 Great photo by Meta AI. We recently had to help a client choose a new, female voice-over (VO) artist for a series of B2B videos. You may need to do something similar, soon; or you might need to farm out the casting thereof.
In either case, you can grab some useful lessons-learned here. Let’s describe the project to you first. We’ll be fudging/anonymizing some details here, out of client confidentiality, but we’ll share enough for you to get the gist. These are corporate videos. Showcasing applications of exciting new technology which is generally demo’ed on-screen. While they are posted for the whole world to see on YouTube, the actual intended audience is way, way, way smaller: We’re talking about business executives in various industries we needn’t detail here. Another characteristic of these videos: They feature two VO’s. One male, one female. Sometimes, the male is the lead, and the female chimes in; sometimes, it’s the other way around. That’s a really important point. If you’re not terribly familiar with audio production, know that you would never have both of those VO artists in the studio at the same time, trading lines. That’s way too inefficient and expensive; even Disney movies are made with individual voice actors recording dialogue in separate sessions. The “interplay” happens in the editing. The VO artists see the entire script—both parts—and should be able to act as if they’re “in the room” with the other. That’s a skill unto itself. But there are other issues. For these videos, we already had our male voice. And he was strong and confident. Whoever we cast as his female counterpart, had to hold her own against him. Bingo. This made our initial “down-select” pretty easy. The women who came across as too meek or whispery were ruled out. Not that they were bad; they just wouldn’t pair well with our guy—they lacked what in Hollywood they call “chemistry.” But we’ve saved the biggest factor for last. Remember our audience? Those C-suite executives? You know that we’re simply obsessive about taking a customer-back approach here at Copel Communications, so reaching those execs was paramount priority. So guess which women got eliminated, based on this factor? It was all the ones who were trying to be cutesy, whiny, nasal, trendy, or falling back on that crutch of the raspy teenager “vocal fry.” Gone, gone, gone. All of them. In the end, we were left with two great candidates; it was practically a coin-flip. In fact, Choice B now acts as our backup when Choice A is unavailable. All of this work matters. If you’re pitching a C-level executive, as our client was, you can’t be tone-deaf. You want your script and production and value-proposition message to shine through. You do not, under any circumstances, want your audience to be distracted by the voice of one of the two VO artists behind the video. Too much is at stake. Need help sweating—or simply offloading—the details like this? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you.
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 Great photo by Grok. That’s a teaser headline for you. Our esteemed client, here at Copel Communications, did not explicitly tell us:
“Hey, Copel Communications. Go invent the wheel for us.” But what did they ask us? What’s it got to do with wheels? And as ever, most importantly, how can this help you be more productive and make more money? Here’s what actually happened: A client of ours wanted us to get them booked for speaking engagements. They weren’t a big A-List celebrity who could simply choose from a passel of drooling speakers-bureau agencies. No, they needed to post their services on a speakers’ exchange platform: effectively a two-door website, with one door for “Speakers Who Want To Get Bookings,” and another for “Event Planners Who Need Speakers.” Get it? We’ve done a lot of different things here at Copel Communications over the years, but creating the proper package for a speaker on an exchange platform was new to us. Undaunted, we plunged in. But how? You could certainly Google this. And you can ChatGPT it, too. But those would effectively give you summaries and to-do lists, which are fine, but not what we wanted. So we reverse-engineered the process. We pretended to be an Event Planner, seeking a speaker just like our client. Ta-dah! What we got was a manageable number—a few dozen—hits on this exchange platform. And then we were free to see the promotional packages that those speakers had uploaded to the site. That is, “the wheel.” Here’s the thing. Don’t assume—we sure didn’t—that those other speakers’ materials would be stellar. Most weren’t. Many, in fact, sucked. Which was actually great for us, for two reasons: 1) If they suck, they’ll be weak competitors, and make our client look even better. 2) We could easily see the weaknesses in their materials—as well as the less-egregious weaknesses of their stronger competitors—and effectively outdo them at every turn. Which is exactly what we did. In fairly short order, we were able to create a package for our client (including bio, sizzle reel, programs catalog, on-stage headshot, technical presentation rider, etc.) that blew away every one of those few-dozen competitors. Just like that. Best-practice. Best-in-class. Zero Googling. The lesson here is that this “wheel” had already been invented. Lucky for us—and our client—that competitors’ “wheels” were burdened with flat tires, to play out the analogy. At its heart, this is a lesson in creative reverse-engineering. There are others. For example, if you’ve got a client you’d like to clone, look at their LinkedIn profile. See what groups they belong to, and join them. You’ll quickly find peers who are worth engaging. Need help with a creative marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Meta AI. “Patch” can mean a lot of things. Patch of grass. Soul patch. Patch cord. Bald patch. We could go on.
Here, though, we’re talking about marketing and advertising. And the idea of a patch—which we’ll define in detail in just a minute—is an oldie but goodie you may have overlooked. It’s so simple and so obvious that it’s easy to take for granted, and thus miss. Let us explain by way of the true client story that sparked this article. We recently were helping a client to create a promotional package for a speaker’s bureau, to get them booked at lots of different live engagements targeting their specialized audience. And we needed to flesh out this package with a “sizzle reel” of their past live engagements: Video clips. Now this client had been on stage a lot. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there was precious little video to document it. We needed every shot, heck, every frame we could get our hands on. And then we found it. What looked like a veritable little silver mine. It was a short clip, but boy was it juicy. It showed our client on stage, in front of a big crowd, delivering some real rousing zingers. It was great! But this silver mine was tarnished. First, it wasn’t created by our client. It was created by someone else who had either organized that event or maybe was in the audience. We found it on YouTube. This created Challenge 1: Find that person and ask/beg/plead/cajole/bargain for permission to use/edit/re-purpose it. This turned out to be surprisingly easy. A quick Googling led us to the poster’s website, and thus to their email address, and they were delightfully generous, to the point of even directing us toward a higher-resolution version of the video clip. Now isn’t that nice? But then there’s Challenge 2. That video was stamped. Right across the lower third, it read “[Speaker Name] of ABC Company, Speaking at XYZ Event 2019.” Oh no! The “[Speaker Name]” was correct; that was our client. But “ABC Company” no longer existed; the client had since changed the name, after, um, 2019, which made this clip look positively ancient. Naturally—since of course you’re thinking of this—we’d asked the original poster of the video (the one who’d granted us access, and the higher-res version) if they had a pristine copy of the source video, with no titles stamped on top. And no, they did not. How do you solve Challenge 2? It’s right in the title of this article: You patch it. You basically build a new title bar, and overlay it on top of the outdated/offensive one. Don’t try and match the style of the old one; why bother? You want this to look intentional, as if that “title” was your idea, and was there all along—not like you’re trying to cover some mistake. Oh, did we mention Challenge 3? Turns out that the original poster had added background music to this video of our client, on stage, speaking. When it rains, it pours. You can’t patch your way out of that one. Fortunately, however, you can somewhat reduce “background noise” (!) in editing, and we’d had our own up-tempo music track for the sizzle reel, which we used to help drown out the old music. Patching, like this, applies to lots of media. You’ve likely seen tons of patches in your life and never ever realized it. They work on TV spots, print ads, web pages, brochures, trade show banners, infomercials, you name it. The only limit is your creativity. Need a creative solution to a tricky marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by Grok. We do serious work for serious clients, here at Copel Communications. We help them with marketing strategy and tactical execution, with the aim of empowering them to better serve their customers, and generate more revenue doing it.
For example, we recently helped a client to develop a marketing strategy and materials that targeted what are known as HNWIs, or high-net-worth individuals. And then Archie stumbled into the scene. What? Huh? What’s this have to do with “serious work for serious clients”? Oh come on. We have fun, too. Hence this silly story—and this article. But don’t worry: there’s a valuable takeaway at the end. So. We confess: We were indulging in one of our off-hours guilty pleasures: Reading an old Archie Comics Digest. The kind you find in the impulse aisle of the supermarket checkout line. It’s mostly full of old reprints from decades past. And there we stumbled across this great story, which instantly made us think of our client. Here’s the gist: Veronica discovers one day, to her amazement, that Archie actually has a large amount of money in his bank account. Turns out, he’s proud to explain, that he’s been socking away money from mowing lawns, running errands, and so on, so he can save up enough to go to college without burdening his parents. Pretty laudable. Veronica then takes this as a green-light for her to ask Archie to take her to the most expensive restaurant in town on their next date. “Why not?” she asks him. “You’ve got the money.” Archie is instantly defensive, and offended. He explodes. He says that that money is sacrosanct. He won’t squander it on a single over-priced date. Veronica is equally incensed. She hands him an ultimatum: “Spend the savings on this date, or forget about having me as a girlfriend.” Curious as to where this goes? So were we. Archie holds the line. He heads for the door, saying that “Some things are just more valuable than you think.” And here’s the kicker: During this whole argument in Veronica’s house, her multimillionaire father, Hiram Lodge, has overheard it all. So he stops Archie at the door and tells him, “So help me, Archie. I want to shake your hand." Wow. How could we not wrap up this little Archie Comics Digest and mail it off to our client, who had just launched messaging to HNWIs about “earning the rewards of their diligent lifetime of smart financial stewardship”? And so, upon receiving this comic book, this client tripled their billing with us. No. Of course not. That wasn’t the case, any more than it was the expectation. Fact is, the client got a laugh out of it, and sent us an email to that effect. Because amid all the serious work we do for serious clients, we’re all people first. It never hurts to reaffirm that connection. Need help with your next creative assignment, regardless of levity level? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Perfect image—replete with appropriately inappropriate cleavage—by Grok. 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:
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.  Great photo by Grok. 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.  Great photo by Grok. 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.  Great photo by Grok. 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.  The joy of de-selecting. 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.  Great photo by Grok. 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!
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! |