing videos. Talk about a big ask: We wanted this former client to record themselves, on camera, giving a testimonial about this company that they’d worked with, a long time ago. Yikes. And so our client asked us to ghost-write the big-ask email for them. Confession: It wasn’t easy. But the finished product went something like this: It opened with a “Hello, old friend, we hope you’re doing well,” followed by “we’re so glad that our company has helped your company succeed.” We also thanked them for letting us use their written testimonial on our website. And that was the segue to the videos we were making. We’d already had the first one produced by the time we ghost-penned this email, so we included a link to it, so that the former client could watch it and see how good it was. Then we got down to the big ask: Could they simply read that same testimonial on camera, and send it to us? We even included its text in the email, like a script. We noted that, “By our estimation, this should take about, well, 15 seconds! So hopefully it’s not a huge ask.” And we closed by saying, “Just as we have helped your company, you’d be doing us a huge solid by helping ours.” The email worked. The old client was flattered by the request, and promptly obliged by recording and sharing a quick video. Bonus: Our client’s firm suddenly became top-of-mind for this former great client. Talk about a nice dollop of biz-dev! Ghost-Written Email Example 2: To “the secret handshake club” Whereas the previous example was written to be sent to one specific, known person, this next one was intended to be sent, one-to-one, to a select number of very exclusive recipients who were all total strangers to the sender. We need to be very cagey here, as this one is super sensitive. That said, it’s one of the best emails we’ve ever written, and it’s ended up netting our client millions. This client of ours had carved out a profitable B2B niche doing technical “cleanup work” for large enterprises. But they longed to broaden the business, and their client base, to include the specialists who helped those enterprises create the situations that inevitably required cleanup afterward. Those specialists were the targets of the email. We can refer to them here as “the secret handshake club,” because that’s how close-knit, clubby, and insular they are. Our pitch, which we ghost-wrote for the owner of our consultancy client, went something like this; note how it combines the Big Ask with the Humble Brag: “Hello Mr. or Ms. Secret Handshake Club Member. I would like to help you as you advise big enterprises as they embark on big initiatives. Full disclosure: I’ve never done this before. But I have helped numerous enterprises with the ‘clean-up’ that’s come from all the overlooked issues in these initiatives, which I’m uniquely qualified to spot, given my experience. Would you have time for a quick call this week?” Guess what the response was? It was awful. That’s right. It’s a secret handshake club! Most of the sends ended up with no response whatsoever. The few that did respond, had some choice suggestions for our client, which we can’t reprint here. But then one—just one— Secret Handshake Club member wrote back. “Okay,” they said. “I’ll bite. Contact my assistant to book a call with me next week.” And that was all it took. That call led to a test project. That test project turned a toe-in-the-water tester into a new client. That client effectively provided entry into the Secret Handshake Club. Fast-forward to today, and that consultancy client of ours now splits their billing, 50/50, between their classic “cleanup” projects and Secret Handshake Club assignments. And it all started with one inexpensive, yet really well-crafted, ghost-written email. Have a challenge that warrants a ghost-written email? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. We recently had a client dump a whole bunch of input on us, as part of a larger marketing project we were helping them with. This data dump, incidentally, was incomplete. They gave us links to videos, and slide decks, and web pages, and Word docs… yet when we cross-checked the lists of stuff we were supposed to receive vs. the stuff we actually received, we found gaps. Plus there was stuff—input—that we flat-out didn’t understand. Was it even relevant? Were we missing something? Clearly, a big team meeting was needed. But our preliminary order of business was simply wrangling all of the input—and making sure that the checklists indeed teed up with requirements of the final deliverable. This was not easy. So. Where are we going with this? And how does this help answer the perennial question of “How will this help me make more money?” Seeing the bigger picture Sure, we’d needed to book, organize, and run, a meeting. And the clock was ticking. This, incidentally, gets to the answer to the italicized question we’d posed above. Time is money. And when you multiply the number of people in the room by what they’re worth, on an hourly basis, the stakes go up real high, real fast. So this is about more than just booking a meeting. There are bigger takeaways than that. This is about bringing different people together in service of a larger—and more profitable—goal. And it’s, frankly, about sweating a ton of details in advance. Chop, chop Know what we ended up creating from all this mess? A “next steps” email to the team we were working with. Think about that. How many times have you had to compose a “next steps” email? It’s hard. We had to lay out:
We still have the email we’d sent to our client. It’s just 397 words long. And yet it took us an hour to write. Yup. We can’t share it here—it’s confidential—but we’ll bet you could read the thing in under two minutes. And that was the intention. And that was why it was so hard to compose. Important point: Every recipient and cc on this email is very busy. We had to make our case, be ultra clear, and close with a specific call-to-action (“Shall we send you slots for a meeting?”). This email took us an hour to write because the initial draft was about double the length of the final one. We sweated the details. We moved paragraphs. We moved sentences within paragraphs. And we cut, cut, cut, as much as we could. Speed reading Honestly: Do you think that any of our client-recipients of this email would have guessed that it took us an hour to write this two-minute read? Of course not. They never gave it a thought. We didn’t want them to give it a thought. But we needed to get stuff done, quickly, succinctly, and efficiently, and this much-sweated-over email was the best way to do it. And think of this: What kinds of replies did this email elicit? Were they equally-well-thought-out, carefully-considered-and-organized responses? Of course not! They were more like “Good idea; how’s Wednesday?” Were we upset by this? Did we feel slighted or unappreciated? Nope. We beamed. Mission accomplished. Because when you fast-forward this story, 1) all of the missing input magically appeared, prior to the meeting, 2) all of the related gaps were filled, and 3) the meeting itself went swimmingly—a full-court press in which seemingly impossible goals were surmounted in a shockingly short timeframe. And, frankly, none of it would have happened without the “next steps” email. Now do you see the broader lesson here? People routinely dash off emails with nary a thought. But sometimes, when the situation calls for it, you’ve got to hunker down and really figure out the tactics of where you’re headed, and do the hard work of putting that into something that can be read at 10x the speed it took to write. Need help getting all of these “tactical marketing ducks” in a row, whether via email or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. It’s funny how some things in business are cyclical. Way back in the day, we toiled over printed outreach, a.k.a. “direct response” a.k.a. “mailers” a.k.a. “junk mail” a.k.a. “printed spam.” Of course, all that went out the window when things went electronic. Spam postal mail was superseded by spam email. Ah, progress! Yeah, we can afford to be a little snarky here. Stay tuned. Because the very recent tale we’re about to spin holds profit potential for your business, and your outreach. Dialing up the numbers game First things first: You invest in direct response to drum up new business. It’s like cold-calling. (We could—and may—write another article on that topic, speaking of business cycles and swinging pendulums.) Direct response is a numbers game. If you send out to 100 people, your odds of getting a response aren’t very high. If you sent out to 10,000 people, your odds go up accordingly. Direct response is also often described as a three-legged stool. The list is one of those legs, and its quantity is just as important as its quality. You don’t want to send to people whose addresses (physical or electronic) have changed, not to mention their title… or even their company. The second leg is the quality of the offer. You’ve got to have something that’s really targeted and worth their time, ideally solving a problem they needed solved yesterday. The third leg is the outreach piece itself. That is, the email, or the letter, or the catalog or brochure or whatever. That’s the crux of this article. A matter of cost Print is expensive. Postage is expensive. There’s a carbon-footprint consideration to it, too. So the whole marketing community breathed a collective sigh of relief when things went from postal to email, decades ago. And for a long time, it worked. Correction: It still does… to an extent. But things have definitely changed. You’ll cringe when we mention it, but a big disruptor here is ChatGPT. When it hit the scene, it made it easy for anyone to instantly generate a well-enough-worded email, which they could then blast out to whomever. And boy did they ever. It practically broke the internet. No, that’s an exaggeration. To put a finer point on it: it practically broke every ISP’s spam filter. We have clients now who can’t even send emails to their own, known clients without their getting trapped in spam filters. It started with ChatGPT: The clients’ clients’ spam filters have been closed down so much, to deal with so much incoming junk, that even their own trusted vendors sometimes get locked out. Some of those longtime trusted vendors happen to be clients of ours. And they’ve been switching back to postal outreach. And it’s been working. Where have all the emails gone? One of these clients of ours recently sent out a catalog. Well, not really a catalog. Call it more of a thought-leadership piece that was really a very handy resource for C-level executives to have on their bookshelf. (We’re purposely being cagey here; we can’t reveal too much.) Now this “catalog” isn’t any good unless it gets opened. In other words, tucked inside the envelope with it was--gasp—a cover letter. Yep. We worked on that one. Short, but vital. It teased what was in the “catalog.” It teased the benefits of working with the company that created it. And it invited the reader to book an all-important demo to learn more. Guess what? Envelopes were opened. And demos were booked. By the exact same execs whose spam filters had blocked every other form of recent outreach to them—including electronic versions of the exact same catalog. Email isn’t dead. But boy is this pendulum ever swinging toward print right now. Need help with thorny issues like these? Contact us. We’d be happy to help! Here at Copel Communications, we get tasked with lots of different writing assignments. There are video scripts. Blogs. Case studies. Email campaigns. Sales decks. Landing pages. Social posts. You name it. Thing is, a lot of these overlap. And therein lies an opportunity—for you—to approach your marketing outreach more effectively and cost-efficiently. Learn from our experience and evolved best practice. It’s actually pretty simple, but it requires both foresight and discipline. Signed, sealed deliverables Our clients will typically want to promote something (a product, a service, an announcement) to as many people/prospects as possible. Which requires leveraging various media, such as web pages, YouTube, email, and so on. And here’s where the “package” concept originated. We realized, early on, that all of these deliverables-centered-around-the-same-story were basically all parts of the same, bigger thing. Thus we coined the phrase “content package”; you might not see it described that way elsewhere. The idea of “packaging” these, however, is powerful. First of all, it’s hugely efficient. If you’re going to create one of these things, create all of them… at the same time. Note that we said “create.” Not, say, “post” or “publish.” That might be staggered, depending on your media plan. But you do want to create them all at once. It’s going to be easier and more efficient for your writing resource, since they’ll need to align their proverbial ducks just once. That will translate to more consistent content across the package’s discrete elements—and lower costs, too. Here’s another advantage of packaging these assignments together: It’s effectively a marketing checklist. By green-lighting a package, you eliminate the possibility of later discovering that you’d inadvertently left one element out. What’s the core asset? The components of any content package will be dissimilar, not in terms of facts or messaging, but rather in terms of sheer size. The package might include, say, an 800-word blog, along with a 280-character tweet (or X-chirp, or whatever it’s called nowadays). The point is, if you’re going to create all this stuff, know that it’s always easier to cut than to add. That matters, whether you’re creating the materials yourself or assigning them to someone else. In other words, you don’t start with the tweet. Identify the biggest, most detailed, and labor-intensive element in the package, and create that one first. Once it’s nicely honed, you can use it as a feeder for all of the others. It’s not quite as simple as doing a “Save as…” and then chopping down, because there are other constraints and style and audience factors to take into consideration. But still, all the heavy lifting should be done for the “core” asset. Example: We have a client who publishes case studies in a tightly-defined three-tab format (“Client,” “Team,” “Solution”). But they’ll also push out a more narrative-style blog about the same story—and the blog always has more detail, captioned illustrations, and little behind-the-scenes anecdotes baked into it. So we always do the blog first. Then the case study. Then the three-touch email campaign. Then the social teasers for the blog and the case study… you get the idea. Packaged goods As we’d mentioned earlier, creating content packages requires foresight and discipline. Foresight, in that you must often delay gratification, knowing that one element of the package may well roll out at some time in the future. And discipline, in that you must remember to employ the content-package approach, and stick to it. But, like any best practice, once you get used to doing this, you’ll find it becomes second nature… to the vast advantage of your marketing outreach, and your production budget. Need help “packaging” up any content, or creating the elements thereof? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. Here at Copel Communications, we’re huge fans of remote work. We’ve been doing it, exclusively, for nearly three decades now, with clients all over the country (and sometimes, the world). Remember the pandemic? People asked us how we adjusted. Our answer: The rest of the world merely caught up with us. That said, there are some glorious exceptions. We recently worked on a big project with a geographically-scattered client team with a deadline looming, and we ran the meeting on-site at our client’s headquarters office. Sure, there were disadvantages to this, but there were also some interesting advantages—that you can profit from in your next meeting or on-site. The cons Let’s get these out of the way. Scheduling this event for the numerous attendees was hard. It took lots of emails to send slots and check availabilities. Apps like Calendly might have helped… to an extent. But there were last-minute changes, in which one person’s suddenly-updated schedule impacted everyone’s, and we all had to start again. Then there were the logistics. They had to book the conference room. Order lunch. Set up the big screen for running preso’s in the room. And all of us had to dress up and drive. For a location which was, fortunately, only 30 minutes away, we had to allow a 15-minute cushion for traffic and parking. Not to mention the loading up the laptop and cables and all that junk. So, round trip, there’s, easily, two hours out of the day just gone, with zero work getting accomplished, while adding to the region’s traffic and carbon footprint from the commute. So… this better be one good meeting. Right? The pros After a zillion Zoom calls with this team, it was refreshing to see everyone in person. Everyone had… shoes. It was incredible. Granted, when we got there, after all the hellos and small talk, everyone still had to fire up their respective laptops and log into the local Wi-Fi network and all that. More zero-productive time. But then it was time for us to run this meeting. And of course we arrived prepared. So we shared the agenda, the input materials, the catch-up from the previous Zoom meeting, and started to get things underway. And up to this point, aside from seeing that people wore shoes and being able to physically see who was looking at whom at any given second, it wasn’t any more productive than a Zoom meeting. But there were differences. We’d mentioned that this was basically a fairly stressful gathering, since we were working on a difficult project on a deadline. So it was a little easier to feel the tension in the physical air… and to defuse it as well, with a stretch, a yawn, or a trot over to the snack table. And it was easier to handle the inevitable digressions, too, since we could “read” the room and still watch the clock, and keep the group reined in. But the best, and most un-Zoom-like part of the whole working session was the time spent not working. It was the lunch break. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s all log off and log back on in 30 minutes.” It was more like, “Who ordered the turkey club?” and “I thought you were a vegetarian,” and “No, Larry’s the vegetarian,” and then “That’s because my wife got me into it,” and, within short order, the room that had been filled with workers was replaced with a room filled with humans. It was great to simply not work. Hang out. Crack jokes. Our follow-up meeting, after this one, was back on Zoom again. It was infinitely easier, from a logistical standpoint. And it was better. The in-person bonding from the earlier on-site carried over and provided deeper connections going forward. Despite all the remote-lauding we’d done at the beginning of this article, the aforementioned on-site is hardly the only in-person meeting we’ve attended! Typically, we’ll do in-person at the beginning of an engagement, to meet all the players and make connections. That’s probably the best time to do it. But later ain’t too bad, either. Have a virtual-vs.-in-person story to share? Send it our way. We’d love to hear it. You’re in business to make money. These days, that sounds like a dirty little secret, but all businesses exist to make money. To reward the owners. The shareholders. To turn a profit. Therefore, you charge your clients for everything you do. Or do you? Or should you? In this article, we’ll dive into the reasons you should, or shouldn’t, provide some hard, payable work for free. It’s based on lots of experience, with lots of clients—and often, their clients. The cold-reality ROI argument You’ve surely heard of a “loss leader.” Something that gets a prospect in the door for a super-attractive price. “Super-attractive,” as in “untenable.” Hence the “loss” you take on it. Ever played a scratch-off Monopoly game at McDonald’s and won a free order of French fries? C’mon. You think McDonald’s will lose money on that one? Remember: You can’t claim that prize on that visit. You have to come back. So would you ever, honestly, make a trip to McDonald’s, and only order French fries? Even if they’re free? Of course you wouldn’t. Neither would anyone else. Hence the “cold, hard ROI” argument for freebies. Which goes something like this: Sure, you can give away something for free—just so long as you’re virtually assured that you’ll end up making way more than the value of what you gave away, from that same client or customer. Ooof. How cold. How… Darwinian. It’s the little things First off, know that we here at Copel Communications toss out freebies to our clients from time to time. Typically, they’re what we’d consider “too small to charge for.” We recently did a little quick-turn project for a client that, while admittedly urgent, simply wasn’t a huge amount of work for us. So what were we going to do at the end of the month? Line-item it for, say, 50 bucks? Naah. We refuse to nickel-and-dime like that. Still, we did list it on that month’s invoice. But the price? “N/C.” Surprise and delight Sometimes, tossing out the freebie is just the right thing to do—especially if you’ve got a longstanding relationship with a client and the right project comes along and you can afford to do it. Ever give your dog a treat not because he chased a squirrel away from your bird feeder, but rather "just because”? This is like that. True story: We have a client that competes in an incredibly high-tech field. In fact, among our tech-savvy clients, this is one of the savviest, to the point where it’s always challenging to write for them—to assume that mantle of brilliance. It’s difficult and daunting. Yet we must be doing something right, because this client keeps turning to us with projects for years and years. One day, however, the owner of this business hit us with an unusual request. Turns out he was running for town council in the area where he lived, and wanted our help with some of his campaign materials. Man oh man. We knew this would be a freebie the instant we saw it. He sent us some fliers. And posters. And emails. And what-not. Asking us to clean them up, and bill him for whatever it required. Now we know this guy and you don’t. Trust us: He’s a great person. Any town council would be blessed to have him aboard. We were flattered, and honored, to work on this stuff. Sure, we had other paying gigs on the calendar, but were happy to carve out time for him. And when we turned to it, we hit it out of the park. Our client was delighted! He was so grateful—perhaps especially because this assignment fell outside of his usual high-tech comfort zone. “Send us your invoice,” he said. And so we sent it. With every single item line-itemed. We showed the “rack rate” for each thing—what it would cost in the real world—and even added up the total cost. And then, below that, we subtracted the entire total cost, with the note: “Courtesy discount." Amount due? Zero. If you think this client was delighted by the work we did, you can only imagine how surprised and happy he was to find out he was getting it for free. And we felt great. It still feels good, simply re-telling this story. Happy ending? So, this client immediately came back and rewarded us with zillions of dollars’ worth of fresh, new work. Right? Wrong. In fact, it was months before he needed our services again. Are we bitter? Not at all! This is the antithesis of the “cold-reality ROI” argument. We’d call it the “spark of humanity” argument. A little Christmas, when it isn’t Christmas. Businesses exist to turn a profit. But they’re also run by people who live lives. Sometimes you simply need to connect at that very basic level. Have thoughts on this issue or a story to share? Contact us. We’d love to hear it. This article was originally going to be about developing a production process for video scripts. But because of the way things turned out at our client, this one is taking a decidedly more valuable turn. For you. We’re going to talk about something that you can create, for your clients, as a gift, which will win you follow-on business. We can’t say “guaranteed,” but pretty darned close. What’s this have to do with video scripting? From production to presents A client of ours—incidentally, we typically get our best education and insights from our clients, as they’re a pretty ingenious lot—had tasked us with making a series of videos. Here’s the genesis: Our client does a lot of similar projects for its clients. And when it completes each one, it ends up with some raw screen-capture video footage, documenting the project. The job they handed to us: Turn that boring screen-capture footage into a compelling video that sells. We’d anonymize these, and our client would post them on their YouTube channel, since they’re great little sales vehicles which show off exactly what they do, in about two minutes each. So far, so straightforward. Right? But here’s the stroke of genius: This same client of ours decided to create a customized version of the same video for their client. Granted, we need to over-simplify here, but think of it this way: Upon completing the project, our client (a consultancy) produced and delivered—without charging an extra dime for it—a custom video for their client, showcasing the work they just completed. As a gift. With our services folded in, the finished video was very “Hollywood”: slick voiceover, music, effects, etc. The V.O. goes something like this: “Working with Consultancy [our client], ABC Business [their client] has been able to do something amazing, which you’ll see, firsthand, in this video.” And then it would effectively go into the demo. Private viewing Whereas videos made for YouTube are intentionally created to reach the largest audience possible (BTW, we worked on one which, as of this writing, has attracted 61 million views), this video was for an audience of, oh, about five people. Yep. That’s it. A slick, high-quality, seemingly big-budget video to be seen by: The CEO. The CFO. The project sponsor. And a couple others. That’s it. This video was a gift of our client’s, to their client. It said “Thank you for letting us work with you. You may not have been in the trenches for this one, like the Project Sponsor was, but we’d like the Executive Leadership Team to see just what we did for you, and how great it came out.” Can you guess what happened next? Roll out the red carpet The Executive Leadership Team audience, you likely won’t be surprised to learn, was positively delighted by this little video. Do you think they kept it to themselves? Au contraire. They demanded that it be posted, enterprise-wide, on the company intranet. Sent out to all the zillions of leaders and team members. And therein lies the gift that keeps on giving. The Executive Leadership Team felt great. They got a rush from this video… to the point where they wanted more. Want another video? Sure! Book another project. And what about all those other leaders in the company who now got to see the video? They want their own projects, too! Some of them, incidentally, ended up leaving the company and going elsewhere. Guess which vendor stuck in their heads as especially helpful when they landed their new gigs? You can, too This is a shockingly easy deliverable to create. Our purposely anonymized story above should inspire you: You can make these, too. And you should. They’re an absolute killer when it comes to burnishing your brand… and helping you win follow-on work. Of course, videos like this do require creative scripting and creative ways to make them look like a million bucks, while costing next to nothing. That’s where we come in. Contact us and let’s talk. ChatGPT, as you know, was huge news about a year ago. So why are we writing about it now? Now is a good time. All the hype has evaporated. All the dust has settled. We can now discuss ChatGPT without the breathless hyperbole, without all the doom-and-gloom forebodings of the apocalypse. Quick teaser: We use ChatGPT. And so should you. Qualifier: When it’s appropriate, and useful, to do so. Let’s dive in. What it is… and isn’t When ChatGPT hit the scene, everyone with a pulse was accosting us about this supposed existential threat to our business here at Copel Communications. Wouldn’t we be subsumed by this marching monster that threatened all creative jobs? No. We weren’t afraid of it then. We’re not afraid of it now. Ignorance is what breeds fear. Knowledge, on the other hand, breeds power. We’ll take the latter any day of the week. ChatGPT, quite simply, is a tool. Just like a hammer. Or a pen. Or a paintbrush. It’s only as good as the person using it. You wouldn’t hand a hammer to a surgeon. (Or if you do, run.) The surgeon knows what tools to use. ChatGPT is no different. As a large-language model, it’s capable of stringing together astonishingly coherent sentences in technically excellent English. (Detect our qualifiers there?) It “knows” tons of stuff, effectively from scouring the entire internet (more qualifiers forthcoming). And it’s fast: Ask it something, and it answers. Instantly. All of which begs the question: Is ChatGPT creative? Oh come on. See what difference a year makes? Of course it’s not. It never was. It’s not even intended to be. It’s a tool. We were asked, many years ago, when Apple introduced iMovie, if Hollywood movies would be going away. See? You’re laughing. Because 1) they didn’t go away, and 2) they weren’t exactly threatened by iMovie. To the contrary: A pro version of iMovie (called Final Cut Pro) came out, and many Hollywood editors embraced it. They still do. So now, with all the hype in the rearview mirror, it’s easy—and often quite useful—to embrace ChatGPT. That said, there are some caveats. Some caveats ChatGPT doesn’t “know” everything. As the site itself will warn you, it’s only scoured the internet up through April, 2023. After that, it’s clueless. So don’t expect any recent information in its database. It’s also a classic case of the old computing adage, “Garbage in, garbage out,” or GIGO. There’s a lot of bad, and biased information out there on the internet (really??), and ChatGPT has Hoovered it all up with nary a hiccup. It will spit out the same junk, to you, that it’s sucked up, from others. And ChatGPT doesn’t have a “B.S. meter.” Sometimes, it will flat-out lie. We’ve tested it. So can you. It’s easy. (We’d asked it, for example, to name some famous dialogue quotes from a movie we have effectively memorized. And while it listed several good quotes, it also spat out others that had nothing to do with that movie whatsoever. And no “red underlining,” as you’ll find in Word for a suspiciously-misspelled word. As far as fact-checking goes, you’re on your own.) The good stuff Granted, we don’t use ChatGPT every day. To the contrary: We hardly use it at all. But every now and then, we’ll get an assignment that’s easy to hand off to ChatGPT. And to be clear: We will tell our clients whenever we use ChatGPT. We do this for many reasons:
So what kinds of assignments are good for ChatGPT? In our experience, it’s great for coming up with lots of “ideas” for basic things that have already been ideated by others. That’s a huge distinction. (It’s like the “technically excellent English,” we’d mentioned above—which checks all the boxes for spelling and grammar, but hasn’t an iota of creativity to it.) Some examples:
Now, it’s incumbent on you to ask ChatGPT in the best way possible in order to get the information you seek. We’re good at it; we have a nice feel for how it was programmed, and thus can effectively “reverse-engineer” our prompts. So ChatGPT is like Word. Or a pen. Or a paintbrush. Just another tool in our kit. Need help with that next assignment—whether it requires ChatGPT or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! |
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