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comment by goobster
goobster  ·  2534 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: We made a video for Forever Labs -- I dig it.

The product is brilliant. I'm sold. Seriously. Gonna get my wife and I into this right away.

Don't read below this line.

Because, you know I do marketing for a living, and have for, oh, 15 years or so? So I have OPINIONS. And I'm going to give you my marketing feedback on your video.

Still reading? Ok. You asked for it! :-)

Three things:

1. The product name needs to be on-screen throughout the entire video. Do not make the person who says FUCK YEAH! TAKE MY MONEY! wait until the end to get the URL.

2. The video is 30 seconds too long.

3. It has the wrong soundtrack.

Too long: At about 1:30, you start repeating what was already said earlier in the video, and pretty much everything between there and the money-shot at 2:09 can be cut without losing any of the core message. (Broadly speaking.)

Stand back and think "What is the purpose of this video? What ACTION do I want the viewer to take?"

The only call-to-action in the video is "go to this URL".

So you need to hit them with your idea, why the viewer should give a shit, and then hit them with the URL. At 2-plus minutes in length, nobody but your friends and family are going to watch the whole thing... and the money shot (or "money-quote") is buried at 2:09.

Music: The music REEKS of Kickstarter, which makes me think of you as a hokey couple of amateurs with a half-baked idea that you haven't fully fleshed out.

You have a BIG idea. An HISTORIC idea. That is going to deeply affect people's LIVES. This has IMPACT. And you are ALREADY open for business with PAYING clients. So (just quick googling while I'm at work) I found this, and 40 seconds into this track as examples.

That's my constructive feedback.

But remember, in the end, what you have is excellent. My suggestions are changes to an already high-quality product.





thenewgreen  ·  2534 days ago  ·  link  ·  

These are all valid insights, I really appreciate it. I will pass them on to th team that created it. They will hate you. I love you :)

Also, if you are serious about signing up for the procedure, PM me. Don't just signup. You are a friend of ours and will get the friends and family plan.

goobster  ·  2533 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    They will hate you.

Man, I have been in that position a LOT. You do some really hard work for someone, slave over a hot computer until the early morning hours, hack through hours of footage trying to carve a story out of all the clips, finally get it mastered with a soundtrack, normalized audio levels, exported via a shitty codec and downsampled to hell so you can post it anywhere without it being a 3gb upload...

... and the first person to watch it points out that you spelled the company name wrong. (Or whatever.)

I've been in their shoes. Many times.

HOWEVER, what makes a true professional, is the person who knows that there will be an iteration after it is "done". You have to test-run it against a hostile audience, to understand how it will actually "land" when released to the mass market. You, the customer, are too close. They, the producers, are too close.

Filmmakers, writers, car designers, architects... everyone knows this. But when you come to marketing video producers, people seem to think the production rules that everyone else knows, don't apply to them for some reason.

When I used to go into recording studios with my bands, I'd take a rough mixdown of our work and put it in the car tape deck, and drive down the freeway. It's amazing how different things sound when you aren't listening on reference monitors in an audio-neutral room!

So yeah. They'll hate me. They'll rage. They'll question my skills or authority to levy an opinion.

But in the end, after a week of these comments nagging in the back of their heads, they'll agree. Because, in the end, they are professionals. They have the same goal you have. And they know "good" when they see it. They just may need to back up a few feet to get some perspective first.

    Also, if you are serious about signing up for the procedure, PM me.

Will do. Thanks, my friend.