Now it’s time for you and your editor to meld minds. Tell them what parts you think are working, what the overall spirit is you were going for, the pieces that didn’t turn out the way you planned on the shoot. Give them your vision. Give a few notes of glaring mistakes or situations to avoid. Then sit back and let them work. I know I know, there are so many comments you still have. You could go on for an hour about what’s not how you imagined. It’ll get there, just don’t give it all at once. If you are working with a great editor, sometimes the best use of your time at the edit is to say nothing.
Done right it should almost be a form of meditation. You breathe out some thoughts, the editor breathes it in and breathes out magic with it. That should be the flow of the conversation. If it starts to feel one sided and not like a meditative breath, you’re doing it wrong.
Mind your manners too, your editor might have an Oscar or two. Also, pick up your dishes. You’re a fucking grown-up and it’ll change their perspective on you. Say thank you. Push in your chair when you go.
YOUR MASTERPIECE IS A GLOB OF CLAY.
There’s a misconception that the edit is a place where you simply glue the pieces of the spot together as you scripted it, add some spackle, and you’re done. Editing is more like sculpting than building. You chip away, mold, squish around some squishy goop until it starts to look like what you want it to look like.
At first don’t worry about the length. Just mash the pieces in the right place and see if it makes as much sense as it did when it was a script. It’s not time yet to stress one exact take over another, just more or less make the spot understandable. It probably won’t be, for a while. Start shifting around the big blocks of scenes. Watch it again, see if it makes sense, shift, watch it, panic, shift, then watch it again. If you shot what you scripted and then some, you should have more than enough material to make a good spot.
If it’s a funny spot, the joke might not work yet, but that’s ok, have faith.
Is it all working now? Ok, now worry about the length. Put it to the song you like, etc.
IT’S NOT PROFESSIONAL UNTIL IT LOOKS PROFESSIONAL.
If you’re not familiar with TV production, color-correction is the difference between an amateur video and a cinematic film. It’s when the spot you worked on begins to look like a professional piece. The first basic step is making sure people don’t look like they all have jaundice, seasickness, or sunburn—getting the greens, yellows, and reds all balanced. Also making sure white objects look white, black objects are black, etc. Of course the most important part is making sure the client’s product is the 100% correct color (especially for food and beer). It’s helpful to bring the product with you to the color correct session so they can see it in person. Any good post house can get you to this level before you even show up. Then comes the fun part, what story are you going to tell with color? The hipster Wes Anderson look is a push of a sepia yellow. A cold and sterile vibe is a touch of blue. Heartwarming is a warm color. It can get more or less serious with the saturation of color, even getting cartoonish if you push the saturation too far. Overly contrasted and crushed midtones gives you that classic ad look, pushed further it becomes a soap opera. The entire mood of a spot can change with what you do here. Find references you think are doing what you want to do. Work with the colorist to play and ask them lots and lots of questions. Most of them have worked on plenty of incredible feature films too and they have great opinions and taste.
DON’T PROMOTE OTHERS FOR FREE.
This is a dumb one, but make sure someone covers up any logos that aren’t your brand’s logo with tape on set. You’ll either have to clear usage rights of every single brand that appears or blur it out in post-production. If you blur it in post you have to do a good job of it or it’ll look like
GET READY TO HAVE A SONG
IN YOUR HEAD FOREVER.
Life is better with a soundtrack. Just like music can change your mood, it can change the mood of a spot. Sometimes your whole idea for the spot will be based on a song. Other times you’ll have some idea, but still be looking for the exact perfect track. Then there will be times you have no idea whatsoever. Start early, find references from your own music collection or online. Try watching the spot with different styles and genres first. Then once you’ve narrowed a category try to find specific songs or artists who seem to work, even if they’re not in your budget. That’s what you can cut your spot to as a guide for making sure the spot works. Then you can bring in a music house to help you make a bespoke track based on a general reference. You can leave it fairly open, “I’m looking for 25% Mozart, 75% Polka” or get specific, “I want something that sounds like this song but is different enough that we won’t get sued.” there are naughty parts everywhere, and that’ll mean a ton of time wasted, especially if the logo is moving. It’s not the end of the world by any means and they won’t be strangers to doing it, it’s just time and money that could be spent making the spot better.
If you let the client hear the scratch track be prepared for them to fall in love with it and either try to find a way to buy it or be heartbroken when they can’t. Final warning: when you finally find the right song for your spot, you will have to hear it over and over and over again. But not even the whole song, just some 2-second segment that’s over the part of the cut that’s not working.
“Some part of the cu…the cut… 2-second…2 sec… part of…part of… part of the cut”
EVERYONE LOVES CARTOONS
UNTIL THEY HATE THEM.
Animated spots are a weird wrinkle in the land of TV. You usually don’t get to travel and they take just as much time and effort as a live-action spot. You’ll have to give feedback in emails and the changes won’t be made for hours or days. It’s also tough to know what you’re approving when. You’ll hear a lot of words like storyboards, doughboys, lighting phase, etc. Ask the producer (and production company if you can) exactly what you’re approving at each step. Loosely, a storyboard is going to be where you approve the framing and timing they’re going for; pre-vis is where you see blobs showing you the movement, exact angles, and pacing of each scene (this is the last real time to change anything); then there will be a few more rounds of polish including color, shadows, and texture. Once each phase is locked, it’s a massive pain in the ass to go back and change anything and you pretty much have to go all the way back to the beginning to tweak. You’ll need client approval at each phase too, to avoid the headache of having to beg and plead the production company to change something you said would be fine.
YOUR GUTS WERE
ALL OVER THE PLACE.
If a scene feels off it’s because it is off. If you reluctantly agree to a change, you’ll regret it later. Trust other people’s guts too, but be wary of logical explanations for errors. No person will be there to explain to every home viewer why it is the way it is.
YOUR COMPETITION IS PORN.
More than any other medium, the guidelines for digital are a rapid work in progress. In general, it’s a little looser, more casual, more entertaining. It pretty much has to be. With TV, people will put up with a commercial that’s boring because they’re too lazy to change the channel. With digital, they have to be motivated enough to become un-lazy and seek out your content. And it’d better be worth it or back they go to porn.
The copy for digital has to be simple and intuitive too or people will get lost and, well, back to porn. Strip away as much as you can. If you don’t need a headline, don’t put one. If the product name can be worked into the title, do that. Ditto for the logo. If you have a text box where people type, write the call-to-action in the box. Consolidate. Shrink. Chop off or mash together anything you can.
Go with clear over cute, but be very casual. Write like a blogger writes: informative but still engaging and light. The internet isn’t a heavy medium, you will lose people with jargon. And if you lose them…you know.
THE TELLTALE SIGNS THAT SOMEONE ACTUALLY KNOWS DIGITAL.
The func
tionality is intuitive and quick, and it is easily accessible (you don’t have to register, create a character from scratch, answer a quiz, etc.).
If you do for some reason have to enter information or upload a photo, it is asked in the most entertaining way possible and is well worth the hassle.
Nothing is more than three steps away.
I saw a site where the user was asked to register and answer a survey to discover what favor of the product they’re most like. Are you fucking kidding? Do they think I can’t wait to post on my Facebook wall that I’m Raspberry-Razzle?
IF THE RULES DON’T WORK, CHANGE THEM.
The bonus of being online is that you can dictate the parameters. Are 30 seconds not long enough for your commercial? Make it 37. Want more room for copy? Add a scroll bar. Headline too long? Have it come up in parts. Media restrictions are gone, all that’s left to do is make it engaging. This freedom also makes it a bit unruly. Create your own boundaries early in the process so you have a way of checking your ideas.
REALITY IS THE FILTER.
Put yourself in the role of a first-time viewer. Does it still make sense? Is it worth the user’s efforts? It’s a bit foolish to assume people have seen other parts of the advertising campaign before they see the digital part. It’s also naïve to assume that a regular person will go through tremendous lengths to receive your advertising messages.
THE BEGINNING;
A GOOD PLACE TO START.
The first part of doing something online is coming up with an idea. Just like anything else in advertising. If you jump straight to some neat new piece of technology you just heard about, it’ll be outdated by the time the project goes live.
Think of what you want people to take away from the project, list them out. Then, think of ways you can group all of those ideas into one overarching digital idea. You also need to consider functional requirements.
Let’s say you’re working on a coffee brand that sells fair-trade beans. You want people to know about the people growing the beans, the importance of different regions, the different favor profiles, etc. You might want to create an online campaign that tells all of these stories through the story of the growers.
There would be a page where you could get to know the growers and hear a personal story of how the company has impacted their lives in positive ways. On the product page you can learn about each bean variety as told by one farmer who grows it. The order page might tell you how much the farmer will get from that bag of beans. Each page achieves its own task, but builds up to the larger idea of the growers.
Figure out all your pieces, prioritize them, then find a way to put them together. There are infinite ways to weave them. Some will be more intuitive than others.
WHEN YOU HAVE JUST
A LITTLE TO SAY…
When you’re doing a simple product like candy, soda, or anything else that doesn’t require a lot of technical information, you’ll want to keep your idea simple and easy to explore. With little new info, your purpose is entertainment—making people like you more than the other guy. What works best in this scenario is a single-experience. Ice Bucket Challenge, Elf-Yourself, Subservient Chicken, all of these had one, singular, simple experience that users could participate in and then move on. It’s easy to share because you know what it is and can sum it up in a few words as you share it with your friends.
WHEN YOU HAVE TO SAY A LOT…
For a product launch or a complex product, you might have to get across a ton of information. The web allows you to do this in a classier way than TV or print. In a print ad you need to get all 14 product points into 8.5 x 11. On the web you have as many pages and sections as you want and you could have one page per product point if it felt right.
When you have a more elaborate product or project you will want to think a lot more about site structure. The idea of a single experience still holds true, but you won’t have the luxury of one page. It’s time to get organized.
Break out the sticky notes and a big board. Think structural, not linear.
Figure out how to break apart your site. Every product has natural seams to cut along. A car has drive, interior, safety, design. A washer has cleaning power, efficiency, clothes care. You can be somewhat avant-garde with it if you’d like, but find intuitive divisions and start putting all the information you have into each of those buckets. This will be your site structure.
You can then create a main page or an intro that ties them together. This landing page will house all information that is necessary to understanding what the heck to expect on the rest of the site.
Let’s say for example that you are creating a site for a refrigerator, the concept is “the land of cold.” The homepage will explain that it’s a land of cold because otherwise when you get to the icicle monsters in the freezer section of the site, you will think “wtf! Icicle monsters?” Conversely, if the freezer section and the quick-cool section and the crisper drawer section all start off with “this is the land of cold,” it will get very grating very fast.
BUILD A WORLD, THEN LIVE IN IT.
Unlike TV and print, which are confined to the media, a web experience exists wherever it wants to go. You can set your own guidelines, but once you do, make sure to follow them. If your tone is funny, it has to be funny from the banner to the Twitter to the About Us page. If the Instagram post is black and white, a sudden burst of color will be disturbing…is that what you were going for? If you have wacky green creatures walking through the site, a sudden serious page of copy will be out of place. The internet is a magic space where anything can happen, but if you jump the logic you’ve created, you will confuse or annoy people.
Working in the web means creating different stories and putting them under one roof. Each section or piece is a tale that is interesting on its own, but also should anchor to the main theme. An online narrative can be interrupted though, so make sure the story holds even if you skip steps. It has to make sense when it’s out of order too.
MAKE DIGITAL LESS DIGITAL
Even though we’re in a digital world, people still like touching, lifting, and poking. We want the instant convenience and accessibility of the digital world, but we’re not ready to abandon the physical world. Some of the most intriguing digital experiences mimic the physical world or work on top of it. Tactile experiences like rolling or spinning or throwing will up time spent on the site. Giving weight and dimension will make objects more approachable and real. Using items and gestures that are instinctive makes it so you won’t have to explain them.
I know to blow on a dandelion. I know to pick up dice. I know that if I spin a wheel it will eventually slow down and stop. If I drop an item, I know it falls. I don’t know that clicking a box gives me a numerical value that relates to the image that will be selected on the orb in the upper right-hand corner.
FINDING SOMEONE ELSE TO DO YOUR WORK.
The icky secret of how agencies make so many amazing digital experiences is that they don’t. They hire other people to do the fine details. The idea comes from the agency along with much of the writing and the initial design, but then it gets handed off to one of many digital production companies. I’ve seen people make their careers by working with the right ones.
Search, study, and memorize a list of vendors you’d like to work with and what type of work they do. Anytime you see a cool project, find out who did it.
Finding the right people to work with is hard. Their site can be great and they can suck. They might be brilliant, but not brilliant for your project. They can be super smart, but impossible to work with. They can look amazing but the guy who did all their work has long since left and opened his or her own company. Ask lots of questions when you get on initial calls.
Then, once you’ve got a capable vendor, make sure to manage the project. Match your vision with their vision and the client’s vision. You talk to the vendor through producers. Talk to your producer daily at least.
YOU’RE PAYING TOO MUCH TO NOT GET WHAT
YOU WANT.
Digital and social media companies get delivered pillowcases filled with gold ingots for every project they do. There’s no need to feel sorry for them unless they’re not able to do what you’re asking them to do because you’re indecisive, slow, or wasting time.
Try and be as civil as possible, but tell them what you expect. Remember that you are nothing without them. You hired them because of your shortcomings, not theirs. You’re partners. If they suck it’s because you suck. If you guys do amazing work together it’s at the very least partially because of them.
If they know what they’re supposed to be doing but they don’t, push them. One way you can make them nervous is to do some of the work yourself. Come up with solutions and tell them that’s “a place to start.” They’ll raise it even further trying to one-up you. They’ll also see that you give a shit and that’ll make them care too.
They want you to be happy. A single bad experience can get a vendor blacklisted for years. A successful experience can mean a new level for their office.
Oh. And remember to say “thank you.”
YOU’RE ALREADY BEHIND SCHEDULE.
To date I have not been on a reasonable timeline for digital projects. By the time you get briefed you are behind the ball.
It’s the best and worst part of it. Choose to focus on whichever aspect of it you’d like. On one hand it’s stressful. On the other, it moves fast enough that it doesn’t get ruined.
START WITH EVERYONE HATING YOU AND GO FROM THERE.
Digital ads are the worst. You are in someone else’s personal space. You aren’t a bathroom break in their program, you are an open sore in their life. What’s more, you’re cheap and dirty, with the narrowest chance of being even remotely entertaining. An eye-tracking study found that people have been physically trained not to look where banners are placed. You’re not even worth forgetting.
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