Boston’s Strategic Marketing
and Video Production Agency
Captains of Industry® is a strategic marketing communications firm based in Boston. Our name may be irreverent, but we’re all business. With 25 years of experience working with some of the best brands in the United States, we help our clients tell their stories, engage customers, and get results. While our work spans many industries and disciplines, we have specific areas of expertise that include renewable energy, branding, inbound marketing content, viral marketing, and video production.
Sometimes, a peak inside the production can itself become another story to be told. The entire production can be an asset to be mined for additional content. For me, the behind-the-scenes action can be just as fascinating as the final deliverable.
We’ve all become accustomed to watching the EPK—the electronic press kit—in our latest Hollywood blockbuster DVD purchase, rental, stream, or download. Making-of shorts and special effects breakdowns even seem to be popping up on cable TV too.
Different aspects of the production can be highlighted depending on the target audience. For instance, a video magazine could focus on the camera equipment used, or a prop makers blog can talk more about the set design.
Peter Jackson has done the same thing recently with his Hobbit production videos. The blog posts act as extended trailers, whetting every fangeek’s appetite for a return trip to Middle Earth. One of my favorite TV shows, “Leverage,” also did a quick show ‘n’ tell with the making of one of those wide canvas slo-mo freeze-frame TNT promo shots.
Leave it to Google, the most virtual company imaginable, to create a brilliantly 3 dimensional, hands-on (literally) model of what google maps can do for you. Here’s a write up from AdWeek, and a peek at the video:
What’s great about this is that it so clearly, cleanly, and fun-ly (okay, I know that isn’t a word) takes something that lives entirely within the digital world, the world of ones and zeros, and makes it as simple to follow as a children’s toy. You really connect to what Google maps is doing for you.
And here’s the takeaway – the more virtual your product or service is, the more you need to make it real, tactile, HUMAN. The world around us has changed dramatically, but we’re still wired pretty much the same as cavemen (er, cavepeople). If you can hold it in your hands, if you can see it, you can understand it. It makes an emotional connection. As marketers, that’s our job. And in this execution Google and Venables Bell have hit a homerun.
My parents, living in a remote corner of Vermont, used to fork over $70 bucks a month for their 150 cable TV channels. They had to. It was the only way to get the good shows and movies. Today, I get most of that content via the Internet, thanks to high speed wireless that’s now available even in very rural areas. $19 bucks a month for wireless, with zero cable bill. According to the most recent Deloitte survey of viewing habits, I’m far from alone: 9% of respondents have cut their cable cord, while 11% are thinking about it. This trend is going to accelerate. For advertisers, it’s one more data point that shows that interactive online marketing – driven by good content – will be THE dominant force in marketing (even more than it already is). The push towards Internet-delivered content will also likely get a major boost when Apple introduces their own TV system; you know it’s coming, right? They’re going to do for TV what the iPhone and iPad did for communications and computing, crushing other technologies and transforming how we enjoy our entertainment, and by default how we engage with advertising.
