2007 Agency Report Cards

Published
by
Jon
on April 28, 2008
in Producing
. 0 Comments

Even though I don’t work in advertising anymore, I always like to check out Adweek’s annual agency report cards. It’s interesting to note how they rank agency profitability:

The second most important factor in determining the numbers grade is revenue per employee. (This year’s average: $286,000.)

That’s a lot of Revevnue Per Employee, considering that the average salary is probably 60k, when you take into account the hoards of junior people making peanuts.

On an interactive note: the navigation to rifle through the agency report cards is hideous. It’s in some serious need of IA. Adweek has a nice new site, but they need to get som IA help!

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Producer hell - the Moment

Published
by
Jon
on April 28, 2008
in Producing
. 1 Comment

Pretty much every major project I’ve had has had the moment. The moment when you start to hyperventilate and consider walking out of the building and never coming back. The moment when you try and rationalize that although your professional career is taking a nosedive, it’s not like you’re a doctor or anything. Not like anybody’s dying because this website doesn’t go live. It’s usually about 4 days before your massive project is due and it’s about 50% done. The moments when you get 50 emails in 2 hours, each one piling on another notch of stress and hopelessness.

I always feel better when I stay late and everyone else is gone. Then I can really take a deep breath an tackle all of the problems that came at me during the day. While it sucks to work late, it’s always nice to know you have a good 8 hours of uninterrupted time. This is when I get back on top of things, stop freaking out and feel better about the project.

It’s human nature to wait until the last minute, but it’s a cool thing when everyone works their ass off for the last few days, and somehow, the thing gets done. By now I’ve been through it enough that I pretty much know that the thing will get done - but it takes the moment to kick everyone into high gear and provide that adrenaline rush that gets you across the finish line.

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Run through the Jungle

Published
by
Jon
on April 24, 2008
in Producer and Producing
. 1 Comment

Producing is a tough job. Most often, the producer is the one to give the bad news: ‘The client wants it tomorrow’, ‘We need to work this weekend’, ‘We need to re-do this page because of XYZ..’. The producer is the one to constantly follow-up with people if they’re doing their jobs. The producer is the one to get the four million changes from the clients, from legal, from editing, from design, and then have to explain them to designers, writers and programmers and get bitched at along the way. The producer is the punching bag that everyone vents at when they’re feeling stressed.

Interactive producing is further complicated by the simple fact that producing for the Web is a mine field of technological disasters just waiting to explode in your face. It’s NOT like producing a video - export the Quicktime and it’s done? No, with the Web, that video might not work in IE or FF, or Safari, Win XP SP 2, but not SP 1, and yes, on a Mac, but not on the iPhone, but it might work in FF 2.01 but not FF 2.0.0.14. Or it might play for 2 seconds and stop. Or it might play but you can’t see the video, but you can hear sound. On your computer.

Note: as I checked my FireFox browser to see what version I had, it crashed, and I lost my post. Case in point.

Producing for the Web means you have no idea what’s going to happen 5 minutes from now, but you can probably guess it’s going to cause you to start to breathe heavily and break into a sweat.

Producing for the Web means you sit at a computer all day and sporadically start banging your fists against the desk and yelling ‘fuck!’ just loud enough for people to hear you.

So why do we produce? Because there’s an adrenaline rush to making it through the storm, getting 99% of the bugs fixed with moments to spare, launching a site that actually does look cool and knowing how much work went into something that looks so simple. Because there is that instant gratification when you push it live and people start looking at it, and you know you had something to do with it. Because you just lead a team of people that don’t report to you through the woods and made it out alive and now you feel kinda good about yourself. And then there’s always the next project: something bigger, better, more challenging, something you’ve never done before. Are you up for it?

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WFH: AKA, Working from Home…Flexible Work Schedule…Continued

Published
by
Maria
on April 23, 2008
in Producing
. 0 Comments

So while Jon likes to write about the more technical side of being an interactive producer, I find myself writing about the more emotional side of things. A friend of mine who works in PR was recently interviewed by the Christian Science Monitor about expectant mothers in the work force so I thought I would include a link to the article (with my friend’s permission of course):

It is a pretty encouraging article about working mothers and how some great companies manage to provide a flexible arrangement before, during and after us moms give birth.

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Ning is the Thing

Published
by
Jon
on April 22, 2008
in Technology
. 0 Comments

Fast Company’s latest cover story featured Ning, a Palo Alto startup that allows users to create their own social network. It’s quite interesting to see how many social networks have cropped up and how many users they have. I’m sure a lot of brands will be racing to create their own social networks (like Saturn) and Ning will make this an easy task for their production team. There’s a lot of instances where social networks are thriving and make a lot of sense for niche groups, but there’s also plenty of cases when a social network doesn’t make a lot of sense. In order for a social network to succeed, your user base has to be passionate enough about a certain topic so that they will invest the time to become a member and exchange information with other users.

Ning’s business model is to offer the service for free in exchange for ads on your site, or you can pay $19.95 a month to run your own ads. What’s your idea for the next social network?

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Bavarian Group

Published
by
Jon
on April 22, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

The Bavarian Group, a fantastic Web design shop in Boston, just launched a new portfolio site. My favorite: Find my Kitten.

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Google Analytics vs. Omniture

Published
by
Jon
on April 22, 2008
in Technology
. 0 Comments

If you haven’t used Google Analytics, you should. It’s easy to install and gives you a lot of data about a site in a very effective and easy to understand interface. For smaller sites with limited budget, Google Analytics can’t be beat (it’s free).

Out of the box, you get all the standard analytics: page views, time spent on page, unique visitors, referrers, etc. Google also ties in nicely with Google Adwords if you’re running pay-per-click campaigns, so you can view all of your analytics in a single dashboard. Even without an ad campaign running, you can quickly view the keywords that sent traffic to your site and the host names (domains) of who visited the site.

What is it missing?
The ability to deeply mine data, run extensive click-path reports, A/B page comparisons, and a million other functions that reporting applications like Omniture can perform. For a large, highly trafficked site, you’re going to want to use something like Omniture, because inevitably someone in the organization is going to ask you (or an analytics person, if you have one) to run reports that go beyond the tyical report suite. The problem with Omniture is that it is slow, slow, slow compared to Google, and the application is weighed down with features and functionality that makes it harder to get at the basics.

Bottom line:
If your company is willing to spend thousands of dollars a month for analytics, you should use Omniture. If you don’t have thousands of dollars and a lot of time to spend on learning analytics, you should use Google Analytics. Even with Omniture in place on a site, I’ve simultaneously used Google Analytics in order to get the data I need quickly. Surprisingly, there was little discrepancy between both sets of data.

Google

  • Free
  • Easy to use reports
  • Quick to install
  • Limited report suites and data mining
  • Integrates with Adwords and other Google services

Omniture:

  • Comprehensive reporting and data mining
  • Integration with third-party software like Salesforce.com and Exact Target
  • Fully customizable (for a fee)
  • Lots of add-on features, such as 3D data modeling (for a fee)
  • Slow to generate reports
  • Getting fully up and running can take months
  • Big learning curve for first-time users
  • Expensive
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Why Producers Should Use Brightcove

Published
by
Jon
on April 20, 2008
in Online video and Producing
. 1 Comment

Let me first start with full disclosure: I used to be the Web Marketing Manager at Brightcove, so I am quite familiar with their service, and whether I work there or not, I think it’s great.

A lot of people are confused by Brightcove, so let me make it simple:
Brightcove is a service that you pay for that allows you to upload, manage and publish video on the Web. With Brightcove, you can create great looking players without needing a big team of designers and programmers. In fact, many a producer has published video in a nicely designed player all by themselves.

Why Producers Should Use Brightcove:

It works
If you need to get video online for a client, look no further. Once you have a Brightcove account, anyone from the team can login and upload videos. They have some of the biggest media companies in the world managing video through their system, and handle millions of video views a day, so the system is reliable. Oh, and the video delivery uses Flash, so 99.99% of the users can see the video with no problem.

It’s customizable
Your Brightcove account comes with a set of nicely designed player templates (some have one video, some allow for multiple tabs and categories of video). If you want to change the colors or add a background image, you can do that through the interface or by editing the .css. If your project really needs a deeper level of customization and integration, you can hire Brightcove or your favorite Flash vendor to use the API to customize it for you. Some examples of highly customized Brightcove players:

VBS.tv
National Geographic

It’s all online
All you need is the Brightcove Platform account to manage your videos. You can assign thumbnails, title stills, descriptions, metatags and all of the other attributes online. Creating a player is literally done by dragging and dropping titles onto a playlist.

Building a customized video delivery solution is not fun, and to do it well costs millions of dollars. Why not use theirs? The best thing about software as a service is there are no updates on your end, but Brightcove is continually making improvements to the application.

Use it for multiple clients
As a former ad agency producer, I always though Brightcove was a good fit for large interactive departments. You typically have 10-15 producers that manage multiple accounts and all of the interactive work within the agency. Imagine if everyone had access to a service like Brightcove – it would be so much easier to manage and publish video for clients. Instead, agencies love to hire Flash companies to create one-off players that need to be tested and don’t have the same viral or ad serving capabilities as a managed video platform. And after the project, that player is never used again.

Viral Capabilities
Yes, everything needs to be viral these days. With every Brightcove player, you have the option to allow users to copy the link or embed code, send it to friends, or you can turn off the functionality (with a paid account).

Advertising
If you don’t want advertisements to run in your videos, they don’t have to. If you do want ads to run, you can use the online interface to insert ad tags (that you control) at different points in the video (pre-roll, post-roll, mid-rolll, overlay, etc). It’s pretty easy.

Stats
There’s a tab in the Brightcove console that allows you to track the views, downloads, etc of all your video titles. If you want deeper integration you can use add-on services to get more stats on how deeply people engage with your videos.

Cons
-It costs money. For any company with any online media budget, this is not a problem.
-The Brightcove console is a little kloogey, but they’re working on that.

There are a lot of other similar services out there – some of them are geared toward consumers, some of them are insanely confusing to understand or use. For businesses that need to get video on the Web, there’s no better choice.

Check out some of the more in-depth tutorials (that I produced!) or find out more on their website.

(No, I am not getting a kick-back on this post, I just think more producers need to understand what Brightcove has to offer).

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Triple bidding: Not just CYA

Published
by
Jon
on April 18, 2008
in Interactive Process
. 0 Comments

Triple bidding. It’s a process we were into at Arnold and it makes a lot of sense. If you’re going to bid out a job (any job, not just interactive), it’s always smart to at least have three vendors and sometimes five or six. Having a competitive bid process gives you a huge advantage in the evaluation process. Do be sure to have a clearly defined scope and set of deliverables in your RFP, or you will be doing everyone a disservice and won’t be able to fairly compare proposals.

Why triple bidding is good:

>Clarity
Especially with interactive projects, the interpretation of scope can vary immensely. You might get one bid for 45k, one for 55k and one for 100k (or 200k). At least looking at the spread will help you determine where the project should end up.

>Competition is good
If you really want to work with one vendor, but they came in higher than another, you can use the other vendor’s bid as a negotiation point. This is not intended to take advantage of the vendor, but it can help to lower the budget or scope if that’s an issue.

>Who cares the most
How much effort a vendor puts into their proposal is indicative of how much they want to work on your project. If you’re comparing a 3 page boilerplate response to a 12 page customized response, your decision can be quite clear.

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A Primer for the Traditional Producer

Published
by
Jon
on April 18, 2008
in Interactive Process and Producing
. 0 Comments

The Barbarians have a nice new site and a lot of interesting content about producing and the interactive production process. This particular post is a nice primer for the traditional producer on the often confusing and ever-changing world of interactive.

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