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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.
Brochures are not required to carry a passport. Maybe that’s a mistake.
In a global economy, brochures, data sheets, sales guides, and other marketing communications are often written in one language (let’s say American English), then read in another. Along the way, writers spend hours trying to find just the right words—which end up with translators who manage to find just the wrong ones.
And it doesn’t take a whole brochure to mess things up. There’s a true story of how a simple slogan like “Finger lickin’ good” was translated into Chinese, quickly becoming, “Eat your fingers off.”
There’s something very satisfying about a specific number. Little kids know that. It’s why they never tell you they’re five; they’re always five-and-a-half. Or almost six. And it’s why mathematicians spend decades trying to compute every last digit of pi—crunching numbers out to the edge of the universe.
It’s also why I’m proud to report that NetMarcom, the proprietary, Web-based content management and publishing solution from Harding Marketing Communications, helped one of our clients, a multinational technology company, cut marcom costs $1,375,300 just last year. Not “over a million.” Not even 1.3 million. But precisely $1,375,300.
Even if that’s not digits out to the edge of the universe, it makes a very satisfying point: NetMarcom is able to save huge piles of money for an enterprise with major marcom projects to manage. But that doesn’t explain how. Since we’re the ones who invented the thing, I’ll give it a try.
NetMarcom helps your business use the net to create all kinds of marketing communications: brochures, spec sheets, blogs, white papers, ads, etc., etc. With NetMarcom, people throughout your organization can enter approved copy once, publish it in almost any format (while maintaining your graphic standards), review work via the Web, revise and update it, translate for folks around the world, and store the finished materials. Anybody (at least anybody you authorize) can access NetMarcom at any time from anywhere (at least anywhere there’s a Web connection).
Hard times mean hard choices. Somebody said that, so it must be true. The current hard-times mean many businesses are making the hard choice to cut through their marcom budgets like a chainsaw plowing through pudding.
It’s called “conventional wisdom.” But even if it is conventional, it might not be wisdom.
There happens to be hard, statistical evidence that says it’s a good idea to keep your marketing budget up, even when the economy’s down. More to the point, for any business that wants to get a jumpstart on the inevitable recovery, bad times might be a good time to boost their budgets for brochures, spec sheets, white papers, email blasts, and advertising. Even without a bailout.
For example, a short article in the April 20 issue of The New Yorker included some interesting arguments to use when you’re standing toe to toe with management as they instruct you to donate more of your budget to the bottom line. Admittedly, The New Yorker is not an authorized source for business advice. And it has its own agenda when it comes to advertising budgets. Come to think of it, so do we. Yet facts are facts, and these days a business ignores them at its peril.
