You might wonder what we here at Copel Communications—who daily toil in the trenches of executive-focused B2B messaging on behalf of our august clientele—have in common with those purveyors of click-bait ads that crowd your screen when you’re invariably trying to read something else.
 
You know what we’re talking about. Headlines, photos, and clickable tiles all doing their best to tempt you with teasers such as: 

• The Five Places Where Mold Is Hiding Inside Your Home
• Why Pediatricians Say Your Children Should Never Touch This 
• Her Red Carpet Dress Was A Little Too Revealing 

 
Admit it. You’ve clicked on some. Despite your deepest-held belief that it wasn’t worth your time. And you were always right. You swore them off, just as you’d had back in college on a bleary Sunday morning: “I’ll never have another drink again in my life.”
 
Yet there they are. Thriving on with virus-like invulnerability, despite the evolution of ad blockers, AI, and your own conviction to avoid them. 
 
Because they’re so juicy. They promise so much to your can’t-hold-it-back lizard brain. 
 
Okay. Let’s pivot back to B2B. This story actually has, believe it or not, a point. 
 
Marketing and advertising--any marketing and advertising, regardless of how buttoned-down and high-end—has a simple goal: Make that target audience sit up and take action. 
 
Oooh. How do we get them to “sit up”? No, we’re not espousing the use of salacious images or language (want to have fun? scroll through a page of click-bait ads and count the instances of cleavage leaping out at you, LOL!). 
 
But there is a lesson—a valuable lesson—that can be applied, from click-bait, directly to the C-suite. 
 
Those click-bait ads persist, despite all the obstacles we’d listed above, for one simple reason: They work. 
 
They generate clicks. And eyeballs. And revenue. They’re as American as apple pie. 
 
What then, is this “valuable lesson”? 
 
It’s simple. Learn from the power of click-bait. Leverage it. You needn’t dumb it down; for goodness’ sake, it’s already at rock-bottom. 
 
But you can smarten it up.
 
Aha. 
 
Each click-bait ad is tempting because of the secret it hides, and the promise it dangles. Those are universal truths. Consider this headline which we just made up: 
 
Logistics executives are rapidly implementing this new automated reporting solution
 
What’s the secret? The solution. 
 
What’s the promise? Learn what it is. 
 
What’s the lizard-brain button being pushed: Good ol’ FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. 
 
It doesn’t really look like a click-bait headline… until you parse it the way we just did. 
 
Whaddya know? Lesson learned. Lesson applied. 
 
Need help with your next marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

​Here at Copel Communications, we recently completed the sixth revision of a project we were working on for a client. And boy was it fun!
 
No. We are not being sarcastic. We’re serious as a heart attack here. 
 
So what gives? And how can this be the basis for an article? More to the point, what can you take away from this story? How can it make you more productive? Happier? 
 
Once the bones are in place…
 
We can’t tell you too many details about the project itself, because it’s confidential/protected by NDA. But we can say that it was an internal written piece, very important, that would be shared across the organization, and eventually re-jiggered into a prospect-facing piece, to help drive sales. 
 
So it was a very important document. And our client was understandably maniacal about the thing, sending us change after change after change. It was a real revisions hamster-wheel. 
 
But by the fifth round, the client had run out of new ideas and tweaks. The ideas, the tenets of the piece, were fixed. The bones were in place. 
 
And so it was our turn to create Draft Six. 
 
And yes, it was actually fun.
 
Why? 
 
In praise of polishing
 
At this point, since the facts of the content were locked, Draft Six became an entirely stylistic challenge. It was 100-percent “polish this document.” We didn’t have to worry about getting new material tossed out wholesale by the client because new quirks and features had crept in. In other words, we could happily roll up our sleeves, and dive into making the English better.
 
(Did you know that Google will ding your website if you use AI-generated copy? As a prime purveyor of AI, Google can recognize it better than anyone, and since their goal is to serve their users with trustworthy content, they seek out human-written material, vs. stuff that had been created by clicking the “Generate” button.) 
 
As you might’ve guessed by now, we certainly didn’t use ChatGPT to “polish” this document. We had the luxury of reading passages aloud, consulting a thesaurus, testing out different sentence structures and phrasing, and getting to the point where it was so tight that it squeaked. 
 
It wasn’t hard. It was gratifying. It was like scratching an itch. And the piece just got better and better, the more we polished it. 
 
Mind you, we didn’t spend a week on what we just described. Creating Draft Six only took us an hour or two. But boy did it come out great, and the client was delighted, and to this day, that piece is doing its job, ably. 
 
The reason we tell this story is that it doesn’t just apply to this arcane document that we were working on, here at Copel Communications. It pertains to everything that you create, in your business, too. 
 
There’s always going to be the ideation phase. Then the creation phase, based on the vetted ideas. 
 
But too many people overlook the final polishing phase, which is when that piece really comes to life and shines. This is true for web pages, for product designs, for graphical layouts, for sales plans, you name it. 
 
The key here is recognizing the inflection point when the initial creation ends, and the polishing begins. Once you can spot it, you’ll be liberated to apply the best possible polish to whatever it is you’ve been working on, without that looming dread of “Oh, this will just get tossed because new input for Version 7 is on its way.” 
 
So enjoy your time in the black hole, with your email and text notifications disabled, as you polish away, knowing that you’ll emerge with a gem in your hand. 
 
Need some help ideating, creating, or polishing that next project? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

This is an article about producing B2B videos: the kind you post on YouTube to bring in prospects. In this story, it was actually about the slick home-page video we were creating for a client’s new website. 
 
For these types of videos, the approach is usually pretty straightforward: You send off your approved two-column (“Video” and “Audio”) video script to your video editor, who does the rest. This includes finding stock footage and music, building titles, editing the footage, and farming our the voice-over or V.O. 
 
It’s that last part we want to talk about here. 
 
Sure, you can proceed the way we just described. But we don’t recommend it. Here’s why. 
 
We’ll use the case of our client, and their new website, as an example. For their new site, they were also updating their brand, and, more importantly, the audience they wanted to target. Specifically, they were going more upscale in their demographic. Very high-end. 
 
Sure, this was conveyed in the video script. And we could have entrusted our video editor (who is fantastic, by the way) to source the V.O. on his own. 
 
Instead, we worked with the client to produce the V.O. first, before sending the script to the editor. This gave us the advantage (“luxury”?) of casting that part ourselves, letting our client listen to audio samples of different V.O. artists, and then narrowing down to the final one. 
 
Then we were able to work with this voice-over artist very directly and intently, explaining to him the exact audience we were looking to target, the similar reads on his reel that would be relevant/close to what we wanted, the intended look and feel of the finished video, and so on. 
 
Armed with all of this info, that V.O. artist delivered. He nailed it. You could just see the gorgeous video it would accompany… even if that video hadn’t been created yet. 
 
Take 2
 
Now we could send that V.O. recording—along with the script, our client’s logo, and other files—along to our brilliant video editor. 
 
And think of this: Not only did our producing the V.O. (whose cost was ridiculously nominal, by the way) save our editor work and time, but it also provided killer input to help create a better video.
 
All he had to do was listen to the thing. It helped him pick just the right background music—on the very first try! It helped him source the right stock-footage candidates, with minimal back-and-forth from us.
 
We knew, all along, how this video was supposed to come out. That’s our job. It was tougher for our client to visualize in advance; that’s neither their job nor their skill-set. But boy were they delighted when the final product came together. 
 
And note that nothing mentioned above increased the production budget of this video. It was simply a matter of choosing to sequence it in this way which elevated its production value so much, and so efficiently. 
 
Have a creative project you need help with? Contact us. We’d be delighted to pitch in. 

​In case you were unaware, here at Copel Communications, we alternate our blog articles between those directed toward business owners/consultants (at the top of the month), and our “creatives” audiences of ad agencies and other creative folk (at mid-month). 
 
This article is one of the latter. 
 
And it begins with a story. A colleague called us up not long ago, bemoaning the fact that her creative agency (we’re obfuscating/anonymizing here) had seen a sudden drop in business, since all of her clients were switching to AI for their creative work. To say she was unhappy was an understatement; there was a distinct edge of panic in her voice. 
 
But was she right? 
 
And how does this story relate to you, and your business? Are the ubiquitous doom-and-gloom headlines correct? And what the heck is an “Upwork moment,” which we’d teased in the headline? 
 
Let’s unpack this part-by-part. 
 
They’re going where?
 
A little more (fudged/anonymized) info about this colleague of ours. Her creative agency serves big you-know-them national brands. They’ve entrusted her and her great staff, for years, to deliver beautiful hand-crafted creative which elevates these brands to their respective audiences. Collectively, there’s billions of dollars of brand equity at stake here. 
 
Now ask yourself an obvious question: 
 
Are these huge brands suddenly asking ChatGPT to do the same thing for them? 
 
Yeah, we’re laughing, too. 
 
These huge brands know that ChatGPT can’t come close when it comes to quality. They also know that ChatGPT (or any other widget of its ilk) treads in very murky waters when it comes to copyright clearance. 
 
Do you honestly think that they’d risk their billion-dollar brands on that? Do you think that they would dump our colleague and her team, in order to get such sketchy and legally-questionable content… merely to save a few bucks? You think they don’t have “a few bucks”? 
 
Or is the answer perhaps far more mundane? 
 
Spoiler alert: It is. 
 
As we’d told our colleague: “This isn’t AI. It’s just a downturn. A basic dip in your business, wherein a few accounts happen to be slow at the exact same time.” 
 
You could hear her sigh of relief. “Oh,” she said. “That, I can deal with.” It was, in short, familiar territory. Solve-able via old-school tricks like shaking the trees and good old-fashioned business development or biz-dev. 
 
Beware the ostrich
 
Does this mean that AI isn’t a threat, or at least a factor? Get your head out of the sand. It’s a real thing. But then again, so was Google. So was the internet. We’re still breathing. The world didn’t end. The sky didn’t fall. 
 
Which brings us back to our “Upwork moment.” Several years ago, back around 2013, Upwork and other gig-economy platforms, such as Fiverr, burst onto the scene. Many people predicted that they would rob us of all our work and that we here at Copel Communications would promptly go out of business. 
 
We’re still breathing. The sky is still blue above us. 
 
But Upwork and Fiverr are still here and thriving. So what gives? 
 
As it turns out, Upwork was a really great find for businesses who, say, wanted dirt-cheap copywriting and didn’t care too much about the quality. So if you wanted to hire a writer from India who would create a 2,000-word blog for 15 bucks, Upwork was a godsend. 
 
This did not put us out of business. All it did was to better delineate various strata of clients and providers—and we don’t interact with either of them. Our work is higher-end than that, and our clients are, too. If you’ve read this far into this article, 1) thanks, and 2) you’re likely in the same watertight boat. 
 
Which gets back to AI. Sure, there are tons of people, worldwide, for whom AI/ChatGPT-generated content is good enough, and you certainly can’t beat the price. That is, free. 
 
For them, it’s a godsend. For us—and for you, and for our now-breathing-again colleague—it’s just another way the rest of the landscape is evolving around us. 
 
The sky ain’t falling tomorrow, either. 
 
Have a comment? Leave it in the comments below, or feel free to contact us directly. 

​Do not get us wrong. We are not luddites here at Copel Communications! We love shiny new tech. 
 
We use AI a lot, too. 
 
So don’t think that this article—about yanking the plug on Apple Intelligence—is about some kind of irrational fear of technology. 
 
Nope. It’s far simpler than that. 
 
It’s about helping our clients to make money. 
 
Wait, what?? Apple Intelligence stands in the way of that?
 
A solution in search of a problem
 
The comedian John Mulaney once compared his aging body to the iPhone: each year it looks the same, but it just gets worse. LOL! 
 
We’ve been on Apple tech since the very first generation of Macs, so we have a well-entrenched more-love-than-hate relationship with the folks in Cupertino. But Apple Intelligence crossed a new threshold for us. 
 
Sure, you’ve seen all of the “ingenious” new features that Apple will foist on you, every single year, with every new OS update, whether it’s for your Mac, your iPhone, whatever. Each one purports to be the greatest thing ever—which is a tacit admission that the very thing it’s replacing, which had been identically hyped at its outset… wasn’t. 
 
Fine. It’s easy for us to throw stones, and we’re well aware of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the arena” quote (the important part: “It’s not the critic who counts”). And besides, every time Apple rolls out a controversial feature, it typically back-pedals with a new slider whereby you can disable it. Liquid Glass, anyone? 
 
You certainly remember--remember? it’s still ongoing—all the hype around Apple’s version of AI. It was so special that it wasn’t just AI, i.e., artificial intelligence. Oh no. The “A” now stood for “Apple.” Apple Intelligence. Capitalized. 
 
It would solve everything in your life. 
 
Until it didn’t. 
 
The last straw
 
As we’ve taken pains to make clear: We’re not afraid of technology. When Apple Intelligence rolled out, and even as it got updates and bug fixes, we stuck with it, waiting (and wondering) for it to help us in our daily lives. 
 
Until it tried to answer emails and text messages on our behalf.
 
Woah. Stop the presses. It’s one thing to suggest some verbiage. It’s another to insert it into a reply by default, whereby our accidentally depressing the spacebar would constitute “Send.” 
 
A client asked us a question. We were about to give them a well-considered and nuanced answer, with a few factors to consider. 
 
And there’s Apple Intelligence, replying to our client with “Sounds great! I agree!” 
 
Fortunately, we caught this before any damage was done. 
 
Here at Copel Communications, clients pay us for our intelligence. The real kind. Not the over-hyped artificial kind. 
 
Hence the illustration for this article. We effectively rocketed our way to System Prefs to disable this hallucinogenic digital sidekick. 
 
Should you? Your choice. 
 
But now you know where we stand. And should you contact us, you also know that you’ll get a real reply, from a real sentient human. 

​Question: As the year draws to a close, are you merely older… or wiser? 
 
Not to flatter ourselves, but we think we can help with the latter. That’s because it’s time for our year-end round-up—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications —of our top posts for creatives like you. 
 
Catch the ones you’d missed. Or revisit those that helped. Enjoy! 

• How to keep your business videos on the rails—and on budget.  There’s a technique, developed in Hollywood, which will actually make the production of your B2B videos go faster, easier, and cheaper. Check it out. 

 

• What are website “pilot pages”? And why should you use them? Be efficient. Be frugal. Adopt best practice. And learn just what the heck “pilot pages” are, and why they’re an essential step in your next website or site re-brand. 

 

• Where do you draw the line, literally, with creative direction? When should you purposely create low-quality input and/or downplay the quality of the input itself? This is a fine line to walk, both literally and figuratively—but it can yield stellar results from other creatives who work for you. 

 

• How do you get good creative input from non-creative types? If for no other reason, click on this article to see the awesome AI-generated “nerd” we created for its illustration! LOL! Seriously, though: Great tips in this article, too. 

 

• When will real intelligence serve you better than the artificial kind? If AI makes things easy, isn’t it better for challenges like marketing taglines? Well… no. Read a true (anonymized) client story here, and grab some useful takeaways for your business, too. 

 

• How can you update your brand, yet keep it familiar? It’s a paradoxical challenge: Update your brand, keep it from going stale, yet keep it familiar, too. But how? Get the guidelines and guardrails you need, right here. 

 

• One blog is worse than none. Really! Even if you’re not a marketing guru, you don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot. Ready to cringe? Read this true story about a supposed marketing guru who did just that! Yikes! 

 

• The biggest shifts in book publishing since Gutenberg. You want your exciting new manuscript to be picked up by one of those famous New York publishing houses… or do you? You might be quite shocked to learn about the new reality of book publishing. Get it, quickly, right here. 

 

• We made a Gantt chart in Word! (And so can you.) Talk about counterintuitive: Here’s a way to make a Gantt chart not only in Word… but in reverse! Trust us: This will make you look like a hero to your client or boss. 

 

• How to live with a ghost (writer). There is a very specific way to structure your relationship with the ghost writer or copy-editor you choose to develop your thought-leading book. But what is it? You might be pleasantly surprised to find out what it is. So find out here. 

 

• What we’re thankful for, 2025 edition. It’s become an annual tradition here at Copel Communications, dating back over a decade. And we haven’t run out of things—or more importantly, people—to thank. Sit back and enjoy this one; it will inspire you to appreciate others in your life, even more. 

 
Well, that’s all for this year. Have a suggestion for a post for next year? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you! 

Wow. It’s a tradition (almost) as big as Thanksgiving here at Copel Communications. In which we devote our mid-November blog post to that which we’re thankful for. And in which, of course, we ask you what you’re thankful for! In other words, feel free to chime in, in the comments!
 
The title of this article is a tad misleading. Last year, we wrote about what we’re thankful for. 
 
“What” implies things. 
 
You can already see where this is going. That’s why you read these. Just to stay two jumps ahead of us!
 
Not what, but who
 
Sure, there’s plenty of “what” that we’re thankful for this year. Our technology and systems keep chugging along, relatively unimpaired. The economy, doom-and-gloom headlines notwithstanding, has been pretty good to us. Heck, at the more primal/Maslowian (??) level, we’re happy every time we flick a switch and the lights come on. Or open a spigot and get water. 
 
Don’t take anything for granted. 
 
But enough of the stuff. Let’s talk people. 
 
If you’ve read any of these articles of ours, you know we’re sticklers for anonymizing details when appropriate. This article is no exception. That said, if you’re reading this, and you’re called out in our little honor roll below, we’re confident that you’ll know who you are. 
 
Boy are we lucky to be surrounded by great people who help us do our job and make us look insanely better than we actually are. 
 
Here, we’re talking about other creatives. We’re talking about vendors. We’re talking about members of internal client teams we work with. We’re talking about SEO nerds and knob-turners. Some examples: 

• We’ve got a great graphic artist we’ve worked with for years. She turns our crappy thumbnail sketches into masterpieces. And she’s simply a nice person to work with. 

 

• We’ve got a designer who’s also a video editor we work with, at one of our clients. This person exhibits a degree of can-do attitude and positive professionalism that’s at once inspiring and humbling. Bonus: When the higher-ups at that same client get delayed on, say, providing us input for a project, this one person transforms into the world’s most polite yet effective squeaky wheel on our behalf. Bonus-bonus: This is also one of the nicest people we’ve ever met. 

 

• There’s a video editor out there whom we’ve never even spoken to, but boy is he great. Why haven’t we spoken to him? It’s because he resides behind the wall of one of the major gig platforms, so we have to effectively email him our input and feedback. (See our article about how you can navigate these sticky wickets yourself.) The talent from this person is blinding. Even better: He’s got great taste. We can describe stuff in broad strokes, and he translates it into just the right music cut, just the right amount of white space in a title, just the right kind of transition or effect. We hope, someday, to talk to this special person! 

 

• There’s a voice-over artist we’ve been using for years who is flat-out awesome. Here’s proof: Every time we get one of his reads (via an intermediary; it’s complicated), we always respond, not with “Oh, here are the flubs to fix,” but rather, “Wow is this guy ever great.” Double bonus: Both his turnaround times and his pricing are amazing. 

 

• We’ve got a web designer who is so smart and professional, that they make us raise our game when it comes to providing input and/or working with a mutual client. And the deliverables—the websites—are just gorgeous.

 
Not to leave out… 
 
We’re happy to sing about these unsung heroes. They’re vital members of the Copel Communications pantheon, which includes some really great clients who make it all possible, and the love of a family that makes it all worth it. 
 
What, and who, are you thankful for this year? Post your reply in the comments, or feel free to contact us.
​

If you’re an aspiring business book writer, this article is for you. And if you know someone who is, this article is for them. Share it with them. 
 
Our topic: How to get the most from your ghost copy-editor. 
 
We feel pretty qualified to weigh in on this topic, having ghost-copy-edited numerous books for various authors, some of whose works have gone on to become Amazon bestsellers. 
 
First things first: Credit where it’s due. Those aforementioned bestsellers did not become bestsellers because of us. It was due to the authors’ vision, as well as the complete marketing team that guided the book through its gestation. 
 
Still. We were along for the process from concept to completion. 
 
Interested in penning a business book? Let’s dive in. 
 
Division of labor
 
When you hear phrases like “ghost writer” or “ghost copy-editor,” you likely think of some celebrity, sitting back and sipping martinis, while some poor hack does all the work of actually writing the celebrity’s so-called “memoir,” or whatever. 
 
And that may well be true, in that instance. 
 
But that is not what we’re talking about here. 
 
Here, we’re talking about you, as a thought-leader in your business area of interest. You want to share your wisdom and experience with others. Done right, everyone benefits: Your readers elevate their knowledge. And you elevate your status as an authority. Heck, a published authority. 
 
So this is, clearly, not about sipping martinis and letting someone else come up with the ideas. The ideas here are yours. All of them. 
 
After that, however, it gets fuzzier. 
 
And that’s not a bad thing. In fact, the opposite is true. When this process is done right, it’s custom tailored to you, and no one else. We’ve worked with authors who are detail freaks. We’ve worked with authors who are bulls-in-China-shops. And in every case, it’s our job to accommodate their style of working. 
 
Ta-dah. If you take nothing else away from this article, it should be this: Your preferred and most comfortable style of working is the one that is best for you, when working with a ghost copy-editor. Period.
 
It’s hard enough for you to get these ideas out of your head and down on paper. And then to pay someone to lubricate that process can feel like adding insult to injury. 
 
But if it’s a good fit, it will be the opposite. It will be intuitive, stress-relieving, and rewarding. You’ll get to see pages appear that make you say, “Dang! I never realized I was that good!”
 
And that’s just when it comes to the finished product: the pages. In consultant-speak, that’s the “destination.” Which is certainly crucial. But equally important is the “journey.” How do you like to work? In person? Via Zoom? Transactionally and asynchronously, via email? Or some crazy hybrid of all of the above? Are you serious? Are you playful? Do you work in marathons? Or sprints? 
 
Again, it doesn’t matter. Whatever works best for you is what’s best. Period. 
 
So we’ve done brainstorming sessions to help authors tease out ideas. And we’ve worked with others who have simply “thrown stuff over the wall” at us, nearly completely baked. 
 
And what’s our reward? Sure, we get paid. But the far bigger reward is seeing the happiness that our authors derive from both the journey and the destination. 
 
Remember: “Ghost.” Our name does not appear, anywhere, on any of the books we’ve helped shepherd to press. So it’s got to be a good relationship—on both sides—for it to work. 
 
Writing a book is a big project. It takes a long time, typically measured in months. So be sure you choose a ghost you can live with. 
 
Have a book project you’d like to discuss? Contact us, and let’s see if it’s a good fit. 

​There’s a hint in the headline to this article. Read it again. 
 
We’ll circle back to it in a minute. But the topic is important: You want to fill that room for your upcoming webinar! Otherwise, all of that prep work is for naught. 
 
Here, we’ll give you some pointers, based on actual client experiences, to help you boost your odds. 
 
To webinar or not to webinar
 
This entire article, and the recommendations herein, predicate on some pretty big assumptions: 
 
1) You think a webinar is an optimal marketing tactic for your business, and 
 
2) You’ve done a stellar job creating the presentation you’ll deliver during the webinar itself. 
 
Those are huge assumptions. 
 
A webinar is, as we’d noted above, a big commitment. They’re hard to do. It’s much easier, say, to be a guest on someone else’s well-established podcast (we have an article on that topic, too), but that isn’t necessarily easy to get, either. 
 
To have a successful webinar—and by “successful,” we mean “one that brings in prospects and leads to future business-generating conversations with them individually”—you need to choose a ripe topic that will attract your desired audience. You need to craft a really great presentation for them. You need to hone it and rehearse it. You need to publicize the event before it happens, in order to “fill the room.” You need to manage attendee lists and email sequencing thereto. You need to nail the presentation when you do it live. And you need to crush the follow-up, because that’s the impetus for the entire webinar in the first place: building new business. 
 
Phew. 
 
If that checklist sounds daunting, good. It should. But the upside can well be worth it; we’ve helped numerous clients with webinars that they’ve used to build business. 
 
While we’ve worked on various facets of webinar development and production, we’d like to focus on just one aspect here. It’s the “teaser” that we’d teased in the headline. 
 
Building unbearable suspense
 
Marketing a webinar is like marketing a Hollywood movie that’s slated for theatrical release: It’s all about driving the maximum traffic for one specific date. For a movie studio, it’s opening weekend. For you, it’s your webinar date and time. 
 
So your marketing—let’s say, your social ads—for this webinar is exactly like what you see—say, on TV—for a movie. You may not have noticed this, but you’ll almost never see a TV commercial for a movie that’s already opened. That window has closed. Ditto for your webinar. 
 
So you can learn—and borrow a page—from Hollywood here. Think about a movie ad or a trailer: It gives you glimpses of the very best moments of the movie. Because the (untrue) assumption you have, as a viewer, is that the rest of the movie will be that good. But it isn’t. It never is. It can’t be. 
 
Still, you can tease snippets and factoids from your webinar, since you already know all of its content, and can gauge, pretty easily, what you think are some of its juiciest tidbits. 
 
And here’s the last bit of inspiration we’ll give you. It’s the one we’d teased in the headline of this article. And it’s one you’ve seen in several places. Here’s one: 
 
You’ve seen it on the TV news. Just as they’re about to head into a commercial. They’ll never tell you, for example: 
 
“The U.S. Olympic committee just chose Los Angeles as its next host city! We’ll give you all the details after the break.” 
 
That never happens! You know that. It’s always something more like this: 
 
“The U.S. Olympic committee just chose its next host city, and you won’t believe where it is! Get all the details after the break.” 
 
It’s a teaser. Reading about it, here, makes you groan, but you’ve got to admit that it’s effective. 
 
And here’s the lowest form of teaser, but we still love them, in a perverse way; and it’s what inspired our headline for this article: 
 
Clickbait! 
 
Yep, all of those “stories” you’ll see at the bottom of a news article’s page, with headlines like “You won’t believe how so-and-so looks today” or “My jaw dropped when I saw her dress” or whatever. 
 
Now look at your webinar content. Think of what, in it, is exciting. And then tease the heck out of it.
 
Need help with a webinar challenge, or any other marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

Here at Copel Communications, we recently helped a client of ours to plan, execute, and roll out a new product. It was a big initiative, spanning several months. 
 
Our client, not surprisingly or unreasonably, asked us to craft the rollout plan, along with a Gantt Chart so they could easily visualize the process. 
 
You know what a Gantt Chart is, right? It was invented by an early 20th century management consultant named Henry Chart. 
 
Okay, we couldn’t resist that one. It was Henry L. Gantt. And the chart—you’ve seen tons of them—is made up of little colored horizontal bars that “move forward” over time, showing what gets done and when. 
 
It’s basically a matrix. For ours, the vertical columns represented months, going forward in time from left-to-right. 
 
And the horizontal rows represented the different activity streams of this project. Some would, say, start in August and run through October. Others wouldn’t start until November, but would run for six months. And so on. 
 
Confession: We are not Excel mavens here at Copel Communications. If you are, we salute you! But you might still pick up a tidbit or two from this article. 
 
List, then draw
 
The plan/execute/rollout initiative was, as we’d mentioned, very detailed. Indeed, the way for us to even wrap our minds around it was doing it as an outline.
 
And that’s how we proceeded. 
 
It went something like this: 
 
Step One: Write up the highest-level bullet points of the outline. Things like “Come up with product ideas.” “Develop the best idea.” “Create marketing materials.” And so on. 
 
Step Two: Populate the sub-bullets of each. So bullets such as “Create marketing materials” would include sub-bullets such as: 

• Write blogs 
• Create an email sequence 
• Develop social posts 

 
And then there would be sub-sub-bullets. In the above example, “Develop social posts” would include sub-sub-bullets such as: 

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram 
• X

 
And so on. 
 
Chart your course
 
Even if you’re an Excel maven, that little bit of Word-play can help you. Just use indented bullets for brainstorming; you don’t need any special Word skills to do that. 
 
Here’s the thing: The Gantt chart isn’t as detailed as that outline.
 
It basically just charts out the highest-level bullet points, over time. 
 
There’s probably some built-in Excel (or even PowerPoint) command that will “Gantt-ify” a bullet list; if there is, illuminate us in the comments section. 
 
In the meantime, if you’re living in Word Land, like us, the chart-“drawing” process is actually quite easy: 
 
All you do is create a table in Word. The top row is the months (or days, weeks, whatever). The left-most column lists the titles of the different activity streams (“Come up with product ideas,” “Develop the best idea,” etc.). 
 
And then all you do is fill in the colors for where the two will overlap. If the first month of “Develop social posts” is, say, October, then make that cell a color other than white. And click-to-fill the other cells as needed. 
 
It takes all of about two minutes. 
 
We delivered both of these docs to our client, who was delighted to receive them. First and foremost was the Gantt chart they’d requested: A quick and easy visualization of how the project would play out over time. 
 
And, for added detail, there was a Word doc outline of the project, in which each row of the Gantt chart teed up to a top-level section of the outline. It was perfect. 
 
It may not have been obvious to the client that we “worked in reverse” to make these deliverables, i.e., starting with the outline and then culling from it to make the Gantt chart, but who cares? They were happy, and the process was efficient. 
 
Have a marketing challenge you’d like to address? Or have tips for us on how to make Gantt charting even easier? In either case, we’d love to hear from you! Contact us today.