This October, Innovation is the theme for the CMMA National Conference in Nashville. Recently, David Burkus wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “…in most organizations, innovation isn’t hampered by a lack of ideas, but rather a lack of noticing the good ideas already there. It’s not an idea problem; it’s a recognition problem.” He says there is a “negative bias against creativity” in uncertain times and I, and I’m sure many of you, are living through uncertain times in your organization. https://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/07/innovation_isnt_an_idea_proble.html

Many businesses utilize a form of internal social networking for collaboration and employee engagement. Years ago, we explored a program, Yammer, as a solution to the assertion that, “we need to be cutting edge, we need a new idea …” comment from one of the directors of our sales development team. He wanted his managers to communicate with each other to develop ideas and strategies in a more collaborative way than email provided. Our Yammer experiment lasted for a month, and died a slow death.

Then, our training team pursued an tool that would allow them to collaborate, share best practices, access training tools and videos, and develop solutions to common challenges. They too re-examined the use of Yammer. Once again, the department didn’t have a firm plan to go along with this tool. Subsequently, it produced, three months of “inspirational messaging” from one Senior Manager, and a couple “selfie” pictures from team members. No one utilized the training videos we had in the file base.

Finally, the groups that manage our Contact Center staffing and Workforce Management teams came to me with the same challenge as the aforementioned work groups. Once we had a firm plan and an inclusive process for working in this collaborative environment, Yammer turned out to be the right idea after all. Now we share best practices via self-produced video trainings and developed a community of people throughout the company who share a common goal and mission. With some of these “training videos” they’ve prompted our Contact Center training group to integrate some of these ideas into formal processes. To date, it has saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in staffing time and training adjustments.

Ultimately, we often need to take the time to re-evaluate an existing idea and determine if it can be reworked, repurposed, or utilized by others within the organization. Innovation may be as simple as seeing the good ideas already in front us, maybe not for what they are… but what they might become. To Burkas’ point, “It’s not an idea problem; it’s a recognition problem.”

Article contributed by Gerry Harris, CMMA Board of Directors

Should we embrace the growing demand for Do-it-Yourself video production? The use of video is exploding and becoming a more dominant communications preference. Therefore, the need to create video is also exploding. Our department goal is to effectively and efficiently support our corporate growth strategies through video communications. Nowhere in these goals does it say, “Only high-end productions”. In fact, it is our responsibility to help employees be aware of all the video resources available to them.

At the recent CMMA National Conference, I shared a case study about the installation of our new Do-it-Yourself (DIY) video recording studio and editing suite. Many of the media managers in attendance shared their same challenge with this business dilemma. Being associated with the low-end productions concerned my colleagues as it might dilute their department’s brand name or quality reputation. However, satisfying our client’s business requirements has enhanced our reputation. Another concern was the DIY facility would take away business. In some cases, these new clients are validating the need for a video to meet their business objectives, and after digging in, they realize they are not qualified to produce video. As a result, they come to us for a producer and we’ve gained a new customer.

The more important question to ask ourselves may be: what will happen if we don’t embrace DIY video productions? If producing low-end, YouTube, or DIY, style videos truly is a new business requirement, employees are going to find a way to shoot and edit these projects on their own. We think it makes better business sense to have a centralized, minimally supported, shared production facility than it does to have little DIY studios popping up all over. In addition to the overall cost savings, this model gives us a better chance to implement production and format standards and asset management.

We started supporting the DIY trend three years ago with an internal Video Library (ala YouTube) and now have over 7,500 user generated videos in the system. It didn’t take long for employees to start asking for a production facility. Our objective was to provide an easy to use, low investment, HD video production facility to capture and edit video with minimal support. With a few muslin backdrops, LED lighting, a remote controlled camera, and simple video capture software, we find with a little training our DIY producers can create great looking videos. The editing suite is simply an engineering workstation PC running Adobe Elements 10, consumer oriented video editing software. So far we’ve only sent out one e-mail communication about this new service and are already seeing 70% usage.

Should you embrace the Do-it-Yourself video production trend? Absolutely! Your group will still be seen as video experts in your company, but also as a group that listens to customer requirements and is willing to adopt new business models to meet them. Adding DIY production capabilities is really a low risk/low dollar investment; you’ll see some fresh creative concepts along the way and engage a whole new group of clients.

Article contributed by Doug E. Salmela, CMMA Board of Directors

Have you ever had to justify your department’s existence? If you’re like me, maybe more times than you’d like – it’s not a fun exercise. It can be precipitated for several reasons…your company’s soft or declining business results, a restructuring or reorganization, a new senior executive looking in the wrong place to save money, or worse yet, an outside consulting firm brought in to identify cost efficiencies. For some, it might be part of your regular year-end process.

Whatever the reason, you need to be prepared and ready to demonstrate the value of your department. To make it even more challenging, you might be preparing a report for someone who doesn’t know you or have a clue what you do and how well you do it. I’ve been involved in several of these justifications and fortunately all have resulted in positive outcomes – hence, I’m still around to write this! Our approach to these reports is simple and straightforward – we’re confident that we have a good story to tell, careful to not be defensive and report as many “facts” as possible. Here’s what we include:

• Our department’s mission/vision statement that articulates what we do for the company and how we deliver business results.
• Testimonials, especially from senior management and other influential clients.
• Regarding costs, we are a partial charge-back department. We charge for our all our production services (graphics, video production and editing, staging and technical direction) and pass-through all outside costs (freelancers and equipment rental). We provide creative and producing consultation at no cost. For the report, we benchmark outside production companies and include a cost comparison against our internal rates for similar services. We try and maintain our chargeback rates at 10 – 50% below “street prices.” Using the outside rates as a reference we calculate what the company would need to spend to if our department didn’t exist – and to be fully transparent, we subtract our salaries and expenses. We also include actual cost-savings examples from client projects; e.g. what a five-day edit would have cost on the outside versus in-house.
• While cost is obviously a very significant component of the report, I feel the following has become almost as important. It’s a separate document that describes what we call “Inherent strengths UNIQUE to our department that benefit our clients.” We’ve developed and fine-tuned the list over the years – here it is:

Company Knowledge – We know the company exceedingly well – our history, people, culture, values, priorities and our business strategies – we’re in a unique position to see across the broad organization day-in and day-out.

Shared Goals and Vision – With our clients, we are equally vested in the success of the company; we’re system first; clients can trust us to do the right thing…we’re on the same team.

Value – Financial profit is not our motive; reasonable prices for our services allow us to deliver a unique in-house value to clients, while positively impacting G&A.

Program/Event Expertise – We are experts at producing our company’s programs and events; often, we are the consistent link.

Visual Assets – We possess and manage the largest, most complete collection of our company’s visual assets anywhere in the world – photo and video.

Confidentiality/Security – We operate behind the corporate firewall; our visual assets are secure; we provide company staff for confidential programs.

Responsiveness – Being in-house, and working with our staff communications partners, we are well positioned to respond to urgent and even crisis communication needs.

Seven simple but very impactful statements that make this section of the report what I enjoy sharing most. No outside production company or agency can lay claim to any of these strengths. And of course it goes without saying, (and my internal clients need to agree) that my internal Creative Services and Meetings & Events team is as good or better than any outside production company or agency.

My wish would be that you’re never in a situation that necessitates the preparation of a department justification report, but if the need ever arises, I hope you find the above information useful.

Article contributed by Tom Bowman, CMMA Board of Directors

I began my career in TV and special effects. Everything we did was measured both visually and aurally. I prided myself on surviving the transition from analog to digital, knowing color space, black levels, and the transition from 0VU to -20db in audio levels as reference points for any content sent out for air. My first foray into Internet delivery started with building one of the first Microsoft encoding platforms for MSN. I noticed very quickly that all of my history and pride went out the door when I looked at the results of this content on the web. If you could get past the variable frame rate and low sample rate of the audio, I noticed that the content looked washed out when set up to color bars. It took an intern to show me that his video looked a little richer by adding contrast and increased color values outside of legal limits to make video look good on the web. The interesting thing is the intern had no training in color space, broadcast levels, or any understanding of the use of color bars and reference tone, he just knew it looked better. After a few heated discussions and feedback from our Internet customers, we adopted profiles that were not compliant for broadcast. Recently we have experienced the same transition in audio.

The web, in many ways, is the Wild West. I’ve personally measured hours of various audio content played from the web and the levels are all over the place. With much self-generated content making its way to the web in such places as YouTube, people can output at whatever level and quality they like. This can become a problem for professionals as broadcast levels are typically much lower and delivering a separate, louder mix may not be a possibility.

Recent developments in the audio industry have brought us tools for measuring loudness in a much more accurate way. These tools demonstrate audio loudness in LKFS or LUFS. By and large these terms are interchangeable with LUFS being a more current rendition. Starting in Europe and now being adopted in America, LUFS metering has become what could almost be described as the first universal standard for audio loudness metering with it becoming the law in many regions across the world. In America, we have the CALM Act to keep commercial loudness at bay.

Here at MPS, our audio team has been investigating this situation for the better part of five years. As a result, we have arrived at what we believe is a great solution for delivering content to broadcast legal audio levels while having a louder, more competitive spec for online. Compliance with the CALM Act requires a program loudness of -24LUFS and a peak level of -2dbtp. That’s an additional 8db of headroom or dynamic range compared to previous program levels which peaked at -10dbfs. Some material may benefit from this additional dynamic range such as movies or dramatic TV shows, but by and large, news, reality TV, and music may still choose to peak limit lower than -2 for a less dynamic audio experience. At MPS our audio team has chosen to work at a level spec that is louder to the CALM Acts requirements since the bulk of our deliveries are for web. Our online spec is -2dbtp and -16LUFS. What’s great about this is that content does not require re-mixing if used for broadcast. Simply normalizing the program audio -8db or to -10dbtp and -24LUFS would make the content broadcast legal. You could say that the same mix creates two deliveries. Pretty cool.

From a management perspective I have good and bad news. Bad news is I rarely see the use of scopes or measurement tools. The good news is how much money we saved by not having a suite of measurement tools in every production room.

Article Contributed by Brian Honey, CMMA Board of Directors

it works. As a matter of fact, research also found that almost all brand communication focuses on sight and sound.

Although we hear music everywhere we go it takes the right tune to really grasp someone’s attention and not just become a part of the noise.

After all we see and hear day-to-day, businesses must put more thought into what will be an “attention-grabber.” Quality sound not only creates the mood, but also makes the production more memorable. It’s all in the details. We must think about what sound will stand out in the world of today to help our production become successful.

It’s important when working on a production to ask yourself: Do the visuals and copy flow with the music? Does it all create the emotion you desire in your production? And finally, is it memorable?

It takes more than a well-written script to captivate an audience. For years, music has been used to enhance an advertisements success. The music in productions can make it easier to be recollected, as well as cause people to feel a certain way about the product or service – which can drive sales.

Music is a powerful tool – especially when it comes to a business’ production. Overlooking the details can greatly impact the success of your production.

Article contributed by Nancy Aguirre at FirstCom Music, CMMA Partner