Client Spotlight: Leadership University

This video shoot was a little more complicated than most that we have completed for a client. It involved shooting at a high ropes course and about 5-6 other locations and dates. It involved 4-5 different cameras with different gear for each. But to capture the excitement of the ropes course and to capture the variety of locations and actions was well worth the extra effort.

One of my favorite parts of this was including a GoPro trained on the faces of some of the students. It helped capture the excitement of jumping out of a tree! This video needed to be fun to help capture students’ imagination and attention.

Here is the Leadership Jackson recruitment video for 2018!

State of the Apps: May 2018

At Adelsberger Marketing, we use a lot of apps to help keep the business running smoothly. I know you probably use a few, too, but I wanted share ours in case you were looking for others to help productivity!

RainyMood: Rainy Mood is a free browser-based rain noise maker. I frequently use this in Chrome, with an extension called ‘Volume’ Master. I like to make the rain noises be the base layer of sound in my earphones when I am at theCO or working around other people. This allows a continuous background noise that I often edit video over or play focus music on top of it. It helps keep dips and track changes in the music from becoming distracting.

Google Drive: Adelsberger Marketing using Google’s G Suite for our emails, this also gives us access to Google Drive which we have nearly unlimited amounts of storage on. This is a way we share files internally and externally with clients. Instead of also paying for DropBox, we use Google Drive’s provided storage with G Suite. It’s pretty sweet.

BackBlaze: Fortunately, I have not needed to implement the recovery feature of BackBlaze yet, and hopefully I never will. Backblaze is a very affordable in-the-background backup service. It is always backing up my computer and it’s $5 a month for all you can use data. It also backs up external hard drives that you connect to your computer once a month. I have this running on all of my team’s computers.

Toggl: Toggle is our time tracking method of choice (right now). It helps us keep our time based on the client. We don’t charge hourly but it helps us review where we are spending our time.

Slack: We use slack internally to communicate as a team. We try to avoid sending email in house as much as possible. Slack is a lifesaver. Pro-tip: I recently found out that you can ask Slack to remind you of a message in a certain period of time. This is a new tool that I will use a lot.

Adobe Creative Cloud: We use the creative cloud suite for all of our creative work around here. Seems like on a weekly basis we use almost all of the major Adobe products!

Splice: Splice is the app I use to assemble my daily videos. It is a free app from GoPro and has built-in titles and sound files. It makes putting that video together a snap.

WordSwag: WordSwag may be some of the best money I have ever spent on an app. We use it all the time. Fortunately, they recently released some new fonts.

Overcast: Listening to podcasts is something I spend a lot of time on. Overcast helps me to do that better. It has smart speed, which removes dead spaces in conversation, which helps you listen to podcasts faster. It also allows you to save custom speeds for each of the shows that you listen to.

How Motion Improves Customer Experience

We have become accustomed to receiving mass amounts of information from various outlets throughout our day. To not get overwhelmed, we have also developed a subconscious system to filter out things that we know don’t interest us. Because of this, businesses have to figure out a way to connect with their customers in a non-intrusive way. One of these ways is the use of motion in your website, app, or social media post. In 2016, over 70% of all of the traffic online was video. That means that the greatest chance to reach a customer is to use a platform that they are primarily using. By using motion graphics in these videos, you will be able to hold their attention even longer.

This is because motion provides elements that a static graphic or photograph just can’t. For instance, take a look at this GIF that we made for one of our clients.

Now look a still from the gif.

 

 

With just stopping the motion, the personality of the graphic was taken away and made less interesting. We just naturally pay more attention to things that are moving especially when vibrant colors are involved.

Another benefit with using motion is that it can be used to focus a viewer’s eyes to a specific spot on their screen. With the majority of people consuming content on their mobile devices, apps and mobile sites benefit greatly from having motion elements. Take a look at this mockup of an iPhone screen.

 

Bright colors can draw your viewer’s attention. But look at how much more engaging the same notification is when it moves:

 

When providing content to your customers, you want them to be focused on what your business has to offer. One way to do that is by attracting them with a little bit of motion. This can be in the form of a video background on a website or a non-intrusive alert that provides helpful information. While this is a somewhat new idea in the world of marketing, it has its origins in the world of video production. Interviews usually have name plates that are on the lower area of the screen to provide the viewer with some important information that could have been easily overlooked. This also serves as place for things that weren’t said in the video to be placed.

The same concept can be used with a call to action button on a website or on an animated social media post. Just remember that it is better to be simple and subtle rather than having something that is visually overbearing.