Client Spotlight: First Presbyterian Church

We recently completed a website for First Presbyterian Church of Jackson Tennessee. The staff and lay folks felt it was time for an internet Facelift so we went to work!

They already had a strong brand so we just needed to give the website an updated look. This included writing new copy, doing a photo shoot on a Sunday, and recording a new welcome message from the pastor. It also led them to work on a new system to stream and log their services. This component was done in partnership with Cody Cunningham.

First Pres takes their history seriously so we worked that into the new site. We also worked to streamline the menu navigation and bring a responsive element to the site which had been lacking. We also built the site on WordPress to make content updates easy for the staff as they continue their progress into the future.

Check it out here. 

 

Book Review: End of Advertising

For Christmas, my little brother gave me The End of Advertising by Andrew Essex.

I would recommend this book for someone who has worked in the advertising world for a long time or whose thoughts on advertising stem from years ago.

As a digital native and Gary Vaynerchuck fan, the concepts in the book are preaching to the choir. But I am regularly surprised by people I speak with that are way behind the times when it comes to advertising.

To Andrew’s credit, he is a storied and successful advertising man. But he is wise enough to see the changes coming and is writing this book, I think, to help awaken his colleagues to the modern realities of today.

One of the core concepts that most people to figure out is that appointment TV no longer exists. What is appointment TV? It’s TV that people watch at certain time every night/week and, therefore, are there to watch the commercials, too. But with the exception of live sports, almost no one watches live tv anymore, and almost no one watches TV commercials. (With the huge exception being the SuperBowl, even Gary Vee says that it is one of the best deals in advertising!)

This applies also to banner ads and increasingly all forms of digital marketing. Interruption-based marketing, as Seth Godin would refer to it, is becoming less and less effective. Most large companies are just riding the Titanic down to the bottom.

The second thing I loved about this book was the case study of CitiBike. Here is a link to an article Andrew wrote that gives a shorter version of the account in the book.

The big point is here: the next generation doesn’t want to watch your interruption ads. How your company deals with that will determine a lot about how your company succeeds in the next 40 years.

Behind the Scenes: Jackson Chamber Carpool Karaoke

This was a fun one!

 

The Jackson Chamber is one of my favorite clients. They like to have fun, are pretty laid back, get me the information I need, and let me be creative with our projects. That makes for a great combo of traits. When we got together to talk about ideas for this year’s annual celebration staff video, Alexis and Jill decided they wanted to go after one of the trendy styles – a Carpool Karaoke video.

We started with research. I googled and googled how James Corden films his videos and came across this great video from the Met Film School with some excellent tips.  We then set a date to record and I went over to LensRentals.com (A Great Tennessee based Firm!) and had 3 GoPro Hero 6s and suction cup mounts sent over for the shoot.

Normally with Carpool Karaoke, Corden and a guest(s) sing different parts from a lot of songs. This is great if you have two celebrities who are ready to ham it up on camera. We saw it as a weakness during research. If you do not have Adele and Corden, sometimes it can drag a bit depending on the guests. To counteract this, we decided to have everyone sing the same song, which would allow us to use the most entertaining bits of each group, to help keep the video funny and fast moving.

 

Disclaimer: I did not pick the song. But the choice worked out great. It was somewhat ironically funny and had enough vocal parts that people could get into it to add some hilarity to the shoot.

We shot in one afternoon. Starting at lunchtime, we borrowed the executive director’s SUV and set up our 4 cameras. I had a GoPRO Hero Session which we mounted on the sunroof to get a good view of the folks in the back seat. (This turned out to be important because 4-Runners are built like tanks and you can’t see the back seat from the front.) GoPros provided the right size and camera abilities for this task, and the Hero6’s got pretty good audio. (I did have an H4N recording but something went wrong and it failed me, which has happened on a few occasions.)

Each group went through and we had a fun time.

The editing was tricky. I needed to put four cameras in sync and then edit all 8 different groups into one final video edit. To accomplish this, I synced the four cameras based on the 8 groups. I could usually do this by finding a clap or a door closing as my match point. Then, I found each song start in the car and synced it to the audio track. I then had all 8 groups synced to the audio at the start of their own timeline. This allowed me to see approximately what time I made each cut to bring a group into the main timeline and make the next cut at the same time spot on the timeline on a different set of people. This made editing take just 4-5 hours instead of probably 8-9.

I believe in content marketing. With a shoot this intricate and fun, I decided it would be worth the investment to have someone there to take photo and video of this event for Adelsberger Marketing. The photos throughout this article are from Ricky Santos and the behind the scenes video is from Brooks Neely.

Here’s the video:

 

Behind the Scenes: Carpool Karaoke with the Jackson Chamber from Kevin Adelsberger on Vimeo.

Here is the Carpool Karaoke video:

Social Media Win: Burger King Explains Net Neutrality

I always find it interesting when a company takes a stand on a social issue. Even more so when these social issues don’t seem to directly effect them. Recently, Burger King released a video attacking the repeal of Net Neutrality. It would seem, based on emails I received from my Congress people, that Burger King understands how the internet works and how important net neutrality is to business growth for everyone, not just for a few telecom companies.

The great thing about this is how social the video went. Because it was a hot social topic, news outlets and the vast majority of the internet who supports net neutrality, latched onto this great description of how to explain Net Neutrality to people.

 

It also led to long comment discussions which is great for the Facebook algorithm. So without an insane level of production or without spending a lot of money on advertising, Burger King dominated social media for this and created a huge win!