Using Flash® for marcom: Hollywood extravaganzas without the extravagance.

Today’s subject is Flash. And also pizzazz.

So let’s see. There’s a flash in the pan. A flash of lightning. Flashy clothing—plus cars, sunglasses, and moves. There’s a flash of genius. In fact, A Flash of Genius is even a movie. It’s about windshield wipers. There are also flash cameras. And flash drives.

And then there’s using Flash for marcom, i.e., Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional, the multimedia platform that makes it possible to add animation and interactive pizzazz to your Web pages. Flash allows you to create low-cost presentations and marketing communications with the punch of expensive movies or video, but without the expensive part.

How not-so-expensive? At Harding Marketing, we’ve done highly effective Flash productions simply by animating the graphics and text from a brochure—then adding an announcer and stock music.

But Flash can also get pretty flashy—with voice-over actors, original music, sound effects, and film footage. Our French office in Grenoble created a Flash presentation with amazingly high production values at amazingly low production costs.

But low cost is not the only reason Flash is now such a hot medium. Jerry Tanner, one of Harding’s killer designers, gets all misty-eyed when he talks about using Flash’s 3D effects and something called Drawing API that lets him stretch and twist graphics like a mad genius. Which he is. “Flash gives me all kinds of creative freedom for special effects,” he says, wiping away a tear of joy. “I can sit at my computer and compete with Hollywood. Okay, B-movie Hollywood, but still.”

Chuck Gardner, Harding’s creative guru for Flash production, made his bones writing and producing over a hundred network and local TV commercials. “The idea is still what’s important,” he says. “With features like Flash Custom Filters, we can make good ideas come alive—without spending a ton of money.”

At Harding, we’ve found another important benefit of Flash: Because the production costs are so low and the creative tools are so fast and easy to use, Flash is amazingly simple to customize. A few quick changes can shift the focus from one target audience to another.

Testing alternative selling strategies is equally painless. Announcer tracks can be prepared in as many languages as needed—along with on-screen texts and headlines. And the cost of all these variations is minimal.

Tracking results is easy, too. At Harding we use a number of sophisticated online tools to measure activity and response levels for our clients’ sites. Time after time they’ve shown an unusually attractive return on investment (ROI) for Flash. In this not-so-hot period of economic ennui, that’s obviously important. Not that an attractive ROI is ever unimportant.

Even so, many distinguished marcom leaders still believe Flash is beyond their reach. Their designers don’t have the knowledge, they fear. Or the time. Or their writers are print experts, not film.

Perhaps we can help. At Harding, we have with a staff of cutting-edge designers and writers, many with broad experience in Flash. And, of course, we also have dedicated and professional Project Managers who can help you plan and budget, as well as coordinate with our afore-mentioned creative people.

Which leads us to one of the most fundamental parts of any marcom piece: The Call to Action. We’d like to invite you to take a look at a few more of the Flash productions our people have created working with our clients in the U.S. and Europe. For a close-up look at Harding Marketing’s Flash and pizzazz, please click here.

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