First Video

Last year, I facilitated the recruitment of 3M as a sponsor for the Sawbones Air Racing team. The thought was that the company could benefit from supporting a local team at the National Air Racing Championship by engaging aerospace customers in an aviation event. We were successful in recruiting a few of those customers to Reno last year, who raved about the experience. Unfortunately, we didn't recruit as many as we hoped, and not all at the level of influence we targeted.

This year, on the other side of the fence, I suggested to 3M that if they repeated their sponsorship this year, we could improve customer recruitment on those two dimensions by preparing their sales reps better with better marketing aids. Because they are so short on marketing resources, I offered to do that marketing work as part of the sponsorship benefit so they wouldn't have to expend any additional time or money.

One of the marketing tools I imagined was a video that they could use to help give customers a sense of the opportunity, and some background into what made these races special and why they should be interested in attending. So we cornered the owner of the airplane and the race pilot one evening to do some interviews. Without a budget, it was up to me to edit some past Sawbones video and the interviews into a viable video presentation. The challenge was that I had never edited a video before. So after many hours cutting, pasting, learning, and experimenting, here is my first product as a video producer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSA5y7MZlLU&feature=em-upload_owner


Bonnie is glad to have it done. She's heard the soundtrack repeated a hundred times, to the point where she came into the office with a pair of headphones and said, "here, put these on." Apple's iMovie is a powerful tool. But it has a whole different language that needs to be adopted to understand what they do and how to use them. Now I feel empowered. Prepare to be offered links into "My Summer Vacation," or "Isn't He a Cute Baby," or, "Our Own Stupid Pet Tricks." And watch out for that cleverly disguised video camera trying to include you in that the next artistic scene.

The other possibility is that this will be the first and the last, with my patience for the required detail work in short supply.

But I do think I might have a future in this marketing thing....